(Soft music playing) >> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello, this is Dave Vellante. Welcome to this CUBE Conversation. We're here with Scott Strickland. Who's the executive vice president and CIO of Wyndham Hotels & Resorts. Scott, great to talk to CIO's, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for inviting me, Dave. >> You're very welcome. All right, let's let me, let's get into it. You guys, Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, obviously that industry hard hit by the COVID pandemic. Uh, I got to say though, your executives doing a great job, you guys just had your earnings call. Your stock is more than doubled since the March low. So obviously hanging in there, well-run company, but how did the, how did you respond to the, to the, and adapt to the COVID impact? What was your first move? >> Our first move, um, when we looked at COVID, we're on the sharp end of that proverbial hospitality spear. You know, we're in an industry where people are going to see this first and COVID is going to be very apparent as people stop traveling. So the first thing we saw is actually in China, because we're a worldwide company. We saw obviously the impact of COVID there. So we had a little bit of a head start in terms of planning here in North America. And we were already planning for possible hotel closures and for different work environments. The very first thing we did was actually take our corporate staff, roughly 1400 people off campus in a 36 hour period. And we're really, really proud of that. The second thing we did was, we looked at how do we help our franchisees as they consider possibly closing their hotels? Or how do they react to a much lower occupancy type environment? >> Yeah. So, okay. So you had like a canary in a coal mine with visibility in China. You didn't, you didn't wait, you acted. I want to bring up a chart guys, if, if you would. Um, this is data from our data partner ETR, and every quarter they go out and ask customers, you you going to adopt new, you going to spend more, that's the green, are you flat spending? Are you going to decrease spending, or are you going to kind of replace the platform? This is specific to Zscaler and you can see, and this was taken, Scott, right at the height of the US lockdown. And so what impressed me is that well over half, well, 52% of the customers that they talked to said, they're going to spend more on Zscaler. Now of course, part of that was the work from home pivot the investment in security. But I wonder Scott, if you could tell us, what does this picture look like for Wyndham? >> So as we were migrating off site, we realized that we needed a different set of security solutions for us. We had implemented Zscaler from an end point security. They have additional security in terms of putting applications behind them. So they can serve almost as a VPN and you don't have to leverage VPN to get to some of your apps in the future. And we're going to be spending more with them actually to implement that solution. So for us, we're going to be in that box, in that eye area there, where we will be spending more with Zscaler in the next six months than we did in the prior year. >> So what, what do you think happens with this kind of work from home? Um, basically you saw, I just saw Twitter said, "Hey, we're going to make it permanent." Other companies said, "Hey, we're going to make it through the end of the year." What's your thinking in terms of that work from home, you know, hybrid, how are we, how was Wyndham going to respond going forward? >> On a go-forward basis, we're going to go to a hybrid model. So what that'll mean for us is we're going to be looking at the equivalent of shifts, almost, so two days on, a deep cleaning, two days on and rotate that through so that you have different shifts of people who necessarily aren't, aren't interacting with each other. We also, before we even went off site, we were looking at a work-from-home model and what COVID did, is it really accelerated it for us. So when we go back into the offices, we're going to have roughly 20% of our staff, that's going to remain as Twitter referred to them as "permanent work from home." These are roles that only need to be in the office once every two to three weeks. And then we're going to go to that rotational schedule for the rest of the folks for that phase one. >> So one of the other things that our friends at ETR looking into is sort of what CIOs are expecting, in terms of the shape of the recovery. People talk about a V-shape, uh, which, you know, some people expect, but not most, most people expect some kind of U shape recovery down for maybe a couple of quarters and then come back over the next several quarters. Or an L shape down for three or more quarters. And then very slowly coming back, you know, maybe into the late '20, '21, some of the harder-hit industries like airlines, you would expect that. What's your thinking in terms of the shape of the recovery. >> As we look at the recovery, we try to make it a database decision right now. And so we work a lot with Smith Travel. They provide most of the data actually for the hospitality industry. Looking at occupancy and guests preconceptions, are they willing to come back in? Are they willing to check into a hotel? And what Smith is forecasting right now is a very gradual U over the next year and a half or so. Now that said, we believe that we're well positioned in the industry because as people do start to travel again, we believe they're going to want to go to "drive-to" hotels. And with 9,000 plus hotels worldwide, and the top economy brands around such as Super 8 and Days Inn, those are classic drive-to hotels. You know, you're going to go drive and visit your parents, who you haven't seen in a while. You need to stay somewhere overnight off the highway. You're going to check into a Days Inn, we believe we're going to be well positioned to capture some of the initial market share when it does return. >> Well, true. I think people, I mean, people have cabin fever and young people I think are going to be more receptive, you know, people with a lot of disposable income. So I think that could actually bode well, and it'd be some upside for industries like yours. I want to talk about, you know, get into the security aspect, the cloud. Um, you obviously have a CSO. Um, We'll talk about that. You, you, you were, uh, your CSO was a peer, uh, is that right? How, what's your relationship to your CSO? >> Sure. So at Wyndham hotels and resorts, the CSO reports into me, he reports into IT. He's a group vice president level reporting into me as an EVP. However, really when we think about it, I, I treat him as a peer. And what I love about having him in my group, is he can be part of those technology decisions and the development cycle from the beginning. So what that enables us to do is we're not coming along later and putting security into one of our products. He's part of the security decisions as we develop our products. Whether it's an application, whether it's an infrastructure, whether it's even a new networking solution. He's part of those decisions from the beginning, which has been great. And he's the type of guy actually, that the rest of my teams want to work with. And they want to work with his security teams and ask them questions. So he serves as a trusted advisor for us. >> So that's an interesting model. And I think it's one that's going to gain traction because, you know, if the, if the security team is sort of an isolated island, you know, it's sort of all falls on them. You've got a seat at the table. Security, of course, as we know is a board-level topic right now. So let's, let's talk about your environment. I kind of want to talk about, you know, pre- and post-COVID, but also pre- and post-Zscaler. So let me, let's paint a picture. You know, a lot of organizations, you've got the corporate headquarters, you've got a lot of appliances. Um, You've got, maybe got people working from home, tunneling through and a VPN. You got your data center somewhere, but you've got all these cloud apps as well. Um, So it's a changing environment. You've got to bring your own devices. What did you know, go back a little bit, however much is appropriate. What did Wyndham look like in the pre-mode? >> So in the pre-mode we had seven global offices scattered throughout the world. And our main office on the Parsippany campus was roughly 1400 people across two buildings. We used a classic, uh, Cisco sort of infrastructure with multiple redundant data lines brought in, and then the heavy duty switches that didn't turn off, loaded it into a wifi network as well. We then had a dedicated line out to our co-location facility and that in turn, then served out into our public cloud, such as an AWS or Google. So that was our pre picture. We were in process. Even prior to this, we were in the process of saying, okay, we have some of this legacy hardware in it and the Cisco-type environment, how do we deploy that so that it can be cloud first? So we were halfway through a Meraki implementation all the way from the switch level and the wifi level so that we could administer that remotely. And what this has done for us is we've actually accelerated that implementation. Uh, the good thing about everybody being out of the office is it's pretty easy to send one or two people in, to complete some of that work in the closets and get our backbone adjusted. So what we've been doing is we've been working at fixing that backbone, replacing it with the Meraki switch and wifi equipment so that we can remote administer it from anywhere in the world, which is, is suddenly has opened up a whole new level of ability to follow the sun, ability to possibly even outsource that or leverage lower cost resources to do some of that. They don't have to be based here in the New York, New Jersey area. >> So maybe the big sort of challenges that you face. A lot of organizations will tell us, you've got different users coming in from different apps. They've got different security policies, uh, different standards, you got shadow IT, um, with, with, you know, not really enforcing our corporate edicts. Uh, what were some of the challenges that you faced that maybe the objectives of bringing in Zscaler? >> Sure. So the last part that I didn't really cover, that it'll help play into some of these challenges is our co-location facility. Originally we had three data centers and we migrated those three data centers largely into the cloud, into an AWS or into a SaaS-based environment. But for some of those applications that just you can't, we put it into a co-location facility and then paid a third party to manage that, so that we're out of the administration and data center business. So that's, that's part of that pre so when this came along and we suddenly said, okay, how do we lock everything down? How do we ensure that we understand how people are going to access this? Um, we only had two or three applications that had a significant user base where we needed to invest in VPN, where we needed to ramp up our VPN licenses because suddenly everybody's going to be at home. >> For example, the beautiful part is, is what we had our, our biggest applications. Those were already cloud-based. So those were already being accessed by people who just had a network connection. And that was why originally we chose, we chose Zscaler because we wanted our folks no matter where they were. And the classic example, our CSO was working there at Starbucks and they need to access our HR, uh, SaaS-based application. We can do that with confidence, from a Starbucks or from a coffee shop, you know, any coffee shop in the world, because we know we have Zscaler installed on their end point because we know it's going to go through that level of scrutiny and we'll have that protection. So even if the network is being sniffed or there's something weird going on, there we'll be protected. So Zscaler has been a partner for us on that for about a year or so. And then I spoke earlier a little bit about us, uh, looking at their VPN-like solution where you put the applications behind Zscaler so that you no longer have to go in with VPN and double-click and get a token from a company like RSA or something of that nature. You can just make it, you know, a virtual application that you can access via Zscaler as well. >> And let me just understand Scott, that would be essentially like a security cloud that you would be putting in front of all applications or just your private applications. >> That's a great way to think about it, Dave. Yes, is it would be a security cloud that we would put in front of all of our applications. So we have it in front of our applications that are SaaS-based, and then we would start putting it in front of our applications that are based in our co-location facility. >> So Scott, when I talk to CSOs and I ask them, what's their number one challenge, they'll tell me "lack of talent." "We've got all these devices and we're running around and we just can't find the talent." So I'm wondering, is that a main challenge of you and what is the business impact of this sort of new security regime that you're putting in place? >> So what's really worked well for us is we've been able to recruit some of the best and the brightest and keep them here because we're continuing to implement these cloud-based security tools. So Zscaler's, one of them, we have others in our suite there, and that's what excites security guys and gals is that they get to play with some of the new toys and we get to migrate from something that was legacy to something that's brand new and they continue to get to improve their resume. Yes, but they also get to play with play with the new toys and some of the shiny new objects. Our retention rate in our security team is unheard of in the industry. We are single digit turnover, voluntary turnover a year over year on our security team. And again, these are guys and girls that could go into the city and make more and they purposely chosen not to because we let them be at the front edge of, of security. >> Well, that's, that's a pretty interesting metric. Because a lot of times you guys don't, like air traffic controllers, you know, the eyes bleeding, staring at screens all day and it's, you know, you got to, you got to win every day. You know, the bad guys only have to win once. But, but so, okay. So what has been the business impact of sort of this new approach that you've been taking, this sort of cloud-first approach? >> What it's allowed us to do is to look at the threats that are actually most important. So if you look at security, you know, you have your traditional DDOS attacks, you have SQL injections, you have some of these lower-level type attacks by automating a lot even. And by putting it into the cloud, we're not worried about most of that anymore. What we can really focus on now is the state-sponsored agencies or the criminal agencies that are coming after us with very, very sophisticated phishing attacks or mail. We had some physical mail attacks recently that are trying to penetrate us in ways that we've never seen before. And again, that's exciting for the security team because they get to focus and they get to almost think like one of these hackers and say, okay, if they're trying to get in here, where, where do we believe we're not protected? How do we go on the offensive a little bit here? We have, we have a threat-hunting organization as well. >> And I'm actually, if you had a Mulligan, I don't know if you golf of, if you do, hopefully. >> I do, I do every time Dave, >> Yeah, yeah, you know, my, my golf, my golf club went out of business. I got to find another one. But, but if you had a mulligan, what would you do over again? What kind of advice would you give to your peers? >> My mulligan on this would have been to have moved faster. When we started, our original migration of the cloud back then even then there was concerns about, can the cloud be as secure as your physical data center? And the answer there is absolutely yes. If you've ever toured one of these Tier Ones, you know, such as an Amazon or a Google and you take a look at their security versus our physical security, tear off that band-aid, execute the migration, and wherever possible as you do that migration, don't go a legacy-for-legacy. Don't do a lift-and-shift. Instead, take the opportunity to transform, do a lift-and-transform while you're doing that. Not a lift-and-shift. So my mulligan would be go faster. And if I got a bonus mulligan, then I'd say a lift-and-transform, not lift-and-shift. >> Yeah. That's great advice. I mean, I tend to agree with you. I think that the work that we've done in the research that we've done really underscores what you've just said. There is a shared-responsibility model, uh, but shared responsibility is great. Uh, when you, when you're working with a, like you say, an Amazon or an Azure or Google. Um, so last question is, you know, when you look forward, we've been so tactical early putting out fires, but as you start to come out of this thing, how do you see, you know, some of the things that you're going to preserve from the past maybe, but what does the future look like? I mean, it's kind of ironic. This whole thing hit at the start of a new decade. So I think we all agree. And maybe, maybe you do too. Maybe you don't, I'd love your thoughts. We're just not going to go back to 2019. So as you start to think of the, the midterm and the longer term, what's your, what are your, some of your planning, assumptions, and some of your thinking? >> They say, Dave, "never to waste a good crisis." And we've learned a lot out of this crisis. Uh, one is that we don't need a traditional work-from-home model, and we're going to be able to collapse actually our, our campus down into a single building, and then go with that shift, uh, approach that I spoke to earlier. If I look forward into the medium and the longer term, what we're seeing is we're seeing that our franchisees and our guests, things are going to change. When you check into a hotel, you're going to want to have that as contact-less an experience as possible. So how do we offer the technology at scale to our guests and franchisees to enable that? That's beyond just mobile check in, and that's beyond mobile checkout. You know, that's keyless entry, that's mobile payments. That's the ability to choose my room, perhaps on my mobile device. You know, there's, there's a whole new world. I believe that's coming, ordering my, my room service on my mobile device from my room without leaving my room. You can start to see it in this brave new world, you know, post-, post-COVID that we're going to be able to leverage a lot more contact-less, a lot less face-to-face technologies, but still enable a good guest experience when they're at our hotels. >> Well, I'm excited about that because I mean, as, as theCUBE, you know, our businesses do go into events. I mean, mostly because we're all in the studio now, but we do a lot of travel. And this notion of accelerating the digital transformation and leaders like yourself, Scott, really driving that, I'm excited about the new experiences. So I really want to thank you for coming on theCUBE and sharing with us the best practice and, and your journey. Appreciate it. >> Hey, thanks for reaching out, Dave. Good to be here. >> All right. And I thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (soft music playing)

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

(upbeat music) >> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube Conversation. >> As we've been reporting, the COVID-19 pandemic has created a bifurcated IT spending picture. And over the last several weeks, we've reported both in the macro and even some come at it from a vendor and a sector view. I mean, for example, we've reported on some of the companies that have really continued to thrive, we look at the NASDAQ and its near a toll-time hard. Companies like Okta and CrowdStrike, we've reported on Snowflake, UiPath. The sectors, RPA, some of the analytic databases around AI, maybe even to a lesser extent Cloud but still has a lot tailwinds relative to some of those on-prem infrastructure plays. Even companies like Cisco, bifurcated in and of themselves, where you see this more rocky side of the house doing quite well. The work-from-home stuff but maybe some of the traditional networking not as much. Well, now what if you flip that to really try to understand what's going on with the shape of the recovery which is the main narrative right now. Is it a V shape? Is it a U shape? What do people expect? And now to understand that, you really have to look at different industries because different industries are going to come back at a different pace. With me again is Sagar Kadakia, who's the Director of Research at ETR. Sagar, you guys are all over this, as usual timely information, it's great to see you again. Hope all is well in New York City. >> Thanks so much David, it's a pleasure to be back on again. >> Yeah, so where are we in the cycle? You've done a great job and very timely, ETR was the first to really put out data on the Covid impact with the server that ran from mid March to mid April. And now everybody's attention Sagar, is focused on, okay, we've started to come back, stores are starting to open, people are beginning to go out again and everybody wants to know what the shape of the recovery looks like. So, where are we actually in that research cycle for you guys? >> Yeah, no problem. So, like you said, in that kind of March, April timeframe, we really want to go out there and get an idea of what are going to be the budget impacts as it relates to IT because of COVID-19, right? So, we kind of ended off there around a decline of 5%. And coming into the year, the consensus was a growth of 4% or 5%, right? So, we saw about a 900 or 1000 base point swing, to the negative side. And then (murmurs) topic we covered in March and April were which sectors of vendors were going to benefit as a result of work-from-home. And so, now as we kind of fast forward to the research cycle as we kind of go more into May and into the summer, rather than asking those exact same question again, because it's just been maybe 40 or 50 days. We really want to (murmurs) on the recovery type as well as well as kind of more emerging private vendors, right? We want it to understand what's going to be the impact on these vendors that typically rely on larger conferences, more in person meetings, because these are younger technologies. There's not a lot of information about them. And so, last Thursday we launched our biannual emerging technology study. It covers roughly 300 private emerging technologies across maybe 60 sectors of technology. And in tandem, we've launched a COVID Flash Poll, right? What we want to do was kind of twofold. One really understand from CIOs the recovery type they had in mind, as well as if they were seeing any kind of permanent changes in their IT, stacks IT spend because of COVID-19. And so, if we kind of look at the first chart here, and kind of get more into that first question around recovery type, what we asked CIOs in this kind of COVID Flash Poll, again, we did it last Thursday was, what type of recovery are you expecting? Is it V-shaped so kind of of a brief decline, maybe 1/4, and then you're going to start seeing growth into 2 each 20. Is it U-shaped? So two to 3/4 of a decline or deceleration revenue, and you're kind of forecasting that growth in revenue as an organization to come back in 2021. Is it L-shaped, right? So, maybe three, four or 5/4 of a decline or deceleration. And very minimal to moderate growth or none of the above, your organization is actually benefiting from COVID-19, as we've seen some many reports. So, those are kind of the options that we gave CIOs and you kind of see them at first chart here. >> Well, interesting. And this is a survey, a flash of survey, 700 CIOs or approximately. And the interesting thing I really want to point out here is, the COVID pandemic, it didn't suppress all companies, and the return is it's not going to be a rising tide that lifts all ships. You really got to do your research. You have to understand the different sectors, really try to peel back the onion skin and understand why there are certain momentum, how certain organizations are accommodating the work from home. We heard several weeks ago, how there's a major change in networking mindsets we're talking about how security is changing. We're going to talk about some of the permanents, but it's really, really important to try to understand these different trends by different industries, which we're going to talk about in a minute. But if you take a look at this slide, I mean, obviously most people expect this U-shape decline. I mean, U-shape recovery rather. So it's two or 3/4 followed by some growth next year. But as we'll see, some of these industries are going to really go deeper with an L-shape recovery. And then it's really interesting that a pretty large and substantial portion see this as a tailwind, presumably those with strong SAS models, annual recurring revenue models, your thoughts? >> If we kind of start on this kind of aggregate chart, you're looking at about 44% of CEO's anticipate a U-shaped recovery, right? That's the largest bucket. Then you can see another 15% anticipate an L-shape recovery 14 on the V-shaped, and then 16% to your point that are kind of seeing this tailwind. But if we kind of focus on that largest bucket that U-shaped, one of the things to remember and again, when we asked this to CIOs within this kind of COVID Flash Poll, we also asked, can you give us some commentary? And so, one of the things that, or one of the themes that are kind of coming along with this U-shape recovery is CIOs are cautiously optimistic about this U-shape recovery. They believe that they can get back onto a growth cycle, into 2021, as long as there's a vaccine available. We don't go into a second wave of lockdowns. Economic activity picks up, a lot of the government actions become effective. So there are some kind of let's call it qualifiers, with this bucket of CIOs that are anticipating a U-shape recovery. What they're saying is that, "look, we are expecting these things to happen, "we're not expecting a lockdown, "we are expecting a vaccine. "And if that takes place, "then we do expect an uptake in growth, "or going back to kind of pre COVID levels in 2021." But I think it's fair to assume that if one or more of these are ups and things do get worse as all these States are opening up, maybe the recovery cycle gets pushed along. So kind of at the aggregate, this is where we are right now. >> Yeah. So as I was saying, you really have to understand the different, not only different sectors not only the different vendors, but you can really get to look into the industries, and then even within industries. So if we pull up the next chart, we have the industry sort of break down, and sort of the responses by the industry's V-shape, U-shape or L-shape. I had a conversation with a CIO of a major resort, just the other day. And even he was saying, well, it was actually, I'll tell you it was Wyndham Resorts, public company. I mean, and obviously that business got crushed. They had their earnings call the other day. They talked about how they cut their capex in half. But the stock, Sagar, since the March loss is more than doubled. >> Yeah. >> It was just amazing. And now, but even there, within that sector, they're appealing that on you are doing well, certain parts are going to come back sooner, certain parts are going to take longer, depending on, what type of resort, what type of hotel. So, it really is a complicated situation. So, take us through what you're seeing by industry. >> Yeah, sure. So let's start with kind of the IT-Telco, retail, consumer space. Dave to your point, there's going to be a tremendous amount of bifurcation within both of those verticals. Look, if we start on the IT-Telco side, you're seeing a very large bucket of individuals, right over 20%? That indicated they're seeing a tailwind or additional revenue because of COVID-19 and Dave, we spoke about this all the way back in March, right? All these work from home vendors. CIOs were doubling down on Cloud and SAS and we've seen how some of these vendors have reported in April, with very good reports, all the major Cloud vendors, right? Like Select Security vendors. And so, that's why you're seeing on the kind of Telco side, definitely more positivity, right? As you relates to recovery type, right? Some of them are not even going through recovery. They're seeing an acceleration, same thing on the retail consumer side. You're seeing another large bucket of people who are indicating, "look, we've benefited." And again, there's going to be a lot of bifurcation, there's been a lot of retail consumers. You just mentioned with the hotel lines, that are definitely hurting. But if you have a good online presence as a retailer, and you had essential goods or groceries, you benefited. And those are the organizations that we're seeing really indicate that they saw an acceleration due to COVID-19. So, I thought those two verticals between kind of the IT and retail side, there was a big bucket of people who indicated positivity. So I thought that was kind of the first kind of as we talked about kind of feeling this onion back. That was really interesting. >> Tech continues to power on, and I think a lot of people try, I think somebody was saying that the record time in which we've developed a vaccine previously was like mumps or something. I mean, it was just like years. But now today, 2020, we've got AI, we've got all this data, you've got these great companies all working on this. And so, wow, if we can compress that, that's going to change the equation. A couple of other things Sagar that jump out at me here in this chart that I want to ask you about. I mean, the education, the colleges, are really kind of freaking out right now, some are coming back. I know, like for instance, my daughter at University of Arizona, they're coming back in the fall indefinitely, others are saying, no. You can clearly see the airlines and transportation, has the biggest sort of L-shape, which is the most negative. I'm sure restaurants and hospitality are kind of similar. And then you see energy which got crushed. We had oil (laughs) negative people paying it, big barrels of oil. But now look at that, expectation of a pretty strong, U-shape recovery as people start driving again, and the economy picks up. So, maybe you could give us some thoughts on some of those sort of outliers. >> Yeah. So I kind of bucket the next two outliers as from an L-shaped and a U-shaped. So on the L-shaped side, like you said, education airlines, transportation, and probably to a little bit lesser extent, industrials materials, manufacturing services consulting. These verticals are indicating the highest percentages from an L-shaped recovery, right? So, three plus 1/4 of revenue declines in deceleration, followed by kind of minimal to moderate growth. And look, there's no surprise here. Those are the verticals that have been impacted the most, by less demand from consumers and businesses. And then as you mentioned on the energy utility side, and then I would probably bucket maybe healthcare, pharma, those have some of the largest, percentages of U-shaped recovery. And it's funny, like I read a lot of commentary from some of the energy and the healthcare CIOs, and they were saying they were very optimistic (laughs) about a U-shaped type of recovery. And so it kind of, maybe with those two issues that we could even kind of lump them into, probably to a lesser extent, but you could probably lump it into the prior one with the airlines and the education and services consulting, and IMM, where these are definitely the verticals that are going to see the longest, longest recoveries. And it's probably a little bit more uniform, versus what we've kind of talked about a few minutes ago with IT and retail consumer where it's definitely very bifurcated. There's definitely winners and losers there. >> Yeah. And again, it's a very complicated situation. A lot of people that I've talked to are saying, "look, we really don't have a clear picture, "that's why all these companies are not giving guidance." Many people, however, are optimistic only for a vaccine, but also their thinking is young people with disposable income, they're going to kind of say,"Damn the torpedoes, "I'm not really going to be exposed." >> And they could come back much stronger, there seems to be pent up demand for some of the things like elective surgery, or even some other sort of more important, healthcare needs. So, that obviously could be a snapback. So, obviously we're really closely looking at this, one thing though is certain, is that people are expecting a permanent change, and you've got data that really shows that on the next chart. >> That's right. So, one of the last questions that we ask kind of this quick COVID Flash Poll was, do you anticipate permanent changes to your kind of IT stack, IT spend, based on the last few months? As everyone has been working remotely, and rarely do you see results point this much in one direction, but 92% of CIOs and kind of high level IT end users indicated yes, there are all going to be permanent changes. And one of the things we talked about in March, and look, we were really the first ones, in our discussion, where we were talking about work from home spend, kind of negating or bouncing out all these declines, right? We were saying, look, yes, we are seeing a lot of budgets come down, but surprisingly, we're seeing 20,30% of organizations accelerate spend. And even the ones that are spending less, even them, some of their budgets are kind of being negated by this work from home spend, right? When you think about collaboration tools and additional VPN and networking bandwidth, and laptops and then security, all that stuff. CIOs now continue to spend on, because what CIOs now understand is productivity has remained at very high levels, right? In March CIOs were very concerned with the catastrophe and productivity that has not come true. So on the margin CIOs and organizations are probably much more positive on that front. And so now, because there is no vaccine, where we know CIOs and just in general, the population, we don't know when one is coming. And so remote work seems to be the new norm moving forward, especially that productivity levels are pretty good with people working from home. So, from that perspective, everything that looked like it was maybe going to be temporary, just for the next few months, as people work from home, that's how organizations are now moving forward. >> Well, and we saw Twitter, basically said, "we're going to make work from home permanent." That's probably because their CEO wants to live in Africa. Google, I think, is going to the end of the year. >> I think many companies are going to look at a hybrid, and give employees a choice, say, "look, if you want to work from home "and you can be productive, you get your stuff done, we're cool with that." I think the other point is, everybody talks about these digital transformations leading into COVID. I got to tell you, I think a lot of companies were sort of complacent. They talk the talk, but they weren't walking the walk, meaning they really weren't becoming digital businesses. They really weren't putting data at the core. And I think now it's really becoming an imperative. And there's no question that what we've been talking about and forecasting has been pulled forward, and you're either going to have to step up your digital game or you're going to be in big trouble. And the other thing I'm really interested in is will companies sub-optimize profitability in the near term, in order to put better business resiliency in place, and better flexibility, will they make those investments? And I think if they do, longer term, they're going to be in better shape. If they don't, they could maybe be okay in the near term, but I'm going to put up a caution sign, although the longer term. >> Now look, I think everything that's been done in the last few months, in terms of having those continuation plans, due to pandemics and all that stuff, look, you got to have that in your playbook, right? And so to your point, this is where CIOs are going and if you're not transforming yourself or you didn't before, lesson learned, because now you're probably having to move twice as fast to support all your employees. So I think this pandemic really kind of sped up digital transformation initiatives, which is why, you're seeing some companies, SAS and Cloud related companies, with very good earnings reports that are guiding well. And then you're seeing other companies that are pulling their guidance because of uncertainty, but it's likely more on the side if they're just not seeing the same levels of spend, because if they haven't oriented themselves, on that digital transformation side. So I think events like this, they typically showcase winners and losers than when things are going well. and everything's kind of going up. >> Well, I think that too, there's a big discussion around is the S&P over valued right now. I won't make that call, but I will say this, that there's a lot of data out there. There's data in earnings reports, there's data about this pandemic, which it continues to change. Maybe not so much daily, but we're getting new information, multiple times a week. So you got to look to that data. You got to make your call, pick your spots, earlier you talk about a stock pickers market. I think it's very much true here. There are some going to be really strong companies. emerging out of this, don't gamble but do your research. And I think you'll find some gems out there, maybe Warren buffet can't find them okay. (laughs) But the guys at main street. I'm optimistic, I wonder how you feel about the recovery. I think I maybe tainted by tech. (laughs). I'm very much concerned about certain industries, but I think the tech industry, which is our business's, going to come out of this pretty strong? >> Yeah. Look, the one thing we should have stated this earlier, the majority of organizations are not expecting a V-shaped recovery. And yet I still think there's part of the consensus is expecting a V-shaped recovery. You can see as we demonstrate in some of the earlier charts, That U-shaped, there is some cautious optimism around there, almost the majority of organizations are expecting a U-shape recovery. And even then, as we mentioned, right? That U-shape, there is some cautious optimism around there, and I have it, you probably have it where. Yes, if everything goes well, it looks like 2021 we can really get back on track. But there's so much unknown. And so yes, that does give I think everyone pause when it comes from an investment perspective, and even just bringing on technologies. into your organization, right? Which ones are going to work, which ones aren't? So, I'm definitely on the boat of, this is a more U-shaped in a V-shape recovery. I think the data backs that up. I think when it comes to Cloud and SAS players, those areas, and I think you've seen this on the investment side, a lot of money has come out of all these other sectors that we mentioned that are having these L-shaped recoveries. A lot of it has gone into the text-based. I imagine that will continue. And so that might be kind of, it's tough to sometimes balance what's going on, on the investment that stock market side, with how organizations are recovering. I think people are really looking out into two, 3/4 and saying, look to your point where you said that earlier, is there a lot of that pent up demand, are things going to get right back to normal? Because I think a lot of people are anticipating that. And if we don't see that, I think the next time we do some of these kind of COVID Flash Polls I'm interested to see whether or not, maybe towards the end of the summer, these recovery cycles are actually longer because maybe we didn't see some of that stuff. So there's still a lot of unknowns. But what we do know right now is it's not a V-shaped recovery. >> I agree, especially on the unknowns, there's monetary policy, there's fiscal policy, there's an election coming up. >> That's fine. >> There's escalating tensions with China. There's your thoughts on the efficacy of the vaccine? what about therapeutics? Do people who've had this get immunity? How many people actually have it? What about testing? So the point I'm making here is it's very, very important that you update your forecast regularly That's why it's so great to have this partnership with you guys, because you're constantly updating the numbers. It's not just a one shot deal. So Sagar, thanks so much for coming on. I'm looking forward to having you on in the coming weeks. Really appreciate it. >> Absolutely. Yeah, we'll really start kind of digging into how a lot of these emerging technologies are fairing because of COVID-19. So, I'm actually interested to start digging through the data myself. So yeah, we'll do some reporting in the coming weeks about that as well. >> Well, thanks everybody for watching this episode of theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. I'm Dave Vellante for Sagar Kadakia, check out etr.plus, that's where all the ETR data lives, I publish weekly on wikibond.com and siliconangle.com. And you can reach me @dvellante. We'll see you next time. (gentle music).

>> Announcer: From Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS IMAGINE Nonprofit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in the waterfront in Seattle, Washington, it's absolutely gorgeous here the last couple of days. We're here for the AWS IMAGINE Nonprofit event. We were here a couple weeks ago for the education event, now they have a whole separate track for nonprofits, and what's really cool about nonprofits is these people, these companies are attacking very, very big, ugly problems. It's not advertising, it's not click here and get something, these are big things, and one of the biggest issues is human trafficking. You probably hear a lot about it, it's way bigger than I ever thought it was, and we're really excited to have an expert in the field that, again, is using the power of AWS technology as well as their organization to help fight this cause. And we're excited to have Brad Myles, he is the CEO of Polaris and just coming off a keynote, we're hearing all about your keynote. So Brad, first off, welcome. >> Yeah, well thank you, thank you for having me. >> Absolutely, so Polaris, give us a little bit about kind of what's the mission for people that aren't familiar with the company. >> Yeah, so Polaris, we are a nonprofit that works full-time on this issue. We both combat the issue and try to get to long-term solutions, and respond to the issue and restore freedom to survivors by operating the National Human Trafficking Hotline for the United States, so, it's part kind of big data and long-term solutions, and it's part responding to day-to-day cases that break across the country every day. >> Right, in preparing for this interview and spending some time on the site there was just some amazing things that just jump right off the page. 24.9 million people are involved in this. Is that just domestically here in the States, or is that globally? >> That's a global number. So when you're thinking about human trafficking, think about three buckets. The first bucket is any child, 17 or younger, being exploited in the commercial sex trade. The second bucket is any adult, 18 or over, who's in the sex trade by force, fraud, or coercion. And the third bucket is anyone forced to work in some sort of other labor or service industry by force, fraud, or coercion. So you've got the child sex trafficking bucket, you've got the adult sex trafficking bucket, and then you've got all the labor trafficking bucket, right? You add up those three buckets globally, that's the number that the International Labour Organization came out and said 25 million around the world are those three buckets in a given year. >> Right, and I think again, going through the website, some of the just crazy discoveries, it's the child sex trafficking you can kind of understand that that's part of the problem, the adult sex trafficking. But you had like 25 different human trafficking business models, I forget the term that was used, for a whole host of things well beyond just the sex trade. It's a very big and unfortunately mature industry. >> Totally, yeah, so we, so the first thing that we do that we're kind of known for is operating the National Human Trafficking Hotline. The National Human Trafficking Hotline leads to having a giant data set on trafficking, it's 50,000 cases of trafficking that we've worked on. So then we analyzed that data set and came to the breakthrough conclusion that there are these 25 major forms, and almost any single call that we get in to the National Hotline is going to be one of those 25 types. And once you know that then the problem doesn't seem so overwhelming, it's not, you know, thousands of different types, it's these 25 things, so, it's 18 labor trafficking types and seven sex trafficking types. And it enables a little bit more granular analysis than just saying sex trafficking or labor trafficking which is kind of too broad and general. Let's get really specific about it, we're talking about these late night janitors, or we're talking about these people in agriculture, or we're talking about these women in illicit massage businesses. It enables the conversation to get more focused. >> Right, it's so interesting right, that's such a big piece of the big data trend that we see all over the place, right? It used to be, you know, you had old data, a sample of old data that you took an aggregate of and worked off the averages. And now, because of big data, and the other tools that we have today, now actually you can work on individual cases. So as you look at it from a kind of a big data point of view, what are some of the things that you're able to do? And that lead directly to, everyone's talking about the presentation that you just got off of, in terms of training people to look for specific behaviors that fit the patterns, so you can start to break some of these cases. >> Exactly, so, I think that the human trafficking field risks being too generic. So if you're just saying to the populace, "Look for trafficking, look for someone who's scared." People are like, that's not enough, that's too vague, it's kind of slipping through my fingers. But if you say, "In this particular type of trafficking, "with traveling magazine sales crews, "if someone comes to your door "trying to sell you a magazine with these specific signs." So now instead of talking about general red flag indicators across all 25 types, we're coming up with red flag indicators for each of the 25 types. So instead of speaking in aggregate we're getting really specific, it's almost like specific gene therapy. And the data analysis on our data set is enabling that to happen, which makes the trafficking field smarter, we could get smarter about where victims are recruited from, we could get smarter about intervention points, and we could get smarter about where survivors might have a moment to kind of get help and get out. >> Right, so I got to dig into the magazine salesperson, 'cause I think we've all had the kid-- >> Brad: Have you had a kid come to you yet? >> Absolutely, and you know, you think first they're hustlin' but their papers are kind of torn up, and they've got their little certificate, certification. How does that business model work? >> Yeah, so that's one of the 25 types, they're called mag crews. There was a New York Times article written by a journalist named Ian Urbina who really studied this and it came out a number of years ago. Then they made a movie about it called "American Honey," if you watch with a number of stars. But essentially this is a very long-standing business model, it goes back 30 or 40 years of like the door-to-door salesperson, and like trying to win sympathy from people going to door-to-door sales. And then these kind of predatory groups decided to prey on disaffected U.S. citizen youth that are kind of bored, or are kind of working a low-wage job. And so they go up to these kids and they say, "Tired of working at the Waffle House? "Well why don't you join our crew and travel the country, "and party every night, and you'll be outdoors every day, "and it's coed, you get to hang out with girls, "you get to hang out with guys, "we'll drink every night and all you have to do "is sell magazines during the day." And it's kind of this alluring pitch, and then the crews turn violent, and there's sometimes quotas on the crew, there's sometimes coercion on the crew. We get a lot of calls from kids who are abandoned by the crew. Where the crew says, "If you act up "or if you don't adhere to our rules, "we'll just drive away and leave you in this city." >> Wherever. >> Is the crews are very mobile they have this whole language, they call it kind of jumping territory. So they'll drive from like Kansas City to a nearby state, and we'll get this call from this kid, they're like, "I'm totally homeless, my crew just left me behind "because I kind of didn't obey one of the rules." So a lot of people, when they think of human trafficking they're not thinking of like U.S. citizen kids knocking on your door. And we're not saying that every single magazine crew is human trafficking, but we are saying that if there's force, and coercion, and fraud, and lies, and people feel like they can't leave, and people feel like they're being coerced to work, this is actually a form of human trafficking of U.S. citizen youth which is not very well-known but we hear about it on the Hotline quite a lot. >> Right, so then I wonder if you could tell us more about the Delta story 'cause most of the people that are going to be watching this interview weren't here today to hear your keynote. So I wonder if you can explain kind of that whole process where you identified a specific situation, you train people that are in a position to make a difference and in fact they're making a big difference. >> Yeah. So the first big report that we released based on the Hotline data was the 25 types, right? We decided to do a followup to that called Intersections, where we reached out to survivors of trafficking and we said, "Can you tell us about "the legitimate businesses that your trafficker used "while you were being trafficked?" And all these survivors were like, "Yeah, sure, "we'll tell you about social media, "we'll tell you about transportation, "we'll tell you about banks, "we'll tell you about hotels." And so we then identified these six major industries that traffickers use that are using legitimate companies, like rental car companies, and airlines, and ridesharing companies. So then we reached out to a number of those corporate partners and said, "You don't want this stuff on your services, right?" And Delta really just jumped at this, they were just like, "We take this incredibly seriously. "We want our whole workforce trained. "We don't want any trafficker to feel like "they can kind of get away with it on our flights. "We want to be a leader in transportation." And then they began taking all these steps. Their CEO, Ed Bastian, took it very seriously. They launched a whole corporate-wide taskforce across departments, they hosted listening sessions with survivor leaders so survivors could coach them, and then they started launching this whole strategy around training their flight attendants, and then training their whole workforce, and then supporting the National Human Trafficking Hotline, they made some monetary donations to Polaris. We get situations on the Hotline where someone is in a dangerous situation and needs to be flown across the country, like an escape flight almost, and Delta donated SkyMiles for us to give to survivors who are trying to flee a situation, who needs a flight. They can go to an airport and get on a flight for free that will fly them across the country. So it's almost like a modern day Underground Railroad, kind of flying people on planes. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> So they've just been an amazing partner, and they even then took the bold step of saying, "Well let's air a PSA on our flights "so the customer base can see this." So when you're on a Delta flight you'll see this PSA about human trafficking. And it just kept going and going and going. So it's now been about a five-year partnership and lots of great work together. >> And catching bad guys. >> Yeah, I mean, their publicity of the National Human Trafficking Hotline has led to a major increase in calls. Airport signage, more employees looking for it, and I actually do believe that the notion of flying, if you're going to be a trafficker, flying on a Delta flight is now a much more harrowing experience because everyone's kind of trained, and eyes and ears are looking. So you're going to pivot towards another airline that hasn't done that training yet, which now speaks to the need that once one member of an industry steps up, all different members of the industry need to follow suit. So we're encouraging a lot of the other airlines to do similar training and we're seeing some others do that, which is great. >> Yeah, and how much of it was from the CEO, or did he kind of come on after the fact, or was there kind of a champion catalyst that was pushing this through the organization, or is that often the case, or what do you find in terms of adoption of a company to help you on your mission? >> That's a great question. I mean, the bigger picture here is trafficking is a $150 billion industry, right? A group of small nonprofits and cops are not going to solve it on their own. We need the big businesses to enter the fight, because the big businesses have the resources, they have the brand, they have the customer base, they have the scale to make it a fair fight, right? So in the past few years we're seeing big businesses really enter the fight against trafficking, whether or not that's big data companies like AWS, whether or not that's social media companies, Facebook, whether or not that's hotel companies, like Wyndham and Marriott, airlines like Delta. And that's great because now the big hitters are joining the trafficking fight, and it happens in different ways, sometimes it's CEO-led, I think in the case of Delta, Ed Bastian really does take this issue very seriously, he was hosting events on this at his home, he's hosted roundtables of other CEOs in the Atlanta area like UPS, and Chick-fil-A, and Home Depot, and Coca-Cola, all those Atlanta-based CEOs know each other well, he'll host roundtables about that, and I think it was kind of CEO-led. But in other corporations it's one die hard champion who might be like a mid-level employee, or a director, who just says, "We really got to do this," and then they drive more CEO attention. So we've seen it happen both ways, whether or not it's top-down, or kind of middle-driven-up. But the big picture is if we could get some of the biggest corporations in the world to take this issue seriously, to ask questions about who they contract with, to ask questions about what's in their supply chain, to educate their workforce, to talk about this in front of their millions of customers, it just puts the fight against trafficking on steroids than a group of nonprofits would be able to do alone. So I think we're in a whole different realm of the fight now that business is at the table. >> And is that pretty much your strategy in terms of where you get the leverage, do you think? Is to execute via a lot of these well-resourced companies that are at this intersection point, I think that's a really interesting way to address the problem. >> Yeah, well, it's back to the 25 types, right? So the strategies depend on type. Like, I don't think big businesses being at the table are necessarily going to solve magazine sales crews, right? They're not necessarily going to solve begging on the street. But they can solve late night janitors that sometimes are trafficked, where lots of big companies are contracting with late night janitorial crews, and they come at 2:00 a.m., and they buff the floors, and they kind of change out the trash, and no one's there in the office building to see those workers, right? And so asking different questions of who you procure contracts with, to say, "Hey, before we contract with you guys, "we're going to need to ask you a couple questions "about where these workers got here, "and what these workers thought they were coming to do, "and we need to ID these workers." The person holding the purse strings, who's buying that contract, has the power to demand the conditions of that contract. Especially in agriculture and large retail buyers. So I think that big corporations, it's definitely part of the strategy for certain types, it's not going to solve other types of trafficking. But let's say banks and financial institutions, if they start asking different questions of who's banking with them, just like they've done with terrorism financing they could wipe out trafficking financing, could actually play a gigantic role in changing the course of how that type of trafficking exists. >> So we could talk all day, I'm sure, but we don't have time, but I'm just curious, what should people do, A, if they just see something suspicious, you know, reach out to one of these kids selling magazines, or begging on the street, or looking suspicious at an airport, so, A, that's the question. And then two, if people want to get involved more generically, whether in their company, or personally, how do they get involved? >> Yeah, so there are thousands of nonprofit groups across the country, Polaris is in touch with 3,000 of them. We're one of thousands. I would say find an organization in your area that you care about and volunteer, get involved, donate, figure out what they need. Our website is polarisproject.org, we have a national Referral Directory of organizations across the country, and so that's one way. The other way is the National Human Trafficking Hotline, the number, 1-888-373-7888. The Hotline depends on either survivors calling in directly as a lifeline, or community members calling in who saw something suspicious. So we get lots of calls from people who were getting their nails done, and the woman was crying and talking about how she's not being paid, or people who are out to eat as a family and they see something in the restaurant, or people who are traveling and they see something that doesn't make, kind of, quite sense in a hotel or an airport. So we need an army of eyes and ears calling tips into the National Human Trafficking Hotline and identifying these cases, and we need survivors to know the number themselves too so that they can call in on their own behalf. We need to respond to the problem in the short-term, help get these people connected to help, and then we need to do the long-term solutions which involves data, and business, and changing business practice, and all of that. But I do think that if people want to kind of educate themselves, polarisproject.org, there are some kind of meta-organizations, there's a group called Freedom United that's kind of starting a grassroots movement against trafficking, freedomunited.org. So lots of great organizations to look into, and this is a bipartisan issue, this is an issue that most people care about, it's one of the top headlines in the newspapers every day these days. And it's something that I think people in this country naturally care about because it references kind of the history of chattel slavery, and some of those forms of slavery that morphed but never really went away, and we're still fighting that same fight today. >> In terms of, you know, we're here at AWS IMAGINE, and they're obviously putting a lot of resources behind this, Teresa Carlson and the team. How are you using them, have you always been on AWS? Has that platform enabled you to accomplish your mission better? >> Yeah, oh for sure, I mean, Polaris crunches over 60 terabytes of data per day, of just like the computing that we're doing, right? >> Jeff: And what types of data are you crunching? >> It's the data associated with Hotline calls, we collect up to 150 variables on each Hotline call. The Hotline calls come in, we have this data set of 50,000 cases of trafficking with very sensitive data, and the protections of that data, the cybersecurity associated with that data, the storage of that data. So since 2017, Polaris has been in existence since 2002, so we're in our 17th year now, but starting three years ago in 2017 we started really partnering with AWS, where we're migrating more of our data onto AWS, building some AI tools with AWS to help us process Hotline calls more efficiently. And then talking about potentially moving our, all of our data storage onto AWS so that we don't have our own server racks in our office, we still need to go through a number of steps to get there. But having AWS at the table, and then talking about the Impact Computing team and this, like, real big data crunching of like millions of trafficking cases globally, we haven't even started talking about that yet but I think that's like a next stage. So for now, it's getting our data stronger, more secure, building some of those AI bots to help us with our work, and then potentially considering us moving completely serverless, and all of those things are conversations we're having with AWS, and thrilled that AWS is making this an issue to the point that it was prioritized and featured at this conference, which was a big deal, to get in front of the whole audience and do a keynote, and we're very, very grateful for that. >> And you mentioned there's so many organizations involved, are you guys doing data aggregation, data consolidation, sharing, I mean there must be with so many organizations, that adds a lot of complexity, and a lot of data silos, to steal classic kind of IT terms. Are you working towards some kind of unification around that, or how does that look in the future? >> We would love to get to the point where different organizations are sharing their data set. We'd love to get to the point where different organizations are using, like, a shared case management tool, and collecting the same data so it's apples to apples. There are different organizations, like, Thorn is doing some amazing big data-- >> Jeff: Right, we've had Thorn on a couple of times. >> How do we merge Polaris's data set with Thorn's data set? We're not doing that yet, right? I think we're only doing baby steps. But I think the AWS platform could enable potentially a merger of Thorn's data with Polaris's data in some sort of data lake, right? So that's a great idea, we would love to get to that. I think the field isn't there yet. The field has kind of been, like, tech-starved for a number of years, but in the past five years has made a lot of progress. The field is mostly kind of small shelters and groups responding to survivors, and so this notion of like infusing the trafficking field with data is somewhat of a new concept, but it's enabling us to think much bigger about what's possible. >> Well Brad, again, we could go on all day, you know, really thankful for what you're doing for a whole lot of people that we don't see, or maybe we see and we're not noticing, so thank you for that, and uh. >> Absolutely. >> Look forward to catching up when you move the ball a little bit further down the field. >> Yeah, thank you for having me on. It's a pleasure to be here. >> All right, my pleasure. He's Brad, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at AWS IMAGINE Nonprofits, thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (futuristic music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back to Las Vegas. We are at AWS re:Invent, along with Rebecca Knight, I'm John Walls. A lot of energy still behind us here. >> It's amazing. >> Have you noticed that? >> This is day three, people, wow. >> And again, I know a lot of you watching, you come to shows, you attend these things, and you realize that day three sometimes can be a little bit >> Sleepy, yeah. >> Slower, yeah. Not so here, this place is still very much alive. >> Sin City. >> Yeah. Easy, easy now. (group chuckles) We're joined by a couple of gentlemen right now to join us here, Prathap Dendi, who is the General Manager of Growth Initiatives and Commercialization at AppDynamics. Prathap, thank you for being with us. >> Oh, great to be here. >> And Emmanuel Offiong, who is Vice President of Enterprise at Wyndham Hotels. Emmanuel, now usually the conversation in here is, hey, how ya doin', where are you staying? We don't have to ask you that. (group chuckles) We know, right. >> Right. >> So you're good to go at Wyndham. So, first off, let's just talk about, I'd like to get your ideas, we've talked about the show, I mean, how do you feel? You're probably around here quite a bit, Prathap, at various shows and what have ya, your thoughts about what you're seeing here at AWS re:Invent 2018? >> For starters, I think you guys need at least 10 more Cubes because I've been watching the activity here. It's just, you know, crazy, right? A lot of high energy here, a lot of cloud stories, multi-cloud stories, really feed on that, a lot of innovation that's being announced here. >> Alright, and Emmanuel, we hear this a lot, right, customers who are making that big digital jump, you're making that leap, and, in some cases, it's a bit of a leap of faith, right, in some respects. Let's go back to before that, the genesis of your decision, what was the impetus and what were your reservations, and what are your reservations still, for that matter, going forward? >> Sure, so I actually joined Wyndham about three years ago when we were trying to undertake this digital journey, and what we realized was that there was a lot of competition with our online travel agents, and we weren't really bringing in customers the way we thought we could, and so we realized that our digital platforms were antiquated. They weren't speaking to our customers in terms of increased loyalty and such, and so we knew that we had to make a change. We knew that in today's economy, in order to attract customers, we had to be more digital friendly. We had to provide a seamless experience, and we had to make sure that, on all of our platforms, that customers were able to check-in and check-out on their mobile platforms very easily. >> You mentioned online travel agents, but just talk a little bit about this era of hoteling. Has it become so much more competitive, particularly with the rise of Airbnb and other VRBOs? >> It has, it really has, so the Expedias, the Airbnbs of the world, they've really embraced technology, more so than maybe the traditional hospitality companies have, and so that's why you'll see companies like ourselves starting to make investments in technology, making investments into digital transformation. >> So you have your aha moment, we need to move forward, we need a digital transformation so you begin to look for partners. What were you looking for? >> Couple of things, so we were looking at transformation on three levels, for digital, infrastructure management, and data, and so, in terms of a partner, what we wanted to do is we were looking for someone to help us ease that journey. We knew the journey was going to be rough, especially from where we started, so we were looking for a partner like AWS that was going to help us sort of make that scale into modern-day technology very quickly. >> Alright, so when you talk about a digital journey, I just want to back up a little bit. What exactly does that encompass in your case? I mean, I'm thinking you've got your website, you've got your reservation, you know, you've got all these microservices running on your site, you know, it's all good, it's all fine. What weren't you doing specifically germane to your business that AppDynamics is now getting you back up to speed and getting you into the 21st century, if you will? >> Sure, so let me give you some context then. When we talk about customers, we talk about two sets of customers. There are guests who walk in through the door, and then there are franchisees. We're a franchise-based company so let's speak to our guests. In regards to our guests, our check-in/check-out process wasn't as seamless as it could be, right. It wasn't very mobile friendly at the time so those were the things that we were looking to change, and in regards to our franchisees, their ultimate goal is they want to be able to check revenue. They want to be able to check rates, change rates. They want to be able to see what their competitors are doing, and they want to be able to do that very seamlessly and on a mobile platform, and we didn't have those capabilities available to them at the time. >> If I may say something? >> Please. >> It's interesting when we see leaders like Emmanuel talk about digital transformation, they're not talking about I.T. transformation, they're not talking about servers going away, infrastructure. It's really refreshing to see customers talk about business model changes. What I see, you know, Scott and Emmanuel, their team has done a great job about focusing on what is it about the business model that needs to change, and really getting that end-user experience journey, like you asked, right from the time they log-in to requesting a service or changing some reservation, all of that is what they're capturing, and it's really complex, and I know he's quite humble to say, oh, we've done it at scale, but this is hard stuff, to make it simple for the end-user passes the complexity down to the systems, and that's what the team at Wyndham was able to do and we're lucky, AppDynamics, to be part of that journey that monitors the end-to-end performance of the end-user journeys, and then importantly correlate that to business outcomes. You know, do we actually have more partners coming in? Is the full journey faster now, now that we've gone to AWS, is it really impacting the business or is it just I.T. spin? So that's really a good caller to see that digital transformation is really a business model change not just an I.T. change. >> So the business model, so walk us through exactly what you did for this transformation and this cloud migration too. >> Sure, so the first step was realizing that we had to start to migrate some workloads to the cloud, and the reason why we knew we had to go to the cloud was, like I said before, we wanted to get out of the business of managing infrastructure, right, so we said we're going to take our workloads to the cloud. Well, going to the cloud, especially with the type of workloads we were looking at, is often a very complicated and complex adventure, and that's where AppDynamics came in for us, right. We knew we needed something that was going to allow us to see end to end where we started from, and when we migrate to the cloud, have that same level of visibility to ensure that we didn't do two things, right. We're protecting the brand, and we want to make sure we protect our customer experience. Those are the two things that were most important to us as a part of this journey. >> From a security standpoint, huge concern, right? I mean, it has been for a while, but when you go public and what exposure there might be, how have you two kind of dealt with that because, obviously, you're dealing with financial information, with customer information, there's a lot of proprietary stuff that you're getting from your folks that you have to protect, and, obviously, internally as well. So talk about the security component. >> Yeah, happy to go first. It used to be just about five, six years ago, application was seen as a separate silo or a separate layer, and security was different and experience was different. What we're now seeing is every business function is getting really melded into that one concept of end-user experience so security becomes, not an afterthought, but actually is part of the design construct, right, and what we've seen with customers like Wyndham is they have gotten so much better at measuring right from the click stream of from reservation to fulfillment, and looking for anomalies in that data, right, so security correlation to the application data is out of the box now so that's the pre-design for architecture groups like Emmanuel's. >> Sure, yeah, so I (chuckles) I think you said it very well. >> I'll say what he said, right? (group chuckles) >> Well, when you're thinking about this migration, which began in, when did this journey begin? >> Couple years ago. >> Couple of years ago. So, now, was there resistance to it? As you said, you were really at this tipping point where you said we got to do something different here. We've got a lot of different competition coming at us from different angles. >> Yeah, so there was some level of internal concern, I would say, but we worked through that, right. It's really about, at the end of the day, we migrated 8,400 hotels across 18 brands onto this new platform, right, so it's not insignificant so you can imagine, right, the amount of internal conversations that needed to happen to get something like that accomplished. >> And what haven't you done? Obviously, this is a multi-year process. You can't snap your fingers and it's going to be done. I assume you're in a still a nascent stage of this, and you have much more work to do. >> Yep, now we're focused on data, right. Now, we're focused on grabbing insights from the data that we've put into the cloud. We've migrated most of what we were looking to migrate over the last two years, if you will, and now we're lookin' at how do we get more insights from the data that's available to us? >> Alright, and is that something that your company can play with as well? >> And Amazon and AWS themselves so I think over the years what I've seen, you know, I've been an engineer in this career, now in the business side, you co-system around application stack has gotten so transparent, right, so customers like Wyndham are able to purchase best of breed solutions like AppDynamics on AWS marketplace, click of a button. There's no long cycles of value so you quickly get to the value, and then once the journey starts, it's really all about the customer. They're generating trillions of data set every day across their business. Our goal is to see how can we bubble up the impact of that investment to their line of business? How quickly are the customers getting on board, making their decisions versus having to worry about the servers and the infrastructure. That's what we're seeing in a big way. >> Well, and as you said before, this is a business model change. It wasn't just a technology change so how have your customers seen this? How are they reacting? What are your franchisees seeing? How has the business changed? >> From our perspective, the customers love it, and we can measure that in terms of our bookings. We're up 75% in terms of mobile bookings as a result of some of these changes that we've made. Our customers have given us feedback that the experience is much more seamless. Our franchisees have given us feedback that, you know what, it's easier to use our services. >> Yeah, all I want is the best rate. (group laughs) Just give me the best rate, Emmanuel, alright, and I'm a happy camper. >> The statistic that he shared is phenomenal, right, being able to see 75% jump in mobile booking is significant. >> That's extraordinary. >> That's real ROI. >> Yeah, and there are others too. Scott, their CIO, recently wrote in a blog about how and why the CIOs are sleeping better, right. They're actually getting sleep back, and I think that's really the result of the transformation where systems like AppDynamics, systems like applications they wrote, they'll become a lot more seamless now, and being able to show, when I invest a dollar into an application, how is that yielding to line of business, real time is what they have as power now. >> The boss is happy. >> Yeah. >> Yes. >> Well, if they're sleeping well, we're all sleeping well. I know how that goes. Gentlemen, thanks for sharing this story. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, thank you for having us. >> Appreciate your time here. >> Appreciate it. >> Appreciate it. >> You bet, back with more here from AWS re:Invent. You're watching this live from Las Vegas, and we're on theCUBE. (techno music)