(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)

(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).