>> From "theCUBE" studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from "theCUBE" and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> There are very few political issues that get bipartisan support these days, nevermind consensus spanning geopolitical boundaries. But whether we're talking across the aisle or over the pond, there seems to be common agreement that the power of big tech firms should be regulated. But the government's track record when it comes to antitrust aimed at big tech is actually really mixed, mixed at best. History has shown that market forces rather than public policy have been much more effective at curbing monopoly power in the technology industry. Hello, and welcome to this week's "Wikibon CUBE" insights powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis" we welcome in frequent "CUBE" contributor Dave Moschella, author and senior fellow at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. Dave, welcome, good to see you again. >> Hey, thanks Dave, good to be here. >> So you just recently published an article, we're going to bring it up here and I'll read the title, "Theory Aside, Antitrust Advocates Should Keep Their "Big Tech" Ambitions Narrow". And in this post you argue that big sweeping changes like breaking apart companies to moderate monopoly power in the tech industry have been ineffective compared to market forces, but you're not saying government shouldn't be involved rather you're suggesting that more targeted measures combined with market forces are the right answer. Can you maybe explain a little bit more the premise behind your research and some of your conclusions? >> Sure, and first let's go back to that title, when I said, theory aside, that is referring to a huge debate that's going on in global antitrust circles these days about whether antitrust should follow the traditional path of being invoked when there's real harm, demonstrable harm to consumers or a new theory that says that any sort of vast monopoly power inevitably will be bad for competition and consumers at some point, so your best to intervene now to avoid harms later. And that school, which was a very minor part of the antitrust world for many, many years is now quite ascendant and the debate goes on doesn't matter which side of that you're on the questions sort of there well, all right, well, if you're going to do something to take on big tech and clearly many politicians, regulators are sort of issuing to do something, what would you actually do? And what are the odds that that'll do more good than harm? And that was really the origins of the piece and trying to take a historical view of that. >> Yeah, I learned a new word, thank you. Neo-brandzian had to look it up, but basically you're saying that traditionally it was proving consumer harm versus being proactive about the possibility or likelihood of consumer harm. >> Correct, and that's a really big shift that a lot of traditional antitrust people strongly object to, but is now sort of the trendy and more send and view. >> Got it, okay, let's look a little deeper into the history of tech monopolies and government action and see what we can learn from that. We put together this slide that we can reference. It shows the three historical targets in the tech business and now the new ones. In 1969, the DOJ went after IBM, Big Blue and it's 13 years later, dropped its suit. And then in 1984 the government broke Ma Bell apart and in the late 1990s, went after Microsoft, I think it was 1998 in the Wintel monopoly. And recently in an interview with tech journalist, Kara Swisher, the FTC chair Lena Khan claimed that the government played a major role in moderating the power of tech giants historically. And I think she even specifically referenced Microsoft or maybe Kara did and basically said the industry and consumers from the dominance of companies like Microsoft. So Dave, let's briefly talk about and Kara by the way, didn't really challenge that, she kind of let it slide. But let's talk about each of these and test this concept a bit. Were the government actions in these instances necessary? What were the outcomes and the consequences? Maybe you could start with IBM and AT&T. >> Yeah, it's a big topic and there's a lot there and a lot of history, but I might just sort of introduce by saying for whatever reasons antitrust has been part of the entire information technology industry history from mainframe to the current period and that slide sort of gives you that. And the reasons for that are I think once that we sort of know the economies of scale, network effects, lock in safe choices, lot of things that explain it, but the good bit about that is we actually have so much history of this and we can at least see what's happened in the past and when you look at IBM and AT&T they both were massive antitrust cases. The one against IBM was dropped and it was dropped in as you say, in 1980. Well, what was going on in at that time, IBM was sort of considered invincible and unbeatable, but it was 1981 that the personal computer came around and within just a couple of years the world could see that the computing paradigm had change from main frames and minis to PCs lines client server and what have you. So IBM in just a couple of years went from being unbeatable, you can't compete with them, we have to break up with them to being incredibly vulnerable and in trouble and never fully recovered and is sort of a shell of what it once was. And so the market took care of that and no action was really necessary just by everybody thinking there was. The case of AT&T, they did act and they broke up the company and I would say, first question is, was that necessary? Well, lots of countries didn't do that and the reality is 1980 breaking it up into long distance and regional may have made some sense, but by the 1990 it was pretty clear that the telecom world was going to change dramatically from long distance and fixed wires services to internet services, data services, wireless services and all of these things that we're going to restructure the industry anyways. But AT& T one to me is very interesting because of the unintended consequences. And I would say that the main unintended consequence of that was America's competitiveness in telecommunications took a huge hit. And today, to this day telecommunications is dominated by European, Chinese and other firms. And the big American sort of players of the time AT&T which Western Electric became Lucent, Lucent is now owned by Nokia and is really out of it completely and most notably and compellingly Bell Labs, the Bell Labs once the world's most prominent research institution now also a shell of itself and as it was part of Lucent is also now owned by the Finnish company Nokia. So that restructuring greatly damaged America's core strength in telecommunications hardware and research and one can argue we've never recovered right through this 5IG today. So it's a very good example of the market taking care of, the big problem, but meddling leading to some unintended consequences that have hurt the American competitiveness and as we'll talk about, probably later, you can see some of that going on again today and in the past with Microsoft and Intel. >> Right, yeah, Bell Labs was an American gem, kind of like Xerox PARC and basically gone now. You mentioned Intel and Microsoft, Microsoft and Intel. As many people know, some young people don't, IBM unwillingly handed its monopoly to Intel and Microsoft by outsourcing the micro processor and operating system, respectively. Those two companies ended up with IBM ironically, agreeing to take OS2 which was its proprietary operating system and giving Intel, Microsoft Windows not realizing that its ability to dominate a new disruptive market like PCs and operating systems had been vaporized to your earlier point by the new Wintel ecosystem. Now Dave, the government wanted to break Microsoft apart and split its OS business from its application software, in the case of Intel, Intel only had one business. You pointed out microprocessors so it couldn't bust it up, but take us through the history here and the consequences of each. >> Well, the Microsoft one is sort of a classic because the antitrust case which was raging in the sort of mid nineties and 1998 when it finally ended, those were the very, once again, everybody said, Bill Gates was unstoppable, no one could compete with Microsoft they'd buy them, destroy them, predatory pricing, whatever they were accusing of the attacks on Netscape all these sort of things. But those the very years where it was becoming clear first that Microsoft basically missed the early big years of the internet and then again, later missed all the early years of the mobile phone business going back to BlackBerrys and pilots and all those sorts of things. So here we are the government making the case that this company is unstoppable and you can't compete with them the very moment they're entirely on the defensive. And therefore wasn't surprising that that suit eventually was dropped with some minor concessions about Microsoft making it a little bit easier for third parties to work with them and treating people a little bit more, even handling perfectly good things that they did. But again, the more market took care of the problem far more than the antitrust activities did. The Intel one is also interesting cause it's sort of like the AT& T one. On the one hand antitrust actions made Intel much more likely and in fact, required to work with AMD enough to keep that company in business and having AMD lowered prices for consumers certainly probably sped up innovation in the personal computer business and appeared to have a lot of benefits for those early years. But when you look at it from a longer point of view and particularly when look at it again from a global point of view you see that, wow, they not so clear because that very presence of AMD meant that there's a lot more pressure on Intel in terms of its pricing, its profitability, its flexibility and its volumes. All the things that have made it harder for them to A, compete with chips made in Taiwan, let alone build them in the United States and therefore that long term effect of essentially requiring Intel to allow AMD to exist has undermined Intel's position globally and arguably has undermined America's position in the long run. And certainly Intel today is far more vulnerable to an ARM and Invidia to other specialized chips to China, to Taiwan all of these things are going on out there, they're less capable of resisting that than they would've been otherwise. So, you thought we had some real benefits with AMD and lower prices for consumers, but the long term unintended consequences are arguably pretty bad. >> Yeah, that's why we recently wrote in Intel two "Strategic To Fail", we'll see, Okay. now we come to 2022 and there are five companies with anti-trust targets on their backs. Although Microsoft seems to be the least susceptible to US government ironically intervention at this this point, but maybe not and we show "The Cincos Comas Club" in a homage to Russ Hanneman of the show "Silicon Valley" Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon all with trillion dollar plus valuations. But meta briefly crossed that threshold like Mr. Hanneman lost a comma and is now well under that market cap probably around five or 600 million, sorry, billion. But under serious fire nonetheless Dave, people often don't realize the immense monopoly power that IBM had which relatively speaking when measured its percent of industry revenue or profit dwarf that of any company in tech ever, but the industry is much smaller then, no internet, no cloud. Does it call for a different approach this time around? How should we think about these five companies their market power, the implications of government action and maybe what you suggested more narrow action versus broad sweeping changes. >> Yeah, and there's a lot there. I mean, if you go back to the old days IBM had what, 70% of the computer business globally and AT&T had 90% or so of the American telecom market. So market shares that today's players can only dream of. Intel and Microsoft had 90% of the personal computer market. And then you look at today the big five and as wealthy and as incredibly successful as they've been, you sort of have almost the argument that's wrong on the face of it. How can five companies all of which compete with each other to at least some degree, how can they all be monopolies? And the reality is they're not monopolies, they're all oligopolies that are very powerful firms, but none of them have an outright monopoly on anything. There are competitors in all the spaces that they're in and increasing and probably increasingly so. And so, yeah, I think people conflate the extraordinary success of the companies with this belief that therefore they are monopolist and I think they're far less so than those in the past. >> Great, all right, I want to do a quick drill down to cloud computing, it's a key component of digital business infrastructure in his book, "Seeing Digital", Dave Moschella coined a term the matrix or the key which is really referred to the key technology platforms on which people are going to build digital businesses. Dave, we joke you should have called it the metaverse you were way ahead of your time. But I want to look at this ETR chart, we show spending momentum or net score on the vertical access market share or pervasiveness in the dataset on the horizontal axis. We show this view a lot, we put a dotted line at the 40% mark which indicates highly elevated spending. And you can sort of see Microsoft in the upper right, it's so far up to the right it's hidden behind the January 22 and AWS is right there. Those two dominate the cloud far ahead of the pack including Google Cloud. Microsoft and to a lesser extent AWS they dominate in a lot of other businesses, productivity, collaboration, database, security, video conferencing. MarTech with LinkedIn PC software et cetera, et cetera, Googles or alphabets of business of course is ads and we don't have similar spending data on Apple and Facebook, but we know these companies dominate their respective business. But just to give you a sense of the magnitude of these companies, here's some financial data that's worth looking at briefly. The table ranks companies by market cap in trillions that's the second column and everyone in the club, but meta and each has revenue well over a hundred billion dollars, Amazon approaching half a trillion dollars in revenue. The operating income and cash positions are just mind boggling and the cash equivalents are comparable or well above the revenues of highly successful tech companies like Cisco, Dell, HPE, Oracle, and Salesforce. They're extremely profitable from an operating income standpoint with the clear exception of Amazon and we'll come back to that in a moment and we show the revenue multiples in the last column, Apple, Microsoft, and Google, just insane. Dave, there are other equally important metrics, CapX is one which kind of sets the stage for future scale and there are other measures. >> Yeah, including our research and development where those companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars over the years. And I think it's easy to look at those numbers and just say, this doesn't seem right, how can any companies have so much and spend so much? But if you think of what they're actually doing, those companies are building out the digital infrastructure of essentially the entire world. And I remember once meeting some folks at Google, and they said, beyond AI, beyond Search, beyond Android, beyond all the specific things we do, the biggest thing we're actually doing is building a physical infrastructure that can deliver search results on any topic in microseconds and the physical capacity they built costs those sorts of money. And when people start saying, well, we should have lots and lots of smaller companies well, that sounds good, yeah, it's all right, but where are those companies going to get the money to build out what needs to be built out? And every country in the world is trying to build out its digital infrastructure and some are going to do it much better than others. >> I want to just come back to that chart on Amazon for a bit, notice their comparatively tiny operating profit as a percentage of revenue, Amazon is like Bezos giant lifestyle business, it's really never been that profitable like most retail. However, there's one other financial data point around Amazon's business that we want to share and this chart here shows Amazon's operating profit in the blue bars and AWS's in the orange. And the gray line is the percentage of Amazon's overall operating profit that comes from AWS. That's the right most access, so last quarter we were well over a hundred percent underscoring the power of AWS and the horrendous margins in retail. But AWS is essentially funding Amazon's entrance into new markets, whether it's grocery or movies, Bezos moves into space. Dave, a while back you collaborated with us and we asked our audience, what could disrupt Amazon? And we came up with your detailed help, a number of scenarios as shown here. And we asked the audience to rate the likelihood of each scenario in terms of its likelihood of disrupting Amazon with a 10 being highly likely on average the score was six with complacency, arrogance, blindness, you know, self-inflicted wounds really taking the top spot with 6.5. So Dave is breaking up Amazon the right formula in your view, why or why not? >> Yeah, there's a couple of things there. The first is sort of the irony that when people in the sort of regulatory world talk about the power of Amazon, they almost always talk about their power in consumer markets, whether it's books or retail or impact on malls or main street shops or whatever and as you say that they make very little money doing that. The interest people almost never look at the big cloud battle between Amazon, Microsoft and lesser extent Google, Alibaba others, even though that's where they're by far highest market share and pricing power and all those things are. So the regulatory focus is sort of weird, but you know, the consumer stuff obviously gets more appeal to the general public. But that survey you referred to me was interesting because one of the challenges I sort of sent myself I was like okay, well, if I'm going to say that IBM case, AT&T case, Microsoft's case in all those situations the market was the one that actually minimized the power of those firms and therefore the antitrust stuff wasn't really necessary. Well, how true is that going to be again, just cause it's been true in the past doesn't mean it's true now. So what are the possible scenarios over the 2020s that might make it all happen again? And so each of those were sort of questions that we put out to others, but the ones that to me by far are the most likely I mean, they have the traditional one of company cultures sort of getting fat and happy and all, that's always the case, but the more specific ones, first of all by far I think is China. You know, Amazon retail is a low margin business. It would be vulnerable if it didn't have the cloud profits behind it, but imagine a year from now two years from now trade tensions with China get worse and Christmas comes along and China just says, well, you know, American consumers if you want that new exercise bike or that new shoes or clothing, well, anything that we make well, actually that's not available on Amazon right now, but you can get that from Alibaba. And maybe in America that's a little more farfetched, but in many countries all over the world it's not farfetched at all. And so the retail divisions vulnerability to China just seems pretty obvious. Another possible disruption, Amazon has spent billions and billions with their warehouses and their robots and their automated inventory systems and all the efficiencies that they've done there, but you could argue that maybe someday that's not really necessary that you have Search which finds where a good is made and a logistical system that picks that up and delivers it to customers and why do you need all those warehouses anyways? So those are probably the two top one, but there are others. I mean, a lot of retailers as they get stronger online, maybe they start pulling back some of the premium products from Amazon and Amazon takes their cut of whatever 30% or so people might want to keep more of that in house. You see some of that going on today. So the idea that the Amazon is in vulnerable disruption is probably is wrong and as part of the work that I'm doing, as part of stuff that I do with Dave and SiliconANGLE is how's that true for the others too? What are the scenarios for Google or Apple or Microsoft and the scenarios are all there. And so, will these companies be disrupted as they have in the past? Well, you can't say for sure, but the scenarios are certainly plausible and I certainly wouldn't bet against it and that's what history tells us. And it could easily happen once again and therefore, the antitrust should at least be cautionary and humble and realize that maybe they don't need to act as much as they think. >> Yeah, now, one of the things that you mentioned in your piece was felt like narrow remedies, were more logical. So you're not arguing for totally Les Affaire you're pushing for remedies that are more targeted in scope. And while the EU just yesterday announced new rules to limit the power of tech companies and we showed the article, some comments here the regulators they took the social media to announce a victory and they had a press conference. I know you watched that it was sort of a back slapping fest. The comments however, that we've sort of listed here are mixed, some people applauded, but we saw many comments that were, hey, this is a horrible idea, this was rushed together. And these are going to result as you say in unintended consequences, but this is serious stuff they're talking about applying would appear to be to your point or your prescription more narrowly defined restrictions although a lot of them to any company with a market cap of more than 75 billion Euro or turnover of more than 77.5 billion Euro which is a lot of companies and imposing huge penalties for violations up to 20% of annual revenue for repeat offenders, wow. So again, you've taken a brief look at these developments, you watched the press conference, what do you make of this? This is an application of more narrow restrictions, but in your quick assessment did they get it right? >> Yeah, let's break that down a little bit, start a little bit of history again and then get to Europe because although big sweeping breakups of the type that were proposed for IBM, Microsoft and all weren't necessary that doesn't mean that the government didn't do some useful things because they did. In the case of IBM government forces in Europe and America basically required IBM to make it easier for companies to make peripherals type drives, disc drives, printers that worked with IBM mainframes. They made them un-bundle their software pricing that made it easier for database companies and others to sell their of products. With AT&T it was the government that required AT&T to actually allow other phones to connect to the network, something they argued at the time would destroy security or whatever that it was the government that required them to allow MCI the long distance carrier to connect to the AT network for local deliveries. And with that Microsoft and Intel the government required them to at least treat their suppliers more even handly in terms of pricing and policies and support and such things. So the lessons out there is the big stuff wasn't really necessary, but the little stuff actually helped a lot and I think you can see the scenarios and argue in the piece that there's little stuff that can be done today in all the cases for the big five, there are things that you might want to consider the companies aren't saints they take advantage of their power, they use it in ways that sometimes can be reigned in and make for better off overall. And so that's how it brings us to the European piece of it. And to me, the European piece is much more the bad scenario of doing too much than the wiser course of trying to be narrow and specific. What they've basically done is they have a whole long list of narrow things that they're all trying to do at once. So they want Amazon not to be able to share data about its selling partners and they want Apple to open up their app store and they don't want people Google to be able to share data across its different services, Android, Search, Mail or whatever. And they don't want Facebook to be able to, they want to force Facebook to open up to other messaging services. And they want to do all these things for all the big companies all of which are American, and they want to do all that starting next year. And to me that looks like a scenario of a lot of difficult problems done quickly all of which might have some value if done really, really well, but all of which have all kinds of risks for the unintended consequence we've talked before and therefore they seem to me being too much too soon and the sort of problems we've seen in the past and frankly to really say that, I mean, the Europeans would never have done this to the companies if they're European firms, they're doing this because they're all American firms and the sort of frustration of Americans dominance of the European tech industry has always been there going back to IBM, Microsoft, Intel, and all of them. But it's particularly strong now because the tech business is so big. And so I think the politics of this at a time where we're supposedly all this great unity of America and NATO and Europe in regards to Ukraine, having the Europeans essentially go after the most important American industry brings in the geopolitics in I think an unavoidable way. And I would think the story is going to get pretty tense over the next year or so and as you say, the Europeans think that they're taking massive actions, they think they're doing the right thing. They think this is the natural follow on to the GDPR stuff and even a bigger version of that and they think they have more to come and they see themselves as the people taming big tech not just within Europe, but for the world and absent any other rules that they may pull that off. I mean, GDPR has indeed spread despite all of its flaws. So the European thing which it doesn't necessarily get huge attention here in America is certainly getting attention around the world and I would think it would get more, even more going forward. >> And the caution there is US public policy makers, maybe they can provide, they will provide a tailwind maybe it's a blind spot for them and it could be a template like you say, just like GDPR. Okay, Dave, we got to leave it there. Thanks for coming on the program today, always appreciate your insight and your views, thank you. >> Hey, thanks a lot, Dave. >> All right, don't forget these episodes are all available as podcast, wherever you listen. All you got to do is search, "Breaking Analysis Podcast". Check out ETR website, etr.ai. We publish every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. And you can email me david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @davevellante. Comment on my LinkedIn post. This is Dave Vellante for Dave Michelle for "theCUBE Insights" powered by ETR. Have a great week, stay safe, be well and we'll see you next time. (slow tempo music)

(soft music) >> There are many constants in the storage business, relentlessly declining cost per bit, innovations that perpetually battled the laws of physics, a seemingly endless flow of venture capital, despite the intense competition. And there's one other constant in the storage business, Eric Hertzog, and he joins us today in this CUBE video exclusive to talk about IBM's recent storage announcements. Eric, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Great, Dave, thanks very much, we love being on theCUBE and you guys do a great job of informing the industry about what's going on in storage and IT in general. >> Well, thank you for that. >> Great job. >> We're going to cover a lot of ground today. IBM Storage, made a number of announcements the past month around data resilience, a new as-a-service model, which a lot of folks are doing in the industry, you've made performance enhancements. Can you give us the top line summary of the hard news, Eric? >> Sure, the top line summary is of course cyber security is on top of mind for everybody in the recent Fortune 500 list that came out, you probably saw, there was a survey of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, they named cybersecurity as their number one concern, not war, not pandemic, but cybersecurity. So we've got an announcement around data resilience and cyber resiliency built on our FlashSystem family with our new offering, Safeguarded Copy. And the second thing is the move to a new method of storage consumption. Storage-as-a-Service, a pay-as-you-go model, cloud-like the way people buy cloud storage, that's what you can do now from IBM Storage with our Storage-as-a-Service. Those are the key, two takeaways, Dave. >> Yeah and I want to stay on the trends that we're seeing in cyber for a moment, the work from home pivot in the hybrid work approach has really created a new exposures, people aren't as secure outside of the walled garden of the offices and we've seen a dramatic escalation in the adversaries capabilities and techniques, another least of which is island hopping, in other words, putting code fragments in the digital supply chain, they reform once they're inside the company and it's almost like this organic creepy thing that occurs. They're also living as you know, stealthily for many, many months, sometimes years, exfiltrating data, and then just waiting and then when companies respond, the incidents response trigger a ransomware incident. So they escalate the cyber crime and it's just a really, really bad situation for victims. What are you seeing in that regard and the trends? >> Well, one of the key things we see as everyone is very concerned about cybersecurity. The Biden administration has issued (indistinct) not only to the government sector, but to the private sector, cyber security is a big issue. Other governments across the world have done the same thing. So at IBM Storage, what we see is taking a comprehensive view. Many people think that cybersecurity is moat with the alligators, the castle wall and then of course the sheriff of Nottingham to catch the bad guys. And we know the sheriff of Nottingham doesn't do a good job of catching Robin Hood. So it takes a while as you just pointed out, sitting there for months or even longer. So one of the key things you need to do in an overall cybersecurity strategy is don't forget storage. Now our announcement around Safeguarded Copy is very much about rapid recovery after an attack for malware or ransomware. We have a much broader set of cyber security technology inside of IBM Storage. For example, with our FlashSystem family, we can encrypt data at rest with no performance penalty. So if someone steals that data, guess what? It's encrypted. We can do anomalous pattern detection with our backup product, Spectrum Protect Plus, why would you care? Well, if theCUBE's backup was taking two hours on particular datasets and all of a sudden it was taking four hours, Hmm maybe someone is encrypting those backup data sets. And so we notify. So what we believe at IBM is that an overarching cybersecurity strategy has to keep the bad guys out, threat detection, anomalous pattern behavior on the network, on the servers, on the storage and all of that, chasing the bad guy down once they breach the wall, 'cause that does happen, but if you don't have cyber and data resilience built into your storage technology, you are leaving a gap that the bad guys can explain, whether that be the malware ransomware guys oh by the way, Dave, there still is internal IT theft that there was a case about 10 years ago now where 10 IT guys stole $175 million. I kid you not, $175 million from a bunch of large banks across the country, and that was an internal IT theft. So between the internal IT issues that could approach you malware and ransomware, a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy, must include storage. >> So I want to ask you about come back to Safeguarded Copy and you mentioned some features and capabilities, encrypting data at rest, your anomalous pattern recognition inferring, you're taking a holistic approach, but of course you've got a storage centricity, what's different about your cyber solution? What's your unique value probability to your (indistinct) . >> Well, when you look at Safeguarded Copy, what it does is it creates immutable copies that are logically air-gapped, but logically air-gapped locally. So what that means is if you have a malware or ransomware attack and you need to do a recovery, whether it be a surgical recovery or a full-on recovery, because they attacked everything, then we can do recovery in a couple hours versus a couple of days or a couple of weeks. Now, in addition to the logical local air-gapping with Safeguarded Copy, you also could do remote logical air-gapping by snapping out to the cloud, which we also have on our FlashSystem products and you also of course, could take our FlashSystem products and back up to tape, giving you a physical air gap. In short, we give our customers three different ways to help with malware and ransomware. >> Let me ask you- >> Are air-gapped locally. >> Yeah, please continue, I'm sorry. >> So our air-gapping locally for rapid recovery, air-gapping remotely, which again, then puts it on the cloud provider network, so hopefully they can't breach that. And then clearly a physical air gap going out to tape all three and on the mainframe, we have Safeguarded Copy already, Dave and several of our mainframe customers actually do two of those things, they'll do Safeguarded Copy or rapid recovery locally, but they'll also take that Safeguarded Copy and either put it out to tape or put it out to a cloud provider with a remote logical air-gap using a snapshot. >> I want to ask you a question about management 'cause when you ask CSOs, what's your number one challenge, they'll say lack of talent, We've got all these tools and all this lack of skills to really do all this stuff. Can't hire people fast enough and they don't have the skills. So when you think about it, and so what you do is you bring a lot of automation into the orchestration and management. My question is this, when you set up air gaps, do you recommend, or what do you see in terms of not, of logically and physically not only physically separating the data, but also the management and orchestration and automation does that have to be logically air-gapped as well or can you use the same management system? What's best practice there? >> Ah, so what we do is we work with our copy management software, which will manage regular copies as well, but Safeguarded Copies are immutable. You can't write to them, you can't get rid of them and they're logically air-gapped from the local hosts. So the hosts, for the Safeguarded Copies that immutable copy, you just made, the hosts don't even know that it's there. So you manage that with our copy management software, which by the way, we'll manage regular snapshots and replicas as well, but what that allows you to do is allows you to automate, for example, you can automate recovery across multiple FlashSystem arrays, the copy services manager will allow you to set different parameters for different Safeguarded Copies. So a certain Safeguarded Copy, you could say, make me a copy every four hours. And then on another volume on a different data set, you could say, make me a copy every 12 hours. Once you set all that stuff update, it's completely automated, completely automated. >> So, I want to come back to something you mentioned about anomalous pattern recognition and how you help with threat detection. So a couple of a couple of quick multi-part question here. First of all, the backup corpus is an obvious target. So that's an area that you have to protect. And so can, and you're saying, you've used the example if your backups taking too long, but so how do you do that? What's the technology behind that? And then can you go beyond, should you go beyond just the backup corpus, with primary data or copies on-prem, et cetera? Two part questions. >> So when we look at it, the anomalous pattern detection is part of our backup software, say Spectrum Protect and what it does it uses AI-based technology, it recognizes a pattern. So it knows that the backup dataset for the queue takes two hours and it recognizes that, and it sees that as the normal state of events. So if all of a sudden that backup that theCUBE was doing used to take two hours and starts taking four, what it does is that's an anomalous pattern, it's not a normal pattern. It'll send a note to the backup admin, the storage admin, whoever you designate it to and say the backup data set for theCUBE that used to take two hours, it's taken four hours, you probably ought to check that. So when we view cyber resiliency from a storage perspective, it's broad. We just talked about anomalous pattern detection in Spectrum Protect. We were talking most of the conversation about our Safeguarded Copy, which is available on the mainframe for several years and is now available on FlashSystems, making immutable local air-gap copies, that can be rapidly recovered and are immutable and can help you recover for a malware or ransomware attack. Our data at rest encryption happens to be with no performance penalty. So when you look at it, you need to create an overarching strategy for cybersecurity and then when you look at your storage estate, you need to look at your secondary storage, backup, replicas, snaps, archive, and have a strategy there to protect that and then you need a strategy to protect your primary storage, which would be things like Safeguarded Copy and encryption. So then you put it all together and in fact, Dave, one of the things we offer is a free cyber resilience assessment. It's not only for IBM Storage, but it happens to be a cyber resilience assessment that conforms to the NIST Framework and it's heterogeneous. So if you're a big company, you've got IBM EMC and HP Storage, guess what? It's all about the data sets not about the storage. So we say, you said these 10 data sets are critical, why are you not encrypting them? These data sets are XYZ, why are you not air-gapping them? So we come up based on the NIST Framework, a set of recommendations that are not IBM specific, but they are storage specific. Here's how you make your storage more resilient, both your secondary storage and your primary storage. That's how we see the big thing and Safeguarded Copy of course fits in on the primary storage side, A on the mainframe, which we've had for several years now and B in the Linux world, the Unix world and the Windows Server world on our FlashSystem portfolio with the announcement we did on July 20th. >> Great, thank you for painting that picture. Eric, are you seeing any use case patterns emerge in this space? >> Well, we see a couple of things. First of all, is A most resellers and most end-users, don't see storage an overarching part of the cybersecurity strategy, and that's starting to change. Second thing we're seeing is more and more storage companies are trying to get into this bailiwick of offering cyber and data resilience. The value IBM brings of course is much longer experience to that and we even integrate with other products. So for example, IBM offers a product called QRadar from the security divisions not a storage product, a security product, and it helps you with early data breach recognition. So it looks at servers, network access, it looks at the storage and it actually integrates now with our Safeguarded Copy. So, part of the value that we bring is this overarching strategy of a comprehensive data and cyber resilience across our whole portfolio, including Safeguarded Copy our July 20th announcement. But also integration beyond storage now with our QRadar product from IBM security division. And there will be future announcements coming in both Q4 and Q1 of additional integration with other security technologies, so you can see how storage can be a vital COD in the corporate cybersecurity strategy. >> Got it, thank you. Let's pivot to the, as-a-service it's, cloud obviously is brought in that as-a-service. Now, it seems like everybody has one now. You guys have announced obviously HPE, Dell, Lenovo, Cisco, Pure, everybody's gotten out there as-a-service model, what do we need to know about your as-a-service solution and why is it different from the others? >> Sure. Well, one of the big differences is we actually go on actual storage, not effective. So when you look at effective storage, which most of them do that includes creating the (indistinct) data sets and other things, so you're basically paying for that. Second thing we do is we have a bigger margin. So for example, if theCUBE says we want SLA-3 and we sell it by the SLA, Dave, SLA-1, two and three. So let's say theCUBE needs SLA-3 and the minimum capacity is a 100 terabytes, but let's say you think you need 300 terabytes. No problem. You also have a variable. One of the key differences is unlike many of our competitors, the rate for the base and the rate for the variable are identical. Several of our competitors, when you're in the base, you pay a certain amount, when you go into the variable, they charge you a premium. The other key differentiator is around data reduction. Some of our competitors and all storage companies have data reduction technology. Block-level D do thin provisioning, compression, we all offer those features. The difference is with IBM's pay-as-you-grow, Storage-as-a-Service model, if you have certain data sets that are not very deducible, not very compressible, we absorbed that with our competitors, most of them, if the dataset is not easily deducible, compressible, and they don't see the value, they actually charge you a premium for that. So that is a huge difference. And then the last big difference is our a 100% availability guarantee. We have that on our FlashSystem product line, we're the only one offering 100% availability guarantee. We also against many of the competitors offer a better base nines, as you know, availability characteristics. We offer six nines of availability, which is five minutes and 26 seconds of downtime and a 100% availability of offering. Some of our competitors only offer four nines of availability and if you want five or six, they charge you extra. We give you six nines base in which has only five minutes and change of downtime in a year. So those are the key difference between us and the other as-a-service models out there. >> So, the basic concept I think, is if you commit to more and buy more, you pay less per. I mean, that's the basic philosophy of these things, right? So, if- >> Yes. >> I commit to you X, let's say, I want to just sort of start small and I commit to you to X and great. I'm in now in, maybe I sign up for a multi-year term, I commit this much, whatever, a 100 terabytes or whatever the minimum is. And then I can say, Hey, you know what? This is working for me. The CFO likes it and the IT guys can provision more seamlessly, we got our chargeback or showback model goes, I want to now make a bigger commitment and I can, and I want to sort of, can I break my three-year term and come back and then renegotiate, kind of like reserved instances, maybe bigger and pay less? How do you approach that? >> Well, what you do is we do a couple of things. First of all, you could always add additional capacity, and you just call up. We assign a technical account manager to every account. So in addition to what you get from the regular sales team and what you get from our value business partners, by the way, we did factor in the business partners, Dave, into this, so business partners will have a great pay-as-you-go Storage-as-a-Service solution, that includes partners and their ability to leverage. In fact, several of our partners that do have both MSP and MHP businesses are working right now to leverage our Storage-as-a-Service, and then add on their own value with their own MSP and MHP capability. >> And they can white label that? Is that right or? >> Well, you'd still have Storage-as-a-Service from IBM. They would resell that to theCUBE and then they'd add in their own MHP or MSP. >> Got it. >> That said partners interested in doing a white label, we would certainly entertain that capability. >> Got it. I interrupted you, carry on please. >> Yeah, you can go ahead and add more capacity, not a problem. You also can change the SLA. So theCUBE, one of the leading an industry analyst firms, you bought every analyst firm in the world, and you're using IBM Storage-as-a-Service, pay-as-you-go cloud-like model. So what you do is you call up the technical account manager and say, Eric, we bought all these other companies they're using on-prem storage, we'd like to move to Storage-as-a-Service for all the companies we acquire. We can do that, so that would up your capacity. And then you could say, now we've been at SLA-2, but because we're adding all these new applications of workloads from our acquired companies, we want some of it to be at SLA-1. So we can have some of your workloads on SLA-2, others on SLA-1, you could switch everything to SLA-1, and you just call your technical account manager and they'll make that happen for you or your business partner, obviously, if you bought through the channel. >> I get it, the hard question is what if all those other companies theCUBE acquired are also IBM Storage-as-a-Service customers? Can I, what's that discussion like? Hey, can I consolidate those and get a better deal? >> Yeah, there are all Storage-as-a-Service customers and Dave I love that thought, we would just figure out a way to consolidate the agreement. The agreements are one through five years. What I think also that's very unique is let's say for whatever reason, and we all love finance people. Let's say the IT guys have called the finance and say, we did a one-year contract, we now like to do a three-year contract. The one year is coming up and guess what? Finance's delayed for whatever reason, the PO doesn't go through. So the ITI calls up the technical account manager, we love your service, it's delayed in finance. We will let them stay on their Storage-as-a-Service, even though they don't have a contract. Now, of course they've told us they want to do one, but if they exceed the contract by a quarter or two, because they can't get the finance guys are messing with the IT guys, that's fine. What the key differentiators? Exactly the same price. Several of our competitors will also extend without a contract, but until you do a contract, they charge you a premium, we do not, whatever, if you're an SLA-3, you're SLA-3, we'll extend you and no big deal. And then you do your contract, when the finance guys get their act together and you're ready to go. So that is something we can do and we'll do on a continual basis. >> Last question. Let's go way out. So, we're not doing any time, near-term forecasts, I'm trying to understand how popular you think as-a-service is going to be. I mean, if you think about the end of the decade, let's think industry total, IBM specific, how popular do you think as-a-service models will be? Do you think it will be the majority of the transacted business or it's kind of more of a, just one of many? >> So I think there will be many, some people will still have bare metal on-premises. Some people will still do virtualization on-premises or in a hybrid cloud configuration. What I do think though is Storage-as-a-Service will be over 50% by the end. Remember, we're sitting at 2021. So we're talking now 2029. >> Right. >> So I think Storage-as-a-Service will be over 50%. I think most of that Storage-as-a-Service will be in a hybrid cloud model. I think the days of a 100% cloud, which is the way it started. I think a lot of people realize that a 100% cloud actually is more expensive than a hybrid cloud or fully on-prem. I was at a major university in New York, they are in the healthcare space and I know their CIO from one of my past lives. I was talking to him, they did a full on analysis of all the cloud providers going a 100% cloud. And their analysis showed that a 100% cloud, particularly for highly transactional workloads was 50% more expensive than buying it, paying the maintenance and paying their employees. So we did an all in view. So what I think it's going to be is Storage-as-a-Service will be over 50%. I think most of that Storage-as-a-Service will be in a hybrid cloud configuration with storage on-prem or in a colo, like what our IBM pay-as-you-go service will do and then it will be accessed and available through a hybrid cloud configuration with IBM Cloud, Google, Amazon as or whoever the cloud provider is. So I do think that you're looking at over 50% of the storage being as-a-service, but I do think the bulk of that as-a-service will be as-a-service through someone like IBM or our competitors and then part of it will be from the cloud providers. But I do think you're going to see a mix because right now the expense of going a 100% cloud cloud storage is dramatically understated and when someone does an analysis like that major university in New York did, they had a guy from finance, help them do the analysis and it was 50% more expensive than doing on-premise either on-prem or on-prem as-a-service, both were way cheaper. >> But you own the asset, right? >> Yes. >> As-a-service model. >> We, right, we own the asset. >> And I would bet, >> I would bet that over the lifetime value of the spend and it as-a-service model, just like the cloud, if you do this with IBM or any of your competitors, I would bet that overall you're going to spend more just like you've seen in the cloud, but you get the benefit is the flexibility that you get. >> Yeah, yeah. If you compare it to the, so obviously the number one model would be to buy. That's probably going to be the least expensive. >> Right. >> But it's also the least flexible. Then you also have leasing, more flexibility, but leasing usually is more expensive. Just like when you lease your car, if you add up all the lease payments and then you, at the end, pay that balloon payment to buy, it's cheaper to buy the car up front than it is to lease a car. Same thing with any IT asset, now storage network servers, all are available on leasing, the net is at the bottom line, that's more than buying it upfront. And then Storage-as-a-Service will also be more expensive than buying it, my friend, but ultimate capability, altering SLAs, adding new capacity, being able to handle an app very quickly. We can provision the storage, as you mentioned, the IT guys can easily provision. We provision, the storage in 10 minutes, if you bought from IBM Storage or any competitor you bought and you need more storage, A you got to put a PO through your system and if you're not theCUBE, but you're a giant global Fortune 500, sometimes it takes weeks to get the PO done. Then the PO has to go to the business partner, the business partner has got to give a PO to the distributor and a PO to IBM. So it can take you weeks to actually get the additional storage that you need. With Storage-as-a-Service from IBM with our pay-as-you-go, cloud-like model, all you have to do is provision and you're done. And by the way, we provide a 50% overage for free. So if they end up needing more storage, that 50% is actually sitting on-prem already and if they get to 75% utilization of the total amount of storage, we then call them up, the technical account manager would call them up and their business partner and say, Dave, do you know that you guys are at 75% full? We'd like to come add some additional storage to get you back down to a 50% margin. And by the way, most of our competitors only do a 25% margin. So again, another differentiator for IBM Storage-as-a-Service. >> What about, I said, last question, but I have another question. What about day one? Like how long does it take, if I want to start fresh with as-a-service? >> Get it. >> How long does it take to get up and running? >> Basically you put the PO through, whatever it takes on your side or through your business partner, we then we'll sign the technical account manager, will call you up because you need to tell us, do you want to, in a colo facility that you're working with or do you want to put it on on-prem? And then once we do that, we just schedule a time for your IT guys do the install. So, probably two weeks. >> Yeah. >> It all depends because you've got to call back and say, Eric, we'd like it at our colo partner, our colo partners, ABC, we got to call ABC and then get back to you or on-prem , we're going to have guys in the office, a good day when it's not going to be too busy. Could you come two weeks from Thursday? Which now would be three weeks for sake of argument. But that would be, we interface with the customer, with the technical account manager to do it on your schedule on your time, whether you do it in your own facility or use a colo provider. >> Yeah, but once you tell, once I tell you, once we get through all that stuff, it's two weeks from when that's all agreed. >> Yeah. >> It's like the Xerox copier salesman, (Dave chuckles) Where are you going to put it? Once you decide where you're going to put it, then it's a couple of weeks. It's not a month or two months or yeah. >> Yeah, it's not. And we need additional capacity, remember there's a 50% margin sitting there. So if you need to go into the variable and use it, and when we hit a 75%, we actually track it with our storage insights pro. So we'll call you up and say, Dave, you're at 76%. We'd like to add more storage to give you better margin of extra storage and you would say, great, when can we do it? So, yeah, we're proactive about that to make sure that you stay at that 50% margin. Again, our competitors, all do only have 25% margin. So we're giving you that better margin, a larger margin in case you really have a high capacity demand for that quarter and we proactively will call you up, if we think you need more based on monitoring your storage usage. >> Great. Eric got to go, thank you so much for taking us through that great detail, I really appreciate it. Always good to see you. >> Great, thanks Dave, really appreciate it. >> Alright, thank you for watching this CUBE conversation, this is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time. (soft music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of biz ops Manifesto unveiled. Brought to you by Biz Ops Coalition. Hey, Welcome back, everybody. Jeffrey here with the Cube. We're coming to you from our Palo Alto studios. And welcome back to this event. Is the biz Opps Manifesto unveiling? So the biz Opps manifesto and the biz Opps coalition have been around for a little while, But today's the big day. That's kind of the big public unveiling are excited to have some of the foundational people that put their put their name on the dotted line, if you will, to support this initiative to talk about why that initiative is so important. And so the next guest, we're excited to have his doctor, Mick Kirsten. He is the founder and CEO of Task Top. Make great to see you coming in from Vancouver, Canada, I think. Right. >>Yes. Great to be here, Jeff. Thank you. Absolutely. >>I hope your air is a little better out there. I know you had some of the worst air of all of us a couple a couple of weeks back, so hopefully things air, uh, getting a little better. And we get those fires under control? >>Yeah, Things have cleared up now, so yeah, it's good. It's good to be close to the U. S. And it's gonna have the Arabic clean as well. >>Absolutely. So let's let's jump into it. So you you've just been an innovation guy forever Starting way back in the day and Xerox Park. I was so excited to do an event at Xerox Park for the first time last year. I mean that that to me represents along with Bell Labs and and some other, you know, kind of foundational innovation and technology centers. That's got to be one of the greatest one. So I just wonder if you could share some perspective of getting your start there at Xerox Parc. You know, some of the lessons you learn and what you've been ableto kind of carry forward from those days. >>Yeah, I was fortunate. Joined Xerox Park in the computer science lab there at a very early point in my career, and to be working on open source programming languages. So back then, and the computer science lab where some of the inventions around programming around software development names such as Object of programming and ah, lot of what we had around really modern programming levels construct. Those were the teams that had the fortune of working with and really our goal waas. And of course, there's a Z. You know, this, uh, there's just this DNA of innovation and excitement and innovation in the water. And really, it was the model that was all about changing the way that we work was looking at for how we could make it 10 times easier to write. Code like this is back in 99 we were looking at new ways of expressing especially business concerns, especially ways of enabling people who are who want to innovate for their business, to express those concerns in code and make that 10 times easier than what that would take. So we created a new open source programming language, and we saw some benefits, but not quite quite what we expected. I then went and actually joined Charles Stephanie that former chief actor Microsoft, who is responsible for I actually got a Microsoft word as a out of Xerox Parc and into Microsoft and into the hands of Bill Gates and the company I was behind the whole office suite and his vision and the one I was trying to execute with working for him was to, you know, make Power point like a programming language, make everything completely visual. And I realized none of this was really working, that there was something else fundamentally wrong that programming languages or new ways of building software like Let's try to do with Charles around intentional programming. That was not enough. >>That was not enough. So you know, the agile movement got started about 20 years ago, and we've seen the rise of Dev ops and really this kind of embracing of of, of sprints And, you know, getting away from M. R. D s and P. R. D s and these massive definitions of what we're gonna build and long billed cycles to this iterative process. And that's been going on for a little while. So what was still wrong? What was still missing? Why the Biz Ops Coalition? Why the biz ops manifesto? >>Yeah, so I basically think we nailed some of the things that the programming language levels of teams can have. Effective languages deployed softened the club easily now right and at the kind of process and collaboration and planning level agile two decades decades ago was formed. We were adopting all the all the teams I was involved with on. It's really become a solved problem. So agile tools, agile teams actually of planning are now very mature and the whole challenges when organizations try to scale that. And so what I realized is that the way that Agile was scaling across teams and really scaling from the Technology Party organization to the business was just completely flawed. The agile teams had one set of doing things. One set of metrics, one set of tools and the way that the business was working was planning was investing in technology was just completely disconnected and using a a whole different set of measures. It's pretty interesting because I think it's >>pretty clear from the software development teams in terms of what they're trying to deliver, because they've got a feature set right and they've got bugs and it's easy. It's easy to see what they deliver, but it sounds like what you're really honing in on is is disconnect on the business side in terms of, you know, is it the right investment you know. Are we getting the right business? R o I on this investment? Was that the right feature? Should we be building another feature or shall we building a completely different products? That so it sounds like it's really a core piece of this is to get the right measurement tools, the right measurement data sets so that you can make the right decisions in terms of what you're investing, you know, limited resource is you can't Nobody has unlimited resources and ultimately have to decide what to do, which means you're also deciding what not to dio. It sounds like that's a really big piece of this of this whole effort. >>Yeah, Jeff, that's exactly it. Which is the way that the adult measures their own way of working is very different from the way that you measure business outcomes. The business outcomes are in terms of how happy your customers are. Are you innovating fast enough to keep up with the pace of, ah, rapidly changing economy, rapidly changing market and those are those are all around the customer. And so what? I learned on this long journey of supporting many organizations transformations and having them trying to apply those principles vigilant develops that those are not enough. Those measures technical practices, those measures, technical excellence of bringing code to the market. They don't actually measure business outcomes. And so I realized that really was much more around having these entwined flow metrics that are customer centric and business centric and market centric where we needed to go. So I want to shift gears >>a little bit and talk about your book because you're also a best selling author project a product, and and you you brought up this concept in your book called The Flow Framework. And it's really interesting to me because I know, you know, flow on one hand is kind of a workflow in the process flow, and you know that's how things get done and and embrace the flow. On the other hand, you know, everyone now in a little higher level, existential way is trying to get into the flow right into the workflow and, you know not be interrupted and get into a state where you're kind of your highest productivity, you know, kind of your highest comfort. Which floor you talking about in your book, or is it a little bit of both. >>That's a great question, is it's not what I gotta ask very often, cause me, it's It's absolutely both. So the thing that we want to get that we've learned how toe and, uh, master individual flow, that there's this beautiful book by me Holly teachings mentality. There's a beautiful Ted talk about him as well, about how we can take control of our own flow. So my question with the book with project surprise, How can we bring that to entire teams and really entire organizations? How come we have everyone contributing to a customer outcome? And this is really what if you go to the bazaar manifesto? It says, I focus on Out comes on using data to drive, whether we're delivering those outcomes rather than a focus on proxy metrics such as How quickly did we implement this feature? And now it's really how much value did the customs of the future and how quickly did we learn? And how quickly did you use that data to drive to that next outcome? Really, that with companies like Netflix on, like Amazon, have mastered, how do we get that every large organization, every idea, organization and make everyone be a softer innovator. So it's to bring that on the concept of flow to these entering value streams. And the fascinating thing is, we've actually seen the data. We've been able to study a lot of value streams. We see when flow increases, when organizations deliver value to a customer faster developers actually become more happy. So things like that implying that promotes course rise. And we've got empirical data for this. So that beautiful thing to me is that we've actually been able thio, combine these two things and and see the results in the data that you increased flow to the customer, your development or more happy. I >>love it. I love it, right, because we're all more. We're all happier when we're in the flow and we're all more productive winner in the flow. So I that is a great melding of two concepts. But let's jump into the into the manifesto itself a little bit. And you know, I love that you know, that took this approach really of having kind of four key values, and he gets 12 key principles and I just want to read a couple these values because when you read them, it sounds pretty brain dead, right? Of course. Right. Of course, you should focus on business outcomes. Of course, you should have trust and collaboration. Of course, you should have data based decision making processes and not just intuition or, you know, whoever is the loudest person in the room on toe, learn and respond and pivot. But >>what's the >>value of actually just putting them on a piece of paper? Because again, this is not this. These are all good positive things, right? When when somebody reads these to you or tells you these or sticks it on the wall? Of course. But unfortunately, of course, isn't always enough. >>No, I think what's happened is some of these core principles originally from the agile manifested two decades ago. The whole Dev ops movement of the last decade off flow feedback and continue learning has been key. But a lot of organizations, especially the ones undergoing transformations, have actually gone a very different way, right? The way that they measure value in technology innovation is through costs For many organizations, the way that they actually are looking at at their moving to cloud is actually is a reduction in costs, whereas the right way of looking at moving the cloud is how much more quickly can we get to the value to the customer? How quickly can we learn from that? And how could quickly can we drive the next business outcome? So, really, the key thing is to move away from those old ways of doing things that funding projects and call centers to actually funding and investing in outcomes and measuring outcomes through these flow metrics, which in the end are your fast feedback for how quickly you're innovating for your customer. So these things do seem, you know, very obvious when you look at them. But the key thing is what you need to stop doing. To focus on these, you need to actually have accurate real time data off how much value your phone to the customer every week, every month, every quarter. And if you don't have that, your decisions are not given on data. If you don't know what your bottle like, it's. And this is something that in the decades of manufacturing car manufacturers, other manufacturers master. They always know where the bottom back in their production processes you ask, uh, random. See, I all want a global 500 company where the bottleneck is, and you won't get it there. Answer. Because there's not that level of understanding. So have to actually follow these principles. You need to know exactly where you follow like is because that's what's making your developers miserable and frustrated on having them context, which on thrash So it. The approach here is important, and we have to stop doing these other things right. >>There's so much. They're a pack. I love it, you know, especially the cloud conversation, because so many people look at it wrong as a cost saving device as opposed to an innovation driver, and they get stuck, they get stuck in the literal. And, you know, I think the same thing always about Moore's law, right? You know, there's a lot of interesting riel tech around Moore's law and the increasing power of microprocessors. But the real power, I think in Moore's laws, is the attitudinal change in terms of working in a world where you know that you've got all this power and what will you build and design? E think it's funny to your your comment on the flow in the bottleneck, right? Because because we know manufacturing assumes you fix one bottleneck. You move to your next one, right, You always move to your next point of failure. So if you're not fixing those things, you know you're not. You're not increasing that speed down the line unless you can identify where that bottleneck is, or no matter how Maney improvements you make to the rest of the process, it's still going to get hung up on that one spot. >>That's exactly, and you also make it sound so simple. But again, if you don't have the data driven visibility of where the bottleneck is. And but these bottlenecks are just as you said, if it's just lack, um, all right, so we need to understand is the bottleneck, because our security use air taking too long and stopping us from getting like the customer. If it's that automate that process and then you move on to the next bottleneck, which might actually be that deploy yourself through the clouds is taking too long. But if you don't take that approach of going flow first rather than again the sort of way cost production first you have taken approach of customer centric city, and you only focus on optimizing cost. Your costs will increase and your flow will slow down. And this is just one, these fascinating things. Whereas if you focus on getting back to the customer and reducing your cycles on getting value your flow time from six months to two weeks or 21 week or two event as we see with tech giants, you actually could both lower your costs and get much more value. Of course, get that learning going. So I think I've I've seen all these cloud deployments and modernizations happen that delivered almost no value because there was such a big ball next up front in the process. And actually the hosting and the AP testing was not even possible with all of those inefficiencies. So that's why going flow first rather than costs. First, there are projects versus Sochi. >>I love that and and and and it begs, repeating to that right within a subscription economy. You know you're on the hook to deliver value every single month because they're paying you every single month. So if you're not on top of how you delivering value, you're going to get sideways because it's not like, you know, they pay a big down payment and a small maintenance fee every month. But once you're in a subscription relationship, you know you have to constantly be delivering value and upgrading that value because you're constantly taking money from the customers. It's it's such a different kind of relationship, that kind of the classic, you know, Big Bang with the maintenance agreement on the back end really important. >>Yeah, and I think in terms of industry ship, that's it. That's what catalyzed this industry shift is in this SAS that subscription economy. If you're not delivering more and more value to your customers, someone else's and they're winning the business, not you. So one way we know is that divide their customers with great user experiences. Well, that really is based on how many features you delivered or how much. How about how many quality improvements or scaler performance improvements you delivered? So the problem is, and this is what the business manifesto was was the forefront of touch on is, if you can't measure how much value delivered to a customer, what are you measuring? You just back again measuring costs, and that's not a measure of value. So we have to shift quickly away from measuring costs to measuring value to survive in in the subscription economy. Mick, >>we could go for days and days and days. I want to shift gears a little bit into data and and a data driven, um, decision making a data driven organization. Because right day has been talked about for a long time. The huge big data mean with with Hadoop over over several years and data warehouses and data lakes and data, oceans and data swamps and you go on and on, it's not that easy to do right. And at the same time, the proliferation of data is growing exponentially were just around the corner from from I, O. T and five G. So now the accumulation of data at machine scale again this is gonna overwhelm, and one of the really interesting principles that I wanted to call out and get your take right is today's organizations generate mawr data than humans can process. So informed decisions must be augmented by machine learning and artificial intelligence. I wonder if you can again, you've got some great historical perspective reflect on how hard it is to get the right data to get the data in the right context and then to deliver to the decision makers and then trust the decision makers to actually make the data and move that down. You know, it's kind of this democratization process into more and more people and more and more frontline jobs, making more and more of these little decisions every day. >>Yeah, and Jeff, I think the front part of what you said are where the promises of big data have completely fallen on their face into these swamps. As you mentioned, because if you don't have the data and the right format, you can connect, collected that the right way, you're not. Model it that way the right way. You can't use human or machine learning on it effectively. And there have been the number of data, warehouses and a typical enterprise organization, and the sheer investment is tremendous. But the amount of intelligence being extracted from those is a very big problem. So the key thing that I've known this is that if you can model your value streams so you actually understand how you're innovating, how you're measuring the delivery value and how long that takes. What is your time to value through these metrics? Like for the time you can actually use both. You know the intelligence that you've got around the table and push that balance as it the assay, far as you can to the organization. But you can actually start using that those models to understand, find patterns and detect bottlenecks that might be surprising, Right? Well, you can detect interesting bottle next one you shift to work from home. We detected all sorts of interesting bottlenecks in our own organization that we're not intuitive to me that had to do with more senior people being overloaded and creating bottlenecks where they didn't exist. Whereas we thought we were actually organization. That was very good at working from home because of our open source route. So the data is highly complex. Software Valley streams are extremely complicated, and the only way to really get the proper analysts and data is to model it properly and then to leverage these machine learning and AI techniques that we have. But that front, part of what you said, is where organizations are just extremely immature in what I've seen, where they've got data from all the tools, but not modeled in the right way. >>Well, all right, so before I let you go, you know? So you get a business leader he buys in. He reads the manifesto. He signs on the dotted line. He says, Mick, how do I get started? I want to be more aligned with With the development teams, you know, I'm in a very competitive space. We need to be putting out new software features and engage with our customers. I want to be more data driven. How do I get started? Well, you know, what's the biggest inhibitor for most people to get started and get some early winds, which we know is always the key to success in any kind of a new initiative, >>right? So I think you can reach out to us through the website. Uh, on the is a manifesto, but the key thing is just it's exactly what you said, Jeff. It's to get started and get the key wins. So take a probably value stream. That's mission critical. It could be your new mobile Web experiences, or or part of your cloud modernization platform where your analysts pipeline. But take that and actually apply these principles to it and measure the entire inflow of value. Make sure you have a volumetric that everyone is on the same page on, right. The people on the development teams that people in leadership all the way up to the CEO and one of the where I encourage you to start is actually that enter and flow time, right? That is the number one metric. That is how you measure whether you're getting the benefit of your cloud modernization. That is the one metric that even Cockcroft when people I respect tremendously put in his cloud for CEOs Metric 11 way to measure innovation. So basically, take these principles, deployed them on one product value stream measure into and flow time on. Then you'll actually you well on your path to transforming and to applying the concepts of agile and develops all the way to the business to the way in your operating model. >>Well, Mick, really great tips, really fun to catch up. I look forward to a time when we can actually sit across the table and and get into this, because I just I just love the perspective. And, you know, you're very fortunate to have that foundational, that foundational base coming from Xerox parc. And it's, you know, it's a very magical place with a magical history. So the to incorporate that and to continue to spread that wealth, you know, good for you through the book and through your company. So thanks for sharing your insight with us today. >>Thanks so much for having me, Jeff. Absolutely. >>Alright. And go to the biz ops manifesto dot org's Read it. Check it out. If you want to sign it, sign it. They'd love to have you do it. Stay with us for continuing coverage of the unveiling of the business manifesto on the Cube. I'm Jeffrey. Thanks for watching. See you next time.

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage, a BizOps manifesto unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition. >>Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the cube. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of the biz ops manifesto. Unveil. Something has been in the works for a little while. Today's the formal unveiling, and we're excited to have three of the core founding members of the manifesto authors of the manifesto. If you will, uh, joining us again, we've had them all on individually. Now we're going to have a great power panel. First up. We're gonna have Mitt Kirsten returning he's the founder and CEO of Tasktop mic. Good to see you again. Where are you dialing in from? >>Great to see you again, Jeff I'm dialing from Vancouver, >>We're Canada, Vancouver, Canada. One of my favorite cities in the whole wide world. Also we've got Tom Davenport come in from across the country. He's a distinguished professor and author from Babson college, Tom. Great to see you. And I think you said you're at a fun, exotic place on the East coast >>Realm of Memphis shoes. That's on Cape Cod. >>Great to see you again and also joining surge Lucio. He is the VP and general manager enterprise software division at Broadcom surge. Great to see you again, where are you coming in from? >>Uh, from Boston right next to Cape Cod. >>Terrific. So welcome back, everybody again. Congratulations on this day. I know it's been a lot of work to get here for this unveil, but let's just jump into it. The biz ops manifesto, what was the initial reason to do this? And how did you decide to do it in a kind of a coalition, a way bringing together a group of people versus just making it an internal company, uh, initiative that, you know, you can do better stuff within your own company, surge, why don't we start with you? >>Yeah, so, so I think we were at a really critical juncture, right? Many, um, large enterprises are basically struggling with their digital transformation. Um, in fact, um, many recognized that, uh, the, the business side, it collaboration has been, uh, one of the major impediments, uh, to drive that kind of transformation. That, and if we look at the industry today, many people are, whether we're talking about vendors or, um, you know, system integrators, consulting firms are talking about the same kind of concepts, but using very different language. And so we believe that bringing all these different players together, um, as part of the coalition and formalizing, uh, basically the core principles and values in a BizOps manifesto, we can really start to F could have a much bigger movement where we can all talk about kind of the same concepts and we can really start to provide, could have a much better support for large organizations to, to transform. Uh, so whether it is technology or services or, um, or training, I think that that's really the value of bringing all of these players together, right. >>And mic to you. Why did you get involved in this, in this effort? >>So I've been closely involved the agile movement since it started two decades with that manifesto. And I think we got a lot of improvement at the team level, and I think that was just no. Did we really need to improve at the business level? Every company is trying to become a software innovator, trying to make sure that they can pivot quickly and the changing market economy and what everyone's dealing with in terms of needing to deliver value to customers sooner. However, agile practices have really focused on these metrics, these measures and understanding processes that help teams be productive. Those things now need to be elevated to the business as a whole. And that just hasn't happened. Uh, organizations are actually failing because they're measuring activities and how they're becoming more agile, how teams are functioning, not how much quickly they're delivering value to the customer. So we need to now move past that. And that's exactly what the manifesto provides. Right, >>Right, right. And Tom, to you, you've been covering tech for a very long time. You've been looking at really hard challenges and a lot of work around analytics and data and data evolution. So there's a definitely a data angle here. I wonder if you could kind of share your perspective of what you got excited to, uh, to sign onto this manifesto. >>Sure. Well, I have, you know, for the past 15 or 20 years, I've been focusing on data and analytics and AI, but before that I was a process management guy and a knowledge management guy. And in general, I think, you know, we've just kind of optimize that to narrow a level, whether you're talking about agile or dev ops or ML ops, any of these kinds of ops oriented movements, we're making individual project, um, performance and productivity better, but we're not changing the business, uh, effectively enough. And that's the thing that appealed to me about the biz ops idea, that we're finally creating a closer connection between what we do with technology and how it changes the business and provides value to it. >>Great. Uh, surge back to you, right? I mean, people have been talking about digital transformation for a long time and it's been, you know, kind of trucking along and then covert hit and it was instant Lightswitch. Everyone's working from home. You've got a lot more reliance on your digital tools, digital communication, uh, both within your customer base and your partner base, but also then your employees when you're, if you could share how that really pushed this all along. Right? Because now suddenly the acceleration of digital transformation is higher. Even more importantly, you got much more critical decisions to make into what you do next. So kind of your portfolio management of projects has been elevated significantly when maybe revenues are down, uh, and you really have to, uh, to prioritize and get it right. >>Yeah. Maybe I'll just start by quoting Satina Nello basically recently said that they're speeding the two years of digital preservation just last two months in any many ways. That's true. Um, but yet when we look at large enterprises, they're still struggling with a kind of a changes in culture. They really need to drive to be able to disrupt themselves. And not surprisingly, you know, when we look at certain parts of the industry, you know, we see some things which are very disturbing, right? So about 40% of the personal loans today are being, uh, origin data it's by fintechs, uh, of a like of Sophie or, uh, or a lending club, right? Not to a traditional brick and mortar for BEC. And so the, well, there is kind of a much more of an appetite and it's a, it's more of a survival type of driver these days. >>Uh, the reality is that's in order for these large enterprises to truly transform and engage on this digital transformation, they need to start to really align the business nightie, you know, in many ways and make cover. Does agile really emerge from the core desire to truly improve software predictability between which we've really missed is all the way we start to aligning the software predictability to business predictability, and to be able to have continual sleep continuous improvement and measurement of business outcomes. So by aligning that of these, uh, discuss inward metrics, that's, it is typically being using to business outcomes. We think we can start to really ELP, uh, different stakeholders within the organization to collaborate. So I think there is more than ever. There's an imperative to acts now. Um, and, and resolves, I think is kind of the right approach to drive that kind of transformation. Right. >>I want to follow up on the culture comment, uh, with you, Tom, because you've talked before about kind of process flow and process flow throughout a whore and an organization. And, you know, we talk about people process and tech all the time. And I think the tech is the easy part compared to actually changing the people the way they think. And then the actual processes that they put in place. It's a much more difficult issue than just the tech issue to get this digital transformation in your organization. >>Yeah. You know, I've always found that the soft stuff about, you know, the culture of a behavior, the values is the hard stuff to change and more and more, we, we realized that to be successful with any kind of digital transformation you have to change people's behaviors and attitudes. Um, we haven't made as much progress in that area as we might have. I mean, I've done some surveys suggesting that most organizations still don't have data driven cultures. And in many cases there is a lower percentage of companies that say they have that then, um, did a few years ago. So we're kind of moving in the wrong direction, which means I think that we have to start explicitly addressing that, um, cultural, behavioral dimension and not just assuming that it will happen if we, if we build system, if we build it, they won't necessarily come. Right. >>Right. So I want to go to you Nick. Cause you know, we're talking about workflows and flow, um, and, and you've written about flow both in terms of, um, you know, moving things along a process and trying to find bottlenecks, identify bottlenecks, which is now even more important again, when these decisions are much more critical. Cause you have a lot less, uh, wiggle room in tough times, but you also talked about flow from the culture side and the people side. So I wonder if you can just share your thoughts on, you know, using flow as a way to think about things, to get the answers better. >>Yeah, absolutely. And I'll refer back to what Tom has said. If you're optimized, you need to optimize your system. You need to optimize how you innovate and how you deliver value to the business and the customer. Now, what we've noticed in the data, since that we've learned from customers, value streams, enterprise organizations, value streams, is that when it's taking six months at the end to deliver that value with the flow is that slow. You've got a bunch of unhappy developers, unhappy customers when you're innovating half so high performing organizations, we can measure third and 10 float time and dates. All of a sudden that feedback loop, the satisfaction your developer's measurably goes up. So not only do you have people context, switching glass, you're delivering so much more value to customers at a lower cost because you've optimized for flow rather than optimizing for these other approximate tricks that we use, which is how efficient is my agile team. How quickly can we deploy software? Those are important, but they do not provide the value of agility of fast learning of adaptability to the business. And that's exactly what the biz ops manifesto pushes your organization to do. You need to put in place this new operating model that's based on flow on the delivery of business value and on bringing value to market much more quickly than you were before. Right. >>I love that. And I'm going back to you, Tom, on that to follow up. Cause I think, I don't think people think enough about how they prioritize what they're optimizing for. Cause you know, if you're optimizing for a versus B, you know, you can have a very different product that you kick out and let you know. My favorite example is with Clayton Christianson and innovator's dilemma talking about the three inch hard drive. If you optimize it for power, you know, is one thing, if you optimize it for vibration is another thing and sure enough, you know, they missed it on the poem because it was the, it was the game console, which, which drove that whole business. So when you, when you're talking to customers and we think we hear it with cloud all the time, people optimizing for cost efficiency, instead of thinking about it as an innovation tool, how do you help them kind of rethink and really, you know, force them to, to look at the, at the prioritization and make sure they're prioritizing on the right thing is make just said, what are you optimizing for? >>Oh yeah. Um, you have one of the most important aspects of any decision or, um, attempt to resolve a problem in an organization is the framing process. And, um, you know, it's, it's a difficult aspect of the decision to frame it correctly in the first place. Um, there, it's not a technology issue. In many cases, it's largely a human issue, but if you frame that decision or that problem incorrectly to narrowly say, or you frame it as an either or situation where you could actually have some of both, um, it, it's very difficult for the, um, process to work out correctly. So in many cases that I think we need to think more at the beginning about how we bring this issue or this decision in the best way possible before we charge off and build a system to support it. You know, um, it's worth that extra time to think, think carefully about how the decision has been structured, right >>Surgery. I want to go back to you and talk about the human factors because as we just discussed, you can put it in great technology, but if the culture doesn't adopt it and people don't feel good about it, you know, it's not going to be successful and that's going to reflect poorly on the technology, even if it had nothing to do with it. And you know, when you look at the, the, the core values, uh, of the Bezos manifesto, you know, a big one is trust and collaboration, you know, learn, respond and pivot. I wonder if you can share your thoughts on, on trying to get that cultural shift, uh, so that you can have success with the people or excuse me, with the technology in the process and helping customers, you know, take this more trustworthy and kind of proactive, uh, position. >>So I think, I think at the ground level, it truly starts with the realization that we're all different. We come from different backgrounds. Um, oftentimes we tend to blame the data. It's not uncommon my experiments that we spend the first 30 minutes of any kind of one hour conversation to debate the validity of the data. Um, and so, um, one of the first kind of, uh, probably manifestations that we've had or revelations as we start to engage with our customers is spike, just exposing, uh, high-fidelity data sets to different stakeholders from their different lens. We start to enable these different stakeholders to not debate the data. That's really collaborate to find a solution. So in many ways, when, when, when we think about kind of the types of changes we're trying to, to truly affect around data driven decision making, it's all about bringing the data in context, in the context that is relevant and understandable for, for different stakeholders, whether we're talking about an operator or develop for a business analyst. >>So that's, that's the first thing. The second layer I think, is really to provide context to what people are doing in their specific cycle. And so I think one of the best examples I have is if you start to be able to align business KPI, whether you are counting, you know, sales per hour, or the engagements of your users on your mobile applications, whatever it is, you can start to connect that PKI to the business KPI, to the KPIs that developers might be looking at, whether it is the number of defects or a velocity or whatever, you know, metrics that they are used to to actually track you start to, to be able to actually contextualize in what we are the effecting, basically a metric that is really relevant in which we see is that DC is a much more systematic way to approach the transformation than say, you know, some organizations kind of creating, uh, some of these new products or services or initiatives, um, to, to drive engagements, right? >>So if you look at zoom, for instance, zoom giving away a it service to, uh, to education, he's all about, I mean, there's obviously a marketing aspect in therapists. It's fundamentally about trying to drive also the engagement of their own teams. And because now they're doing something for good and the organizations are trying to do that, but you only can do this kind of things in a limited way. And so you really want to start to rethink how you connect to, everybody's kind of a business objective fruit data, and now you start to get people to stare at the same data from their own lens and collaborate on all the data. Right, >>Right. That's a good, uh, Tom, I want to go back to you. You've been studying it for a long time, writing lots of books and getting into it. Um, why now, you know, what w why now are we finally aligning business objectives with, with it objectives? You know, why didn't this happen before? And, you know, what are the factors that are making now the time for this, this, this move with the, uh, with the biz ops? >>Well, and much of the past, it was sort of a back office related activity. And, you know, it was important for, um, uh, producing your paychecks and, uh, um, capturing the customer orders, but the business wasn't built around it now, every organization needs to be a software business, a data business, a digital business, the auntie has been raised considerably. And if you aren't making that connection between your business objectives and the technology that supports it, you run a pretty big risk of, you know, going out of business or losing out to competitors. Totally. So, um, and, uh, even if you're in a, an industry that hasn't historically been terribly, um, technology oriented customer expectations flow from, uh, you know, the digital native, um, companies that they work with to basically every industry. So you're compared against the best in the world. So we don't really have the luxury anymore of screwing up our it projects or building things that don't really work for the business. Um, it's mission critical that we do that well. Um, almost every time, I just want to follow up by that, Tom, >>In terms of the, you've talked extensively about kind of these evolutions of data and analytics from artismal stage to the big data stage, the data economy stage, the AI driven stage and what I find diff interesting that all those stages, you always put a start date. You never put an end date. Um, so you know, is the, is the big data I'm just going to use that generically a moment in time finally here, where we're, you know, off mahogany row with the data scientists, but actually can start to see the promise of delivering the right insight to the right person at the right time to make that decision. >>Well, I think it is true that in general, these previous stages never seemed to go away. The, um, the artisinal stuff is still being done, but we would like for less than less of it to be artisinal, we can't really afford for everything to be artisinal anymore. It's too labor and time consuming to do things that way. So we shift more and more of it to be done through automation and B to be done with a higher level of productivity. And, um, you know, at some point maybe we reached the stage where we don't do anything artisanally anymore. I'm not sure we're there yet, but, you know, we are, we are making progress. Right, >>Right. And Mick, back to you in terms of looking at agile, cause you're, you're such a, a student of agile when, when you look at the opportunity with ops, um, and taking the lessons from agile, you know, what's been the inhibitor to stop this in the past. And what are you so excited about? You know, taking this approach will enable. >>Yeah. I think both Sergeant Tom hit on this is that in agile what's happened is that we've been measuring tiny subsets of the value stream, right? We need to elevate the data's there. Developers are working on these tools that delivering features that the foundations for, for great culture are there. I spent two decades as a developer. And when I was really happy is when I was able to deliver value to customers, the quicker I was able to do that the fewer impediments are in my way, that quicker was deployed and running in the cloud, the happier I was, and that's exactly what's happening. If we can just get the right data, uh, elevated to the business, not just to the agile teams, but really these values of ours are to make sure that you've got these data driven decisions with meaningful data that's oriented around delivering value to customers. Not only these legacies that Tom touched on, which has cost center metrics from an ITK, from where, for it being a cost center and something that provided email and then back office systems. So we need to rapidly shift to those new, meaningful metrics that are customized business centric and make sure that every development the organization is focused on those as well as the business itself, that we're measuring value and that we're helping that value flow without interruptions. >>I love that mic. Cause if you don't measure it, you can't improve on it and you gotta, but you gotta be measuring the right thing. So gentlemen, uh, thank you again for, for your time. Congratulations on the, uh, on the unveil of the biz ops manifesto and together this coalition >>Of, of, uh, industry experts to get behind this. And, you know, there's probably never been a more important time than now to make sure that your prioritization is in the right spot and you're not wasting resources where you're not going to get the ROI. So, uh, congratulations again. And thank you for sharing your thoughts with us here on the cube. Alright, so we had surge, Tom and Mick I'm. Jeff, you're watching the cube, it's a biz ops manifesto and unveil. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of BizOps manifesto, unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition and welcome back Friday, Jeff Frick here with the cube we're in our Palo Alto studios. And we'd like to welcome you back to our continuing coverage of biz ops manifesto, unveil exciting day to really, uh, kind of bring this out into public. There's been a little bit of conversation, but today's really the official unveiling and we're excited to have our next guest to share a little bit more information on it. He's Patrick tickle. He's a chief product officer for planned view. Patrick. Great to see you. Yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks for the invite. So why the biz ops manifesto, why the biz optical edition now when you guys have been at it, it's relatively mature marketplace businesses. Good. What was missing? Why, why this, uh, why this coalition? >>Yeah, so, you know, again, why is, why is biz ops important and why is this something I'm, you know, I'm so excited about, but I think companies as well, right. Well, you know, in some ways or another, this is a topic that I've been talking to, you know, the market and our customers about for a long time. And it's, you know, I really applaud, you know, this whole movement, right. And, um, in resonates with me, because I think one of the fundamental flaws, frankly, of the way we've talked about technology and business literally for decades, uh, has been this idea of, uh, alignment. Those who know me, I occasionally get off on this little rant about the word alignment, right. But to me, the word alignment is, is actually indicative of the, of the, of the flaw in a lot of our organizations and biz ops is really, I think now trying to catalyze and expose that flaw. >>Right. Because, you know, I always say that, you know, you know, alignment implies silos, right. Instantaneously, as soon as you say there's alignment, there's, there's obviously somebody who's got a direction and other people that have to line up and that, that kind of siloed, uh, nature of organizations. And then frankly, the passive nature of it. Right. I think so many technology organizations are like, look, the business has the strategy you guys need to align. Right. And, and, you know, as a product leader, right. That's where I've been my whole career. Right. I can tell you that I never sit around. I almost never use the word alignment. Right. I mean, whether I never sit down and say, you know, the product management team has to get aligned with Deb, right. Or the dev team has to get aligned with the delivery and ops teams. I mean, what I say is, you know, are we on strategy, right? >>Like we've, we have a strategy as a, as a full end to end value stream. Right. And that there's no silos. And I mean, look, every on any given day we got to get better. Right. But the context, the context we operate is not about alignment. Right. It's about being on strategy. And I think I've talked to customers a lot about that, but when I first read the manifesto, I was like, Oh yeah, this is exactly. This is breaking down. Maybe trying to eliminate the word alignment, you know, from a lot of our organizations, because we literally start thinking about one strategy and how we go from strategy to delivery and have it be our strategy, not someone else's that we're all aligning to it. And it's a great way to catalyze that conversation. That I've, it's been in my mind for years, to be honest. Right. >>So, so much to unpack there. One of the things obviously, uh, stealing a lot from, from dev ops and the dev ops manifesto from 20 years ago. And as I look through some of the principles and I looked through some of the values, which are, you know, really nicely laid out here, you know, satisfy customers, do continuous delivery, uh, measure, output against real results. Um, the ones that, that jumps out though is really about, you know, change, change, right? Requirements should change frequently. They do change frequently, but I'm curious to get your take from a, from a software development point, it's easy to kind of understand, right. We're making this widget and our competitors, beta widget plus X, and now we need to change our plans and make sure that the plus X gets added to the plan. Maybe it wasn't in the plan, but you talked a lot about product strategy. So in this kind of continuous delivery world, how does that meld with, I'm actually trying to set a strategy, which implies the direction for a little bit further out on the horizon and to stay on that while at the same time, you're kind of doing this real time continual adjustments. Cause you're not working off a giant PRD or MRD anymore. >>Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah. You know, one of the terms, you know, that we use internally a lot and even with my customers, our customers is we talked about this idea of rewiring, right. And I think, you know, it's kind of a, now an analogy for transformation. And I think a lot of us have to rewire the way we think about things. Right. And I think at Planview where we have a lot of customers who live in that, you know, who operationalize that traditional PPM world. Right. And are shifting to agile and transforming that rewire is super important. And, and to your point, right, it's, you've just, you've got to embrace this idea of, you know, just iterative getting better every day and iterating, iterating, iterating as to building annual plans or, you know, I get customers occasionally who asked me for two or three year roadmap. >>Right. And I literally looked at them and I go, there's no, there's no scenario where I can build a two or three year roadmap. Right. You, you, you think you want that, but that's not, that's not the way we run. Right. And I will tell you the biggest thing that for us, you know, that I think is matched the planning, uh, you know, patents is a word I like to use a lot. So the thing that we've like, uh, that we've done from a planning perspective, I think is matched impedance to continuous delivery is instituting the whole program, implement, you know, the program, increment planning, capabilities and methodologies, um, in the scaled agile world. Right. And over the last 18 months to two years, we really have now, you know, instrumented our company across three value streams. You know, we do quarterly PI program increment 10 week planning, you know, and that becomes, that becomes the Terra firma of how we plant. >>Right. And it's, what are we doing for the next 10 weeks? And we iterate within those 10 weeks, but we also know that 10 weeks from now, we're going to, we're going to adjust iterate again. Right. And that shifting of that planning model, you know, to being as cross-functional is that as that big room planning kind of model is, um, and also, uh, you know, on that shorter increment, when you get those two things in place, all sudden the impedance really starts to match up, uh, with continuous delivery and it changes, it changes the way you plan and it changes the way you work. Right? >>Yeah. Their thing. Right. So obviously a lot of these things are kind of process driven, both within the values, as well as the principles, but there's a whole lot, really about culture. And I just want to highlight a couple of the values, right? We already talked about business outcomes, um, trust and collaboration, uh, data driven decisions, and then learn, respond and pivot. Right. A lot of those are cultural as much as they are process. So again, is it the, is it the need to really kind of just put them down on paper and you know, I can't help, but think of, you know, the hammering up the, uh, the thing in the Lutheran church with their, with their manifesto, is it just good to get it down on paper? Because when you read these things, you're like, well, of course we should trust people. And of course we need an environment of collaboration and of course we want data driven decisions, but as we all know saying it and living, it are two very, very different things. >>Yeah. Good question. I mean, I think there's a lot of ways you bring that to life you're right. And just hanging up, you know, I think we've all been through the hanging up posters around your office, which these days, right. Unless you're going to hang a poster and everybody's home office. Right. You can't even, you can't even fake it that you think that might work. Right. So, um, you know, you really, I think we've attacked that in a variety of ways. Right. And you definitely have to, you know, you've got to make the shift to a team centric culture, right. Empowered teams, you know, that's a big deal. Right. You know, a lot of, a lot of the people that, you know, we lived in a world of quote unquote, where we were lived in a deep resource management world for a long, long time. >>And right. A lot of our customers still do that, but you know, kind of moving to that team centric world is, uh, is really important and core the trust. Um, I think training is super important, right. We've, you know, we've internally, right. We've trained hundreds employees over the last a year and a half on the fundamentals really of safe. Right. Not necessarily, you know, we've had, we've had teams delivering in scrum and the continuous delivery for, you know, for years, but the scaling aspect of it, uh, is where we've done a lot of training and investment. Um, and then, you know, I think, uh, leadership has to be bought in. Right. You know? And so when we pie plan, you know, myself and Cameron and the other members of our leadership, you know, we're NPI planning, you know, for, for four days. Right. I mean, it's, it's, you've got to walk the walk, you know, from top to bottom and you've got to train on the context. Right. And then you, and then, and, and then once you get through a few cycles where you've done a pivot, right. Or you brought a new team in, and it just works, it becomes kind of this virtuous circle where he'll go, man, this really works so much better than what we used to do. Right. >>Right. The other really key principle to this whole thing is, is aligning, you know, the business leaders and the business prioritization, um, so that you can get to good outcomes with the development and the delivery. Right. And we, we know again, and kind of classic dev ops to get the dev and the production people together. So they can, you know, quickly ship code that works. Um, but adding the business person on there really puts, puts a little extra responsibility that they, they understand the value of a particular feature or particular priority. Uh, they, they can make the, the, the trade offs and that they kind of understand the effort involved too. So, you know, bringing them into this continuous again, kind of this continuous development process, um, to make sure that things are better aligned and really better prioritize. Cause ultimately, you know, we don't live in an infinite resources situation and people got to make trade offs. They got to make decisions as to what goes and what doesn't go in for everything that goes. Right. I always say you pick one thing. Okay. That's 99 other things that couldn't go. So it's really important to have, you know, this, you said alignment of the business priorities as well as, you know, the execution within, within the development. >>Yeah. I think that, you know, uh, you know, I think it was probably close to two years ago. Forester started talking about the age of the customer, right. That, that was like their big theme at the time. Right. And I think to me what that, the age of the customer actually translates to and Mick, Mick and I are both big fans of this whole idea of the project and product shift, mixed book, you know, it was a great piece on a, you're talking about, you know, as part of the manifesto is one of the authors as well, but this shift from project to product, right? Like the age of the customer, in my opinion, the, the embodiment of that is the shift to a product mentality. Right. And, and the product mentality in my opinion, is what brings the business and technology teams together, right? >>Once you, once you're focused on a customer experience is delivered through a product or a service. That's when I that's, when I started to go with the alignment problem goes away, right. Because if you look at software companies, right, I mean, we run product management models yeah. With software development teams, customer success teams, right. That, you know, the software component of these products that people are building is obviously becoming bigger and bigger, you know, in an, in many ways, right. More and more organizations are trying to model themselves over as operationally like software companies. Right. Um, they obviously have lots of other components in their business than just software, but I think that whole model of customer experience equaling product, and then the software component of product, the product is the essence of what changes that alignment equation and brings business and teams together because all of a sudden, everyone knows what the customer's experiencing. Right. And, and that, that, that makes a lot of things very clear, very quickly. >>Right. I'm just curious how far along this was as a process before, before COBIT hit, right. Because serendipitous, whatever. Right. But the sudden, you know, light switch moment, everybody had to go work from home and in March 15th compared to now we're in October and this is going to be going on for a while. And it is a new normal and whatever that whatever's going to look like a year from now, or two years from now is TBD, you know, had you guys already started on this journey cause again, to sit down and actually declare this coalition and declare this manifesto is a lot different than just trying to do better within your own organization. >>Yeah. So we had started, uh, you know, w we definitely had started independently, you know, some, some, you know, I think people in the community know that, uh, we, we came together with a company called lean kit a handful of years ago, and I give John Terry actually one of the founders LeanKit immense credit for, you know, kind of spearheading our cultural change and not, and not because of, we were just gonna be, you know, bringing agile solutions to our customers, but because, you know, he believed that it was going to be a fundamentally better way for us to work. Right. And we kind of, you know, we started with John and built, you know, out of concentric circles of momentum and, and we've gotten to the place where now it's just part of who we are, but, but I do think that, you know, COVID has, you know, um, I think pre COVID a lot of companies, you know, would, would adopt, you know, the would adopt digital slash agile transformation. >>Um, traditional industries may have done it as a reaction to disruption. Right. You know, and in many cases, the disruption to these traditional industries was, I would say a product oriented company, right. That probably had a larger software component, and that disruption caused a competitive issue, uh, or a customer issue that caused companies and tried to respond by transforming. I think COVID, you know, all of a sudden flatten that out, right. We literally all got disrupted. Right. And so all of a sudden, every one of us is dealing with some degree of market uncertainty, customer uncertainty, uh, and also, you know, none of us were insulated from the need to be able to pivot faster, deliver incrementally, you know, and operate in a different, completely more agile way, uh, you know, post COVID. Right. Yeah. That's great. >>So again, a very, very, very timely, you know, a little bit of serendipity, a little bit of planning. And, you know, as, as with all important things, there's always a little bit of lock in, uh, and a lot of hard work involved. So a really interesting thank you for, for your leadership, Patrick. And, you know, it really makes a statement. I think when you have a bunch of leaderships across an industry coming together and putting their name on a piece of paper, uh, that's aligned around us some principles and some values, which again, if you read them who wouldn't want to get behind these, but if it takes, you know, something a little bit more formal, uh, to kind of move the ball down the field, and then I totally get it and a really great work. Thanks for, uh, thanks for doing it. >>Oh, absolutely. No. Like I said, the first time I read it, I was like, yep. Like you said, this is all, it's all makes complete sense, but just documenting it and saying it and talking about it moves the needle. I'll tell you as a company, you gotta, we're pushing really hard on, uh, you know, on our own internal strategy on diversity and inclusion. Right. And, and like, once we wrote the words down about what, you know, what we aspire to be from a diversity and inclusion perspective, it's the same thing. Everybody reads the words that goes, why wouldn't we do this? Right. But until you write it down and kind of have again, a manifesto or a Terra firma of what you're trying to accomplish, you know, then you can rally behind it. Right. As opposed to it being something that's, everybody's got their own version of the flavor. Right. And I think it's a very analogous, you know, kind of, uh, initiative. Right. And, uh, and it's happening, both of those things right. Are happening across the industry these days. Right. >>And measure it too. Right. And measure it, measure, measure, measure, get a baseline. Even if you don't like to measure, even if you don't like what the, even if you can argue against the math, behind the measurement, measure it. And at least you can measure it again and you can, and you've got some type of a comp and that is really the only way to, to move it forward. We're Patrick really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for, uh, for taking a few minutes out of your day. >>It's great to be here. It's an awesome movement and we're glad to be a part of it. >>All right. Thanks. And if you want to check out the biz ops, Manifesta go to biz ops, manifesto.org, read it. You might want to sign it. It's there for you. And thanks for tuning in on this segment will continuing coverage of the biz op manifesto unveil you're on the cube. I'm Jeff, thanks for watching >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of biz ops manifesto unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition. >>Hey, welcome back, everybody Jeffrey here with the cube. We're coming to you from our Palo Alto studios. And welcome back to this event is the biz ops manifesto unveiling. So the biz ops manifesto and the biz ops coalition had been around for a little while, but today's the big day. That's kind of the big public unveiling, or we're excited to have some of the foundational people that, you know, have put their, put their name on the dotted, if you will, to support this initiative and talk about why that initiative is so important. And so the next guest we're excited to have is dr. Mick Kirsten. He is the founder and CEO of Tasktop mic. Great to see you coming in from Vancouver, Canada, I think, right? Yes. Great to be here, Jeff. Thank you. Absolutely. I hope your air is a little better out there. I know you had some of the worst air of all of us, a couple, a couple of weeks back. So hopefully things are, uh, are getting a little better and we get those fires under control. Yeah. >>Things have cleared up now. So yeah, it's good. It's good to be close to the U S and it's going to have the Arabic cleaner as well. >>Absolutely. So let's, let's jump into it. So you you've been an innovation guy forever starting way back in the day and Xerox park. I was so excited to do an event at Xerox park for the first time last year. I mean, that, that to me represents along with bell labs and, and some other, you know, kind of foundational innovation and technology centers, that's gotta be one of the greatest ones. So I just wonder if you could share some perspective of getting your start there at Xerox park, you know, some of the lessons you learned and what you've been able to kind of carry forward from those days. >>Yeah. I was fortunate to join Xerox park in the computer science lab there at a fairly early point in my career, and to be working on open source programming languages. So back then in the computer science lab, where some of the inventions around programming around software development games, such as object programming, and a lot of what we had around really modern programming levels constructs, those were the teams I had the fortunate of working with, and really our goal was. And of course, there's, as, as you noticed, there's just this DNA of innovation and excitement and innovation in the water. And really it was the model that was all about changing the way that we work was looking at for how we can make it 10 times easier to white coat. But this is back in 99. And we were looking at new ways of expressing, especially business concerns, especially ways of enabling people who are wanting to innovate for their business to express those concerns in code and make that 10 times easier than what that would take. >>So we create a new open source programming language, and we saw some benefits, but not quite quite what we expected. I then went and actually joined Charles Stephanie, that former to fucking from Microsoft who was responsible for, he actually got Microsoft word as a sparking into Microsoft and into the hands of bill Gates and that company that was behind the whole office suite and his vision. And then when I was trying to execute with, working for him was to make PowerPoint like a programming language to make everything completely visual. And I realized none of this was really working, that there was something else, fundamentally wrong programming languages, or new ways of building software. Like let's try and do with Charles around intentional programming. That was not enough. >>That was not enough. So, you know, the agile movement got started about 20 years ago, and we've seen the rise of dev ops and really this kind of embracing of, of, of sprints and, you know, getting away from MRDs and PRDs and these massive definitions of what we're going to build and long build cycles to this iterative process. And this has been going on for a little while. So what was still wrong? What was still missing? Why the biz ops coalition, why the biz ops manifesto? >>Yeah, so I basically think we nailed some of the things that the program language levels of teams can have effective languages deployed to soften to the cloud easily now, right? And at the kind of process and collaboration and planning level agile two decades, decades ago was formed. We were adopting and all the, all the teams I was involved with and it's really become a self problem. So agile tools, agile teams, agile ways of planning, uh, are now very mature. And the whole challenge is when organizations try to scale that. And so what I realized is that the way that agile was scaling across teams and really scaling from the technology part of the organization to the business was just completely flawed. The agile teams had one set of doing things, one set of metrics, one set of tools. And the way that the business was working was planning was investing in technology was just completely disconnected and using a whole different set of measures. Pretty >>Interesting. Cause I think it's pretty clear from the software development teams in terms of what they're trying to deliver. Cause they've got a feature set, right. And they've got bugs and it's easy to, it's easy to see what they deliver, but it sounds like what you're really honing in on is this disconnect on the business side, in terms of, you know, is it the right investment? You know, are we getting the right business ROI on this investment? Was that the right feature? Should we be building another feature or should we building a completely different product set? So it sounds like it's really a core piece of this is to get the right measurement tools, the right measurement data sets so that you can make the right decisions in terms of what you're investing, you know, limited resources. You can't, nobody has unlimited resources. And ultimately you have to decide what to do, which means you're also deciding what not to do. And it sounds like that's a really big piece of this, of this whole effort. >>Yeah. Jeff, that's exactly it, which is the way that the agile team measures their own way of working is very different from the way that you measure business outcomes. The business outcomes are in terms of how happy your customers are, but are you innovating fast enough to keep up with the pace of a rapidly changing economy, roughly changing market. And those are, those are all around the customer. And so what I learned on this long journey of supporting many organizations transformations and having them try to apply those principles of agile and dev ops, that those are not enough, those measures technical practices, uh, those measured sort of technical excellence of bringing code to the market. They don't actually measure business outcomes. And so I realized that it really was much more around having these entwined flow metrics that are customer centric and business centric and market centric where we need it to go. Right. >>So I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about your book because you're also a bestselling author from project to product and, and, and you, you brought up this concept in your book called the flow framework. And it's really interesting to me cause I know, you know, flow on one hand is kind of a workflow and a process flow and, and you know, that's how things get done and, and, and embrace the flow. On the other hand, you know, everyone now in, in a little higher level existential way is trying to get into the flow right into the workflow and, you know, not be interrupted and get into a state where you're kind of at your highest productivity, you know, kind of your highest comfort, which flow are you talking about in your book? Or is it a little bit of both? >>That's a great question. It's not one I get asked very often cause to me it's absolutely both. So that the thing that we want to get, that we've learned how to master individual flow, that there's this beautiful book by me, how you teaches me how he does a beautiful Ted talk by him as well about how we can take control of our own flow. So my question with the book with question replies, how can we bring that to entire teams and really entire organizations? How can we have everyone contributing to a customer outcome? And this is really what if you go to the biz ops manifesto, it says, I focus on outcomes on using data to drive whether we're delivering those outcomes rather than a focus on proxy metrics, such as, how quickly did we implement this feature? No, it's really how much value did the customer go to the future? >>And how quickly did you learn and how quickly did you use that data to drive to that next outcome? Really that with companies like Netflix and Amazon have mastered, how do we get that to every large organization, every it organization and make everyone be a software innovator. So it's to bring that, that concept of flow to these end to end value streams. And the fascinating thing is we've actually seen the data. We've been able to study a lot of value streams. We see when flow increases, when organizations deliver value to a customer faster, developers actually become more happy. So things like that and point out promoter scores, rise, and we've got empirical data for this. So that the beautiful thing to me is that we've actually been able to combine these two things and see the results and the data that you increase flow to the customer. Your developers are more, >>I love it. I love it, right, because we're all more, we're all happier when we're in the flow and we're all more productive when we're in the flow. So I, that is a great melding of, of two concepts, but let's jump into the, into the manifesto itself a little bit. And you know, I love that you took this approach really of having kind of four key values and then he gets 12 key principles. And I just want to read a couple of these values because when you read them, it sounds pretty brain dead. Right? Of course. Right. Of course you should focus on business outcomes. Of course you should have trust and collaboration. Of course you should have database decision making processes and not just intuition or, you know, whoever's the loudest person in the room, uh, and to learn and respond and pivot. But what's the value of actually just putting them on a piece of paper, because again, this is not this, these are all good, positive things, right? When somebody reads these to you or tells you these are sticks it on the wall, of course. But unfortunately of course isn't always enough. >>No. And I think what's happened is some of these core principles originally from the agile manifesto in two decades ago, uh, the whole dev ops movement of the last decade of flow feedback and continue learning has been key. But a lot of organizations, especially the ones undergoing digital transformations have actually gone a very different way, right? The way that they measure value, uh, in technology and innovation is through costs for many organizations. The way that they actually are looking at that they're moving to cloud is actually as a reduction in cost. Whereas the right way of looking at moving to cloud is how much more quickly can we get to the value to the customer? How quickly can we learn from that? And how quickly can we drive the next business outcome? So really the key thing is, is to move away from those old ways of doing things of funding projects and cost centers, to actually funding and investing in outcomes and measuring outcomes through these flow metrics, which in the end are your fast feedback and how quickly you're innovating for your customer. >>So these things do seem very obvious when you look at them. But the key thing is what you need to stop doing to focus on these. You need to actually have accurate realtime data of how much value you fund to the customer every week, every month, every quarter. And if you don't have that, your decisions are not driven on data. If you don't know what your bottleneck is. And this is something that in decades of manufacturing, a car manufacturers, other manufacturers, master, they always know where the bottom back in their production processes. You ask a random CIO when a global 500 company where their bottleneck is, and you won't get a clear answer because there's not that level of understanding. So have to actually follow these principles. You need to know exactly where you fall. And I guess because that's, what's making your developers miserable and frustrated, then having them context, which I'm trash. So the approach here is important and we have to stop doing these other things, >>Right? There's so much there to unpack. I love it. You know, especially the cloud conversation because so many people look at it wrong as, as, as a cost saving a device, as opposed to an innovation driver and they get stuck, they get stuck in the literal. And I, you know, I think at the same thing, always about Moore's law, right? You know, there's a lot of interesting real tech around Moore's law and the increasing power of microprocessors, but the real power, I think in Moore's laws is the attitudinal change in terms of working in a world where you know that you've got all this power and what you build and design. I think it's funny to your, your comment on the flow and the bottleneck, right? Cause, cause we know manufacturing, as soon as you fix one bottleneck, you move to your next one, right? You always move to your next point of failure. So if you're not fixing those things, you know, you're not, you're not increasing that speed down the line, unless you can identify where that bottleneck is or no matter how many improvements you make to the rest of the process, it's still going to get hung up on that one spot. >>That's exactly it. And you also make it sound so simple, but again, if you don't have the data driven visibility of where the bottom line is, and these bottlenecks are adjusted to say, it's just whack-a-mole right. So we need to understand is the bottleneck because our security reviews are taking too long and stopping us from getting value for the customer. If it's that automate that process. And then you move on to the next bottleneck, which might actually be that deploying yourself into the cloud was taking too long. But if you don't take that approach of going flow first, rather than again, that sort of cost reduction. First, you have to think of that approach of customer centricity and you only focused on optimizing costs. Your costs will increase and your flow will slow down. And this is just one of these fascinating things. Whereas if you focus on getting back to the customer and reducing your cycles on getting value, your flow time from six months to two weeks or two, one week or two event, as we see with, with tech giants, you actually can both lower your costs and get much more value that for us to get that learning loop going. >>So I think I've seen all of these cloud deployments and one of the things that's happened that delivered almost no value because there was such big bottlenecks upfront in the process and actually the hosting and the AP testing was not even possible with all of those inefficiencies. So that's why going float for us rather than costs where we started our project versus silky. >>I love that. And, and, and, and it, it begs repeating to that right within the subscription economy, you know, you're on the hook to deliver value every single month because they're paying you every single month. So if you're not on top of how you're delivering value, you're going to get sideways because it's not like, you know, they pay a big down payment and a small maintenance fee every month, but once you're in a subscription relationship, you know, you have to constantly be delivering value and upgrading that value because you're constantly taking money from the customer. So it's such a different kind of relationship than kind of the classic, you know, big bang with a maintenance agreement on the back end really important. Yeah. >>And I think in terms of industry shifts that that's it that's, what's catalyzed. This interesting shift is in this SAS and subscription economy. If you're not delivering more and more value to your customers, someone else's and they're winning the business, not you. So one way we know is to delight our customers with great user experiences. Well, that really is based on how many features you delivered or how much, how big, how many quality improvements or scalar performance improvements you delivered. So the problem is, and this is what the business manifesto, as well as the full frame of touch on is if you can't measure how much value you delivered to a customer, what are you measuring? You just backed again, measuring costs and that's not a measure of value. So we have to shift quickly away from measuring cost to measuring value, to survive in the subscription economy. >>We could go for days and days and days. I want to shift gears a little bit into data and, and, and a data driven, um, decision making a data driven organization cause right day has been talked about for a long time, the huge big data meme with, with Hadoop over, over several years and, and data warehouses and data lakes and data oceans and data swamps, and can go on and on and on. It's not that easy to do, right? And at the same time, the proliferation of data is growing exponentially. We're just around the corner from, from IOT and 5g. So now the accumulation of data at machine scale, again, this is going to overwhelm and one of the really interesting principles, uh, that I wanted to call out and get your take right, is today's organizations generate more data than humans can process. So informed decisions must be augmented by machine learning and artificial intelligence. I wonder if you can, again, you've got some great historical perspective, um, reflect on how hard it is to get the right data, to get the data in the right context, and then to deliver it to the decision makers and then trust the decision makers to actually make the data and move that down. You know, it's kind of this democratization process into more and more people and more and more frontline jobs making more and more of these little decisions every day. >>Yeah. I definitely think the front parts of what you said are where the promises of big data have completely fallen on their face into the swamps as, as you mentioned, because if you don't have the data in the right format, you've cannot connect collected at the right way. You want that way, the right way you can't use human or machine learning effectively. And there've been the number of data warehouses in a typical enterprise organization. And the sheer investment is tremendous, but the amount of intelligence being extracted from those is, is, is a very big problem. So the key thing that I've noticed is that if you can model your value streams, so yes, you understand how you're innovating, how you're measuring the delivery of value and how long that takes. What is your time to value these metrics like full time? You can actually use both the intelligence that you've got around the table and push that down as well, as far as getting to the organization, but you can actually start using that those models to understand and find patterns and detect bottlenecks that might be surprising, right? >>Well, you can detect interesting bottlenecks when you shift to work from home. We detected all sorts of interesting bottlenecks in our own organization that were not intuitive to me that had to do with, you know, more senior people being overloaded and creating bottlenecks where they didn't exist. Whereas we thought we were actually an organization that was very good at working from home because of our open source roots. So that data is highly complex. Software value streams are extremely complicated. And the only way to really get the proper analyst and data is to model it properly and then to leverage these machine learning and AI techniques that we have. But that front part of what you said is where organizations are just extremely immature in what I've seen, where they've got data from all their tools, but not modeled in the right way. Right, right. >>Right. Well, all right. So before I let you go, you know, let's say you get a business leader, he buys in, he reads the manifesto, he signs on the dotted line and he says, Mick, how do I get started? I want to be more aligned with, with the development teams. You know, I'm in a very competitive space. We need to be putting out new software features and engaging with our customers. I want to be more data-driven how do I get started? Well, you know, what's the biggest inhibitor for most people to get started and get some early wins, which we know is always the key to success in any kind of a new initiative. >>Right? So I think you can reach out to us through the website, uh, there's the manifesto, but the key thing is just to get you set up it's to get started and to get the key wins. So take a probably value stream that's mission critical. It could be your new mobile and web experiences or, or part of your cloud modernization platform or your analytics pipeline, but take that and actually apply these principles to it and measure the end to end flow of value. Make sure you have a value metric that everyone is on the same page on the people, on the development teams, the people in leadership all the way up to the CEO. And one of the, what I encourage you to start is actually that content flow time, right? That is the number one metric. That is how you measure it, whether you're getting the benefit of your cloud modernization, that is the one metric that Adrian Cockcroft. When the people I respect tremendously put into his cloud for CEOs, the metric, the one, the one way to measure innovation. So basically take these principles, deploy them on one product value stream, measure, sentiment, flow time, and then you'll actually be well on your path to transforming and to applying the concepts of agile and dev ops all the way to, to the business, to the way >>You're offering model. >>Well, Mick really great tips, really fun to catch up. I look forward to a time when we can actually sit across the table and, and get into this. Cause I just, I just love the perspective and, you know, you're very fortunate to have that foundational, that foundational base coming from Xerox park and they get, you know, it's, it's a very magical place with a magical history. So to, to incorporate that into, continue to spread that well, uh, you know, good for you through the book and through your company. So thanks for sharing your insight with us today. >>Thanks so much for having me, Jeff. >>All right. And go to the biz ops manifesto.org, read it, check it out. If you want to sign it, sign it. They'd love to have you do it. Stay with us for continuing coverage of the unveiling of the business manifesto on the cube. I'm Jeff. Rick. Thanks for watching. See you next time >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of biz ops manifesto unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition. >>Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the cube come due from our Palo Alto studios today for a big, big reveal. We're excited to be here. It's the biz ops manifesto unveiling a thing's been in the works for awhile and we're excited to have our next guest. One of the, really the powers behind this whole effort. And he's joining us from Boston it's surge, Lucio, the vice president, and general manager enterprise software division at Broadcom surge. Great to see you. >>Hi, good to see you, Jeff. Glad to be here. >>So you've been in this business for a very long time. You've seen a lot of changes in technology. What is the biz ops manifesto? What is this coalition all about? Why do we need this today and in 2020? >>Yeah. So, so I've been in this business for close to 25 years, right? So about 20 years ago, the agile manifesto was created. And the goal of the agile manifesto was really to address the uncertainty around software development and the inability to predict the efforts to build software. And, uh, if you, if you roll that kind of 20 years later, and if you look at the current state of the industry, uh, the product, the project management Institute, estimates that we're wasting about a million dollars, every 20 seconds in digital transformation initiatives that do not deliver on business results. In fact, we were recently served a third of the, uh, a number of executives in partnership with Harvard business review and 77% of those executives think that one of the key challenges that they have is really at the collaboration between business and it, and that that's been kind of a case for, uh, almost 20 years now. >>Um, so the, the, the key challenge we're faced with is really that we need a new approach and many of the players in the industry, including ourselves, I've been using different terms, right? Some are being, are talking about value stream management. Some are talking about software delivery management. If you look at the site, reliability engineering movement, in many ways, it embodies a lot of these kind of concepts and principles. So we believed that it became really imperative for us to crystallize around, could have one concept. And so in many ways, the, uh, the BizOps concept and the business manifesto are bringing together a number of ideas, which have been emerging in the last five years or so, and, and defining the key values and principles to finally help these organizations truly transform and become digital businesses. And so the hope is that by joining our forces and defining public key principles and values, we can help the industry, uh, not just, uh, by, you know, providing them with support, but also, uh, tools and consulting that is required for them to truly achieve the kind of transformation that everybody's seeking. >>Right, right. So COVID now we're six months into it, approximately seven months into it. Um, a lot of pain, a lot of bad stuff still happening. We've got a ways to go, but one of the things that on the positive side, right, and you've seen all the memes and social media is, is a driver of digital transformation and a driver of change. Cause we had this light switch moment in the middle of March and there was no more planning. There was no more conversation. You've suddenly got remote workforces, everybody's working from home and you got to go, right. So the reliance on these tools increases dramatically, but I'm curious, you know, kind of short of, of the beginnings of this effort in short of kind of COVID, which, you know, came along unexpectedly. I mean, what were those inhibitors because we've been making software for a very long time, right? The software development community has, has adopted kind of rapid change and, and iterative, uh, delivery and, and sprints, what was holding back the connection with the business side to make sure that those investments were properly aligned with outcomes. >>Well, so, so you have to understand that it is, is kind of a its own silos. And traditionally it has been treated as a cost center within large organizations and not as a value center. And so as a result could have a traditional dynamic between it and the business is basically one of a kind of supplier up to kind of a business. Um, and you know, if you, if you go back to, uh, I think you'll unmask a few years ago, um, basically at this concept of the machines to build the machines and you went as far as saying that, uh, the machines or the production line is actually the product. So, um, meaning that the core of the innovation is really about, uh, building, could it be engine to deliver on the value? And so in many ways, you know, we have missed on this shift from, um, kind of it becoming this kind of value center within the enterprises. >>And, and he talks about culture. Now, culture is a, is a sum total of beavers. And the reality is that if you look at it, especially in the last decade, uh, we've agile with dev ops with, um, I bring infrastructures, uh, it's, it's way more volatile today than it was 10 years ago. And so the, when you start to look at the velocity of the data, the volume of data, the variety of data to analyze this system, um, it's, it's very challenging for it to actually even understand and optimize its own processes, let alone, um, to actually include business as sort of an integral part of kind of a delivery chain. And so it's both kind of a combination of, of culture, um, which is required as well as tools, right? To be able to start to bring together all these data together, and then given the volume variety of philosophy of the data, uh, we have to apply some core technologies, which have only really, truly emerged in the last five to 10 years around machine learning and analytics. And so it's really kind of a combination of those freaks, which are coming together today to really help organizations kind of get to the next level. Right, >>Right. So let's talk about the manifesto. Let's talk about, uh, the coalition, uh, the BizOps coalition. I just liked that you put down these really simple, you know, kind of straightforward core values. You guys have four core values that you're highlighting, you know, business outcomes, over individual projects and outputs, trust, and collaboration, oversight, load teams, and organizations, data driven decisions, what you just talked about, uh, you know, over opinions and judgment and learned, respond and pivot. I mean, surgery sounds like pretty basic stuff, right? I mean, aren't, isn't everyone working to these values already. And I think he touched on it on culture, right? Trust and collaboration, data driven decisions. I mean, these are fundamental ways that people must run their business today, or the person that's across the street, that's doing it. It's going to knock them out right off their blog. >>Yeah. So that's very true. But, uh, so I'll, I'll mention in our survey, we did, uh, I think about six months ago and it was in partnership with, uh, with, uh, an industry analyst and we serve at a, again, a number of it executives to understand how many we're tracking business outcomes I'm going to do with the software executives. It executives we're tracking business outcomes. And the, there were less than 15% of these executives were actually tracking the outcomes of a software delivery. And you see that every day. Right? So in my own teams, for instance, we've been adopting a lot of these core principles in the last year or so, and we've uncovered that 16% of our resources were basically aligned around initiatives, which are not strategic for us. Um, I take, you know, another example, for instance, one of our customers in the, uh, in the airline industry and Harvard, for instance, that a number of, uh, um, that they had software issues that led to people searching for flights and not returning any kind of availability. >>And yet, um, you know, the, it teams, whether it's operations, software environments were completely oblivious to that because they were completely blindsided to it. And so the connectivity between kind of the inwards metrics that RT is using, whether it's database time, cycle time, or whatever metric we use in it are typically completely divorced from the business metrics. And so at its core, it's really about starting to align the business metrics with what the, the software delivery chain, right? This, uh, the system, which is really a core differentiator for these organizations. It's about connecting those two things and, and starting to, um, infuse some of the agile culture and principles. Um, that's emerged from the software side into the business side. Um, of course the lean movement and other movements have started to change some of these dynamic on the, on the business side. And so I think this, this is the moment where we are starting to see kind of the imperative to transform. Now, you know, Covina obviously has been a key driver for that. The, um, the technology is right to start to be able to weave data together and really kind of, uh, also the cultural shifts, uh, Prue agile through dev ops through, uh, the SRE movement, uh frulein um, business transformation, all these things are coming together and that are really creating kind of the conditions for the BizOps manifesto to exist. >>So, uh, Clayton Christianson, great, uh, Harvard professor innovator's dilemma might still my all time favorite business books, you know, talks about how difficult it is for incumbents to react to, to disruptive change, right? Because they're always working on incremental change because that's what their customers are asking for. And there's a good ROI when you talk about, you know, companies not measuring the right thing. I mean, clearly it has some portion of their budget that has to go to keeping the lights on, right. That that's always the case, but hopefully that's an, an ever decreasing percentage of their total activity. So, you know, what should people be measuring? I mean, what are kind of the new metrics, um, in, in biz ops that drive people to be looking at the right things, measuring the right things and subsequently making the right decisions, investment decisions on whether they should do, you know, move project a along or project B. >>So there, there are only two things, right? So, so I think what you're talking about is portfolio management, investment management, right. And, um, which, which is a key challenge, right? Um, in my own experience, right? Uh, driving strategy or a large scale kind of software organization for years, um, it's very difficult to even get kind of a base data as to who is doing what, uh, um, I mean, some of our largest customers we're engaged with right now are simply trying to get a very simple answer, which is how many people do I have and that specific initiative at any point in time, and just tracking that information is extremely difficult. So, and again, back to a product project management Institute, um, there, they have estimated that on average, it organizations have anywhere between 10 to 20% of their resources focused on initiatives, which are not strategically aligned. >>So, so that's one dimensional portfolio management. I think the key aspect though, that we are, we're really keen on is really around kind of the alignment of a business metrics to the it metrics. Um, so I'll use kind of two simple examples, right? And my background is around quality and I've always believed that the fitness for purpose is really kind of a key, um, uh, philosophy if you will. And so if you start to think about quality as fitness for purpose, you start to look at it from a customer point of view, right. And fitness for purpose for a core banking application or mobile application are different, right? So the definition of a business value that you're trying to achieve is different. Um, and so the, and yeah, if you look at our, it, operations are operating there, we're using kind of a same type of, uh, kind of inward metrics, uh, like a database off time or a cycle time, or what is my point of velocity, right? >>And so the challenge really is this inward facing metrics that it is using, which are divorced from ultimately the outcome. And so, you know, if I'm, if I'm trying to build a poor banking application, my core metric is likely going to be uptight, right? If I'm trying to build a mobile application or maybe your social, a mobile app, it's probably going to be engagement. And so what you want is for everybody across it, to look at these metric and what are the metrics within the software delivery chain, which ultimately contribute to that business metric. And some cases cycle time may be completely irrelevant, right? Again, my core banking app, maybe I don't care about cycle time. And so it's really about aligning those metrics and be able to start to, um, Charles you mentioned, uh, around the, the, um, uh, around the disruption that we see is, or the investors is the dilemma now is really around the fact that many it organizations are essentially applying the same approaches of, for innovation, like for basically scrap work, then they would apply to kind of over more traditional projects. And so, you know, there's been a lot of talk about two-speed it, and yes, it exists, but in reality are really organizations, um, truly differentiating, um, all of the operate, their, their projects and products based on the outcomes that they're trying to achieve. And this is really where BizOps is trying to affect. >>I love that, you know, again, it doesn't seem like brain surgery, but focus on the outcomes, right. And it's horses for courses, as you said, this project, you know, what you're measuring and how you define success, isn't necessarily the same as, as on this other project. So let's talk about some of the principles we talked about the values, but, you know, I think it's interesting that, that, that the BizOps coalition, you know, just basically took the time to write these things down and they don't seem all that super insightful, but I guess you just got to get them down and have them on paper and have them in front of your face. But I want to talk about, you know, one of the key ones, which you just talked about, which is changing requirements, right. And working in a dynamic situation, which is really what's driven, you know, this, the software to change in software development, because, you know, if you're in a game app and your competitor comes out with a new blue sword, you got to come out with a new blue sword. >>So whether you had that on your Kanban wall or not. So it's, it's really this embracing of the speed of change and, and, and, and making that, you know, the rule, not the exception. I think that's a phenomenal one. And the other one you talked about is data, right? And that today's organizations generate more data than humans can process. So informed decisions must be generated by machine learning and AI, and, you know, in the, the big data thing with Hadoop, you know, started years ago, but we are seeing more and more that people are finally figuring it out, that it's not just big data, and it's not even generic machine learning or artificial intelligence, but it's applying those particular data sets and that particular types of algorithms to a specific problem, to your point, to try to actually reach an objective, whether that's, you know, increasing the, your average ticket or, you know, increasing your checkout rate with, with, with shopping carts that don't get left behind in these types of things. So it's a really different way to think about the world in the good old days, probably when you got started, when we had big, giant, you know, MRDs and PRDs and sat down and coded for two years and came out with a product release and hopefully not too many patches subsequently to that. >>It's interesting. Right. Um, again, back to one of these surveys that we did with, uh, with about 600, the ITA executives, and, uh, and, and we, we purposely designed those questions to be pretty open. Um, and, and one of them was really wrong requirements and, uh, and it was really a wrong, uh, kind of what do you, what is the best approach? What is your preferred approach towards requirements? And if I were to remember correctly, over 80% of the it executives set that the best approach they'll prefer to approach these core requirements to be completely defined before software development starts, let me pause there we're 20 years after the agile manifesto, right? And for 80% of these idea executives to basically claim that the best approach is for requirements to be fully baked before salt, before software development starts, basically shows that we still have a very major issue. >>And again, our hypothesis in working with many organizations is that the key challenge is really the boundary between business and it, which is still very much contract based. If you look at the business side, they basically are expecting for it deliver on time on budget, right. But what is the incentive for it to actually delivering on the business outcomes, right? How often is it measured on the business outcomes and not on an SLA or on a budget type criteria? And so that's really the fundamental shift that we need to, we really need to drive up as an industry. Um, and you know, we, we talk about kind of this, this imperative for organizations to operate that's one, and back to the, the, um, you know, various Doris dilemna the key difference between these larger organization is, is really kind of, uh, if you look at the amount of capital investment that they can put into pretty much anything, why are they losing compared to, um, you know, startups? What, why is it that, uh, more than 40% of, uh, personal loans today or issued not by your traditional brick and mortar banks, but by, um, startups? Well, the reason, yes, it's the traditional culture of doing incremental changes and not disrupting ourselves, which Christiansen covered the length, but it's also the inability to really fundamentally change kind of a dynamic picture. We can business it and, and, and partner right. To, to deliver on a specific business outcome. >>All right. I love that. That's a great, that's a great summary. And in fact, getting ready for this interview, I saw you mentioning another thing where, you know, the, the problem with the agile development is that you're actually now getting more silos. Cause you have all these autonomous people working, you know, kind of independently. So it's even a harder challenge for, for the business leaders to, to, as you said, to know, what's actually going on, but, but certainly I w I want to close, um, and talk about the coalition. Um, so clearly these are all great concepts. These are concepts you want to apply to your business every day. Why the coalition, why, you know, take these concepts out to a broader audience, including either your, your competition and the broader industry to say, Hey, we, as a group need to put a stamp of approval on these concepts, these values, these principles. >>So first I think we, we want, um, everybody to realize that we are all talking about the same things, the same concepts. I think we were all from our own different vantage point, realizing that things after change, and again, back to, you know, whether it's value stream management or site reliability engineering, or biz ops, we're all kind of using slightly different languages. Um, and so I think one of the important aspects of BizOps is for us, all of us, whether we're talking about, you know, consulting agile transformation experts, uh, whether we're talking about vendors, right, provides kind of tools and technologies or these large enterprises to transform for all of us to basically have kind of a reference that lets us speak around kind of, um, in a much more consistent way. The second aspect is for, to me is for, um, DS concepts to start to be embraced, not just by us or trying, or, you know, vendors, um, system integrators, consulting firms, educators, thought leaders, but also for some of our old customers to start to become evangelists of their own in the industry. >>So we, our, our objective with the coalition needs to be pretty, pretty broad. Um, and our hope is by, by starting to basically educate, um, our, our joint customers or partners, that we can start to really foster these behaviors and start to really change some of dynamics. So we're very pleased at if you look at, uh, some of the companies which have joined the, the, the, the manifesto. Um, so we have vendors such as desktop or advance, or, um, uh, PagerDuty for instance, or even planned view, uh, one of my direct competitors, um, but also thought leaders like Tom Davenport or, uh, or cap Gemini or, um, um, smaller firms like, uh, business agility, institutes, or agility elf. Um, and so our goal really is to start to bring together, uh, fall years, people would have been LP, large organizations, do digital transformation vendors. We're providing the technologies that many of these organizations use to deliver on this digital preservation and for all of us to start to provide the kind of, uh, education support and tools that the industry needs. Yeah, >>That's great surge. And, uh, you know, congratulations to you and the team. I know this has been going on for a while, putting all this together, getting people to sign onto the manifesto, putting the coalition together, and finally today getting to unveil it to the world in, in a little bit more of a public, uh, opportunity. So again, you know, really good values, really simple principles, something that, that, uh, shouldn't have to be written down, but it's nice cause it is, and now you can print it out and stick it on your wall. So thank you for, uh, for sharing this story and again, congrats to you and the team. >>Thank you. Thanks, Jeff. Appreciate it. >>Oh, my pleasure. Alrighty, surge. If you want to learn more about the BizOps manifest to go to biz ops manifesto.org, read it and you can sign it and you can stay here for more coverage. I'm the cube of the biz ops manifesto unveiled. Thanks for watching. See you next >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of this ops manifesto unveiled brought to you by bill. >>Hey, welcome back, everybody Jeffrey here with the cube. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of the biz ops manifesto unveiling. It's been in the works for awhile, but today's the day that it actually kind of come out to the, to the public. And we're excited to have a real industry luminary here to talk about what's going on, why this is important and share his perspective. And we're happy to have from Cape Cod, I believe is Tom Davenport. He is a distinguished author and professor at Babson college. We could go on, he's got a lot of great titles and, and really illuminary in the area of big data and analytics Thomas. Great to see you. >>Thanks Jeff. Happy to be here with you. >>Great. So let's just jump into it, you know, and getting ready for this. I came across your LinkedIn posts. I think you did earlier this summer in June and right off the bat, the first sentence just grabbed my attention. I'm always interested in new attempts to address longterm issues, uh, in how technology works within businesses, biz ops. What did you see in biz ops, uh, that, that kind of addresses one of these really big longterm problems? >>Well, yeah, but the longterm problem is that we've had a poor connection between business people and it people between business objectives and the, it solutions that address them. This has been going on, I think since the beginning of information technology and sadly it hasn't gone away. And so biz ops is a new attempt to deal with that issue with, you know, a new framework, eventually a broad set of solutions that increase the likelihood that we'll actually solve a business problem with an it capability. >>Right. You know, it's interesting to compare it with like dev ops, which I think a lot of people are probably familiar with, which was, you know, built around, uh, agile software development and a theory that we want to embrace change that that changes. Okay. Uh, and we want to be able to iterate quickly and incorporate that. And that's been happening in the software world for, for 20 plus years. What's taken so long to get that to the business side, because as the pace of change has changed on the software side, you know, that's a strategic issue in terms of execution on the business side that they need now to change priorities. And, you know, there's no PRDs and MRDs and big, giant strategic plans that sit on the shelf for five years. That's just not the way business works anymore. It took a long time to get here. >>Yeah, it did. And you know, there have been previous attempts to make a better connection between business and it, there was the so called alignment framework that a couple of friends of mine from Boston university developed, I think more than 20 years ago, but you know, now we have better technology for creating that linkage. And the, you know, the idea of kind of ops oriented frameworks is pretty pervasive now. So I think it's time for another serious attempt at it. Right. >>And do you think doing it this way, right. With the, with the biz ops coalition, you know, getting a collection of, of, of kind of likeminded individuals and companies together, and actually even having a manifesto, which we're making this declarative statement of, of principles and values, you think that's what it takes to kind of drive this kind of beyond the experiment and actually, you know, get it done and really start to see some results in, in, uh, in production in the field. >>I think certainly, um, no one vendor organization can pull this off single handedly. It does require a number of organizations collaborating and working together. So I think our coalition is a good idea and a manifesto is just a good way to kind of lay out what you see as the key principles of the idea. And that makes it much easier for everybody to understand and act on. >>I think it's just, it's really interesting having, you know, having them written down on paper and having it just be so clearly articulated both in terms of the, of the values as well as, as the, uh, the principles and the values, you know, business outcomes matter trust and collaboration, data driven decisions, which is the number three or four, and then learn, respond and pivot. It doesn't seem like those should have to be spelled out so clearly, but, but obviously it helps to have them there. You can stick them on the wall and kind of remember what your priorities are, but you're the data guy. You're the analytics guy, uh, and a big piece of this is data and analytics and moving to data-driven decisions. And principle number seven says, you know, today's organizations generate more data than humans can process and informed decisions can be augmented by machine learning and artificial intelligence right up your alley. You know, you've talked a number of times on kind of the mini stages of analytics. Um, and how has that's evolved over, over time, you know, as you think of analytics and machine learning, driving decisions beyond supporting decisions, but actually starting to make decisions in machine time. What's that, what's that thing for you? What does that make you, you know, start to think, wow, this is, this is going to be pretty significant. >>Yeah. Well, you know, this has been a longterm interest of mine. Um, the last generation of AI, I was very interested in expert systems. And then, um, I think, uh, more than 10 years ago, I wrote an article about automated decision-making using what was available then, which was rule-based approaches. Um, but you know, this addresses an issue that we've always had with analytics and AI. Um, you know, we, we tended to refer to those things as providing decision support. The problem is that if the decision maker didn't want their support, didn't want to use them in order to make a decision, they didn't provide any value. And so the nice thing about automating decisions, um, with now contemporary AI tools is that we can ensure that data and analytics get brought into the decision without any possible disconnection. Now, I think humans still have something to add here, and we often will need to examine how that decision is being made and maybe even have the ability to override it. But in general, I think at least for, you know, repetitive tactical decisions, um, involving a lot of data, we want most of those, I think to be at least recommended if not totally made by an algorithm or an AI based system, and that I believe would add to the quality and the precision and the accuracy of decisions and in most organizations, >>No, I think, I think you just answered my next question before I, before Hey, asked it, you know, we had dr. Robert Gates on a former secretary of defense on a few years back, and we were talking about machines and machines making decisions. And he said at that time, you know, the only weapon systems, uh, that actually had an automated trigger on it were on the North Korea and South Korea border. Um, everything else, as you said, had to go through a sub person before the final decision was made. And my question is, you know, what are kind of the attributes of the decision that enable us to more easily automated? And then how do you see that kind of morphing over time, both as the data to support that as well as our comfort level, um, enables us to turn more and more actual decisions over to the machine? >>Well, yeah, it's suggested we need, um, data and, um, the data that we have to kind of train our models has to be high quality and current. And we, we need to know the outcomes of that data. You know, um, most machine learning models, at least in business are supervised. And that means we need to have labeled outcomes in the, in the training data. But I, you know, um, the pandemic that we're living through is a good illustration of the fact that, that the data also have to be reflective of current reality. And, you know, one of the things that we're finding out quite frequently these days is that, um, the data that we have do not reflect, you know, what it's like to do business in a pandemic. Um, I wrote a little piece about this recently with Jeff cam at wake forest university, we called it data science quarantined, and we interviewed with somebody who said, you know, it's amazing what eight weeks of zeros will do to your demand forecast. We just don't really know what happens in a pandemic. Um, our models maybe have to be put on the shelf for a little while and until we can develop some new ones or we can get some other guidelines into making decisions. So I think that's one of the key things with automated decision making. We have to make sure that the data from the past and that's all we have of course, is a good guide to, you know, what's happening in the present and the future as far as we understand it. Yeah. >>I used to joke when we started this calendar year 2020, it was finally the year that we know everything with the benefit of hindsight, but it turned out 20, 20 a year. We found out we actually know nothing and everything thought we knew, but I wanna, I wanna follow up on that because you know, it did suddenly change everything, right? We got this light switch moment. Everybody's working from home now we're many, many months into it, and it's going to continue for a while. I saw your interview with Bernard Marr and you had a really interesting comment that now we have to deal with this change. We don't have a lot of data and you talked about hold fold or double down. And, and I can't think of a more, you know, kind of appropriate metaphor for driving the value of the BizOps when now your whole portfolio strategy, um, these to really be questioned and, and, you know, you have to be really, uh, well, uh, executing on what you are, holding, what you're folding and what you're doubling down with this completely new environment. >>Well, yeah, and I hope I did this in the interview. I would like to say that I came up with that term, but it actually came from a friend of mine. Who's a senior executive at Genpact. And, um, I, um, used it mostly to talk about AI and AI applications, but I think you could, you could use it much more broadly to talk about your entire sort of portfolio of digital projects. You need to think about, well, um, given some constraints on resources and a difficult economy for a while, which of our projects do we want to keep going on pretty much the way we were and which ones are not that necessary anymore? You see a lot of that in AI, because we had so many pilots, somebody told me, you know, we've got more pilots around here than O'Hare airport and AI. Um, and then, but the ones that involve double down they're even more important to you. They are, you know, a lot of organizations have found this out in the pandemic, on digital projects. It's more and more important for customers to be able to interact with you, um, digitally. And so you certainly wouldn't want to, um, cancel those projects or put them on hold. So you double down on them and get them done faster and better. >>Right, right. Uh, another, another thing that came up in my research that you quoted, um, was, was from Jeff Bezos, talking about the great bulk of what we do is quietly, but meaningfully improving core operations. You know, I think that is so core to this concept of not AI and machine learning and kind of the general sense, which, which gets way too much buzz, but really applied right. Applied to a specific problem. And that's where you start to see the value. And, you know, the, the BizOps, uh, manifesto is, is, is calling it out in this particular process. But I'd love to get your perspective as you know, you speak generally about this topic all the time, but how people should really be thinking about where are the applications where I can apply this technology to get direct business value. >>Yeah, well, you know, even talking about automated decisions, um, uh, the kind of once in a lifetime decisions, uh, the ones that, um, ag Lafley, the former CEO of Procter and gamble used to call the big swing decisions. You only get a few of those. He said in your tenure as CEO, those are probably not going to be the ones that you're automating in part because, um, you don't have much data about them. You're only making them a few times and in part, because, um, they really require that big picture thinking and the ability to kind of anticipate the future, that the best human decision makers, um, have. Um, but, um, in general, I think where they are, the projects that are working well are, you know, when I call the low hanging fruit ones, the, some people even report to it referred to it as boring AI. >>So, you know, sucking data out of a contract in order to compare it to a bill of lading for what arrived at your supply chain companies can save or make a lot of money with that kind of comparison. It's not the most exciting thing, but AI, as you suggested is really good at those narrow kinds of tasks. It's not so good at the, at the really big moonshots, like curing cancer or, you know, figuring out well what's the best stock or bond under all circumstances or even autonomous vehicles. Um, we, we made some great progress in that area, but everybody seems to agree that they're not going to be perfect for quite a while. And we really don't want to be driving around on them very much unless they're, you know, good and all kinds of weather and with all kinds of pedestrian traffic and you know, that sort of thing, right? That's funny you bring up contract management. >>I had a buddy years ago, they had a startup around contract management and was like, and this was way before we had the compute power today and cloud proliferation. I said, you know, how, how can you possibly build software around contract management? It's language, it's legal, ease. It's very specific. And he's like, Jeff, we just need to know where's the contract. And when does it expire? And who's the signatory. And he built a business on those, you know, very simple little facts that weren't being covered because their contracts contractor in people's drawers and files and homes, and Lord only knows. So it's really interesting, as you said, these kind of low hanging fruit opportunities where you can extract a lot of business value without trying to, you know, boil the ocean. >>Yeah. I mean, if you're Amazon, um, uh, Jeff Bezos thinks it's important to have some kind of billion dollar projects. And he even says it's important to have a billion dollar failure or two every year. But I think most organizations probably are better off being a little less aggressive and, you know, sticking to, um, what AI has been doing for a long time, which is, you know, making smarter decisions based on, based on data. >>Right? So Tom, I want to shift gears one more time before, before we let you go on on kind of a new topic for you, not really new, but you know, not, not a, the vast majority of, of your publications and that's the new way to work, you know, as, as the pandemic hit in mid March, right. And we had this light switch moment, everybody had to work from home and it was, you know, kind of crisis and get everybody set up. Well, you know, now we're five months, six months, seven months. A number of companies have said that people are not going to be going back to work for a while. And so we're going to continue on this for a while. And then even when it's not what it is now, it's not going to be what it was before. So, you know, I wonder, and I know you, you, uh, you teased, you're working on a new book, you know, some of your thoughts on, you know, kind of this new way to work and, and the human factors in this new, this new kind of reality that we're kind of evolving into, I guess. >>Yeah. I missed was an interest of mine. I think, um, back in the nineties, I wrote an article called, um, a coauthored, an article called two cheers for the virtual office. And, you know, it was just starting to emerge. Then some people were very excited about it. Some people were skeptical and, uh, we said two cheers rather than three cheers because clearly there's some shortcomings. And, you know, I keep seeing these pop up. It's great that we can work from our homes. It's great that we can accomplish most of what we need to do with a digital interface, but, um, you know, things like innovation and creativity and certainly, um, uh, a good, um, happy social life kind of requires some face to face contact every now and then. And so I, you know, I think we'll go back to an environment where there is some of that. >>Um, we'll have, um, times when people convene in one place so they can get to know each other face to face and learn from each other that way. And most of the time, I think it's a huge waste of people's time to commute into the office every day and to jump on airplanes, to, to, um, give every little, um, uh, sales call or give every little presentation. Uh, we just have to really narrow down what are the circumstances where face to face contact really matters. And when can we get by with, with digital, you know, I think one of the things in my current work I'm finding is that even when you have AI based decision making, you really need a good platform in which that all takes place. So in addition to these virtual platforms, we need to develop platforms that kind of structure the workflow for us and tell us what we should be doing next, then make automated decisions when necessary. And I think that ultimately is a big part of biz ops as well. It's not just the intelligence of an AI system, but it's the flow of work that kind of keeps things moving smoothly throughout your organization. >>Yeah. I think such, such a huge opportunity as you just said, cause I forget the stats on how often we're interrupted with notifications between email texts, Slack, a sauna, Salesforce, the list goes on and on. So, you know, to put an AI layer between the person and all these systems that are begging for attention, and you've written a book on the attention economy, which is a whole nother topic, we'll say for another day, you know, it really begs, it really begs for some assistance because you know, you just can't get him picked, you know, every two minutes and really get quality work done. It's just not, it's just not realistic. And you know what? I don't think that's a feature that we're looking for. I agree. Totally. Alright, Tom. Well, thank you so much for your time. Really enjoyed the conversation. I gotta dig into the library. It's very long. So I might start at the attention economy. I haven't read that one in to me. I think that's the fascinating thing in which we're living. So thank you for your time and, uh, great to see you. >>My pleasure, Jeff. Great to be here. >>All right. Take care. Alright. He's Tom I'm Jeff. You are watching the continuing coverage of the biz ops manifesto and Vale. Thanks for watching the cube. We'll see you next time.

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage, a BizOps manifesto unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition. >>Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the cube. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of the biz ops manifesto. Unveil. Something has been in the works for a little while. Today's the formal unveiling, and we're excited to have three of the core of founding members of the manifesto authors of the manifesto. If you will, uh, joining us again, we've had them all on individually. Now we're going to have a great power panel first up. We're gab Mitt, Kirsten returning he's the founder and CEO of Tasktop mic. Good to see you again. Where are you dialing in from? >>Great to see you again, Jeff I'm dialing from Vancouver, >>We're Canada, Vancouver, Canada. One of my favorite cities in the whole wide world. Also we've got Tom Davenport come in from across the country. He's a distinguished professor and author from Babson college, Tom. Great to see you. And I think you said you're at a fun, exotic place on the East coast >>Realm of Memphis shoe sits on Cape Cod. >>Great to see you again and also joining surge Lucio. He is the VP and general manager enterprise software division at Broadcom surge. Great to see you again, where are you coming in from? >>Uh, from Boston right next to kickoff. >>Terrific. So welcome back, everybody again. Congratulations on this day. I know it's, it's been a lot of work to get here for this unveil, but let's just jump into it. The biz ops manifesto, what was the initial reason to do this? And how did you decide to do it in a kind of a coalition, a way bringing together a group of people versus just making it an internal company, uh, initiative that, you know, you can do better stuff within your own company, surge, why don't we start with you? >>Yeah, so, so I think we were at a really critical juncture, right? Many, um, large enterprises are basically struggling with their digital transformation. Um, in fact, um, many recognize that, uh, the, the business side, it collaboration has been, uh, one of the major impediments, uh, to drive that kind of transformation. And if we look at the industry today, many people are, whether we're talking about vendors or, um, you know, system integrators, consulting firms are talking about the same kind of concepts, but using very different language. And so we believe that bringing all these different players together, um, as part of the coalition and formalizing, uh, basically the core principles and values in a BizOps manifesto, we can really start to F could have a much bigger movement where we can all talk about kind of the same concepts and we can really start to provide, could have a much better support for large organizations to transform. Uh, so whether it is technology or services or, um, we're training, I think that that's really the value of bringing all of these players together, right. >>And Nick to you, why did you get involved in this, in this effort? >>So Ben close and follow the agile movement since it started two decades ago with that manifesto. >>And I think we got a lot of improvement at the team level, and I think as satisfies noted, uh, we really need to improve at the business level. Every company is trying to become a software innovator, uh, trying to make sure that they can adapt quickly and the changing market economy and what everyone's dealing with in terms of needing to deliver the customer sooner. However, agile practices have really focused on these metrics, these measures and understanding processes that help teams be productive. Those things now need to be elevated to the business as a whole. And that just hasn't happened. Uh, organizations are actually failing because they're measuring activities and how they're becoming more agile, how teams are functioning, not how much quickly they're delivering value to the customer. So we need to now move past that. And that's exactly what the that's manifested provides. Right, >>Right, right. And Tom, to you, you've been covering tech for a very long time. You've been looking at really hard challenges and a lot of work around analytics and data and data evolution. So there's a definitely a data angle here. I wonder if you could kind of share your perspective of what you got excited to, uh, to sign onto this manifesto. >>Sure. Well, I have, you know, for the past 15 or 20 years, I've been focusing on data and analytics and AI, but before that I was a process management guy and a knowledge management guy. And in general, I think, you know, we've just kind of optimized that to narrow a level, whether you're talking about agile or dev ops or ML ops, any of these kinds of ops oriented movements, we're making individual project, um, performance and productivity better, but we're not changing the business, uh, effectively enough. And that's the thing that appealed to me about the biz ops idea that we're finally creating a closer connection between what we do with technology and how it changes the business and provides value to it. >>Great. Uh, surge back to you, right? I mean, people have been talking about digital transformation for a long time and it's been, you know, kind of trucking along and then covert hit and it was instant lights, which everyone's working from home. You've got a lot more reliance on your digital tools, digital communication, uh, both within your customer base and your partner base, but also then your employees when you're, if you could share how that really pushed this all along. Right? Because now suddenly the acceleration of digital transformation is higher. Even more importantly, you got much more critical decisions to make into what you do next. So kind of your portfolio management of projects has been elevated significantly when maybe revenues are down, uh, and you really have to, uh, to prioritize and get it right. >>Yeah. Maybe I'll just start by quoting Satina Nello basically recently said that they're speeding the two years of digital preservation just last two months in any many ways. That's true. Um, but, but yet when we look at large enterprises, they're >>Still struggling with the kind of a changes in culture that they really need to drive to be able to disrupt themselves. And not surprisingly, you know, when we look at certain parts of the industry, you know, we see some things which are very disturbing, right? So about 40% of the personal loans today, or being, uh, origin data it's by fintechs, uh, of a like of Sophie or, uh, or a lending club, right? Not to a traditional brick and mortar for BEC. And so the, well, there is kind of a much more of an appetite and it's a, it's more of a survival type of driver these days. Uh, the reality is that's in order for these large enterprises to truly transform and engage with this digital transformation, they need to start to really align the business. And it, you know, in many ways, uh, make covered that agile really emerged from the core desire to truly improve software predictability between which we've really missed is all that we, we start to aligning the software predictability to business predictability and to be able to have continual sleep continuous improvement and measurement of business outcomes. So by aligning kind of these, uh, kind of inward metrics, that's, it is typically being using to business outcomes. We think we can start to really ELP different stakeholders within the organization to collaborate. So I think there is more than ever. There's an imperative to act now. Um, and, and resolves, I think is kind of the right approach to drive that transformation. Right. >>I want to follow up on the culture comment, uh, with Utah, because you've talked before about kind of process flow and process flow throughout a whore and an organization. And, you know, we talk about people process and tech all the time. And I think the tech is the easy part compared to actually changing the people the way they think. And then the actual processes that they put in place. It's a much more difficult issue than just the tech issue to get this digital transformation in your organization. >>Yeah. You know, I've always found that the soft stuff about, you know, the culture of the behavior, the values is the hard stuff to change and more and more, we, we realized that to be successful with any kind of digital transformation you have to change people's behaviors and attitudes. Um, we haven't made as much progress in that area as we might have. I mean, I've done some surveys suggesting that, um, most organizations still don't have data-driven cultures. And in many cases there is a lower percentage of companies that say they have that then, um, did a few years ago. So we're kind of moving in the wrong direction, which means I think that we have to start explicitly addressing that, um, cultural, behavioral dimension and not just assuming that it will happen if we, if we build a system, >>If we build it, they won't necessarily come. Right. >>Right. So I want to go to, to you Nick cause you know, we're talking about workflows and flow, um, and, and you've written about flow both in terms of, um, you know, moving things along a process and trying to find bottlenecks, identify bottlenecks, which is now even more important again, when these decisions are much more critical. Cause you have a lot less, uh, wiggle room in tough times, but you also talked about flow from the culture side and the people side. So I wonder if you can just share your thoughts on, you know, using flow as a way to think about things, to get the answers better. >>Yeah, absolutely. And I'll refer back to what Tom has said. If you're optimized, you need to optimize your system. You need to optimize how you innovate and how you deliver value to the business and the customer. Now, what we've noticed in the data, since that we've learned from customers, value streams, enterprise organizations, value streams, is that when it's taking six months at the end to deliver that value with the flow is that slow. You've got a bunch of unhappy developers, unhappy customers when you're innovating house. So high performing organizations we can measure at antenna flow time and dates. All of a sudden that feedback loop, the satisfaction, your developers measurably, it goes up. So not only do you have people context, switching glass, you're delivering so much more value to customers at a lower cost because you've optimized for flow rather than optimizing for these, these other approximate tricks that we use, which is how efficient is my adult team. How quickly can we deploy software? Those are important, but they do not provide the value of agility of fast learning of adaptability to the business. And that's exactly what the biz ops manifesto pushes your organization to do. You need to put in place this new operating model that's based on flow on the delivery of business value and on bringing value to market much more quickly than you were before. Right. >>I love that. And I'm gonna back to you Tom, on that to follow up. Cause I think, I don't think people think enough about how they prioritize what they're optimizing for, because you know, if you're optimizing for a versus B, you know, you can have a very different product that, that you kick out. And, you know, my favorite example is with Clayton Christianson and innovator's dilemma talking about the three inch hard drive, if you optimize it for power, you know, is one thing, if you optimize it for vibration is another thing and sure enough, you know, they missed it on the poem because it was the, it was the game console, which, which drove that whole business. So when you're talking to customers and we think we hear it with cloud all the time, people optimizing for a cost efficiency, instead of thinking about it as an innovation tool, how do you help them kind of rethink and really, you know, force them to, to look at the, at the prioritization and make sure they're prioritizing on the right thing is make just that, what are you optimizing for? >>Oh yeah. Um, you have one of the most important aspects of any decision or attempt to resolve a problem in an organization is the framing process. And, um, you know, it's, it's a difficult aspect to have the decision to confirm it correctly in the first place. Um, there, it's not a technology issue. In many cases, it's largely a human issue, but if you frame >>That decision or that problem incorrectly to narrowly say, or you frame it as an either or situation where you could actually have some of both, um, it, it's very difficult for the, um, process to work out correctly. So in many cases, I think we need to think more at the beginning about how we bring this issue or this decision in the best way possible before we charge off and build a system to support it. You know, um, it's worth that extra time to think, think carefully about how the decision has been structured. Right, >>Sir, I want to go back to you and talk about the human factors because as we just discussed, you can put it in great technology, but if the culture doesn't adopt it and people don't feel good about it, you know, it's not going to be successful and that's going to reflect poorly on the technology, even if that had nothing to do with it. And you know, when you look at the, the, the, the core values, uh, of the Bezos manifesto, you know, a big one is trust and collaboration, you know, learn, respond, and pivot. Wonder if you can share your thoughts on, on trying to get that cultural shift, uh, so that you can have success with the people, or excuse me, with the technology in the process and helping customers, you know, take this more trustworthy and kind of proactive, uh, position. >>So I think, I think at the ground level, it truly starts with the realization that we're all different. We come from different backgrounds. Uh, oftentimes we tend to blame the data. It's not uncommon my experiments that we spend the first 30 minutes of any kind of one hour conversation to debate the validity of the data. Um, and so, um, one of the first kind of, uh, probably manifestations that we've had or revelations as we start to engage with our customers is spoke just exposing, uh, high-fidelity data sets to different stakeholders from their different lens. We start to enable these different stakeholders to not debate the data. That's really collaborate to find a solution. So in many ways, when, when, when we think about kind of the types of changes we're trying to, to truly affect around data driven decision making, he told about bringing the data in context and the context that is relevant and understandable for, for different stakeholders, whether we're talking about an operator or develop for a business analyst. >>So that's, that's the first thing. The second layer I think, is really to provide context to what people are doing in their specific silo. And so I think one of the best examples I have is if you start to be able to align business KPI, whether you are counting, you know, sales per hour, or the engagements of your users on your mobile applications, whatever it is, you can start to connect that PKI to business KPI, to the KPIs that developers might be looking at, whether it is all the number of defects or velocity or whatever over your metrics that you're used to, to actually track you start to be able to actually contextualize in what we are, the effecting, basically a metric of that that is really relevant. And then what we see is that this is a much more systematic way to approach the transformation than say, you know, some organizations kind of creating some of these new products or services or initiatives, um, to, to drive engagements, right? >>So if you look at zoom, for instance, zoom giving away a it service to, uh, to education, he's all about, I mean, there's obviously a marketing aspect in there, but it's, it's fundamentally about trying to drive also the engagement of their own teams. And because now they're doing something for good and many organizations are trying to do that, but you only can do this kind of things in the limited way. And so you really want to start to rethink how you connect to, everybody's kind of a business objective fruit data, and now you start to get people to stare at the same data from their own lens and collaborate on all the data. Right, >>Right. That's a good, uh, Tom, I want to go back to you. You've been studying it for a long time, writing lots of books and getting into it. Um, why now, you know, what, why, why now are we finally aligning business objectives with, with it objectives? You know, why didn't this happen before? And, you know, what are the factors that are making now the time for this, this, this move with the, uh, with the biz ops? >>Well, and much of a past, it was sort of a back office related activity. And, you know, it was important for, um, uh, producing your paychecks and, uh, capturing the customer orders, but the business wasn't built around it now, every organization needs to be a software business, a data business, a digital business, the auntie has been raised considerably. And if you aren't making that connection between your business objectives and the technology that supports it, you run a pretty big risk of, you know, going out of business or losing out to competitors. Totally. So, um, and even if you're in, uh, an industry that hasn't historically been terribly, um, technology oriented customer expectations flow from, uh, you know, the digital native, um, companies that they work with to basically every industry. So you're compared against the best in the world. So we don't really have the luxury anymore of screwing up our it projects or building things that don't really work for the business. Um, it's mission critical that we do that well. Um, almost every time, I just want to fall by that, Tom, >>In terms of the, you've talked extensively about kind of these evolutions of data and analytics from artismal stage to the big data stage, the data economy stage, the AI driven stage and what I find diff interesting that all those stages, you always put a start date, you never put an end date. Um, so you know, is the, is the big data I'm just going to use that generically a moment in time finally here where we're, you know, off mahogany row with the data scientists, but actually can start to see the promise of delivering the right insight to the right person at the right time to make that decision. >>Well, I think it is true that in general, these previous stages never seemed to go away. The, um, the artisinal stuff is still being done, but we would like for less and less of it to be artisinal, we can't really afford for everything to be artisinal anymore. It's too labor and, and time consuming to do things that way. So we shift more and more of it to be done through automation and B to be done with a higher level of productivity. And, um, you know, at some point maybe we reached the stage where we don't do anything artisanally anymore. I'm not sure we're there yet, but we are, we are making progress. Right. >>Right. And Mick, back to you in terms of looking at agile, cause you're, you're such a student of agile. When, when you look at the opportunity with biz ops and taking the lessons from agile, you know, what's been the inhibitor to stop this in the past. And what are you so excited about? You know, taking this approach will enable. >>Yeah. I think both search and Tom hit on this is that in agile what's happened is that we've been measuring tiny subsets of the value stream, right? We need to elevate the data's there. Developers are working on these tools that delivering features that the foundations for for great culture are there. I spent two decades as a developer. And when I was really happy is when I was able to deliver value to customers, the quicker I was able to do that the fewer impediments are in my way, that quicker was deployed and running in the cloud, the happier I was, and that's exactly what's happening. If we can just get the right data, uh, elevated to the business, not just to the agile teams, but really this, these values of ours are to make sure that you've got these data driven decisions with meaningful data that's oriented around delivering value to customers. Not only these legacies that Tom touched on, which has cost center metrics. So when, from where for it being a cost center and something that provided email and then back office systems. So we need to rapidly shift to those new, meaningful metrics that are customized business centric and make sure that every development the organization is focused on those as well as the business itself, that we're measuring value. And that will help you that value flow without interruptions. >>I love that mic. Cause if you don't measure it, you can't improve on it and you gotta, but you gotta be measuring the right thing. So gentlemen, uh, thank you again for, for your time. Uh, congratulations on the, uh, on the unveil of the biz ops manifesto and bringing together this coalition, uh, of, of, uh, industry experts to get behind this. And, you know, there's probably never been a more important time than now to make sure that your prioritization is in the right spot and you're not wasting resources where you're not going to get the ROI. So, uh, congratulations again. And thank you for sharing your thoughts with us here on the cube. >>Thank you. >>Alright, so we had surge Tom and Mick I'm. Jeff, you're watching the cube. It's a biz ops manifesto unveil. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of biz ops manifesto unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition. >>Hey, welcome back. Variety. Jeff Frick here with the cube. We're in our Palo Alto studios, and we'd like to welcome you back to our continuing coverage of biz ops manifesto unveil some exciting day to really, uh, kind of bring this out into public. There's been a little bit of conversation, but today's really the official unveiling and we're excited to have our next guest is share a little bit more information on it. He's Patrick tickle. He's a chief product officer for planned view. Patrick. Great to see you. >>Yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks for the invite. So why >>The biz ops manifesto, why the biz ops coalition now when you guys have been at it, it's relatively mature marketplace businesses. Good. What was missing? Why, why this, why this coalition? >>Yeah. So, you know, again, why is, why is biz ops important and why is this something that I'm, you know, I'm so excited about, but I think companies as well, right? Well, no, in some ways or another, this is a topic that I've been talking to the market and our customers about for a long time. And it's, you know, I really applaud this whole movement. Right. And, um, it resonates with me because I think one of the fundamental flaws, frankly, of the way we have talked about technology and business literally for decades, uh, has been this idea of, uh, alignment. Those who know me, I occasionally get off on this little rant about the word alignment, right. But to me, the word alignment is, is actually indicative of the, of the, of the flaw in a lot of our organizations and biz ops is really, I think now trying to catalyze and expose that flaw. >>Right. Because, you know, I always say that, you know, you know, alignment implies silos, right. Instantaneously, as soon as you say there's alignment, there's, there's obviously somebody who's got a direction and other people that have to line up and that kind of siloed, uh, nature of organizations then frankly, the passive nature of it. Right. I think so many technology organizations are like, look, the business has the strategy you guys need to align. Right. And, and, you know, as a product leader, right. That's where I've been my whole career. Right. I can tell you that I never sit around. I almost never use the word alignment. Right. I mean, whether, you know, I never sit down and say, you know, the product management team has to get aligned with dev, right. Or the dev team has to get aligned with the delivery and ops teams. I mean, what I say is, you know, are we on strategy, right? >>Like we've, we have a strategy as a, as a full end to end value stream. Right. And that there's no silos. And I mean, look, every on any given day we got to get better. Right. But the context, the context we operate is not about alignment. Right. It's about being on strategy. And I think I've talked to customers a lot about that, but when I first read the manifesto, I was like, Oh yeah, this is exactly. This is breaking down. Maybe trying to eliminate the word alignment, you know, from a lot of our organizations, because we literally start thinking about one strategy and how we go from strategy to delivery and have it be our strategy, not someone else's that we're all aligning to. And I, and it's a great way to catalyze that conversation that I've, it's been in my mind for years, to be honest. Right. >>So, so much to unpack there. One of the things obviously, uh, stealing a lot from, from dev ops and the dev ops manifesto from 20 years ago. And, and as I look through some of the principles and I looked through some of the values, which are, you know, really nicely laid out here, you know, satisfy customer, do continuous delivery, uh, measure, output against real results. Um, the ones that, that jumps out though is really about, you know, change, change, right? Requirements should change frequently. They do change frequently, but I'm curious to get your take from a, from a software development point, it's easy to kind of understand, right. We're making this widget and our competitors, beta widget plus X, and now we need to change our plans and make sure that the plus X gets added to the plan. Maybe it wasn't in the plan, but you talked a lot about product strategy. So in this kind of continuous delivery world, how does that meld with, I'm actually trying to set a strategy, which implies the direction for a little bit further out on the horizon and to stay on that while at the same time, you're kind of doing this real time continual adjustments because you're not working off a giant PRD or MRD anymore. >>Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah. You know, one of the terms, you know, that we use internally a lot and even with my customers, our customers is we talk about this idea of rewiring, right. And I think, you know, it's kind of a, now an analogy for transformation. And I think a lot of us have to rewire the way we think about things. Right. And I think at Planview where we have a lot of customers who live in that, you know, who operationalize that traditional PPM world. Right. And are shifting to agile and transforming that rewire is super important. And, and to your point, right, it's, you've just, you've got to embrace this idea of, you know, just iterative getting better every day and iterating, iterating, iterating as opposed to building annual plans or, you know, I get customers occasionally who asked me for two or three year roadmap. >>Right. And I literally looked at them and I go, there's no, there's no scenario where I can build a two or three year roadmap. Right. You, you, you think you want that, but that's not, that's not the way we run. Right. And I will tell you the biggest thing that for us, you know, that I think is matched the planning, uh, you know, patents is a word I like to use a lot. So the thing that we've like, uh, that we've done from a planning perspective, I think is matched impedance to continuous delivery is instituting the whole program, implement, you know, the program, increment planning, capabilities, and methodologies, um, in the scaled agile world. Right. And over the last 18 months to two years, we really have now, you know, instrumented our company across three value streams. You know, we do quarterly PI program increment 10 week planning, you know, and that becomes, that becomes the Terra firma of how we plan. >>Right. And it's, what are we doing for the next 10 weeks? And we iterate within those 10 weeks, but we also know that 10 weeks from now, we're gonna, we're gonna adjust iterate again. Right. And that shifting of that planning model to, you know, to being as cross-functional is that as that big room planning kind of model is, um, and also, uh, you know, on that shorter increment, when you get those two things in place, also the impedance really starts to match up, uh, with continuous delivery and it changes, it changes the way you plan and it changes the way you work. Right? >>Yeah. Their thing. Right. So obviously a lot of these things are kind of process driven, both within the values, as well as the principles, but there's a whole lot, really about culture. And I just want to highlight a couple of the values, right? We already talked about business outcomes, um, trust and collaboration, uh, data driven decisions, and then learn, respond and pivot. Right. A lot of those are cultural as much as they are process. So again, is it the, is it the need to really kind of just put them down on paper and, you know, I can't help, but think of, you know, the hammer and up the, a, the thing in the Lutheran church with it, with their manifesto, is it just good to get it down on paper? Because when you read these things, you're like, well, of course we should trust people. And of course we need an environment of collaboration and of course we want data driven decisions, but as we all know saying it and living, it are two very, very different things. >>Yeah. Good question. I mean, I think there's a lot of ways to bring that to life you're right. And just hanging up, you know, I think we've all been through the hanging up posters around your office, which these days, right. Unless you're going to hang a poster in everybody's home office. Right. You can't even, you can't even fake it that you think that might work. Right. So, um, you know, you really, I think we've attacked that in a variety of ways. Right. And you definitely have to, you know, you've got to make the shift to a team centric culture, right. Empowered teams, you know, that's a big deal. Right. You know, a lot of, a lot of the people that, you know, we lived in a world of quote, unquote work. We lived in a deep resource management world for a long, long time, and right. >>A lot of our customers still do that, but, you know, kind of moving to that team centric world is, uh, is really important and core to the trust. Um, I think training is super important, right. I mean, we've, you know, we've internally, right. We've trained hundreds employees over the last a year and a half on the fundamentals really of safe. Right. Not necessarily, you know, we've had, we've had teams delivering in scrum and the continuous delivery for, you know, for years, but the scaling aspect of it, uh, is where we've done a lot of training investment. Um, and then, you know, I think a leadership has to be bought in. Right. You know? And so when we pie plan, you know, myself and Cameron and the other members of our leadership, you know, we're NPI planning, you know, for, for four days. Right. I mean, it's, it's, you've got to walk the walk, you know, from top to bottom and you've got to train on the context. Right. And then you, and then, and, and then once you get through a few cycles where you've done a pivot, right. Or you brought a new team in, and it just works, it becomes kind of this virtuous circle where he'll go, man, this really works so much better than what we used to do. Right. >>Right. The other really key principle to this whole thing is, is aligning, you know, the business leaders and the business prioritization, um, so that you can get to good outcomes with the development and the delivery. Right. And we know again, and kind of classic dev ops to get the dev and the production people together. So they can, you know, quickly ship code that works. Um, but adding the business person on there really puts, puts a little extra responsibility that they, they understand the value of a particular feature or particular priority. Uh, they, they can make the, the, the trade offs and that they kind of understand the effort involved too. So, you know, bringing them into this continuous again, kind of this continuous development process, um, to make sure that things are better aligned and really better prioritize. Cause ultimately, you know, we don't live in an infinite resources situation and people gotta make trade offs. They gotta make decisions as to what goes and what doesn't go in for everything that goes. Right. I always say you pick one thing. Okay. That's 99 other things that couldn't go. So it's really important to have, you know, this, you said alignment of the business priorities as well as, you know, the execution within, within the development. >>Yeah. I think that, you know, uh, you know, I think it was probably close to two years ago. Forester started talking about the age of the customer, right. That, that was like their big theme at the time. Right. And I think to me what that, the age of the customer actually translates to and Mick, Mick and I are both big fans of this whole idea of the project, the product shift, mixed book, you know, it was a great piece on a, you're talking to Mick, you know, as part of the manifesto is one of the authors as well, but this shift from project to product, right? Like the age of the customer, in my opinion, the, the, the embodiment of that is the shift to a product mentality. Right. And, and the product mentality in my opinion, is what brings the business and technology teams together, right? >>Once you, once you're focused on a customer experience, that's delivered through a product or a service that's when I that's, when I started to go with the alignment problem goes away, right. Because if you look at software companies, right, I mean, we run product management models, you know, with software development teams, customer success teams, right. That, you know, the software component of these products that people are building is obviously becoming bigger and bigger, you know, in an, in many ways, right. More and more organizations are trying to model themselves over as operationally like software companies. Right. Um, they obviously have lots of other components in their business than just software, but I think that whole model of customer experience equaling product, and then the software component of product, the product is the essence of what changes that alignment equation and brings business and teams together because all of a sudden, everyone knows what the customer's experiencing. Right. And, and that, that, that makes a lot of things very clear, very quickly. >>Right. I'm just curious how far along this was as a process before, before covert hit, right. Because serendipitous, whatever. Right. But th the sudden, you know, light switch moment, everybody had to go work from home and in March 15th compared to now, we're in October, and this is going to be going on for a while, and it is a new normal and whatever that whatever's going to look like a year from now, or two years from now is TBD, you know, had you guys already started on this journey cause again, to sit down and actually declare this coalition and declare this manifesto is a lot different than just trying to do better within your own organization. >>Yeah. So we had started, uh, you know, w we definitely had started independently, you know, some, some, you know, I think people in the community know that, uh, we, we came together with a company called lean kit a handful of years ago, and I give John Terry actually one of the founders leaned to immense credit for, you know, kind of spearheading our cultural change and not, and not because of, we were just going to be, you know, bringing agile solutions to our customers, but because, you know, he believed that it was going to be a fundamentally better way for us to work. Right. And we kind of, you know, when we started with John and built, you know, out of concentric circles of momentum and, and we've gotten to the place where now it's just part of who we are, but, but I do think that, you know, COVID has, you know, um, I think pre COVID a lot of companies, you know, would, would adopt, you know, the, you would adopt digital slash agile transformation. >>Um, traditional industries may have done it as a reaction to disruption. Right. You know, and in many cases, the disruption to these traditional industries was, I would say a product oriented company, right. That probably had a larger software component, and that disruption caused a competitive issue or a customer issue that caused companies and tried to respond by transforming. I think COVID, you know, all of a sudden flatten that out, right. We literally all got disrupted. Right. And, and so all of a sudden, every one of us is dealing with some degree of market uncertainty, customer uncertainty, uh, and also know none of us were insulated from the need to be able to pivot faster, deliver incrementally, you know, and operate in a different, completely more agile way, uh, you know, post COVID. Right. Yeah. That's great. >>So again, a very, very, very timely, you know, a little bit of serendipity, a little bit of, of planning. And, you know, as, as with all important things, there's always a little bit of luck and a lot of hard work involved. So a really interesting thank you for, for your leadership, Patrick. And, you know, it really makes a statement. I think when you have a bunch of leaderships across an industry coming together and putting their name on a piece of paper, uh, that's aligned around us some principles and some values, which again, if you read them who wouldn't want to get behind these, but if it takes, you know, something a little bit more formal, uh, to kind of move the ball down the field, and then I totally get it and a really great work. Thanks for, uh, thanks for doing it. >>Oh, absolutely. No. Like I said, the first time I read it, I was like, yeah, like you said, this is all, this all makes complete sense, but just documenting it and saying it and talking about it moves the needle. I'll tell you as a company, you gotta, we're pushing really hard on, uh, you know, on our own internal strategy on diversity inclusion. Right? And, and like, once we wrote the words down about what, you know, what we aspire to be from a diversity and inclusion perspective, it's the same thing. Everybody reads the words and goes, why wouldn't we do this? Right. But until you write it down and kind of have again, a manifesto or a Terrafirma of what you're trying to accomplish, you know, then you can rally behind it. Right. As opposed to it being something that's, everybody's got their own version of the flavor. Right. And I think it's a very analogous, you know, kind of, uh, initiative, right. And, uh, and this happening, both of those things, right. Are happening across the industry these days. Right. >>And measure it too. Right. And measure it, measure, measure, measure, get a baseline. Even if you don't like to measure, even if you don't like what the, even if you can argue against the math, behind the measurement, measure it, and at least you can measure it again and you can, and you've got some type of a comp and that is really the only way to, to move it forward. Well, Patrick really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for, uh, for taking a few minutes out of your day. >>It's great to be here. It's an awesome movement and we're glad >>That'd be part of it. All right. Thanks. And if you want to check out the biz ops, Manifesta go to biz ops, manifesto.org, read it. You might want to sign it. It's there for you. And thanks for tuning in on this segment will continuing coverage of the biz op manifesto unveil here on the cube. I'm Jeff, thanks for watching >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of biz ops manifesto unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition. >>Hey, welcome back, everybody Jeffrey here with the cube. We're coming to you from our Palo Alto studios. And welcome back to this event is the biz ops manifesto unveiling. So the biz ops manifesto and the biz ops coalition had been around for a little while, but today's the big day. That's kind of the big public unveiling or excited to have some of the foundational people that, you know, have put their, put their name on the dotted, if you will, to support this initiative and talk about why that initiative is so important. And so the next guest we're excited to have is dr. Mick Kirsten. He is the founder and CEO of Tasktop mic. Great to see you coming in from Vancouver, Canada, I think, right? Yes. Thank you. Absolutely. I hope your air is a little better out there. I know you had some of the worst air of all of us, a couple, a couple of weeks back. So hopefully things are, uh, are getting a little better and we get those fires under control. Yeah. >>Things have cleared up now. So yeah, it's good. It's good to be close to the U S and it's going to have the Arabic cleaner as well. >>Absolutely. So let's, let's jump into it. So you you've been an innovation guy forever starting way back in the day and Xerox park. I was so excited to do an event at Xerox park for the first time last year. I mean, that, that to me represents along with bell labs and, and some other, you know, kind of foundational innovation and technology centers, that's gotta be one of the greatest ones. So I just wonder if you could share some perspective of getting your start there at Xerox park, you know, some of the lessons you learned and what you've been able to kind of carry forward from those days. >>Yeah. I was fortunate to join Xerox park in the computer science lab there at a very early point in my career, and to be working on open source programming languages. So back then in the computer science lab, where some of the inventions around programming around software development teams, such as object oriented programming, and a lot of what we had around really modern programming levels constructs, those were the teams I have the fortune of working with, and really our goal was. And of course there's as, as you know, uh, there's just this DNA of innovation and excitement and innovation in the water. And really it was the model back then was all about changing the way that we work, uh, was looking at for how we could make it 10 times easier to write code. But this is back in 99. And we were looking at new ways of expressing, especially business concerns, especially ways of enabling people who are, who want to innovate for their business to express those concerns in code and make that 10 times easier than what that would take. >>So we create a new open source programming language, and we saw some benefits, but not quite quite what we expected. I then went and actually joined Charles Stephanie, that former to fucking Microsoft who was responsible for, he actually got Microsoft word as a spark and into Microsoft and into the hands of bill Gates on that company. I was behind the whole office suite and his vision. And then when I was trying to execute with, working for him was to make PowerPoint like a programming language, make everything completely visual. And I realized none of this was really working in that there was something else, fundamentally wrong programming languages, or new ways of building software. Like let's try and do with Charles around intentional programming. That was not enough. >>That was not enough. So, you know, the agile movement got started about 20 years ago, and we've seen the rise of dev ops and really this kind of embracing of, of, of sprints and, you know, getting away from MRDs and PRDs and these massive definitions of what we're going to build and long build cycles to this iterative process. And this has been going on for a little while. So what was still wrong? What was still missing? Why the BizOps coalition, why the biz ops manifesto? >>Yeah, so I basically think we nailed some of the things that the program language levels of teams can have effective languages deployed soften to the cloud easily now, right? And at the kind of process and collaboration and planning level agile two decades, decades ago was formed. We were adopting and all the, all the teams I was involved with and it's really become a self problem. So agile tools, agile teams, agile ways of planning, uh, are now very mature. And the whole challenge is when organizations try to scale that. And so what I realized is that the way that agile was scaling across teams and really scaling from the technology part of organization to the business was just completely flawed. The agile teams had one set of doing things, one set of metrics, one set of tools. And the way that the business was working was planning was investing in technology was just completely disconnected and using a whole different set of advisors. >>Interesting. Cause I think it's pretty clear from the software development teams in terms of what they're trying to deliver. Cause they've got a feature set, right. And they've got bugs and it's easy to, it's easy to see what they deliver, but it sounds like what you're really honing in on is this disconnect on the business side, in terms of, you know, is it the right investment? You know, are we getting the right business ROI on this investment? Was that the right feature? Should we be building another feature or should we building a completely different product set? So it sounds like it's really a core piece of this is to get the right measurement tools, the right measurement data sets so that you can make the right decisions in terms of what you're investing, you know, limited resources. You can't, no one has unlimited resources and ultimately have to decide what to do, which means you're also deciding what not to do. And it sounds like that's a really big piece of this, of this whole effort. >>Yeah. Jeff, that's exactly it, which is the way that the agile team measures their own way of working is very different from the way that you measure business outcomes. The business outcomes are in terms of how happy your customers are, but are you innovating fast enough to keep up with the pace of a rapidly changing economy, rapidly changing market. And those are, those are all around the customer. And so what I learned on this long journey of supporting many organizations transformations and having them try to apply those principles of agile and dev ops, that those are not enough, those measures technical practices, those measured sort of technical excellence of bringing code to the market. They don't actually measure business outcomes. And so I realized that it really was much more around having these entwined flow metrics that are customer centric and business centric and market centric where we need it to go. Right. >>So I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about your book because you're also a bestselling author, a project, a product, and, and, and you, you brought up this concept in your book called the flow framework. And it's really interesting to me cause I know, you know, flow on one hand is kind of a workflow and a process flow and, and you know, that's how things get done and, and, and embrace the flow. On the other hand, you know, everyone now in, in a little higher level existential way is trying to get into the flow right into the workflow and, you know, not be interrupted and get into a state where you're kind of at your highest productivity, you know, kind of your highest comfort, which flow are you talking about in your book or is it a little bit about, >>Well, that's a great question. It's not what I get asked very often. Just to me, it's absolutely both. So that the thing that we want to get to, we've learned how to master individual flow. That is this beautiful book by me, how he teaches me how he does a beautiful Ted talk by him as well about how we can take control of our own flow. So my question with the book with project replies, how can we bring that to entire teams and really entire organizations? How can we have everyone contributing to a customer outcome? And this is really what if you go to the biz ops manifesto, it says, I focus on outcomes on using data to drive whether we're delivering those outcomes rather than a focus on proxy metrics, such as, how quickly did we implement this feature? No, it's really how much value did the customer go to the feature and how quickly did you learn and how quickly did you use that data to drive to that next outcome? >>Really that with companies like Netflix and Amazon have mastered, how do we get that to every large organization, every it organization and make everyone be a software innovator. So it's to bring that co that concept of flow to these entwined value streams. And the fascinating thing is we've actually seen the data. We've been able to study a lot of value streams. We see when flow increases, when organizations deliver value to a customer faster, developers actually become more happy. So things like the employee net promoter scores rise, and we've got empirical data for this. So the beautiful thing to me is that we've actually been able to combine these two things and see the results in the data that you increase flow to the customer. Your developers are more happy. >>I love it, right, because we're all more, we're all happier when we're in the flow and we're all more productive when we're in the flow. So I, that is a great melding of, of two concepts, but let's jump into the, into the manifesto itself a little bit. And, you know, I love that, you know, took this approach really of having kind of four key values and then he gets 12 key principles. And I just want to read a couple of these values because when you read them, it sounds pretty brain dead. Right? Of course. Right. Of course you should focus on business outcomes. Of course you should have trust and collaboration. Of course you should have database decision making processes and not just intuition or, you know, whoever's the loudest person in the room, uh, and to learn and respond and pivot. But what's the value of actually just putting them on a piece of paper, because again, this is not this, these are all good, positive things, right? When somebody reads these to you or tells you these are sticks it on the wall, of course. But unfortunately of course isn't always enough. >>No. And I think what's happened is some of these core principles originally from the agile manifesto two decades ago, uh, the whole dev ops movement of the last decade of flow feedback and continue learning has been key. But a lot of organizations, especially the ones that are undergoing digital transformations have actually gone a very different way, right? The way that they measure value in technology and innovation is through costs for many organizations. The way that they actually are looking at that they're moving to cloud is actually as a reduction in cost. Whereas the right way of looking at moving to cloud is how much more quickly can we get to the value to the customer? How quickly can we learn from that? And how quickly can we drive the next business outcome? So really the key thing is, is to move away from those old ways of doing things, a funny projects and cost centers, uh, to actually funding and investing in outcomes and measuring outcomes through these flow metrics, which in the end are your fast feedback and how quickly you're innovating for your customer. >>So these things do seem, you know, very obvious when you look at them. But the key thing is what you need to stop doing to focus on these. You need to actually have accurate realtime data of how much value your phone to the customer every week, every month, every quarter. And if you don't have that, your decisions are not driven on data. If you don't know what your boggling like is, and this is something that in decades of manufacturing, a car manufacturers, other manufacturers, master, they always know where the bottom back in their production processes. You ask a random CIO when a global 500 company where their bottleneck is, and you won't get a clear answer because there's not that level of understanding. So let's, you actually follow these principles. You need to know exactly where you fall. And I guess because that's, what's making your developers miserable and frustrated around having them context, which on thrash. So it, the approach here is important and we have to stop doing these other things, >>Right? There's so much there to unpack. I love it. You know, especially the cloud conversation, because so many people look at it wrong as, as, as a cost saving device, as opposed to an innovation driver and they get stuck, they get stuck in the literal and the, and you know, I think at the same thing, always about Moore's law, right? You know, there's a lot of interesting real tech around Moore's law and the increasing power of microprocessors, but the real power, I think in Moore's laws is the attitudinal change in terms of working in a world where you know that you've got all this power and what you build and design. I think it's funny to your, your comment on the flow and the bottleneck, right? Cause, cause we know manufacturing, as soon as you fix one bottleneck, you move to your next one, right? You always move to your next point of failure. So if you're not fixing those things, you know, you're not, you're not increasing that speed down the line, unless you can identify where that bottleneck is or no matter how many improvements you make to the rest of the process, it's still going to get hung up on that one spot. >>That's exactly it. And you also make it sound so simple, but again, if you don't have the data driven visibility of where that bottom line is, and these bottlenecks are adjusted to say defense just whack them. All right. So we need to understand is the bottleneck because our security reviews are taking too long and stopping us from getting value for the customer. If it's that automate that process. And then you move on to the next bottleneck, which might actually be that deploying yourself into the cloud. It's taking too long. But if you don't take that approach of going flow first, rather than again, that sort of cost reduction. First, you have to think of the approach of customer centricity and you only focused on optimizing costs. Your costs will increase and your flow will slow down. And this is just one of these fascinating things. >>Whereas if you focus on getting closer to the customer and reducing your cycles out on getting value, your flow time from six months to two weeks or two, one week or two event, as we see with the tech giants, you actually can both lower your costs and get much more value for us to get that learning loop going. So I think I've, I've seen all these cloud deployments and one of the things happened that delivered almost no value because there was such big bottlenecks upfront in the process and actually the hosting and the AP testing was not even possible with all of those inefficiencies. So that's why going float us rather than costs when we started our project versus silky. >>I love that. And, and, and, and it, it begs repeating to that right within the subscription economy, you know, you're on the hook to deliver value every single month because they're paying you every single month. So if you're not on top of how you're delivering value, you're going to get sideways because it's not like they pay a big down payment and a small maintenance fee every month. But once you're in a subscription relationship, you know, you have to constantly be delivering value and upgrading that value because you're constantly taking money from the customer. So it's such a different kind of relationship than kind of the classic, you know, big bang with a maintenance agreement on the back end really important. Yeah. >>And I think in terms of industry shifts that that's, it that's, what's catalyzed. This industry shift is in this SAS and subscription economy. If you're not delivering more and more value to your customers, someone else's, and they're winning the business, not you. So, one way we know is to delight our customers with great user experience as well. That really is based on how many features you delivered or how much, how much, how many quality improvements or scalar performance improvements we delivered. So the problem is, and this is what the business manifesto, as well as the flow frame of touch on is if you can't measure how much value you deliver to a customer, what are you measuring? You just backed again, measuring costs, and that's not a measure of value. So we have to shift quickly away from measuring costs to measuring value, to survive. And in the subscription economy, >>We could go for days and days and days. I want to shift gears a little bit into data and, and a data driven decision making a data driven organization cause right day has been talked about for a long time, the huge big data meme with, with Hadoop over, over several years and, and data warehouses and data lakes and data oceans and data swamps. And you can go on and on and on. It's not that easy to do, right? And at the same time, the proliferation of data is growing exponentially. We're just around the corner from, from IOT and five G. So now the accumulation of data at machine scale, again, is this gonna overwhelm? And one of the really interesting principles, uh, that I wanted to call out and get your take right, is today's organizations generate more data than humans can process. So informed decisions must be augmented by machine learning and artificial intelligence. I wonder if you can, again, you've got some great historical perspective, um, reflect on how hard it is to get the right data, to get the data in the right context, and then to deliver it to the decision makers and then trust the decision makers to actually make the data and move that down. You know, it's kind of this democratization process into more and more people and more and more frontline jobs making more and more of these little decisions every day. >>Yeah. I definitely think the front parts of what you said are where the promises of big data have completely fallen on their face into the swamps as, as you mentioned, because if you don't have the data in the right format, you've cannot connect, collected that the right way you want it, that way, the right way you can't use human or machine learning on it effectively. And there've been the number of data where, how has this in a typical enterprise organization and the sheer investment is tremendous, but the amount of intelligence being extracted from those is, is, is a very big problem. So the key thing that I've noticed is that if you can model your value streams, so you actually understand how you're innovating, how you're measuring the delivery of value and how long that takes, what is your time to value through these metrics like full time? >>You can actually use both the intelligence that you've got around the table and push that down as well, as far as getting to the organization, but you can actually start using that those models to understand and find patterns and detect bottlenecks that might be surprising, right? Well, you can detect interesting bottlenecks when you shift to work from home. We detected all sorts of interesting bottlenecks in our own organization that were not intuitive to me that have to do with, you know, more senior people being overloaded and creating bottlenecks where they didn't exist. Whereas we thought we were actually an organization that was very good at working from home because of our open source roots. So the data is highly complex. Software value streams are extremely complicated. And the only way to really get the proper analysts and data is to model it properly and then to leverage these machine learning and AI techniques that we have. But that front part of what you said is where organizations are just extremely immature in what I've seen, where they've got data from all their tools, but not modeled in the right way. Right, right. >>Right. Well, all right. So before I let you go, you know, let's say you get a business leader. He, he buys in, he reads the manifesto, he signs on the dotted line and he says, Mick, how do I get started? I want to be more aligned with the, with the development teams. I know I'm in a very competitive space. We need to be putting out new software features and engage with our customers. I want to be more data-driven how do I get started? Well, you know, what's the biggest inhibitor for most people to get started and get some early wins, which we know is always the key to success in any kind of a new initiative. >>Right? So I think you can reach out to us through the website, uh, for the manifesto. But the key thing is just, it's definitely set up it's to get started and to get the key wins. So take a product value stream. That's mission critical if it'd be on your mobile and web experiences or part of your cloud modernization platform where your analytics pipeline, but take that and actually apply these principles to it and measure the end to end flow of value. Make sure you have a value metric that everyone is on the same page on, but the people on the development teams that people in leadership all the way up to the CEO, and one of the, where I encourage you to start is actually that end to end flow time, right? That is the number one metric. That is how you measure it, whether you're getting the benefit of your cloud modernization, that is the one metric that when the people I respect tremendously put into his cloud for CEOs, the metric, the one, the one way to measure innovation. So basically take these principles, deploy them on one product value stream measure, Antonin flow time, uh, and then you'll actually be well on your path to transforming and to applying the concepts of agile and dev ops all the way to, to the, to the way >>You're offering model. >>Well, Mick really great tips, really fun to catch up. I look forward to a time when we can actually sit across the table and, and get into this. Cause I just, I just love the perspective and, you know, you're very fortunate to have that foundational, that foundational base coming from Xerox park and they get, you know, it's, it's a very magical place with a magical history. So to, to incorporate that into, continue to spread that well, uh, you know, good for you through the book and through your company. So thanks for sharing your insight with us today. >>Thanks so much for having me, Jeff. Absolutely. >>All right. And go to the biz ops manifesto.org, read it, check it out. If you want to sign it, sign it. They'd love to have you do it. Stay with us for continuing coverage of the unveiling of the business manifesto on the cube. I'm Jeff. Rick. Thanks for watching. See you next time >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage, a biz ops manifesto unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition. >>Hey, welcome back. You're ready. Jeff Frick here with the cube for our ongoing coverage of the big unveil. It's the biz ops manifesto manifesto unveil. And we're going to start that again from the top three And a Festo >>Five, four, three, two. >>Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the cube come to you from our Palo Alto studios today for a big, big reveal. We're excited to be here. It's the biz ops manifesto unveiling a thing's been in the works for a while and we're excited to have our next guest. One of the, really the powers behind this whole effort. And he's joining us from Boston it's surge, Lucio, the vice president, and general manager enterprise software division at Broadcom surge. Great to see you. >>Hi, good to see you, Jeff. Glad to be here. >>Absolutely. So you've been in this business for a very long time. You've seen a lot of changes in technology. What is the biz ops manifesto? What is this coalition all about? Why do we need this today and in 2020? >>Yeah. So, so I've been in this business for close to 25 years, right? So about 20 years ago, the agile manifesto was created. And the goal of the agile manifesto was really to address the uncertainty around software development and the inability to predict the efforts to build software. And, uh, if you, if you roll that kind of 20 years later, and if you look at the current state of the industry of the product, the project management Institute, estimates that we're wasting about a million dollars, every 20 seconds in digital transformation initiatives that do not deliver on business results. In fact, we were recently served a third of the, a, a number of executives in partnership with Harvard >>Business review and 77% of those executives think that one of the key challenges that they have is really the collaboration between business and it, and that that's been kind of a case for, uh, almost 20 years now. Um, so the, the, the key challenge that we're faced with is really that we need a new approach. And many of the players in the industry, including ourselves have been using different terms, right? Some are being, are talking about value stream management. Some are talking about software delivery management. If you look at the site, reliability engineering movement, in many ways, it embodies a lot of these kind of concepts and principles. So we believed that it became really imperative for us to crystallize around, could have one concept. And so in many ways, the, a, the BizOps concept and the BizOps manifesto are bringing together a number of ideas, which has been emerging in the last five years or so, and, and defining the key values and principles to finally help these organizations truly transform and become digital businesses. And so the hope is that by joining our forces and defining public key principles and values, we can help the industry, uh, not just, uh, by, you know, providing them with support, but also tools and consulting that is required for them to truly achieve the kind of transformation that everybody's taking. >>Right. Right. So COVID now we're six months into it, approximately seven months into it. Um, a lot of pain, a lot of bad stuff still happening. We've got a ways to go, but one of the things that on the positive side, right, and you've seen all the memes and social media is, is a driver of digital transformation and a driver of change. Cause we had this light switch moment in the middle of March, and there was no more planning. There was no more conversation. You've suddenly got remote workforces, everybody's working from home and you got to go, right. So the reliance on these tools increases dramatically, but I'm curious, you know, kind of short of, of the beginnings of this effort in short of kind of COVID, which, you know, came along unexpectedly. I mean, what were those inhibitors because we've been making software for a very long time, right? The software development community has, has adopted kind of rapid change and, and iterative, uh, delivery and, and sprints, what was holding back the connection with the business side to make sure that those investments were properly aligned with outcomes. >>Well, so, so you have to understand that it is, is kind of a its own silos. And traditionally it has been treated as a cost center within large organizations and not as a value center. And so as a result, kind of a, the traditional dynamic between it and the business is basically one of a kind of supplier up to kind of a business. Um, and you know, if you go back to, uh, I think you'll unmask a few years ago, um, basically at this concept of the machines to build the machines and you went as far as saying that, uh, the, the machines or the production line is actually the product. So, uh, meaning that the core of the innovation is really about, uh, building, could it be engine to deliver on the value? And so in many ways, you know, we, we have missed on this shift from, um, kind of it becoming this kind of value center within the enterprises and end. >>He talks about culture. Now, culture is a, is a sum total of behaviors. And the reality is that if you look at it, especially in the last decade, uh, we've agile with dev ops with, um, I bring infrastructures, uh, it's, it's way more volatile today than it was 10 years ago. And so the, when you start to look at the velocity of the data, the volume of data, the variety of data to analyze the system, um, it's, it's very challenging for it to actually even understand and optimize its own processes, let alone, um, to actually include business as sort of an integral part of kind of a delivery chain. And so it's both kind of a combination of, of culture, um, which is required, uh, as well as tools, right? To be able to start to bring together all these data together, and then given the volume of variety of philosophy of the data. Uh, we have to apply some core technologies, which have only really, truly emerged in the last five to 10 years around machine learning and analytics. And so it's really kind of a combination of those freaks, which are coming together today, truly out organizations kind of get to the next level. Right, >>Right. So let's talk about the manifesto. Let's talk about, uh, the coalition, uh, the BizOps coalition. I just liked that you put down these really simple, you know, kind of straightforward core values. You guys have four core values that you're highlighting, you know, business outcomes, over individual projects and outputs, trust, and collaboration, oversight, load teams, and organizations, data driven decisions, what you just talked about, uh, you know, over opinions and judgment and learned, respond and pivot. I mean, surgery sounds like pretty basic stuff, right? I mean, aren't, isn't everyone working to these values already. And I think he touched on it on culture, right? Trust and collaboration, data driven decisions. I mean, these are fundamental ways that people must run their business today, or the person that's across the street, that's doing it. It's going to knock them out right off their block. >>Yeah. So that's very true. But, uh, so I'll, I'll mention an hour survey. We did, uh, I think about six months ago and it was in partnership with, uh, with, uh, an industry analyst and we serve at a, again, a number of it executives to understand only we're tracking business outcomes. I'm going to get the software executives, it executives we're tracking business outcomes. And the, there were less than 15% of these executives were actually tracking the outcomes of the software delivery. And you see that every day. Right? So in my own teams, for instance, we've been adopting a lot of these core principles in the last year or so, and we've uncovered that 16% of our resources were basically aligned around initiatives, which are not strategic for us. Um, I take another example, for instance, one of our customers in the, uh, in the airline industry and Harvard, for instance, that a number of, uh, um, that they had software issues that led to people searching for flights and not returning any kind of availability. >>And yet, um, you know, the it teams, whether it's operation software environments were completely oblivious to that because they were completely blindsided to it. And so the connectivity between kind of the inwards metrics that RT is using, whether it's database time, cycle time, or whatever metric we use in it are typically completely divorced from the business metrics. And so at its core, it's really about starting to align the business metrics with the, the, the software delivery chain, right? This, uh, the system, which is really a core differentiator for these organizations. It's about connecting those two things and starting to, um, infuse some of the agile culture and principles. Um, that's emerged from the software side into the business side. Um, of course the lean movement and other movements have started to change some of these dynamics on the business side. And so I think this, this is the moment where we are starting to see kind of the imperative to transform. Now, you know, Covina obviously has been a key driver for that. The, um, the technology is right to start to be able to weave data together and really kind of, uh, also the cultural shifts, uh, Prue agile through dev ops through, uh, the SRE movement, uh frulein um, business transformation, all these things are coming together and that are really creating kind of the conditions for the BizOps manifestor to exist, >>Uh, Clayton Christianson, great, uh, Harvard professor innovator's dilemma might steal my all time. Favorite business books, you know, talks about how difficult it is for incumbents to react to, to disruptive change, right? Because they're always working on incremental change cause that's what their customers are asking for. And there's a good ROI when you talk about, you know, companies not measuring the right thing. I mean, clearly it has some portion of their budget that has to go to keeping the lights on, right. That that's always the case, but hopefully that's an ever decreasing percentage of their total activity. So, you know, what should people be measuring? I mean, what are kind of the new metrics, um, in, in biz ops that drive people to be looking at the right things, measuring the right things and subsequently making the right decisions, investment decisions on whether they should do, you know, move project a along or project B. >>So there, there are only two things, right? So, so I think what you're talking about is portfolio management, investment management, right. And, um, which, which is a key challenge, right? Um, in my own experience, right? Uh, driving strategy or a large scale kind of software organization for years, um, it's very difficult to even get kind of a base data as to who is doing what, uh, um, I mean, some of our largest customers we're engaged with right now are simply trying to get a very simple answer, which is how many people do I have and that specific initiative at any point in time and just tracking that information is extremely difficult. So, and, and again, back to a product project management Institute, um, they're, they've estimated that on average, it organizations have anywhere between 10 to 20% of their resources focused on initiatives, which are not strategically aligned. >>So that's one dimension on portfolio management. I think the key aspect though, that we are really keen on is really around kind of the alignment of a business metrics to the it metrics. Um, so I'll use kind of two simple examples, right? And my background is around quality. And so I've always believed that fitness for purpose is really kind of a key, um, uh, philosophy if you will. And so if you start to think about quality as fitness for purpose, you start to look at it from a customer point of view, right. And fitness for purpose for core banking application or mobile application are different, right? So the definition of a business value that you're trying to achieve is different. Um, and so the, and yet, if you look at our, it, operations are operating, they were using kind of a same type of, uh, kind of inward metrics, uh, like a database of time or a cycle time, or what is my point of velocity, right? >>And, uh, and so the challenge really is this inward facing metrics that it is using, which are divorced from ultimately the outcome. And so, you know, if I'm, if I'm trying to build a poor banking application, my core metric is likely going to be uptime, right? If I'm trying to build a mobile application or maybe your social mobile app, it's probably going to be engagement. And so what you want is for everybody across it, to look at these metric, and what's hard, the metrics within the software delivery chain, which ultimately contribute to that business metric and some cases cycle time may be completely irrelevant, right? Again, my core banking app, maybe I don't care about cycle time. And so it's really about aligning those metrics and be able to start to differentiate, um, the key challenges you mentioned, uh, around the, the, um, uh, around the disruption that we see is, or the investors is the dilemma now is really around the fact that many it organizations are essentially applying the same approaches of, for innovation, right, for basically scrap work, then they would apply to kind of over more traditional projects. And so, you know, there's been a lot of talk about two-speed it, and yes, it exists, but in reality are really organizations, um, truly differentiating, um, all of the operate, their, their projects and products based on the outcomes that they're trying to achieve. And this is really where BizOps is trying to affect. >>I love that, you know, again, it doesn't seem like brain surgery, but focus on the outcomes, right. And it's horses for courses, as you said, this project, you know, what you're measuring and how you define success, isn't necessarily the same as, as on this other project. So let's talk about some of the principles we've talked about the values, but, you know, I think it's interesting that, that, that the BizOps coalition, you know, just basically took the time to write these things down and they don't seem all that, uh, super insightful, but I guess you just gotta get them down and have them on paper and have them in front of your face. But I want to talk about, you know, one of the key ones, which you just talked about, which is changing requirements, right. And working in a dynamic situation, which is really what's driven, you know, this, the software to change in software development, because, you know, if you're in a game app and your competitor comes out with a new blue sword, you've got to come out with a new blue sword. >>So whether you had that on your Kanban wall or not. So it's, it's really this embracing of the speed of change and, and, and, and making that, you know, the rule, not the exception. I think that's a phenomenal one. And the other one you talked about is data, right? And that today's organizations generate more data than humans can process. So informed decisions must be generated by machine learning and AI, and, you know, in the, the big data thing with Hadoop, you know, started years ago, but we are seeing more and more that people are finally figuring it out, that it's not just big data, and it's not even generic machine learning or artificial intelligence, but it's applying those particular data sets and that particular types of algorithms to a specific problem, to your point, to try to actually reach an objective, whether that's, you know, increasing the, your average ticket or, you know, increasing your checkout rate with, with, with shopping carts that don't get left behind and these types of things. So it's a really different way to think about the world in the good old days, probably when you got started, when we had big, giant, you know, MRDs and PRDs and sat down and coded for two years and came out with a product release and hopefully not too many patches subsequently to that. >>It's interesting. Right. Um, again, back to one of these surveys that we did with, uh, with about 600, the ITA executives, and, uh, and, and we, we purposely designed those questions to be pretty open. Um, and, and one of them was really role requirements and, uh, and it was really a wrong kind of what do you, what is the best approach? What is your preferred approach towards requirements? And if I remember correctly over 80% of the it executives set that the best approach they'll prefer to approach is for requirements to be completely defined before software development starts. Let me pause there where 20 years after the agile manifesto, right? And for 80% of these idea executives to basically claim that the best approach is for requirements to be fully baked before salt, before software development starts, basically shows that we still have a very major issue. >>And again, our hypothesis in working with many organizations is that the key challenge is really the boundary between business and it, which is still very much contract based. If you look at the business side, they basically are expecting for it deliver on time on budget, right. But what is the incentive for it to actually delivering all the business outcomes, right? How often is it measured on the business outcomes and not on an SLA or on a budget type criteria. And so that, that's really the fundamental shift that we need to, we really need to drive up as an industry. Um, and you know, we, we talk about kind of this, this imperative for organizations to operate that's one, and back to the innovator's dilemma. The key difference between these larger organization is, is really kind of a, if you look at the amount of capital investment that they can put into pretty much anything, why are they losing compared to, um, you know, startups? What, why is it that, uh, more than 40% of, uh, personal loans today or issued not by your traditional brick and mortar banks, but by, um, startups? Well, the reason, yes, it's the traditional culture of doing incremental changes and not disrupting ourselves, which Christiansen covered at length, but it's also the inability to really fundamentally change kind of a dynamic picture. We can business it and, and, and partner right. To, to deliver on a specific business outcome. Right. >>I love that. That's a great, that's a great summary. And in fact, getting ready for this interview, I saw you mentioning another thing where, you know, the, the problem with the agile development is that you're actually now getting more silos because you have all these autonomous people working, you know, kind of independently. So it's even a harder challenge for, for the business leaders to, to, to, as you said, to know, what's actually going on, but, but certainly I w I want to close, um, and talk about the coalition. Um, so clearly these are all great concepts. These are concepts you want to apply to your business every day. Why the coalition, why, you know, take these concepts out to a broader audience, including your, your competition and, and the broader industry to say, Hey, we, as a group need to put a stamp of approval on these concepts, values, these principles. >>So, first I think we, we want, um, everybody to realize that we are all talking about the same things, the same concepts. I think we were all from our own different vantage point, realizing that, um, things after change, and again, back to, you know, whether it's value stream management or site reliability engineering, or biz ops, we're all kind of using slightly different languages. Um, and so I think one of the important aspects of BizOps is for us, all of us, whether we're talking about, you know, consulting agile transformation experts, uh, whether we're talking about vendors, right, provides kind of tools and technologies, or these large enterprises to transform for all of us to basically have kind of a reference that lets us speak around kind of, um, in a much more consistent way. The second aspect is for, to me is for, um, these concepts to start to be embraced, not just by us or trying, or, you know, vendors, um, system integrators, consulting firms, educators, thought leaders, but also for some of our old customers to start to become evangelists of their own in the industry. >>So we, our, our objective with the coalition needs to be pretty, pretty broad. Um, and our hope is by, by starting to basically educate, um, our, our joint customers or partners, that we can start to really foster these behaviors and start to really change, uh, some of dynamics. So we're very pleased at if you look at, uh, some of the companies which have joined the, the, the, the manifesto. Um, so we have vendors and suggest desktop or advance, or, um, uh, PagerDuty for instance, or even planned view, uh, one of my direct competitors, um, but also thought leaders like Tom Davenport or, uh, or cap Gemini or, um, um, smaller firms like, uh, business agility, institutes, or agility elf. Um, and so our, our goal really is to start to bring together, uh, thought leaders, people who have been LP, larger organizations do digital transformation vendors, were providing the technologies that many of these organizations use to deliver on these digital preservation and for all of us to start to provide the kind of, uh, education support and tools that the industry needs. Yeah, >>That's great surge. And, uh, you know, congratulations to you and the team. I know this has been going on for a while, putting all this together, getting people to sign onto the manifesto, putting the coalition together, and finally today getting to unveil it to the world in a little bit more of a public, uh, opportunity. So again, you know, really good values, really simple principles, something that, that, uh, shouldn't have to be written down, but it's nice cause it is, and now you can print it out and stick it on your wall. So thank you for, uh, for sharing this story. And again, congrats to you and the team. Thank you. Appreciate it. My pleasure. Alrighty, surge. If you want to learn more about the biz ops, Manifesta go to biz ops manifesto.org, read it, and you can sign it and you can stay here for more coverage. I'm the cube of the biz ops manifesto unveiled. Thanks for watching. See you next time >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of this ops manifesto unveiled and brought to you by >>This obstacle volition. Hey, welcome back, everybody Jeffrey here with the cube. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of the biz ops manifesto unveiling. It's been in the works for awhile, but today's the day that it actually kind of come out to the, to the public. And we're excited to have a real industry luminary here to talk about what's going on, why this is important and share his perspective. And we're happy to have from Cape Cod, I believe is Tom Davenport. He's a distinguished author and professor at Babson college. We could go on, he's got a lot of great titles and, and really illuminary in the area of big data and analytics Thomas. Great to see you. >>Thanks Jeff. Happy to be here with you. >>Great. So let's just jump into it, you know, and getting ready for this. I came across your LinkedIn posts. I think you did earlier this summer in June and right off the bat, the first sentence just grabbed my attention. I'm always interested in new attempts to address longterm issues, uh, in how technology works within businesses, biz ops. What did you see in biz ops, uh, that, that kind of addresses one of these really big longterm problems? >>Well, yeah, but the longterm problem is that we've had a poor connection between business people and it people between business objectives and the, it solutions that address them. This has been going on, I think since the beginning of information technology and sadly it hasn't gone away. And so biz ops is a new attempt to deal with that issue with a, you know, a new framework, eventually a broad set of solutions that increase the likelihood that will actually solve a business problem with an it capability. >>Right. You know, it's interesting to compare it with like dev ops, which I think a lot of people are probably familiar with, which was, you know, built around, uh, agile software development and a theory that we want to embrace change that that changes. Okay. And we want to be able to iterate quickly and incorporate that. And that's been happening in the software world for, for 20 plus years. What's taken so long to get that to the business side, because as the pace of change has changed on the software side, you know, that's a strategic issue in terms of execution, the business side that they need now to change priorities. And, you know, there's no PRDs and MRDs and big, giant strategic plans that sit on the shelf for five years. That's just not the way business works anymore. It took a long time to get here. >>Yeah, it did. And, you know, there had been previous attempts to make a better connection between business and it, there was the so called strategic alignment framework that a couple of friends of mine from Boston university developed, I think more than 20 years ago, but you know, now we have better technology for creating that linkage. And the, you know, the idea of kind of ops oriented frameworks is pretty pervasive now. So I think it's time for another serious attempt at it. >>And do you think doing it this way, right. With the, with the BizOps coalition, you know, getting a collection of, of, of kind of likeminded individuals and companies together, and actually even having a manifesto, which we're making this declarative statement of, of principles and values, you think that's what it takes to kind of drive this kind of beyond the experiment and actually, you know, get it done and really start to see some results in, in, uh, in production in the field. >>I think certainly no one vendor organization can pull this off single handedly. It does require a number of organizations collaborating and working together. So I think our coalition is a good idea and a manifesto is just a good way to kind of lay out what you see as the key principles of the idea. And that makes it much easier for everybody to understand and act on. >>I, I think it's just, it's really interesting having, you know, having them written down on paper and having it just be so clearly articulated both in terms of the, of the values as well as, as the, uh, the principles and the values, you know, business outcomes matter trust and collaboration, data-driven decisions, which is the number three of four, and then learn, respond and pivot. It doesn't seem like those should have to be spelled out so clearly, but, but obviously it helps to have them there. You can stick them on the wall and kind of remember what your priorities are, but you're the data guy. You're the analytics guy, uh, and a big piece of this is data and analytics and moving to data driven decisions. And principle number seven says, you know, today's organizations generate more data than humans can process and informed decisions can be augmented by machine learning and artificial intelligence right up your alley. You know, you've talked a number of times on kind of the mini stages of analytics. Um, and how has that evolved over over time, you know, as you think of analytics and machine learning, driving decisions beyond supporting decisions, but actually starting to make decisions in machine time. What's that, what's that thing for you? What does that make you, you know, start to think, wow, this is this going to be pretty significant. >>Yeah. Well, you know, this has been a longterm interest of mine. Um, the last generation of AI, I was very interested in expert systems. And then, um, I think, uh, more than 10 years ago, I wrote an article about automated decision-making using what was available then, which was rule-based approaches. Um, but you know, this addresses an issue that we've always had with analytics and AI. Um, you know, we, we tended to refer to those things as providing decision support, but the problem is that if the decision maker didn't want their support, didn't want to use them in order to make a decision, they didn't provide any value. And so the nice thing about automating decisions, um, with now contemporary AI tools is that we can ensure that data and analytics get brought into the decision without any possible disconnection. Now, I think humans still have something to add here, and we often will need to examine how that decision is being made and maybe even have the ability to override it. But in general, I think at least for, you know, repetitive tactical decisions, um, involving a lot of data, we want most of those, I think to be at least, um, recommended if not totally made by an algorithm or an AI based system. And that I believe would add to, um, the quality and the precision and the accuracy of decisions and in most organizations, >>No, I think, I think you just answered my next question before I, before I asked it, you know, we had dr. Robert Gates on the former secretary of defense on a few years back, and we were talking about machines and machines making decisions. And he said at that time, you know, the only weapon systems, uh, that actually had an automated trigger on it were on the North Korea and South Korea border. Um, everything else, as you said, had to go through a sub person before the final decision was made. And my question is, you know, what are kind of the attributes of the decision that enable us to more easily automated? And then how do you see that kind of morphing over time, both as the data to support that as well as our comfort level, um, enables us to turn more and more actual decisions over to the machine? >>Well, yeah, as I suggested we need, um, data and the data that we have to kind of train our models has to be high quality and current, and we need to know the outcomes of that data. You know, um, most machine learning models, at least in business are supervised. And that means we need to have labeled outcomes in the, in the training data. But I, you know, um, the pandemic that we're living through is a good illustration of the fact that, that the data also have to be reflective of current reality. And, you know, one of the things that we're finding out quite frequently these days is that, um, the data that we have do not reflect, you know, what it's like to do business in a pandemic. Um, I wrote a little piece about this recently with Jeff cam at wake forest university, we call it data science quarantined, and we interviewed with somebody who said, you know, it's amazing what eight weeks of zeros will do to your demand forecast. We just don't really know what happens in a pandemic. Um, our models maybe have to be put on the shelf for a little while and until we can develop some new ones or we can get some other guidelines into making decisions. So I think that's one of the key things with automated decision making. We have to make sure that the data from the past and that's all we have of course, is a good guide to, you know, what's happening in the present and the future as far as we understand it. >>Yeah. I used to joke when we started this calendar year 2020, it was finally the year that we know everything with the benefit of hindsight, but I turned down 20, 20 a year. We found out we actually know nothing and everything and thought we knew, but I want to, I want to follow up on that because you know, it did suddenly change everything, right? We've got this light switch moment. Everybody's working from home now we're many, many months into it, and it's going to continue for a while. I saw your interview with Bernard Marr and you had a really interesting comment that now we have to deal with this change. We don't have a lot of data and you talked about hold fold or double down. And, and I can't think of a more, you know, kind of appropriate metaphor for driving the value of the biz ops when now your whole portfolio strategy, um, these to really be questioned and, and, you know, you have to be really, uh, well, uh, executing on what you are, holding, what you're folding and what you're doubling down with this completely new environment. >>Well, yeah, and I hope I did this in the interview. I would like to say that I came up with that term, but it actually came from a friend of mine. Who's a senior executive at Genpact. And, um, I, um, used it mostly to talk about AI and AI applications, but I think you could, you could use it much more broadly to talk about your entire sort of portfolio of digital projects. You need to think about, well, um, given some constraints on resources and a difficult economy for a while, which of our projects do we want to keep going on pretty much the way we were and which ones are not that necessary anymore? You see a lot of that in AI, because we had so many pilots, somebody told me, you know, we've got more pilots around here than O'Hare airport and, and AI. Um, and then, but the ones that involve doubled down, they're even more important to you. They are, you know, a lot of organizations have found this out, um, in the pandemic on digital projects, it's more and more important for customers to be able to interact with you, um, digitally. And so you certainly wouldn't want to cancel those projects or put them on hold. So you double down on them and get them done faster and better. Right, >>Right. Uh, another, another thing that came up in my research that, that you quoted, um, was, was from Jeff Bezos, talking about the great bulk of what we do is quietly, but meaningfully improving core operations. You know, I think that is so core to this concept of not AI and machine learning and kind of the general sense, which, which gets way too much buzz, but really applied right. Applied to a specific problem. And that's where you start to see the value. And, you know, the, the BizOps, uh, manifesto is, is, is calling it out in this particular process. But I'd love to get your perspective as you know, you speak generally about this topic all the time, but how people should really be thinking about where are the applications where I can apply this technology to get direct business value. >>Yeah, well, you know, even talking about automated decisions, um, uh, the kind of once in a lifetime decisions, uh, the ones that, um, ag Lafley, the former CEO of Procter and gamble used to call the big swing decisions. You only get a few of those. He said in your tenure as CEO, those are probably not going to be the ones that you're automating in part because, um, you don't have much data about them. You're only making them a few times and in part, because, um, they really require that big picture thinking and the ability to kind of anticipate the future, that the best human decision makers, um, have. Um, but, um, in general, I think where they, I, the projects that are working well are, you know, what I call the low hanging fruit ones, the, some people even report to it referred to it as boring AI. >>So, you know, sucking data out of a contract in order to compare it to a bill of lading for what arrived at your supply chain companies can save or make a lot of money with that kind of comparison. It's not the most exciting thing, but AI, as you suggested is really good at those narrow kinds of tasks. It's not so good at the, at the really big moonshots, like curing cancer or, you know, figuring out well what's the best stock or bond under all or even autonomous vehicles. Um, we, we made some great progress in that area, but everybody seems to agree that they're not going to be perfect for quite a while, and we really don't want to be driving around on, um, and then very much unless they're, you know, good and all kinds of weather and with all kinds of pedestrian traffic and you know, that sort of thing, right? >>That's funny you bring up contract management. I had a buddy years ago, they had a startup around contract management and I've like, and this was way before we had the compute power today and cloud proliferation. I said, you know, how can you possibly build software around contract management? It's language, it's legal, ease. It's very specific. And he's like, Jeff, we just need to know where's the contract. And when does it expire? And who's the signatory. And he built a business on those, you know, very simple little facts that weren't being covered because their contracts are in people's drawers and files and homes. And Lord only knows. So it's really interesting, as you said, these kind of low hanging fruit opportunities where you can extract a lot of business value without trying to, you know, boil the ocean. >>Yeah. I mean, if you're Amazon, um, uh, Jeff Bezos thinks it's important to have some kind of billion dollar project. And he even says it's important to have a billion dollar failure or two every year. But I think most organizations probably are better off being a little less aggressive and, you know, sticking to, um, what AI has been doing for a long time, which is, you know, making smarter decisions based on, based on data. >>Right? So Tom, I want to shift gears one more time before, before we let you go on, on kind of a new topic for you, not really new, but you know, not, not a, the vast majority of, of your publications and that's the new way to work, you know, as, as the pandemic hit in mid March, right. And we had this light switch moment, everybody had to work from home and it was, you know, kind of crisis and get everybody set up. Well, you know, now we're five months, six months, seven months. A number of companies have said that people are not going to be going back to work for a while. And so we're going to continue on this for a while. And then even when it's not what it is now, it's not going to be what it was before. So, you know, I wonder, and I know you, you, uh, you teased, you're working on a new book, you know, some of your thoughts on, you know, kind of this new way to work and, and, and the human factors in this new, this new kind of reality that we're kind of evolving into, I guess. >>Yeah. I missed was an interest of mine. I think, um, back in the nineties, I wrote an article called, um, a coauthored, an article called two cheers for the virtual office. And, you know, it was just starting to emerge. Then some people were very excited about it. Some people were skeptical and, uh, we said two cheers rather than three cheers because clearly there's some shortcomings. And, you know, I keep seeing these pop up. It's great that we can work from our homes. It's great that we can, most of what we need to do with a digital interface, but, um, you know, things like innovation and creativity, and certainly, um, uh, a good, um, happy social life kind of requires some face to face contact every now and then. And so I, you know, I think we'll go back to an environment where there is some of that. >>Um, we'll have, um, times when people convene in one place so they can get to know each other face to face and learn from each other that way. And most of the time, I think it's a huge waste of people's time to commute into the office every day and to jump on airplanes, to, to, um, give every little, um, uh, sales call or give every little presentation. Uh, we just have to really narrow down what are the circumstances where face to face contact really matters. And when can we get by with digital? You know, I think one of the things in my current work I'm finding is that even when you have AI based decision making, you really need a good platform in which that all takes place. So in addition to these virtual platforms, we need to develop platforms that kind of structure the workflow for us and tell us what we should be doing next, then make automated decisions when necessary. And I think that ultimately is a big part of biz ops as well. It's not just the intelligence of an AI system, but it's the flow of work that kind of keeps things moving smoothly throughout your organization. >>I think such, such a huge opportunity as you just said, cause I forget the stats on how often we're interrupted with notifications between email texts, Slack, a sauna, Salesforce, the list goes on and on. So, you know, to put an AI layer between the person and all these systems that are begging for attention, you've written a book on the attention economy, which is a whole nother topic, we'll say for another day, you know, it, it really begs, it really begs for some assistance because you know, you just can't get him picked, you know, every two minutes and really get quality work done. It's just not, it's just not realistic. And you know what? I don't think that's a feature that we're looking for. >>I agree. Totally >>Tom. Well, thank you so much for your time. Really enjoyed the conversation. I got to dig into the library. It's very long. So I might start at the attention economy. I haven't read that one. And to me, I think that's the fascinating thing in which we're living. So thank you for your time and, uh, great to see you. >>My pleasure, Jeff. Great to be here. >>All right. He's Tom I'm Jeff. You are watching the continuing coverage of the biz ops manifesto and Vail. Thanks for watching the cube. We'll see you next time.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Covering the UPGRADE 2020, the NTT Research Summit. Presented by NTT research. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of UPGRADE 2020. It's the NTT Research Labs Summit, and it's all about upgrading reality. Heavy duty basic research around a bunch of very smart topics. And we're really excited to have our next guest to kind of dive in. I promise you, it'll be the deepest conversation you have today, unless you watch a few more of these segments. So our first guest we're welcoming back Kazuhiro Gomi He's the president and CEO of NTT research, Kaza great to see you. >> Good to see you. And joining him is Yoshi Yamamoto. He is a fellow for NTT Research and also the director of the Physics and Informatics Lab. Yoshi, great to meet you as well. >> Nice to meet you. >> So I was teasing the crew earlier, Yoshi, when I was doing some background work on you and I pulled up your Wikipedia page and I was like, okay guys, read this thing and tell me what a, what Yoshi does. You that have been knee deep in quantum computing and all of the supporting things around quantum heavy duty kind of next gen computing. I wonder if you can kind of share a little bit, you know, your mission running this labs and really thinking so far in advance of what we, you know, kind of experience and what we work with today and this new kind of basic research. >> NTT started the research on quantum computing back in 1986 87. So it is already more than 30 years. So, the company invested in this field. We have accumulated a lot of sort of our ideas, knowledge, technology in this field. And probably, it is the right time to establish the connection, close connection to US academia. And in this way, we will jointly sort of advance our research capabilities towards the future. The goal is still, I think, a long way to go. But by collaborating with American universities, and students we can accelerate NTT effort in this area. >> So, you've been moving, you've been working on quantum for 30 years. I had no idea that that research has been going on for such a very long time. We hear about it in the news and we hear about it a place like IBM and iSensor has a neat little demo that they have in the new sales force period. What, what is, what makes quantum so exciting and the potential to work so hard for so long? And what is it going to eventually open up for us when we get it to commercial availability? >> The honest answer to that question is we don't know yet. Still, I think after 30 years I think of hard working on quantum Physics and Computing. Still we don't know clean applications are even, I think we feel that the current, all the current efforts, are not necessarily, I think, practical from the engineering viewpoint. So, it is still a long way to go. But the reason why NTT has been continuously working on the subject is basically the very, sort of bottom or fundamental side of the present day communication and the computing technology. There is always a quantum principle and it is very important for us to understand the quantum principles and quantum limit for communication and computing first of all. And if we are lucky, maybe we can make a breakthrough for the next generation communication and computing technology based on quantum principles. >> Right. >> But the second, is really I think just a guess, and hope, researcher's hope and nothing very solid yet. >> Right? Well, Kazu I want to go, go to you cause it really highlights the difference between, you know, kind of basic hardcore fundamental research versus building new applications or building new products or building new, you know, things that are going to be, you know, commercially viable and you can build an ROI and you can figure out what the customers are going to buy. It really reflects that this is very different. This is very, very basic with very, very long lead times and very difficult execution. So when, you know, for NTT to spend that money and invest that time and people for long, long periods of time with not necessarily a clean ROI at the end, that really, it's really an interesting statement in terms of this investment and thinking about something big like upgrading reality. >> Yeah, so that's what this, yeah, exactly that you talked about what the basic research is, and from NTT perspective, yeah, we feel like we, as Dr. Yamamoto, he just mentioned that we've been investing into 30 plus years of a time in this field and, you know, and we, well, I can talk about why this is important. And some of them is that, you know, that the current computer that everybody uses, we are certainly, well, there might be some more areas of improvement, but we will someday in, I don't know, four years, five years, 10 years down the road, there might be some big roadblock in terms of more capacity, more powers and stuff. We may run into some issues. So we need to be prepared for those kinds of things. So, yes we are in a way of fortunate that we are, we have a great team to, and a special and an expertise in this field. And, you know, we have, we can spend some resource towards that. So why not? We should just do that in preparation for that big, big wall so to speak. I guess we are expecting to kind of run into, five, 10 years down the road. So let's just looking into it, invest some resources into it. So that's where we are, we're here. And again, I I'm, from my perspective, we are very fortunate that we have all the resources that we can do. >> It's great. Right, as they give it to you. Dr. Yamamoto, I wonder if you can share what it's like in terms of the industry and academic working together. You look at the presentations that are happening here at the event. All the great academic institutions are very well represented, very deep papers. You at NTT, you spend some time at Stanford, talk about how it is working between this joint development with great academic institutions, as well as the great company. >> Traditionally in the United States, there has been always two complementary opportunities for training next generation scientists and engineers. One opportunity is junior faculty position or possible position in academia, where main emphasis is education. The other opportunity is junior researcher position in industrial lab where apparently the focus emphasis is research. And eventually we need two types of intellectual leaders from two different career paths. When they sort of work together, with a strong educational background and a strong research background, maybe we can make wonderful breakthrough I think. So it is very important to sort of connect between two institutions. However, in the recent past, particularly after Better Lab disappeared, basic research activity in industrial lab decreases substantially. And we hope MTT research can contribute to the building of fundamental science in industry side. And for that purpose cross collaboration with research Universities are very important. So the first task we have been working so far, is to build up this industry academia connection. >> Huge compliment NTT to continue to fund the basic research. Cause as you said, there's a lot of companies that were in it before and are not in it any more. And when you often read the history of, of, of computing and a lot of different things, you know, it goes back to a lot of times, some basic, some basic research. And just for everyone to know what we're talking about, I want to read a couple of, of sessions that you could attend and learn within Dr. Yamamoto space. So it's Coherent nonlinear dynamics combinatorial optimization. That's just one session. I love it. Physics successfully implements Lagrange multiplier optimization. I love it. Photonics accelerators for machine learning. I mean, it's so it's so interesting to read basic research titles because, you know, it's like a micro-focus of a subset. It's not quantum computing, it's all these little smaller pieces of the quantum computing stack. And then obviously very deep and rich. Deep dives into those, those topics. And so, again, Kazu, this is the first one that's going to run after the day, the first physics lab. But then you've got the crypto cryptography and information security lab, as well as the medical and health information lab. You started with physics and informatics. Is that the, is that the history? Is that the favorite child you can lead that day off on day two of the event. >> We did throw a straw and Dr. Yamamoto won it Just kidding (all laugh) >> (indistinct), right? It's always fair. >> But certainly this quantum, Well, all the topics certainly are focuses that the basic research, that's definitely a commonality. But I think the quantum physics is in a way kind of very symbolic to kind of show that the, what the basic research is. And many people has a many ideas associated with the term basic research. But I think that the quantum physics is certainly one of the strong candidates that many people may think of. So well, and I think this is definitely a good place to start for this session, from my perspective. >> Right. >> Well, and it almost feels like that's kind of the foundational even for the other sessions, right? So you talk about medical or you talk about cryptography in information, still at the end of the day, there's going to be compute happening to drive those processes. Whether it's looking at, at, at medical slides or trying to do diagnosis, or trying to run a bunch of analysis against huge data sets, which then goes back to, you know, ultimately algorithms and ultimately compute, and this opening up of this entirely different set of, of horsepower. But Dr. Yamamoto, I'm just curious, how did you get started down this path of, of this crazy 30 year journey on quantum computing. >> The first quantum algorithm was invented by David Deutsch back in 1985. These particular algorithm turned out later the complete failure, not useful at all. And he spent seven years, actually, to fix loophole and invented the first successful algorithm that was 1992. Even though the first algorithm was a complete failure, that paper actually created a lot of excitement among the young scientists at NTT Basic Research Lab, immediately after the paper appeared. And 1987 is actually, I think, one year later. So this paper appeared. And we, sort of agreed that maybe one of the interesting future direction is quantum information processing. And that's how it started. It's it's spontaneous sort of activity, I think among young scientists of late twenties and early thirties at the time. >> And what do you think Dr. Yamamoto that people should think about? If, if, if again, if we're at a, at a cocktail party, not with not with a bunch of, of people that, that intimately know the topic, how do you explain it to them? How, how should they think about this great opportunity around quantum that's kept you engaged for decades and decades and decades. >> The quantum is everywhere. Namely, I think this world I think is fundamentally based on and created from quantum substrate. At the very bottom of our, sort of world, consist of electrons and photons and atoms and those fundamental particles sort of behave according to quantum rule. And which is a very different from classical reality, namely the world where we are living every day. The relevant question which is also interesting is how our classical world or classical reality surfaces from the general or universal quantum substrate where our intuition never works. And that sort of a fundamental question actually opens the possibility I think by utilizing quantum principle or quantum classical sort of crossover principle, we can revolutionize the current limitation in communication and computation. That's basically the start point. We start from quantum substrate. Under classical world the surface is on top of quantum substrate exceptional case. And we build the, sort of communication and computing machine in these exceptional sort of world. But equally dig into quantum substrate, new opportunities is open for us. That's somewhat the fundamental question. >> That's great. >> Well, I'm not, yeah, we can't get too deep cause you'll lose me, you'll lose me long before, before you get to the bottom of the, of the story, but, you know, I really appreciate it. And of course back to you this is your guys' first event. It's a really bold statement, right? Upgrade reality. I just wonder if, when you look at the, at the registrant's and you look at the participation and what do you kind of anticipate, how much of the anticipation is, is kind of people in the business, you know, kind of celebrating and, and kind of catching up to the latest research and how much of it is going to be really inspirational for those next, you know, early 20 somethings who are looking to grab, you know, an exciting field to hitch their wagon to, and to come away after this, to say, wow, this is something that really hooked me and I want to get down and really kind of advance this technology a little bit, further advance this research a little bit further. >> So yeah, for, from my point of view for this event, I'm expecting, there are quite wide range of people. I'm, I'm hoping that are interested in to this event. Like you mentioned that those are the, you know, the business people who wants to know what NTT does, and then what, you know, the wider spectrum of NTT does. And then, and also, especially like today's events and onwards, very specific to each topic. And we go into very deep dive. And, and so to, to this session, especially in a lot of participants from the academia's world, for each, each subject, including students, and then some other, basically students and professors and teachers and all those people as well. So, so that's are my expectations. And then from that program arrangement perspective, that's always something in my mind that how do we address those different kind of segments of the people. And we all welcoming, by the way, for those people. So to me to, so yesterday was the general sessions where I'm kind of expecting more that the business, and then perhaps some other more and more general people who're just curious what NTT is doing. And so instead of going too much details, but just to give you the ideas that the what's that our vision is and also, you know, a little bit of fla flavor is a good word or not, but give you some ideas of what we are trying to do. And then the better from here for the next three days, obviously for the academic people, and then those who are the experts in each field, probably day one is not quite deep enough. Not quite addressing what they want to know. So day two, three, four are the days that designed for that kind of requirements and expectations. >> Right? And, and are most of the presentations built on academic research, that's been submitted to journals and other formal, you know, peer review and peer publication types of activities. So this is all very formal, very professional, and very, probably accessible to people that know where to find this information. >> Mmh. >> Yeah, it's great. >> Yeah. >> Well, I, I have learned a ton about NTT and a ton about this crazy basic research that you guys are doing, and a ton about the fact that I need to go back to school if I ever want to learn any of this stuff, because it's, it's a fascinating tale and it's it's great to know as we've seen these other basic research companies, not necessarily academic but companies kind of go away. We mentioned Xerox PARC and Bell Labs that you guys have really picked up that mantle. Not necessarily picked it up, you're already doing it yourselves. but really continuing to carry that mantle so that we can make these fundamental, basic building block breakthroughs to take us to the next generation. And as you say, upgrade the future. So again, congratulations. Thanks for sharing this story and good luck with all those presentations. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. Alright, Yoshi, Kazu I'm Jeff, NTT UPGRADE 2020. We're going to upgrade the feature. Thanks for watching. See you next time. (soft music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, covering the Upgrade 2020, the NTT Research Summit presented by NTT Research. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Palo Alto studio for our ongoing coverage of the Upgrade 2020, it's the NTT Research conference. It's our first year covering the event, it's actually the first year for the event inaugural, a year for the events, we're really, really excited to get into this. It's basic research that drives a whole lot of innovation, and we're really excited to have our next guest. He is Kazuhiro Gomi, he is the President and CEO of NTT Research. Kazu, great to see you. >> Hi, good to see you. >> Yeah, so let's jump into it. So this event, like many events was originally scheduled I think for March at Berkeley, clearly COVID came along and you guys had to make some changes. I wonder if you can just share a little bit about your thinking in terms of having this event, getting this great information out, but having to do it in a digital way and kind of rethinking the conference strategy. >> Sure, yeah. So NTT Research, we started our operations about a year ago, July, 2019. and I always wanted to show the world that to give a update of what we have done in the areas of basic and fundamental research. So we plan to do that in March, as you mentioned, however, that the rest of it to some extent history, we needed to cancel the event and then decided to do this time of the year through virtual. Something we learned, however, not everything is bad, by doing this virtual we can certainly reach out to so many peoples around the globe at the same time. So we're taking, I think, trying to get the best out of it. >> Right, right, so you've got a terrific lineup. So let's jump into a little bit. So first thing just about NTT Research, we're all familiar, if you've been around for a little while about Bell Labs, we're fortunate to have Xerox PARC up the street here in Palo Alto, these are kind of famous institutions doing basic research. People probably aren't as familiar at least in the states around NTT basic research. But when you think about real bottom line basic research and how it contributes ultimately, it gets into products, and solutions, and health care, and all kinds of places. How should people think about basic research and its role in ultimately coming to market in products, and services, and all different things. But you're getting way down into the weeds into the really, really basic hardcore technology. >> Sure, yeah, so let me just from my perspective, define the basic research versus some other research and development. For us that the basic research means that we don't necessarily have any like a product roadmap or commercialization roadmap, we just want to look at the fundamental core technology of all things. And from the timescale perspective obviously, not that we're not looking at something new, thing, next year, next six months, that kind of thing. We are looking at five years or sometimes longer than that, potentially 10 years down the road. But you mentioned about the Bell Lab and Xerox PARC. Yeah, well, they used to be such organizations in the United States, however, well, arguably those days have kind of gone, but so that's what's going on in the United States. In Japan, NTT has have done quite a bit of basic research over the years. And so we wanted to, I think because that a lot of the cases that we can talk about the end of the Moore's laws and then the, we are kind of scary time for that. The energy consumptions on ITs We need to make some huge, big, fundamental change has to happen to sustain our long-term development of the ideas and basically for the sake of human beings. >> Right, right. >> So NTT sees that and also we've been doing quite a bit of basic research in Japan. So we recognize this is a time that the let's expand this activities and then by doing, as a part of doing so is open up the research lab in Silicon Valley, where certainly we can really work better, work easier to with that the global talents in this field. So that's how we started this endeavor, like I said, last year. And so far, it's a tremendous progress that we have made, so that's where we are. >> That's great, so just a little bit more specific. So you guys are broken down into three labs as I understand, you've got the Physics, the PHI, which is Physics and Informatics, the CIS lab Cryptography and Information Security, and the MEI lab Medical and Health Informatics, and the conference has really laid out along those same tracks, really day one is a whole lot of stuff, or excuse me, they do to run the Physics and Informatics day. The next day is really Cryptography and Information Security, and then the Medical and Health Informatics. So those are super interesting but very diverse kind of buckets of fundamental research. And you guys are attacking all three of those pillars. >> Yup, so day one, general session, is that we cover the whole, all the topics. And but just that whole general topics. I think some people, those who want to understand what NTT research is all about, joining day one will be a great day to be, to understand more holistic what we are doing. However, given the type of research topic that we are tackling, we need the deep dive conversations, very specific to each topic by the specialist and the experts in each field. Therefore we have a day two, three, and four for a specific topics that we're going to talk about. So that's a configuration of this conference. >> Right, right, and I love. I just have to read a few of the session breakout titles 'cause I think they're just amazing and I always love learning new vocabulary words. Coherent nonlinear dynamics and combinatorial optimization language multipliers, indistinguishability obfuscation from well-founded assumptions, fully deniable communications and computation. I mean, a brief history of the quasi-adaptive NIZKs, which I don't even know what that stands for. (Gomi laughing) Really some interesting topics. But the other thing that jumps out when you go through the sessions is the representation of universities and really the topflight university. So you've got people coming from MIT, CalTech, Stanford, Notre Dame, Michigan, the list goes on and on. Talk to us about the role of academic institutions and how NTT works in conjunction with academic institutions, and how at this basic research level kind of the commercial academic interests align and come together, and work together to really move this basic research down the road. >> Sure, so the working with academic, especially at the top-notch universities are crucial for us. Obviously, that's where the experts in each field of the basic research doing their super activities and we definitely need to get connected, and then we need to accelerate our activities and together with the entities researchers. So that has been kind of one of the number one priority for us to jumpstart and get some going. So as you mentioned, Jeff, that we have a lineup of professors and researchers from each top-notch universities joining to this event and talking at a generous, looking at different sessions. So I'm sure that those who are listening in to those sessions, you will learn well what's going on from the NTT's mind or NTT researchers mind to tackle each problem. But at the same time you will get to hear that top level researchers and professors in each field. So I believe this is going to be a kind of unique, certainly session that to understand what's it's like in a research field of quantum computing, encryptions, and then medical informatics of the world. >> Right. >> So that's, I am sure it's going to be a pretty great lineups. >> Oh, absolutely, a lot of information exchange. And I'm not going to ask you to pick your favorite child 'cause that would be unfair, but what I am going to do is I noticed too that you also write for the Forbes Technology Council members. So you're publishing on Forbes, and one of the articles that you publish relatively recently was about biological digital twins. And this is a topic that I'm really interested in. We used to do a lot of stuff with GE and there was always a lot of conversation about digital twins, for turbines, and motors, and kind of all this big, heavy industrial equipment so that you could get ahead of the curve in terms of anticipating maintenance and basically kind of run simulations of its lifetime. Need concept, now, and that's applied to people in biology, whether that's your heart or maybe it's a bigger system, your cardiovascular system, or the person as a whole. I mean, that just opens up so much interesting opportunities in terms of modeling people and being able to run simulations. If they do things different, I would presume, eat different, walk a little bit more, exercise a little bit more. And you wrote about it, I wonder if you could share kind of your excitement about the potential for digital twins in the medical space. >> Sure, so I think that the benefit is very clear for a lot of people, I would hope that the ones, basically, the computer system can simulate or emulate your own body, not just a generic human body, it's the body for Kazu Gomi at the age of whatever. (Jeff laughing) And so if you get that precise simulation of your body you can do a lot of things. Oh, you, meaning I think a medical professional can do a lot of thing. You can predict what's going to happen to my body in the next year, six months, whatever. Or if I'm feeling sick or whatever the reasons and then the doctor wants to prescribe a few different medicines, but you can really test it out a different kind of medicines, not to you, but to the twin, medical twin then obviously is safer to do some kind of specific medicines or whatever. So anyway, those are the kind of visions that we have. And I have to admit that there's a lot of things, technically we have to overcome, and it will take a lot of years to get there. But I think it's a pretty good goal to define, so we said we did it and I talked with a couple of different experts and I am definitely more convinced that this is a very nice goal to set. However, well, just talking about the goal, just talking about those kinds of futuristic thing, you may just end up with a science fiction. So we need to be more specific, so we have the very researchers are breaking down into different pieces, how to get there, again, it's going to be a pretty long journey, but we're starting from that, they're try to get the digital twin for the cardiovascular system, so basically the create your own heart. Again, the important part is that this model of my heart is very similar to your heart, Jeff, but it's not identical it is somehow different. >> Right, right. >> So we are looking on it and there are certainly some, we're not the only one thinking something like this, there are definitely like-minded researchers in the world. So we are gathered together with those folks and then come up with the exchanging the ideas and coming up with that, the plans, and ideas, that's where we are. But like you said, this is really a exciting goal and exciting project. >> Right, and I like the fact that you consistently in all the background material that I picked up preparing for this today, this focus on tech for good and tech for helping the human species do better down the road. In another topic, in other blog post, you talked about and specifically what are 15 amazing technologies contributing to the greater good and you highlighted cryptography. So there's a lot of interesting conversations around encryption and depending kind of commercialization of quantum computing and how that can break all the existing kind of encryption. And there's going to be this whole renaissance in cryptography, why did you pick that amongst the entire pallet of technologies you can pick from, what's special about cryptography for helping people in the future? >> Okay, so encryption, I think most of the people, just when you hear the study of the encryption, you may think what the goal of these researchers or researches, you may think that you want to make your encryption more robust and more difficult to break. That you can probably imagine that's the type of research that we are doing. >> Jeff: Right. >> And yes, yes, we are doing that, but that's not the only direction that we are working on. Our researchers are working on different kinds of encryptions and basically encryptions controls that you can just reveal, say part of the data being encrypted, or depending upon that kind of attribute of whoever has the key, the information being revealed are slightly different. Those kinds of encryption, well, it's kind of hard to explain verbally, but functional encryption they call is becoming a reality. And I believe those inherit data itself has that protection mechanism, and also controlling who has access to the information is one of the keys to address the current status. Current status, what I mean by that is, that they're more connected world we are going to have, and more information are created through IOT and all that kind of stuff, more sensors out there, I think. So it is great on the one side that we can do a lot of things, but at the same time there's a tons of concerns from the perspective of privacy, and securities, and stuff, and then how to make those things happen together while addressing the concern and the leverage or the benefit you can create super complex accessing systems. But those things, I hate to say that there are some inherently bringing in some vulnerabilities and break at some point, which we don't want to see. >> Right. >> So I think having those securities and privacy mechanism in that the file itself is I think that one of the key to address those issues, again, get the benefit of that they're connected in this, and then while maintaining the privacy and security for the future. >> Right. >> So and then that's, in the end will be the better for everyone and a better society. So I couldn't pick other (Gomi and Jeff laughing) technology but I felt like this is easier for me to explain to a lot of people. So that's mainly the reasons that I went back launching. >> Well, you keep publishing, so I'm sure you'll work your way through most of the technologies over a period of time, but it's really good to hear there's a lot of talk about security not enough about privacy. There's usually the regs and the compliance laws lag, what's kind of happening in the marketplace. So it's good to hear that's really a piece of the conversation because without the privacy the other stuff is not as attractive. And we're seeing all types of issues that are coming up and the regs are catching up. So privacy is a super important piece. But the other thing that is so neat is to be exposed not being an academic, not being in this basic research every day, but have the opportunity to really hear at this level of detail, the amount of work that's being done by big brain smart people to move these basic technologies along, we deal often in kind of higher level applications versus the stuff that's really going on under the cover. So really a great opportunity to learn more and hear from, and probably understand some, understand not all about some of these great, kind of baseline technologies, really good stuff. >> Yup. >> Yeah, so thank-you for inviting us for the first one. And we'll be excited to sit in on some sessions and I'm going to learn. What's that one phrase that I got to learn? The N-I-K-Z-T. NIZKs. (laughs) >> NIZKs. (laughs) >> Yeah, NIZKs, the brief history of quasi-adaptive NI. >> Oh, all right, yeah, yeah. (Gomi and Jeff laughing) >> All right, Kazuhiro, I give you the final word- >> You will find out, yeah. >> You've been working on this thing for over a year, I'm sure you're excited to finally kind of let it out to the world, I wonder if you have any final thoughts you want to share before we send people back off to their sessions. >> Well, let's see, I'm sure if you're watching this video, you are almost there for that actual summit. It's about to start and so hope you enjoy the summit and in a physical, well, I mentioned about the benefit of this virtual, we can reach out to many people, but obviously there's also a flip side of the coin as well. With a physical, we can get more spontaneous conversations and more in-depth discussion, certainly we can do it, perhaps not today. It's more difficult to do it, but yeah, I encourage you to, I think I encouraged my researchers NTT side as well to basic communicate with all of you potentially and hopefully then to have more in-depth, meaningful conversations just starting from here. So just feel comfortable, perhaps just feel comfortable to reach out to me and then all the other NTT folks. And then now, also that the researchers from other organizations, I'm sure they're looking for this type of interactions moving forward as well, yeah. >> Terrific, well, thank-you for that open invitation and you heard it everybody, reach out, and touch base, and communicate, and engage. And it's not quite the same as being physical in the halls, but that you can talk to a whole lot more people. So Kazu, again, thanks for inviting us. Congratulations on the event and really glad to be here covering it. >> Yeah, thank-you very much, Jeff, appreciate it. >> All right, thank-you. He's Kazu, I'm Jeff, we are at the Upgrade 2020, the NTT Research Summit. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering RSA Conference 2020, San Francisco. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick with theCUBE. We're at RSA 2020. It's day four, it's Thursday. This is a crazy long conference, 40,000 people. Even with the challenges presented by coronavirus, and there's a lot of weird stuff going on, the team pulled it together, they went forward. And even though there was drops out here and there, I think all in all, most people will tell you, it's been a pretty successful conference. And we're excited to be joined by really one of the top level sponsors here, that's still here and still doing good things. It's Vittorio Viare... Viarengo, sorry, the new interim CMO of McAfee. >> Yeah. >> Vittorio, I just call you Vittorio all the time. I never look past your first name. Great to see you. >> Likewise. It's always a pleasure to be here with an institution of Silicon Valley-- >> Oh thank you, thank you. So interim CMO, I always think of like interim football coaches that they get pulled in halfway through the season, so the good news is you kind of got the job and all the responsibilities. The bad news is, you still have that interim thing, but you don't care, you just go to work, right? >> Now whenever you have an interim job, you have to just do the job and then that's the best way to operate. >> Yeah, so again, I couldn't help but go back and look at that conversation that we had at Xerox Parc, which is interesting. That's pretty foundational, everything that happens in Silicon Valley, and so many discoveries up there. And you touched on some really key themes in the way you manage your teams, but I think they're really much more valuable, and worth bringing back up again. And the context was using scrum as a way to manage people, but more importantly, what you said is it forced you as a leader to set first priorities and have great communication; and to continually do that on this two week pace, to keep everybody moving down the road. I think that is so powerful and so lacking unfortunately, in a lot of organizations today. >> Yeah, look, I think that when you hire smart people, if you just make sure that they understand what their priorities are, and then remove the obstacle and get out of the way, magical things happen. And I give you example that is very close to your heart. When I took over a great team at Skyhigh, that got bought by McAfee, they had content marketing down to a science, but they were lacking videos. So I brought that in. I said, "Guys, people watch videos, "people engage with videos, "we need to start telling the story through videos." And I started pushing, pushing, pushing, and then I pulled back, and these guys took it to a whole new level. And then they're doing videos, they're very creative, they are crisp. And I'm like, "Yeah, my job is done." >> It is really wild how video has become such an important way for education. I mean it used to be... I remember the first time I ever saw an engineer use Google to answer a question on writing code. I had never seen that before. I'm not a coder. Wow, I thought it was just for finding my local store or whatever. And now to see what really... I think YouTube has pushed people to expect that the answer to any question should be in a video. >> So, yesterday literally, somebody from a company I don't even know stopped me and said, "I watch you to videos on container. "Thank you very much." I was like, "What, you?" And the genesis of that was the sales people ask me, "Hey, we're selling container security and all that," but I don't even understand what containers are. Okay, sure. So I shot a video and I'm the CMO, I was the vice president. I think you have to put your face on your content. It doesn't matter how senior you are, you're not in a corner office, you're down there with the team. So I got into the studio, based on my background at VMware, I knew virtual machine, and I said, "Okay, how do you explain this "to somebody who's not technical?" And next thing you know, it makes its way out there, not just to our sales force, but to the market at large. That's fantastic. >> Right, and let me ask you to follow up on that because it seems like the world is very divergent as to those who kind of want their face, and more their personality to be part of their business culture and their business messaging, and those that don't. And you know, as part of our process, we always are looking at people's LinkedIn, and looking at people's Twitter. I get when people don't have Twitter, but it really surprises me when professionals, senior professionals within the industry aren't on LinkedIn. And is just like, wow! That is such a different kind of world. >> LinkedIn right now is... and I'm stealing this from Gary on the Chuck, as a big believer in this. LinkedIn right now is like Facebook 10 years ago. You get amazing organic distribution, and it's a crime not to use it. And the other thing is if you don't use it, how are you going to inspire your team to do the right thing? Modern marketing is all about organic distribution with a great content. If you're not doing it yourself... I grew up in a bakery. I used to look at my mom, we have a big bakery. We had eight people working, and I said, "Ma, why are you workin' so hard? "Your first day, last hour?" And she said, "Look, you cannot ask your people, "to work harder than you do." That was an amazing lesson. So it's not just about working hard, and harder than your team, it's about are you walking the walk? Are you doing the content? Are you doing the modern marketing things that work today, if you expect your people to also do it? >> Yeah, it's just funny 'cause, when we talk to them, I'm like, "If you don't even have a LinkedIn account, "we shouldn't even be talking to you "because you just won't get what we do. "You won't see the value, you won't understand it "and if you're not engaging at least "a little bit in the world then..." And then you look at people say like Michael Dell, I'll pick on or Pat Gelsinger who use social media, and put their personalities out there. And I think it's, people want to know who these people are, they want to do business with people that they they like, right? >> Absolutely. You know what's the worst to me? I can tell when an executive as somebody else manages their account, I can tell from a mile away. That's the other thing. You have to be genuine. You have to be who you are on your social and all your communication because people resonate with that, right? >> Right. All right, so what are you doing now? You got your new title, you've got some new power, you've got a great brand, leading brand in the industry, been around for a while, what are some of your new priorities? What's some of the energy that you're bringing in and where you want to to go with this thing? >> Well, my biggest priority right now is to get the brand and our marketing to catch up with what the products and the customers are already which is, Cloud, Cloud, Cloud. So when we spun off from Intel two years ago, we had this amazing heritage in the endpoint security. And then we bought Skyhigh, and Skyhigh was transformational for us because it became the foundation for us to move to become a cloud-first organization. And is in the process of becoming a cloud-first organization, and creating a business that is growing really fast. We also brought along the endpoint, which now is all delivered from the Cloud, to the cloud-first open unified approach, which is exciting. >> And we see Edge is just an extension of endpoints, I would assume. It just changes the game. >> Yeah, so if you think about today modern work gets done with the backend in the Cloud, and accessing those backends from the device, right? >> Right. >> And so, our strategy is to secure data where modern work gets done, and it's in the device, in the Cloud, and on the edge. Because data moves in and out of the Cloud, and that's kind of the edge of the Cloud. That's what we launched this week at RSA we launched Unified Cloud Edge, which is our kind of a, Gartner call's it SaaS-y, so that we are kind of the security. We believe we have the most complete and unified security part of the SaaS-y world. >> Okay, I just laugh at Gartner and the trough of disillusion men and Jeff and I always go back to a Mars law. Mar does not get enough credit for a Mars law. We've got a lot of laws, but Mars law, we tend to overestimate in the short term, the impact of these technologies, and they completely underestimate really the long tail of this technology improvements, and we see it here. So let's shift gears a little bit. When you have your customers coming in here, and they walk into RSA for the first time, how do you tell people to navigate this crazy show and the 5,000 vendors and the more kind of solutions and spin vocabulary, then is probably save for anyone to consume over three days? >> Look, security is tough because you look around and say, "You have six, 700 vendors here." It's hard to stand out from the crowd. So what I tell our customers is use this as a way to meet with your strategic vendors in the booth upstairs. That's where you conduct business and all that. And I walk around to see from the ground up, send your more junior team out there to see what's happening because some of these smaller companies that are out here will be the big transformational companies or the future like Skyhigh was three four years ago, and now we're part of McAfee, and leading the charge there. >> Yeah, just how do you find the diamond in the rough, right? >> Yeah. >> 'Cause there's just so much. But it's still the little guys that are often on the leading edge and the bleeding edge, of the innovation so you want to know what's going on so that you're kind of walking into the back corners of the floor as well. >> That's why I am lifelong learner, so I go around to see what people do from a marketing perspective because, the last thing I want to do, I want to become obsolete. (Jeff laughs) And the way you don't become obsolete is to see what the new kids on the block do and steal their ideas, steal their tactics take them to the next level. >> Right, so I want to ask you a sensitive question about the conference itself and the coronavirus thing and we all saw what happened in Mobile World Congress. I guess it just got announced today that Facebook pulled F8, their developer conference. We're in the conference business. You go to a lot of conferences. Did you have some thought process? There were some big sponsors that pulled out of this thing. How did you guys kind of approach the situation? >> It's a tough one. >> It's a really tough one. >> It's a very tough one 'cause last thing you want to do is to put your employees and your customers at risk. But the way we looked at it was there were zero cases of coronavirus in San Francisco. And we saw what the rest of the industry was doing, and we made the call to come here, give good advice to our employees, wash their hands, and usual and this too will pass. >> Yeah, yeah. Well Vittorio, it's always great to catch up with you. >> Likewise. >> I just loved the energy, and congratulations. I know you'll do good things, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if that interim title fades away like we see with most great coaches. >> Good. >> So thanks for stopping by. >> My pleasure. >> All right, he's Vittorio, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE, we're at RSA 2020 in San Francisco. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

[Music] okay welcome back and ready Jeff from here with the cube we're at the conference board event it's called the sixth annual innovation master classes here at Xerox PARC I'm really excited to be the arc spark I've never been here I lived like a stone's throw away and as you know if you're any type of a student of history this is where so many other really the core fundamental foundational technologies were developed what a long time ago mice GUI a lot of fun stuff but that's but now we're talking about today we're talking about helping companies be better at innovation a series of fantastic presentations that were excited to have our first guest he's Vittorio via Rango and he is the VP of cloud security for McAfee just coming off your your presentation so great to see you likewise I'm excited to be here about DevOps and how that that world has really changed in the software development world to get away from waterfall you talking about kind of applying the same principles not just for software development but in marketing and your role as a marketer how did you come to that kind of conclusion that this was probably a better way to get things done yeah well I have an interesting background when I used to run engineer engineering and product management and then I'm moving to the dark side to marketing and and I used successfully use Chrome in building products and if you look at scrum and agile methodologies at the end of the day their methodology methodologies to get things done in a world that changes often and that applies to any functions and so I said why not doing in marketing and so I've been doing in marketing now for six years but you juxtapose that you know it's now December 6th I believe so everyone with the whole room gotta get a good laugh out of them is in the throes of their annual business planning coming off their QPR's as they wrapped up 2018 so you know there is kind of an annual process and there is an annual budget so how did you you know find a convenient way to marry the two things together I think that everything is frantically pretending to know what's gonna happen next year and building plans they go out 12 months that never pan out right now unless you do is something that is the same thing over and over again then you can but if you're doing innovation by definition you don't know what's gonna happen so I think a better approach is to align around the goals and then take that goes decentralize the execution of that goes to the function and then in my case in marketing I take those goals that are applicable to me and I break it down using scrum and I do cycles of two weeks I tell the people I feel the the backlog with all the top initiatives that I think we should do and then when we get into a sprint I say okay what is the most important what are the most important priorities for the next two weeks right I tell the team and then the team tells me what we need to do to achieve those goals in every two weeks I'm in front of them talking about priorities and then reviewing how we move the needles to achieve the goals right so a lot of people hit there's plenty of stuff out there for people that aren't familiar with how scrum works and how about this process so we won't get on that but what I want to talk about is some of the the secondary benefits that maybe people don't understand it there's only looking at kind of the process of these two-week sprints but you you highlight it on a whole bunch of kind of side benefits that come as a result of this process number one being you know constantly reinforcing your priorities which are the company's priorities to your team every two weeks that's a pretty amazing communication flow yeah look every when people think about agile they obsess about the stand-up meeting every day and other people that are obsessed with that they don't get a job what agile is is about constant communication about the priorities letting the team innovate and tell you what to do and then being able every two weeks to adjust to changes so instead of executing against initiatives and plans that you build a year before that may not be relevant based on the market changes you're actually dealing with the reality measuring how you're progressing against the goals and then make changes as as you go and it gives an amazing platform for even junior people in a team to step up you know sometimes in a hierarchical structure you have somebody junior really good that is boxed in in the corner with scrum I come up with the priorities if somebody just out of college says I'll take that okay go ahead do it and then if they deliver good for them good for you right another you touched on so many good topics we could go on and on and on another one you talked about is really the giving up of time you know you try to manage kind of the interruptions for the team you try to be that kind of traffic cop if you will to enable them to use I think you said the target is 75% of the time during those two weeks is actually getting work done and 25% of the time is managing the minutia that we have to manage every day I think that's a really important concept because I think a lot of times it's it's easy it's easy to do the minutia yes it's in front of your face super important role for for a manager look when was the last time you you like being interrupted right and and if you are using your intellect to design to to sell to do whatever you know activity requires using your brain context switches is really expensive and so the ideal scrum is that you plan these two weeks so you don't have to like spend a lot of time thinking about three six months out just let's think about the next two weeks and then during those two weeks you never ever ever change the priorities and so that allows engineers or professionals to stay focused on what they're trying to do and get it done right right another piece that I thought was pretty interesting is is you've got the two weeks sprints and you've got your two weeks priorities and you now have an ability to switch if you need to based on market pressures competitive pressures whatever but how do you continue to tie that back to those goals how do you how do you make sure that you don't lose sight of the fact that maybe didn't have an annual plan because we know that's gonna change but you're still making sure you're driving towards kind of the general direction of where you're trying to go so the way I do it every two weeks we look at all our top goals and we look at how closer we are to achieving those goals and of course I map those goals I split them by quarter and then by weeks so that you at all times you know if you're achieving your goals or not and because of the two weeks interval if the cattle sales in my case comes as you know they they always have big priorities that has to happen tomorrow and yesterday usually I go to them and say hey here's the list of things I'm gonna deliver my team is gonna deliver to you in an axe in average next week right and is what this emergency you're talking about more important than this in most cases the answer is No if the answer is yes then the question is can that wait a week and then you have the full attention of my entire team and so that way you keep doing what you do in the scrum principle you always ship so you always work on things you can actually ship during those two weeks and then you can take the whole team in okay let's now please the head of sales and and I can go ahead with that you know the other thing is because we look at the goals every two weeks I can also look at the other sale say oh you know you won't really want to run this program in pick your region you know South America where we have no we don't have any goals of growth in that area this year so you can also use the constant communication constant interlocking goals to say you know maybe you shouldn't do it right so last thing Victoria just to get your insight is you've been doing this for years you know what's what's the greatest benefit of managing a team this this way that most people just don't get and we talked about the frequency of communications you talked about the frequency of being able to change course you know what is it that people are still kind of doing it the old line way or missed to me scrum forces you as a leader to focus on the two most important things that I think any leader should you know take care of one Chris priorities and communication I think those are the roots of how many companies get in trouble when they don't have clear priorities and all levels and they don't communicate those priorities and there is all there they're achieving and I think scrum really forces you every two weeks to be there on the treadmill with the team and and the third thing I think is to empower the team to size and tell you what to do and how to do it and not you telling them what to do you tell them without the priorities let them tell you what is the best way to achieve the goals it's such a great such a great lesson right be a leader not it not let let your people do what you hired him to do yeah because even more and more to me if you're hiring great people if you're managing them what are you gonna do if you alright people that are better than you if you're manage them what are you gonna do you're going to by definition so let them tell you what how to do give them a direction and get out of the way alright Vittorio thanks for for taking a few minutes and really really enjoyed your talk today all right we're at the innovation masterclass at Xerox PARC you're watching the Q see you next time thanks for watching [Music]

(upbeat music) >> Hey welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCube. We're at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, one of the most historic pieces of ground really in the history of computer science. We're excited to be here for a special event. It's the Innovators Master Class put on by the Conference Board. Relatively small event, great content. We've been here all morning and we're excited to have our next guest, she's Maureen Rinkunas. She's the Innovations System Designer, Specialty Products Division for DowDuPont. Maureen, great to see you. >> It's great to be here. >> So you're, you're giving a panel in a little bit about really how do big companies work with little companies to basically be more innnovative, so what are some of the things that you're looking forward to, what are some of the lessons that you've learned, 'cause you've had a very varied experience, you've been in academia, you've been in industry, you've been kind of big company and little company. >> Yes, and I think, you know, you learn a lot from being able to look outside of your sphere. And so that's what I'm really excited about on this panel, we're going to be talking with startups and VCs and it's not surprising, people are really keeping an eye on what's happening in Silicon Valley but I think for large corporations, we have to go beyond that. We have to say, let's not just be observers, let's be active participants in the ecosystem. And so I think that by engaging with some of the startups and businesses on this panel, we're really going to get some pragmatic advice on how to do that in the best way possible. >> Yeah, you had some great statements, I've been doing some research on you, about some tricks to innovation and one of the great ones was, new hires as change agents. I wonder if you could dig into that a little bit because I think, you know, unfortunately new hires, especially at a big company, they don't have status, they don't have title, you know, they don't necessary have formal authority but there's a real opportunity for companies to take advantage of this fresh new outlook to help look at things in a slightly different way. >> Yeah, it's actually been great to be here at the conference for an event because I've talked with a lot of organizations that are bringing in this fresh view and especially in innovation centers where the proportion of people coming from outside the organization is sometimes as high as 80 percent of the team at that facility and so it's really great to have people who aren't carrying the baggage of how we always have done things. >> Right right. >> And they can push the limits a little bit which is sometimes what we need to, to really break out of our routines and I think as well, you know, bringing people in who have experience in startups, people who, perhaps, are coming from the venture world also offers that opportunity for people who have experienced working in that really fast-paced environment, they are very impatient, which is a good thing and I think really push teams to move faster. So it's great to be able to bring that, an element, into your team. >> Right. There was a great presentation earlier today about DevOps and, you know, agile software development and it's easy in software, you know, you can have a two week spread and get something out new. In the chemical world, right, there's lots of different axes of innovation but you guys, kind of by rule, have to move slower. These are much bigger investments in factory and plant, you know, there's ecological implications to all these things. So when you look at the innovation challenges and opportunities at a big company like DowDuPont, what are some of the easier paths to go down that you can, you can help to drive some of that innovative thought process and products? >> Well I think, you know, certainly we don't want to take any shortcuts with safety, and so you're absolutely right, that in some ways we can't move as quick as launching a new app to market, but we really do need to challenge ourselves to think about how we move as quickly as possible. One way to do that is to look at outside innnovations and so, I've just recently was working with a team and they had mapped out their development pipeline, they thought, oh this is 3 to 5 years in the making, and then we were able to connect them with a startup who cut about 4 years out of that and so, they are actually really excited, they're going to be partnering with that startup and moving forward with a customer in a very short timeframe. So, I think there are ways to make that window a much shorter timeline. >> Right. And then what about just the culture clash? I mean, just this example specifically, you've got people that had probably a very comfortable, maybe they thought it was aggressive, timeline that went out for 4 or 5 years, then you bring up this crazy aggressive startup who are doing things much quicker. Was it simply process? Was it a new technology innovation? Was it just a different kind of spin of the lens that they were able to reframe their problem differently? And then how do you get those two groups of people to work together effectively? >> Well you know, I think in the corporate space, there's a lot of this, well we don't care because it wasn't invented here, syndrome. We're very fortunate that at a leadership level at DuPont, there has been very much this perspective that we need to get beyond that, we need to collaborate with our customers, we need to move externally, and so, you know, that helps, having someone who champions looking outside for alternatives, but I think, too, it's helpful to have those change agents within, people who are really brave, people who aren't afraid to push back, often these are the people who are coming outside with the legacy, they're not worried about getting fired and they're pushing for what they know is right and that's moving fast and hopefully making some positive change. >> Right, and not breaking too many things, right? >> (laughs) >> We've kind of got away from the move fast and break things. So final question, you know, we're here at this Innovation Master Class, what are you looking to get out of this type of event? Have you been here before and you know, what types of things do you take away of kind of this small, intimate little affair? >> Yeah so this is my second time here and you know, after seeing what we've learned this morning and reflecting on what I learned last year, I think you always take things away that are really actionable, you know, the folks that come to these events are in the field, they are getting things done, and so you really have an opportunity to learn from people who have tested things, they've learned from those experiments, sometimes they've failed and we can learn from those failures too and so that's what I really appreciate about having this opportunity to be here. >> Well Maureen, thanks for taking a few minutes. Good luck on your panel this afternoon. I can't wait to, can't wait to watch. >> Great, thanks. >> Alright, she's Maureen, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCube. We are at the Innovation Master Class put on by the Conference Board at Xerox PARC. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From Palo Alto, California, it's theCUBE, covering the Conference Board's Sixth Annual Innovation Master Class. (fast techno music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are at the Innovation Master Collab at Xerox PARC. It's put on by the Conference Board, a relatively small event, but really, a lot of high-caliber individuals giving really great presentations. And we're excited about our next guest, he kicked the whole thing off this morning, and we could go for hours. We won't go for hours, we'll go about 10 minutes. But Peter Coffee, he's the VP of Strategic Research for Salesforce. Been there a long time, but you were a media guy before that for many, many years? So Peter, great to see you. >> It's good to be with you, thanks. >> So, you talk about so many things. So many things in your opening statement, and I have a ton of notes. But let's just jump into it, I think. One of the big things is you know, the future happens faster than we expect it. And we as humans have a really hard time with exponential growth, because it's not built that way. That's the way things move. >> So how do you as a businessperson kind of deal with that reality? Because the issue is you're never going to be ready for when they come. >> Yeah, well, it's not just humans as individuals, but the institutions and processes we've built. If you look at the process of getting a college degree, it's really seriously misaligned with the timeframe of change. By the time you're a senior, half of the subject matter in your field may be new since your freshman year, and conversely four years after you've graduated, perhaps a third of what you were taught will no longer be considered to be current information. Someone at Motorola once said, "a batch process "no matter how much you accelerate it "doesn't become a continuous flow process". You have to rethink what does a continuous flow look like, and that's useful conversation to have getting back to your actual opening question. When we're talking with customers, we say what are your unvoiced assumptions about the manner in which you have succession of technology, succession of product, and so on? Can we try to see what it would look like if that were a continuous process and not a project process? Many of our partners will tell us that their most difficult conversations with their customers are about getting away from a project mentality, a succession of Big Bang changes, into a process in which transformation is a way of life and not a bold initiative that will take a big sigh of relief and congratulate yourself on having transformed. No, dude, you've gotten your running shoes tied now you can begin to run. But now the hard part begins. >> Right, and the sun comes up tomorrow and you start to run again. You talked on big shifts count on new abundance and use horsepower. >> George Gilder's phrase, "errors are punctuated "by a dramatic change from a scarcity "to an abundance" so for example, horsepower or bandwidth or intelligence. >> So now we're coming into the era of massive big data we are asymptotically approaching free compute, free storage, and free networking. So how do you get business leaders to kind of rethink in an era where they have basically infinite resources, and it always goes back, so what would you build then? Because we're heading that way even if we're not there today. >> A Jedi mind trick that I often use with them is to say, let's not talk about the next couple of quarters, I want you to imagine the next Winter Olympics. When they light the torch four years from now I want you to try to visualize the world you're pretty sure you'll be living in four years from now and work backwards from that and say well if we all agree that within four years that's going to get done, well there's some implications about things we should be doing now and some things that we should stop doing now if we know that four years from now, the world is going to look like this. It helps free your mind from the pressures of incremental improvement and meeting next quarterly goals. And instead saying, ya know, that's not going to be a thing in four years and we should stop getting better at doing something that's simply not going to be relevant in that short of a time. >> So hard though, right? Innovators still, I mean, that's the classic conundrum especially if it's something that you have paying customers and you're driving great revenue to, it's hard to face the music that that may not be so important down the path. >> The willingness to acknowledge that someone will disrupt you, so it might as well be you, you might as well disrupt yourself, the conversation was had with IBM back in the days of the IBM PC, that they thought that that might be a quarter of a million machines they would sell, but whatever you do, don't touch the bread and butter of the 3270 terminal business, right? And they did not ultimately succeed in visualizing the impact of what they had done. Ironically, because they didn't think it was that important, they opened all the technology, and so things like Microsoft becoming what it is and the fact that the bios was open and allowed the compatibles industry like Compact to emerge was a side effect of IBM failing to realize how big of a door they were opening for the world. You can start off a spinoff operation. At Salesforce we have a product line called Essentials which is specifically tasked with create versions of Salesforce that are packaged and priced and supported in a way that's suitable to that small business. And that way you can kind of uncouple from that Clayton Christensen innovators dilemma thing by acknowledging it's a separate piece of the business, it can be measured differently, rewarded differently, and it's going to convey itself maybe even through a genuinely different brand. This is an example that was used once with Disney which when it decided it wanted to get away from family and children's entertainment, and start making movies aimed at more adult audiences, fine, they created the Touchstone brand so they could do that without getting in the way of, or maybe even polluting, a brand that they spent so much time building. So branding is important. A brand is a set of promises, and if you want to make different promises to different people, have a different brand. >> Right, so I'm shifting gears 'cause you touched on so many great things. A really popular thing that's going on now is the conversion of products to services. And repackaging your product as a service. And you talked about the don't taze me bro story which has so many elements of fun and interesting but I thought the best part of it, though, was now they took it to the next step. And we're only a stones throw away from Tesla, a lot of innovation but I think one of the most kind of not reported on benefits of these connected devices and a feedback loop back to the manufacturer is how people are actually using these things, checking in from home, being able to do these updates. And you talk about how the TASER company now is doing all the services, it's not even a service, it's a process. I thought it's awesome. >> Taking a product and selling it at a subscription price does not turn it into a service, even though some people will say, well see now we're moving to a services model. If you're still delivering a product in a lumpy, change-it-every-couple-of-years way, you haven't really achieved that transformation. So you have to go back into more of a sense of I mean, look at the expectation people have of the apps on their smartphones, that they just get better all the time, that the update process is low-burden, low-complexity, low-risk, and you have to achieve that same fluidity of continuous improvement. So that's one of the differences. You can't just take the thing you sell, bill for it on a monthly subscription, and think that you achieved that transition. The thing that they folks who were once TASER and now are Axon, of which TASER is a sub-brand, they managed to elevate their view from the device in a police officer's hand to a process of which that device is a part. Which is the incident that begins, is concluded, results in a report, maybe results in a criminal prosecution, and they broadened the scope of the Axon services package to the point that now it is selling the proposition of increased peace officer productivity rather than merely the piece of hardware that's part of that. So being able to zoom out and really see the environment in which your product is used, and this relates to yet another idea which is that people are saying you got to think outside your box. It doesn't help if you get outside your box, but all of the people with whom you might want to collaborate are all still inside their boxes. And so you may actually have to invest in the transformation and interface development of partners or maybe even competitors, and isn't that a wild idea. Elon Musk at Tesla open sourced a lot of their technology with the specific goal of growing that whole ecosystem of charging stations and other things so Tesla could be a great success. And the comment that I once made is it doesn't help if you're a perfect drop of artisanal oil in a world of water. You have to make the world capable of interacting with you and supporting you if you really want to grow. Or else you're an oddity, you're Betamax, which might have been technically superior but by failing to really build the ecosystem around it, wound up losing big time to VHS for a while. I may have to explain to all of your viewers under the age of 30 what VHS and Betamax even mean. >> I was sellin' those, I could tell you the whole Panasonic factory optimization story, which is whole 'nother piece of that puzzle. So that's good, so I'm going to shift gears again. >> You have to look a big perspective, you have to be prepared to forget that your excellence is your product, and start thinking of that as just the kernel of what needs to be your real proposition which is the need you meet, the pain you address, the process of which you become an inseparable part instead of a substitutable chunk of hardware. >> Well and I think too it's embracing the ongoing relationship as part of the process, versus selling something to your distribution and off it goes you cash the check and you build another one. >> Well that's another aspect, we've got whole industries where there's been a waterfall model. Automobiles were a particular example. Where manufacturers wholesaled cars to distributors who gave them the small markup to dealers who owned the buyer customer. And dealers would be very hostile to manufacturers trying to get involved in that relationship. But now because of the connected vehicles the manufacturer may know things about the manner of use of the vehicle and about the preliminary engagement of the prospective buyer with the manufacturers website. And so improving that relationship from a futile model, or a waterfall model, into a collaborative model is really necessary if all these great digital aspects are to have any value. >> Right, right, right. And as a distribution of information that desire to get a level of knowledge is no longer the case, there's so much more. >> Well it's scary how easy it is to do it wrong. IDC just did a study about the use in retail banking of technology like apps and websites. Which that industry was congratulating itself on adopting in ways that reduce the cost of things like bank office hours. And yet J.D. Power has found that the result is that customers no longer see differentiation among banks, are less loyal, more easily seduced by $50 to open a new bank account with direct deposit. And so innovation's a vector, and if you aim it at cost reduction, you'll get one set of results. And if you aim it at customer satisfaction improvement, you'll innovate differently, and ultimately I think much more successfully. >> Right, right, so we're almost out of time here. I want to go down one more path with you which I love. You talked a lot about visualization, you brought up some old NOPs, really talked about context, right? In the right context, this particular visualization is of value. And there's a lot of conversation about visualization especially with big data. And something I've been looking for, and maybe you've got an answer is, is there a visualization of a billion data point dataset that I can actually look at the visualization and see something, and see the insight. 'Cause most of the ones we see that are examples, they're very beautiful and there's a lot of compound shapes going on, but to actually pinpoint an actionable something out of that array, often times I don't see, I wonder if you have any good examples that you've seen out there where you can actually use visualization to drive insight from a really, really big dataset. >> Well if a big data exercise produces a table of numbers, then someone's going to have to apply an awful lot of understanding to know which numbers look odd. But a billion points, to use your initial question, well what is that? That's an array that's 1,000 by 1,000 by 1,000. We look at 1,000 by 1,000 two-dimensional screens all the time, visualizing a three-dimensional 1,000 by 1,000 cube is something we could do. And if there is use of color, use of motion, superposition of one over another with highlighting of what's changed, what people need most is for their attention to be drawn to what's changing or what's out of a range. And so it's tremendously important that people who are presenting the output of a big data exercise go beyond the high-resolution snapshot, if you will, and construct at least some sense of A B. Back in the ancient days of astronomy, they had a thing called the Blink Camera which would put two pictures side-by-side and simply let you flip back-and-forth between the images, and the human eye turned out to be amazingly good. There could be thousands of stars in that picture, the one dot that's moving and represents some new object, the one dot that suddenly appears, the human brain is very good at doing that. And there's a misperception that the human eye's just a camera. The eye does a lot of pre-processing before it ever sends stuff to the brain. And understanding what human vision does, it impressed the heck out of me the first time I had a consultation on the big data program at a university where the faculty waiting to meet with me turned out to be from the schools of Computer Science, Mathematics, Business, and Visual Arts. And having people with a sense of visual understanding and human perception in the room is going to be that critical link between having data and having understanding of opportunity threat or change. And that's really where it has to go. So if you just ask yourself, how can I add an element of color, or motion, or something else that the human eye and brain have millennia of evolution to get good at detecting, do that. And you will produce something that changes behavior and doesn't just give people facts >> Right, right. Well, Peter, thank you for taking a few minutes. We could go on, and on, and on. >> Happy to do chapters two, three, and four any time you like, yeah. >> We'll do chapter two at the new tower downtown. >> Any old time, thanks so much. >> Thanks for stoppin' by. >> My pleasure. >> He's Peter, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at the Master Innovation Class at Xerox PARC put on by the Conference Board. Thanks for watching. (fast techno music)

>> From Palo Alto, California, it's theCUBE, covering the conference boards sixth annual Innovation Master Class. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff with theCUBE, we're at the Innovation Master Class at Xerox Parc in Palo Alto. It's put on by the conference boards, a relatively small event. But a bunch of really high powered people, terrific presentations. If you ever get a chance to go, I suggest you check it out. We're happy to be here for our first time, we're here and one of the big themes on innovation is how do you innovate well as a big company. It's not easy to do, there's a lot of barriers in the way. We're excited to have an expert in the field, he's Alex Goryachev the senior director of innovation strategy and programs at Sisco. Great to see you. >> Thank you, I'm glad to be here. >> So you just gave a presentation on this topic so first off, give us a little overview of what your role is at Sisco and how it plays with innovation. >> So at Sisco, I'm lucky to lead two things. One is how do we work with the ecosystem, at our network of global innovation centers. And the second one is how do we capture best ideas from our employees. And most importantly, support them in making those ideas happen, turning them into products, or process improvements. >> Right, so Sisco's an interesting company, it's like intel and a lot of really dominant players in their field. Terrific market share, dominant for a long time. So it's really hard, that innovators dilemma is really written for companies like Sisco, so those innovation centers, how did those come about, how many of them are there, and what is the mission of the innovation centers? >> So the mission, if you think about innovation, it doesn't happen in San Jose or doesn't happen only in San Jose, it happens around the world. So when we think about the innovation centers, we've got around 12 of them around the globe. With a core mission of working with ecosystem players. Whenever that's start ups, customers, partners, academia, governments, and coming up with solutions that then we can deploy in a local market and potentially scale around the globe. >> So it's interesting, you lead with really working with the ecosystem partners, so their mission is more leveraged that greater ecosystem versus we need to come up with the great ideas inside of our four walls. >> Absolutely, because if you think about it, we have a lot of great ideas inside the four walls, but when we look at the specific problems that are you know, problems for Japan, may not necessarily be the same that they are for Australia. And what we really want to do, is be able to work on an issue of national relevancy and focus on the economic strengths and problems that are in the particular area, so that we can make a meaningful impact. >> Right, so one of the topics in one of the earlier presentations here, was how do big companies manage innovation centers, and we're here at Xerox Parc, this is probably one of the most historic innovation centers ever in computers industry. So how do you manage this kind of dichotomy between having them kind of set aside, the people at the innovation center in their own separate little location and still be innovative and kind of unbridled from some of the corporate tail winds I guess, would be head winds I should say. But also make them part of the bigger Sisco environment and still make em feel like they're included and that these things are important, not just to what they're working on and even their ecosystem, but are important to the whole Sisco. >> It's a great question, and I think that's where the corporate government comes in really well. Because at the end of the day with the innovation centers we don't want to boil the ocean right? We want to make sure that everybody wins. So when we think of creating products and solutions, we want to work with customers that have real problems and with start ups that can potentially close that gap and help us co develop a solution with them. So we're very focused on ar engineering priorities and be our specific country priorities and particular opportunities that exist in the country. For example, we have a center in Australia, right? And if you look at the Australian economy, a lot of it is with agriculture, right? So what we have in Australia is a concertia with other industry players in the region to focus on solving some problems for the agriculture. Which utilizes the internet of thinks technology. So that's one of the ways that we're connected to companies mission which is iot, one of the corporate missions. And at the same time we're solving the local problem, working with the ecosystem and creating something that can then be scaled around the world. >> Right, so the other part of your job that you mentioned is inside the four walls and trying to help foster the innovation that does come from your own internal people that are in line jobs, more regular jobs. So what are some of the initiatives that you have in place to identify and to surface and to ultimately support and maybe those grow into new products and divisions and whatever. What are some of the secrets you can share there. >> Well I think the secret is very simple. It's everyone, at the end of the day, everything in the company comes down to talent. People generally invest in talent, not necessarily in ideas. So, one is recognizing that the innovation is a mindset, and then the second thing is really focusing on empowering every single employee to innovate. And in practical terms, that means that we have to redefine innovation. It's not only about new product development, it's not only about top line grove, right? It could be about process improvements. It could be about other things that bring value to the company. Could be about corporate social responsibility, when you go in and listen and engage with employees across the entire company, you actually have far better ideas that touch all aspects of your business, and can produce a lasting impact. Not only in products but with sound process improvement as well. >> And how do you support that? How do you give people the encouragement to say listen, we're interested in your ideas or interested in your innovations across this broad swath of opportunities, like I said from product all the way to social responsibility or cleaning out the Guadalupe river, I'm sure there's all kinds of interesting things that you can point to. How do you make sure that's communicated, that this is a priority for us, the company, that we want to support you, our employee, in some of these opportunities. >> Well first of all, we're lucky to have the sponsorship of our CO Chuck Robbins, who really put this as one of his key priorities. The second one is because innovation is about talent first and product second, we're lucky to work with our chief people officer, Francine, and she's a sponsor for this as well. So we have an incredible opportunity to go and message this as a top corporate priority to our employee's year after year. But the other thing, which is the key, is for every single function in the company, we worked with them to define innovation ambition. So that when we got to employee's and say hey help us, give us your best ideas, we can go and guide them towards some of the Sisco's key priorities. So we connect them with strategy. Obviously at the end of the day, some of them will give us whatever ideas they're passionate about. And there are a lot of great things there as well. >> So Alex I'll give you the last word. We'll be at Sisco live in Barcelona, it's right around the corner, and Sisco live US, etc. This is a really small event. So for you as an attendee and also as a presenter what is this type of event here at the innovation master class mean to you, what are you hoping to get out of it, what do you get out of participating in these type of events? >> Well if I think about, the most important thing, again going back to Sisco, we believe that no single company can do this alone. The innovation program that I just talked about, they innovate everywhere, we put it for the entire world to use and I think just connecting with other fellow practitioners is very important. At the end of the day, innovation teams, they typically go against the grain. So a lot of this is group therapy, it's support. It's the human connection, but then we learn so much from each other, right? Because at the end of the day, we face the same challenges, we face the same problems together. So any industry concertia, we can make a meaningful difference for our companies and for our employee's. And by the way, if you're at Sisco live Barcelona, do stop by our booth, we have the innovation network booth, where we talk about the Sisco innovation centers, and the innovation programs that we run. >> Great, we'll do that. Well Alex thank you for taking a few minutes, and I guess we'll see you in Barcelona. >> Pleasure. >> Alright, he's Alex and I'm Jeff, and you're watching theCUBE, we're at the Innovation Master Class, put on by the conference board here at Xerox Parc in Palo Alto, thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

>> From Palo Alto, California, it's theCUBE. Covering the Conference Boards Sixth Annual Innovation Master Class. >> Hey, welcome back here, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Innovation Mater Class at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto. Really excited to be here, never been here, surprisingly, for all the shows we do just up the hill next to VMware, and Tesla. This is kind of the granddaddy of locations and innovation centers, it's been around forever. If you don't know the history, get a couple books, you'll learn it pretty fast. So we're excited to be here and our next guess is Antony Brydon, four-time founder and CEO, which is not easy to do. Again, check the math on that, most people are successful a couple times, hard to do it four times. And now he's the co-founder and CEO of Directly. So Antony, great to see you. >> It's good to be here. >> So, Directly, what is directly all about for people aren't familiar with the company? >> Most companies are excited to, and pursuing, the opportunity of automating up to 85% of their customer service. That's the ambition, and giving customers a delightful answer in their first experience. Most of those companies are falling down out of the gates because there are content gaps, and data gaps, and training gaps, and empathy gaps in the systems. So we build a CX automation platform and it puts experts at the heart of AI, letting these companies build networks of product experts and then rewarding those experts for creating content for AI systems, for training AI systems, for resolving customer questions. >> Right. So let's back up a step. So Zendesk is probably one we're all familiar with. You send in a customer service node, a lot of the times it comes back, customer service to Zendesk. >> Yes. >> But you're not building kind of a competitor of Zendesk, you're more of a partner, if I believe, for those types of applications, to help those apps do a better job. >> We are, we're a partner for Zendesk, we're a partner for Microsoft Dynamics, for Service Cloud and the like, and, essentially, are building the automation systems that make their AI systems work and work better. >> Right. >> Those are pure technology systems that often lack the data and the content to deliver AI at scale and quality, and that's where our platform and the human network, the experts in the mix, come into play. >> We could probably go for a long, long time on this topic. So what are some of the key things that make them not work now? Besides just the fact that it's kind of like the old dial-in systems. It's like, I just want to hit 0000. I just want to talk to a person. I have no confidence or faith that going through these other steps is going to get me the solution. Do you still see that on the online world as well? >> No, there are very clear gaps. There are four or five areas where systems are falling down. AI project mortality, as I refer to it. Very few companies have the structured data that systems need to work at scale. >> On the back, to feed the whole thing. >> That's right. Labeled, structured, organized data. So that doesn't exist. Many companies don't have the content. That's a second area. They may have enterprised knowledge bases, but they're five years old, they're seven years old, they're outdated, they're not accurate. Many companies don't have the signal. When a automated answer's delivered, they have to wait for a customer to rate it, and that tends to be really poor signal on whether that answer was good or not. And then last, many companies just don't have the teams to maintain these algorithms and constantly tune them. And that is where experts at the heart of a platform can come into play, by building a network of product experts who know the products inside and out. These could be Airbnb hosts for one of our customers, these could by Microsoft Excel users in the Microsoft example. Those experts can create that content, train the data, and actually resolve questions, filling those gaps, solving those problems. >> Right. I'm just curious, on the expert side, how many--? I don't know if there's best practices or if there's kind of certain buckets depending on the industry. Of those expert answers are generated by people inside the company versus a really kind of active, engaged community where you've got third-party experts that are happy to participate and help provide that info. >> Over 99% of the answers and the content is actually generated by the external network. >> 99%? >> 99%. You start with sources of enterprise knowledge, but it's a long, hard, arduous process to create those internal knowledge bases, and companies really struggle to keep up, it's Britannica. By the time you ship it it's outdated and you have to start all over again. The external expert networks work more like Wikipedia. Content constantly being organically created, the successful content is promoted, the unsuccessful content is demoted, and it's an evergreen cycle where it's constantly refreshing. Overwhelmingly external. >> Overwhelming. I mean, I could see where there's certain types of products. I was telling somebody else the other day about Harley-Davidson, one of the all-time great brands. People tattoo it on their body. Now, there aren't very many brands that people tattoo on their body. So easy to get people to talk about motorcycles or some of these types of things, but how do you do it for something that's really not that exciting? What are some of the tricks and incentives to engage that community? Or is there just always some little corps that you may or may not be aware of that are happy to jump in and so passionate about those types of products? >> There are definitely some companies where there's very little expertise and passion in the ecosystem around it. They're few and far between. If you find a product, if you find a company, you can find people that rely, love, and depend on that company. I gave some of the B to C examples, but we've also got networks for enterprise software companies, folks like SAP, folks like Autodesk. And those networks have experts that are developers, resellers, VARs, systems integrators, and the like. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the talent and the passion exists, you just have to have a simple platform to onboard and start tapping that talent and passion. >> So if I hear you right, you use kind of your Encyclopedia Britannica because that's what you have to start, to get the fly wheel moving, but as you start to collect inputs from third-party community, you can start to refine and get the better information back. And I ask specifically that way because you mentioned the human factors, and making people part of this thing, which is probably part of the problem with adoption, as I'd want confidence that there's some person behind this, even if the AI is smart. I'd want at least feel like there's some human-to-human contact when I reach out to this company. >> Yeah, that's critically important, because the empathy gap is real in almost all of the systems that are traditionally out there, which is when an automated answer's delivered, in a traditional system, it typically has a much lower CSAT than when it comes from a human being. What we found is when you have an expert author that content, when his or her face is shown next to the answer as it's presented to the user, and where he or she is there to back it up should that user still need more help, there you retain the human elements that personalize the contact, that humanize the experience, and immediately get big gains in CSAT. So It think that empathy piece is really important. >> Right. I wondered if you could share any specific examples of a customer that had an automated, kind of dumb system, I'll just use that word, compared to what they can do today, and some of the impacts when they put in some of the AI-powered systems like you guys support. >> So one of the first immediate impacts is often when we go in, a automated or unassisted system will be handling a very small percentage of the queries, and percentage of the customer questions coming in, and-- >> And people are going straight to zero, they're just like, I got to go to a person. >> Yeah, we're mostly in digital channels, so less phone, but yes, because the content there-- >> As an analogy, right. >> Because the content isn't there, it doesn't hit and resolve the question in that frequent a rate, or because the training and the signal isn't there, it's giving answers that are a little off-base. So the first and lowest hanging fruit is with a content library that's get created that can get 10, 50, 100 times broader that enterprise content pretty quickly. You're able to hit a much broader set of questions at a much higher rate. That's the first low-hanging fruit and kind of immediate impact. >> And is that helping them orchestrate, coordinate, collect data form this passionate ecosystem that's outside the four walls? Is that, essentially, what you're doing in that step? >> It essentially is. It is about companies having these ecosystems of these users, millions of hours of expertise in their head, millions of hours free time on their hands, and the ability to tap that in a systematic way. >> Wow. Shift gears a little bit, you are participating on a panel here at the event, talking about startups working with big companies and there's obviously a lot of challenges, starting with vendor viability issues, which is more kind of selling to big customers versus, necessarily, partnering with big companies. But what are some of the themes that you've seen that make that collaboration successful? Because, obviously, you've got different cultures, you got different kind of rates of the way things happen, you've got, beware the big company who eats you up in meetings all the time when you're a little start-up, they'll kill you accidentally just by scheduling so many meetings. What are some of the secrets of success that you're going to share here at the event? >> So we've got experience in that. Microsoft is a partner of ours, Microsoft Ventures is an investor. I think the single biggest key is an aligned vision and a complementary approach. The aligned vision where both the start-up and the partner are aiming for a similar point on the horizon. For example, the belief that automation can delight a very large set of customers by providing them a good, instant answer, but complementary approaches where the core skillsets of the companies round out each other and become less competitive. In this case, we've partnered with-- Microsoft is best in class AI platform and cognitive services, and we're able to tap and leverage that. We're also able to bring something unique to the equation by putting experts at the heart of it. So I think that architectural structure, in the first place, is a great example of kind of getting it right. >> Right. And your experience, that's been pretty easy to establish at the head-end of the process, so that you have kind of smooth sailing ahead? >> No, I don't think it's easy to establish at the head of the process, and I think that's where all of the good work and investment needs to happen. Upfront, on that kind of shared vision, and on that kind of complementary approach. And I think it is probably 20% building that together, but it's also 80% just finding it. The selection criteria by which a corporate partner picks a startup and the startup partner picks the corporate partner. I think just selecting right is the majority of the challenge, rather than trying to craft it kind of midstream. >> If it doesn't feel good at the beginning, it's probably not going to to work out. >> Right, it's about finding it. It's a little bit like the Venture analogy. Do they find great companies, or do they build great companies? Probably a little of both, but that finding that great company is a large part of the equation. >> Yeah, helps. So, Antony, finally get a last question. So, again, four successful startups. That does not happen very often with the same team. And look at your background, you're a psychology and philosophy major, not an engineer. So I'd just love to get kind of your thoughts about being a non-tech guy starting, running, and successfully exiting tech companies here in silicon valley. What's kind of the nice thing being from a slightly different background that you've used to really drive a number of successes? So I think the-- I think two things, I think one, coming from a non-tech and coming from a psych background has given us an appreciation of the human elements in these systems that tech alone can't do it. I'd say, personally, one of the impacts of being a non-tech founder in this valley is a heck of a lot of appreciation for what teams can do. And realizing that what teams can do is far more important than what individuals can do. And I say that because as a non-tech founder, there's literally nothing I could accomplish without being a part of a team. So that, I think, non-tech founders have that in spades. A harsh and frank realization that it's about team and they can't do anything on their own. >> Well, Antony, thanks for taking a minute out of your time. Good luck on the panel this afternoon and we'll keep an eye, watch the story unfold again. >> Yep, I appreciate it. Thanks very much. >> He's Antony, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at the Master at the Master Innovation Class at Xerox PARC, thanks for watching.

>> From Palo Alto, California, it's theCUBE. Covering The Conference Board's 6th Annual Innovation Master Class. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Innovation Master Class that's put on by The Conference Board. We're here at Xerox PARC, one of the original innovation centers here in Silicon Valley. Tremendous history, if you don't know the history of Xerox PARC go get a book and do some reading. And we're excited to have our next guest because there's a lot of talk about tech but really not enough talk about people and where the people play in this whole thing. And as we're seeing more and more, especially in downtown San Francisco, an assumption of responsibility by tech companies to use some of the monies that they're making to invest back in the community. And one of the big problems in San Francisco if you've been there lately is homelessness. There's people all over the streets, there's tent cities and it's a problem. And it's great to have our next guest, who's actually doing something about it, small discrete steps, that are really changing people's lives, and I'm excited to have him. He's Kevin Adler, the founder and CEO of Miracle Messages. Kevin, great to meet you. >> Great to meet you too Jeff. >> So, before we did this, doing a little background, you knew I obviously stumbled across your TED Talk and it was a really compelling story so I wonder A, for the people, what is Miracle Messages all about, and then how did it start, how did you start this journey? >> Miracle Messages, we help people experiencing homelessness reconnect to their loved ones and in the process, help us as their neighbors reconnect with them. And we're really tackling what we've come to call the relational poverty on the streets. A lot of people that we walk by every day, Sure, they don't have housing, but their level of disconnection and isolation is mind boggling when you actually find out about it. So, I started it four years ago. I had an uncle who was homeless for about 30 years. Uncle Mark, and I never saw him as a homeless man. He was just a beloved uncle, remembered every birthday, guest of honor at Thanksgiving, Christmas. >> And he was in the neighborhood, he just didn't have a home? >> He was in Santa Cruz, he suffered from schizophrenia. And, when he was on his meds he was good and then he'd do something disruptive and get kicked out of a halfway house. And we wouldn't hear from him for six months or a year. >> Right. So, after he passed away, I was with my dad, and not far from here, visiting his grave site in Santa Cruz. And I was having a conversation with my dad of the significance of having a commemorative plot for Uncle Mark. I said, he meant something to us, this is his legacy. So that's nice, but I'm going to go back in the car, pull out my smartphone, and see status updates from every friend, acquaintance I've ever met, and I'm going to learn more about their stories on Facebook, with a quick scroll, than I will at the grave site of my Uncle Mark. So, I'm actually a Christian. I have a faith background, and I asked this question: "How would Jesus use a smartphone?" "How would Jesus use a GoPro camera?" Cause I didn't think it was going to be surfing pigs on surf boards. And I started a side project where homeless volunteers, like my Uncle Mark, wore GoPro cameras around their chests. And I invited them to narrate those experiences and I was shocked by what I saw. And I won't regale you with stories right now but I heard over and over again, people say "I never realized I was homeless when I lost my housing, "only when I lost my family and friends." >> Right. >> And that led me to say, if that's true, I can just walk down the street and go up to every person I see and say "Do you have any family or friends "you'd like to reconnect with?" And I did that in Market Street, San Francisco four years ago, met a man named Jeffrey, he hadn't seen his family in 22 years. Recorded a video on the spot to his niece and nephew, go home that night, posted the video in a Facebook group connected to his hometown, and within one hour the video was shared hundreds of times, makes the local news that night. Classmates start commenting, "Hey, "I went to high school with this guy, "I work in construction, does he need a job? "I work at the mayor's office does he need healthcare?" His sister gets tagged, we talk the next day. It turns out that Jeffrey had been a missing person for 12 years. And that's when I quit my job and started doing this work full time. >> Right, phenomenal. There's so many great aspects to this story. One of the ones that you talked about in your TED Talk that I found interesting was really just the psychology of people's reaction to homeless people in the streets. And the fact that once they become homeless in our minds that we really see through them. >> Totally. >> Which I guess is a defense mechanism to some point because, when there's just so many. And you brought up that it's not the condition that they don't have a place to sleep at night, but it's really that they become disassociated with everything. >> Yeah, so I mean, you're introduction to me, if you had said hey there's this guy, there's no TED talk, there's nothing else, he's a housed person, let's hear what he has to say. Like, what would I talk... That's what we do every single day with people experiencing homelessness. We define them by their lack of one physical need. And, sure, they need it, but it presumes that's all there is to being human. Not the higher order needs of belonging, love, self-actualization. And some of the research has found that the part of the brain that activates when we see a person, compared to an inanimate object, does not respond when we see a person who's experiencing homelessness. And in one experiment in New York, they had members of a person's very own family, mom and dad, dress up to look homeless on the streets. Not a single person recognized their own member of their own family as they walked by 'em. >> Yeah, it's crazy. It's such a big problem, and there's so many kind of little steps that people are trying to do. There's people that walk around with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that we see on social media, and there's a couple guys that walk around with scissors and a comb and just give haircuts. These little tiny bits of humanization is probably the best way to describe it makes such a difference to these people. And I was amazed, your website... 80 percent of the people that get reconnected with their family, it's a positive reconnection. That is phenomenal because I would have imagined it's much less than that. >> Every time we reconnect someone, we're blown away at the lived examples of forgiveness, reconciliation. And every reunion, every message we record from a person experiencing homelessness, we have four, five messages from families reaching out to us saying, "Hey I haven't seen "my relative in 15 years, 20 years." The average time disconnect of our clients is 20 years. >> Right, wow. >> So what I've been doing now is, once you see it like this, you walk down the street, you see someone on the streets, you're like that's someone's son or daughter. That's someone's brother or sister. It's not to say that families sometimes aren't the problem. Half of the youth in San Francisco that are homeless, LGBTQ. But it's to say that everyone's someone's somebody that we shouldn't be this disconnected as people in this age of hyper-connectivity and let's have these courageous conversations to try to bring people back in to the fold. >> Right, so I'm just curious this great talk by Jeff Bezos at Amazon talking about some of the homeless situations in Seattle and he talks, there's a lot-- >> He's a wealthy guy, right? >> He's got a few bucks, yeah, just a few bucks. But he talks about there's different kind of classes of homelessness. We tend to think of them all as the same but he talks about young families that aren't necessarily the same as people that have some serious psychological problems and you talked about the youth. So, there's these sub-segments inside the homeless situations. Where do you find in what you offer you have the most success? What is the homeless sub population that you find reconnecting them with their history, their family, their loved ones, their friends has the most benefit, the most impact? >> That's a great question. Our sweet spot right now, we've done 175 reunions. >> And how many films have you put out? >> Films in terms of recording the messages? >> Yeah, to get the 175. >> 175 reunions, we have recorded just north of about 600 messages. And not all of 'em are video messages. So, we have a hotline, 1-800-MISS-YOU. Calls that number, we gather the information over the phone, we have paper for 'em. So 600 messages recorded, about 300, 350 delivered and then half of them lead to a reunion. The sweet spot, I'd say the average time disconnected of our clients is 20 years. And the average age is 50, and they tend to be individuals isolated by their homelessness. So, these are folks for decades who have had the shame, the embarrassment, might not have the highest level of digital literacy. Maybe outside of any other service provider. Not going to the shelter every night, not working with a case worker or social worker, and we say hey, we're not tryna' push anything on ya' but do you have any family or friends you'd like to reconnect with. That opens up a sense of possibility that was kind of dormant otherwise. But then we also go at the other end of the spectrum where we have folks who are maybe in an SRO, a single room occupancy, getting on their feet through a drug rehab program and now's the point that they're sayin' "Hey, I'm stably housed, I feel good, "I don't need anything from anyone. "Now's the time to rebuild that community "and that trust from loved ones." >> Kevin, it's such a great story. You're speaking here later today. >> I think so, I believe so. >> On site for good, which is good 'cause there's so much... There's a lot of negative tech press these days. So, great for you. How do people get involved if they want to contribute time, they want to contribute money, resources? Definitely get a plug in there. >> Now, or later? Right now, yeah, let 'em know. >> No time like the present. We have 1200 volunteer digital detectives. These are people who use social media for social good. Search for the loved ones online, find them, deliver the messages. So, people can join that, they can join us for a street walk or a dinner, where they go around offering miracle messages and if they're interested they can go to our website miraclemessages.org and then sign up to get involved. And we just released these T-shirts, pretty cool. Says, "Everyone is someone's somebody." I'm not a stylish man, but I wear that shirt and people are like "That's a great shirt." I'm like, wow, and this is a volunteer shirt? Okay cool, I'm in business. >> I hope you're putting one on before your thing later tonight. >> I have maybe an image of it, I should of. >> All right Kevin, again, congratulations to you and doing good work. >> Thanks brother, I appreciate it. >> I'm sure it's super fulfilling every single time you match somebody. >> It's great, yeah, check out our videos. >> All right he's Kevin, I'm Jeff. We're going to get teary if we don't get off the air soon so I'm going to let it go from here. We're at the Palo Alto Xerox PARC. Really the head, the beginning of the innovation in a lot of ways in the computer industry. The Conference Board, thanks for hosting us here at the Innovation Master Class. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (bright ambient music)

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Google Cloud Next 2018, brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. (electronic music) >> Hello, everyone, welcome to theCUBE, here, live in San Francisco at Masconi South. We're here with Google Cloud Next Conference. It's Google Next 2018. It's theCUBE's exclusive three days of wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier, and I'm joined with my co-host Dave Vallente. Jeff Rick's here, the whole team is here. This is a big break out moment for Google Cloud and we're going to break it down for you. Going to have interviews with Diane Green coming in today, Google Executives, Google's top women in the Cloud, top customers, and top people within the ecosystem. Google Cloud is really going to the next level. This show is really about coming out party for two years of work that Diane Green and her team have been doing, transforming Google from the largest Cloud for their own business, to making Google Cloud consumable and easy to use with the technology for large enterprise customers as well as developers around the world, global platform. Dave, we had the keynote here. I'd say Google we're seeing, introduce their Google Cloud service platform GCP certifying partners, Cisco announced on stage they are re-selling Google Cloud, which takes a big objection off the table around not having a quote, "Enterprise ready sales force". Google is in every large enterprise, Google's Cloud is morphing into a large scale technology driven Cloud. The number one advantage they have is their technology, their OpenSource, and now a partnership with Cisco, and all the machine learning and all the infrastructure that they have are bringing out a new look. This is Google's coming out party. This is really two years of hard work, that Diane Green and the team have accomplished. Working, bringing on new people, bringing on a whole new set of capabilities. Checking the boxes for the table stakes, trying to get it to pull position, for the Cloud game, obviously Amazon is significantly ahead of everybody. Microsoft making great progress, their stock is up. Microsoft, although leveraging their core confidency, the enterprise and the office, and all the existing business that they do. Again a B to B, Google bringing in end-user centric view with all the automation. Big announcements. Google Cloud services platform, Histeo is now shipping in production, doubling down on Kubernetes, this is Google looking at new abstraction layers for developers and businesses. Diane Green, not the most elegant in her keynotes, but really hitting all her marks that she needed to hit. Big customer references, and really showcasing their competitive advantage, what they want to do, the posture of Google Cloud is clear, next is the execution. >> So here at Google Next 25,000 registered people, so big crowd. Diane Green said on stage 3000 engineers here, we want to talk to you. The Cisco announcements, classic case of a company without a Cloud, wanting to partner up with somebody that has a Cloud, Google, and Google, without a big enterprise sales presence. Obviously Cisco brings that. So kind of match made in heaven. Obviously, Cisco's got relationships with other Cloud providers, particularly Microsoft but, to me this makes a lot of sense. It's going GA in August, you also saw underneath that, GKE, Google Kubernetes Engine, now it's on prem, so you're seeing recognition of hybrid. We heard Diane Green talk about two years ago when she started John, she got a lot of heat from the analysts. You're not really an enterprise company, you got a long way to go, it's going to take you a decade. She basically laid down the gun and said, we are there. We'll talk about that. We'll talk about what leadership means. You just made a comment that Amazon is obviously in the lead. What is leadership? How does Google define leadership? Clearly they're leading in aspects of the Cloud. Scale, automation, OpenSource, contributing a lot, it makes me wonder, does this hundred plus billion dollar company with a hundred billion dollars in the bank, do they really care about how much money they make in the enterprise? Or are they trying to sort of change the way in which people do development, do programming, that's maybe a form of leadership that we really haven't often seen in the industry. I mean I go back, I harken back, not that it's an exact comparison, but you think about Xerox park and all the contributions they made to the industry, think about the contributions that Google's making with TensorFlow, with Kubernetes, with Istio, a lot of OpenSource chops giving to the community. And taking their time about monetizing it, not that a couple billion dollars or billion dollars a quarter is not monetization, but compared to 25 billion of Amazon, and what Microsoft's doing it's much smaller market share. >> I mean that's a great point about the monet, all the analysts and all the Wall Street guys are going to go to try to figure out, squint through the numbers try to figure out how you make money on this. We've been talking to a lot of the Google Executives and a lot of the engineers leading up to Google Next, we've had great relationship, some of their inside people. The common theme Dave that I'm hearing is absolutely they're playing the long game, but if Google's smart, they will leverage their retail business, ads and other things, and not focus on the short-term monetization, and that's pretty clear, some of the posture. That they're looking at this as an engineering culture, engineering DNA, OpenSource DNA, and they're about speed. When I press Google people and say, "What is the DNA of Google Cloud?". It all comes back down to the same thing, inclusive, open, speed. They're going to focus on how to make things faster, that has always been the culture at Google, make page loads faster, make things go faster. Amazon has the notion of, ship things as fast as possible at lower prices. Amazon is make stuff go faster and make it easy to use from a consumer standpoint so, easy of use has always been a consumer DNA of Google, and now with Cloud, if they don't focus on the short-term, they continue to march the cadence of open, speed, ease of use, and take that user-centric view, to make things easier that's key. I'm really impressed with the announcement, one little kind of technical kind of nuance is this Istio. Istio is an extension of Kubernetes, and this is where you're starting to see some signals from Google on where they're going to be scanning through with (mumbles). And that is as Kubernetes builds on top of containers, and as Kubernetes starts to be more of an orchestration layer, the services that are deployed in the Cloud are going to have more and more functionality. This is classic moving up the stack. This is an only an opportunity to build abstraction layers, that make things really easy to consume, and make things faster. If they can get that position, that beach head, they will enable developer greatness, and that'll maybe hopefully change the game a little bit, and sling shot them into a position that's different than what Amazon, I mean, what Microsoft's doing. Microsoft's just brute force, throwing everything at Cloud. The numbers look good on paper, but will that truly translate to ease of use, large scale, global deployment, managing data at scale. I mean Google's great some technology, and that is their number one thing that they have a their disposal. >> Well Istio, the classic case of dog fooding, right John? I mean there's Google, using tons and tons of micro services for its own purposes, enter gate, how do we simplify this? How do we automate this? And how do we pay it forward? And that's what they do, that's their culture. This is a company that's, again, talk about leadership, they spent well over $10 billion a year on Capex, you can argue easily they got the biggest Cloud in the world, certainly they got more underwater cable, the biggest network in the world, so these are forms of leadership. Diane Green talked about information technology powering every aspect of the business. I mean we've heard that since Nick Carr said IT doesn't matter, but now it seems like more than ever, it's more important. She also said CIO's realized they're not in the data center business, but yet they only have a small fraction of their workloads in the Cloud. This is why she said Google is seeing, and others I'm sure, seeing such big growth in the Cloud. But then she underscored, but we're modern Cloud. We're not lift and shift Cloud. We're not doing what Oracle's doing and sticking the existing apps in the Cloud. We're doing things differently. You talk about this a lot John, you talked to a couple of really high level women in Google, about the new development model, the new programming model, they're really changing the way in which people think about software development. >> Yeah I mean I think one of the things that's clear is that, the modern era can hear around software development. Software development life cycle, certainly we hear, Agile have been going on for the DevOps movement and that's kind of been out there, but what's changing now is that software engineering, or software development, isn't just computer science. You don't need three computer science degrees to do Cloud and do development. The aperture is widening on what computer science is, that's opening up more women in tech, and as Diane Green pointed out on her keynote, there's a re-engineering of business going on, there's new discoveries happening, and half the population is women, and so women should be part of making the products consumed by women and other people. So there's a huge opportunity to fill the gender diversity gap, but more importantly I think what's interesting about Google Cloud in particular is that they kind of figured out something, and it might have been a pop to their arrogance balloon but it used to be, "Oh, everyone wants to be like Google, 'cause we're so huge and we're great". 'Cause they are. Their technology is phenomenal, you look at what Google's built and Urs has been on stage, they have built probably the best most complex system to power their business, and all of a sudden that's come out from map produced paper, Kubernetes, which they're now doubling down on, Google has done amazing. They're about 10 to 15 years ahead of the market in terms of technology by my estimate. The problem that they've had when they first started doing Cloud was, oh just, you want to be like Google. No people don't want to be like Google, people can't be like Google, what they now understand is that people want what Google has, and that's ease of use, DevOps, fully com instead of libraries, com instead of interfaces, really ease of rolling out at scale applications. That's different. People want the benefits of what Google has for their business, not, they don't want to be like Google. I think that was the, I think that Diane Green two years ago, came in and reset. They've hired great enterprise people, and the question is can they catch up? How fast can they catch up? They're checking the boxes, they're doing the table stakes, and can they harvest the best that they're making? Auto ML is a great example. IT operations is going to be decimated as an industry sector. All the industry analysts and the financial analysts have not yet observed this but, anyone who's in the business of IT operations is going to get decimated. Automation's going to take that away and make it a service, it's going to be a human component, but the value is going to shift up the stack. This is something that we're seeing as to look at value of start ups, IT operations, AI operations, this is a new category of the industry, and Google is betting on that. That to me is a big tell sign. >> And we've been talking about the economics of that for years, but I want to come back to something you said. Google clearly was late to the enterprise party, and I think part of the reason you were touching on this is I think they underestimated the degree to which organizations, enterprise in particular, have all this technical debt built up. You can't just rip out and replace, these companies are making money with their existing Oracle databases, with their existing outdated processes, but they're making money, they're meeting Wall Street expectations, they're making their big bonuses so they can't just stop doing that. It'd be like Google to your point, but Google is playing the long game, they are doing something differently, and they're trying to help people get to this new era of software development, so I think that's a very very important point. >> Melody Meckfessel, one of the VP of Engineering, she is going to announce a survey that she did. It's interesting, they pulled the human aspect of development, and they asked the question, "What do you care about?". And developers care about generally the enterprise and kind of Cloud native developers, really two things. Technical debt, and time to push code. If technical debt accumulates, that's a huge problem, makes them unhappy, makes them kind of, not happy with how things are going, and then also speed. If you're shipping code it takes more than a few minutes to get back the commits that it hit. That's a problem. This is a huge issue. You said technical debt. Enterprise IT has been accumulating decades of technical debt, that's now running the company. So as re-engineering the business theme that Diane Green points out, really is spot on, people are going to stop buying IT and be deploying services more in the future, and using those services to drive business value. This to me is a big shift, this is what's going to hurt in (mumbles) and enterprises that, no one's buying IT. They're building platforms, the product is the platform, and the sense of services will enable applications to sit on top of them. This is an absolute mindset shift, and that impacts every vertical that we cover. You've covered IOT and everything else. The way CIOs think about this is they think about a portfolio, and it's just to simplify it. It's like run the business, grow the business, transform the business. And by far, the biggest investments are in run the business, and they can't stop running the business, they can't stop investing in running that business. What they can do is say, okay we can grow the business with these new projects and these new initiatives, and we can transform the business with new models of software development, as we transform into a digital company as a software company. So that it increasingly going to be pouring investments there, and it's slowly sunset, the run the business apps. It happens over decades. It doesn't happen over night. >> Well that's actually the number one point I think that didn't come out in the keynote but Earl's talked about it, where he said the old model is lift and shift. When we covered at the Linux foundation, and the CNC app, and the other shows that we go to is that what containers and Kubernetes are bringing to the market, the real value of that, is that existing IT CIOs don't have to rip and replace old apps, and that's a lot of pressure, the engineering requirements, there's personnel requirements, there's migration, so with Kubernetes and containers, containers and Kubernetes, you can essentially keep them around for as long as they need to be around. So you can sunset the applications and let the apps take its natural life cycle course, while bringing in new functionality. So if you want to be Cloud native right out of the gate, with Google Cloud, and some of these great services, like AI and machine learning that's going on, you can actually bring it in natively, containerize and with Kubernetes and now Istio, build a set of services to connect existing applications, and not feel the pressure and the heat, the budget for it, the engineer for it, to actually hire against it, to manage the existing life cycle. This is a huge accelerant for Cloud native. The rip and replace doesn't have to happen. You can certainly sunset applications at will, but you need to kill the old, to bring in the new. This is a very very important point. >> Yeah so a couple things that Diane Green hit on that I just want to go quickly through her keynote. She talked about, like you say, a small fraction of workloads are actually in the Cloud, but she asked the question, why Google? She said "Look, we're an enterprise company, but we're a modern enterprise company. We take all the information from that Cloud, we organize it, we allow you to put it back intelligently. We've got a global Cloud and it's unbelievably complex. We've got 20 years of scaling and optimizing, with that elite team. We've the most advanced Cloud in the world". She said, she didn't give the number, but many many football size, football stadium size data centers around the world that are carbon neutral with tons of fiber under the ocean, specialized processors, talked about Spanner, which is this amazing distributed, globally distributed consistent transactional database, big query, and she also talked about a consistency with a common core set of primitives. Now I want to ask her about that, 'cause I think she was taking a shot at Amazon, but I'm not sure, if they have a, to make a similar statement, so we're going to ask her about that when she comes on. She also said, the last thing I'll share with you is, "AI and security are basically hand in hand". She said security is what everybody's worried about, AI is the big opportunity, those are the two areas where Google is putting some of its greatest resources. >> That was my favorite sound bite by the way, she said, "Security's the number one worry, and AI is the number one opportunity". Really kind of points to it. On the primitive things, I don't think that's so much a shot at Amazon, as in it's more of multi Cloud. We've been kind of seeing multi Cloud vapor ware for months, past year, 'cause it kind of is. What we were seeing with Cloud native community and OpenSource is multi Cloud can only happen if you can run the same map across multiple Clouds with common interfaces, and that ultimately is I think what they're trying to solve. My favorite sound bites from her keynote is, she said, quote, "We've got 20 years scaling Google Cloud", it's obviously very large, number one Cloud, if you want to put Clouds in benchmarks and without (mumbles) of the enterprise number one, in terms of tech and scale. But she says, "My main job at Google two years ago was surfacing the great technologies and services, and make it easy to use. We have a technical infrastructure, TI, that has big query, Spanner, and then consistencies across all primitives", and she said on top of the technical infrastructure they got Gmail, Gsuite, maps, et cetera et cetera, powering at large scale, dealing with all the threat intelligence, and a ton of body of technology around II. And then to cap it all off, leader in OpenSource. To me this is where Google's betting big, with security as the number one worry, which is a major check box with AI kind of the catnip for developers. And they got security features. If you compare Amazon to Google Cloud, Amazon wins on sense of services in terms of number of features, but the question is, does Google have the right features? These are the questions we're going to have. And the dig at Amazon was Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO, friend of Diane Green, I've seen them both speak at Stanford, so she bumped into, what she said, "Reed Hastings is a power user of Google Chrome and Gsuite", and kind of said how great it is, but that's not Netflix. Now Netflix is an Amazon customer, so interesting jab there was about Reed Hastings personally but not about Netflix being a customer of Google Cloud. The question is, can Diane Green convince Reed Hastings to move Netflix from Amazon to Google Cloud? That's the question I'm going to ask her. >> The other piece of the keynote that I thought was quite interesting was Urs Holzle, who's the Senior Vice President of Technology Infrastructure who was doing Cloud before anybody talked about Cloud, he said, "Cloud's a fundamental shift in computing. GCP gives you access to unlimited computing on the world's largest network". Talked about Spanner, the globally consistent distributed database, ML APIs for doing speech and natural language recognition. Big query, the big data warehouse, basically a silo buster, but he said what's still missing, is essentially that hybrid (mumbles) all the Cloud's are different. I interpreted that meaning closed. So he said, "Things like setting up a network, provisioning a virtual machine, are all different". And basically to your point John, that stuff is going to get automated away. So Istio, they talked about Apogee, visibility, orchestration, serverless, they talked about GKE on prem, which is Google Kubernetes Engine on prem, and then Cisco came out on stage. The big partnership, the big news from the keynote. >> Lets talk about what we're going to look for this week in Google Cloud, and also within the industry. Dave I'll start. I'm looking for Google's technology architecture map, which I love, I think they've got a great solution, does that translate to the enterprise? In other words, can they take what Google has and make it usable and consumable for enterprises without having the be like Google strategy, use what Google has benefited from, in a way that enterprises can consume. I'm going to look for that, see how the technology can fit in there. And then I think the most important thing that I'm going to swing through all the hype here and the comment and the news and Kool Aid that they're spreading around, is how are they making the ecosystem money? Because if Google Cloud wants to take the long game, they got to secure the beach head of the viable, large scale Cloud which I think they're doing extremely well. Can they translate that into a ecosystem flourishing market? Does that make money for developers? They talk about going into verticals as a core strategy and healthcare being one. Can they go in there, in financial services, manufacturing, transportation, gaming and media, and attract the kind of partners and business customers that allow them to do better business? Does it translate the distribution for developers? Do businesses make more money with Google? That to me is the ultimate tell sign with how Google Cloud translates to the market place. Ecosystem, benchmark, and value to customers in terms of money making, utility of the users, and their customers' customers. >> So two things for me John. One is the same as yours is ecosystem. I learned from the SiliconANGLE editorial team, by the way, go to siliconangle.com, there's some great editorial to drop this week in support of just what's going on in Cloud and Google Next, but I learned from reading that stuff, Google late to the party. Only 13,000 partners. Amazon's got 100,000 Cloud partners. (mumbles) has 70,000 Cloud partners. Where, what's the ecosystem strategy, how are they going to grow? How are they going to help make money? The second thing is, basic question, I want to understand what Google wants in the Cloud. What's their objective? I know Amazon wants to dominate infrastructures of services, and be the leader there. I know that Microsoft wants to take its existing software state, bring it to the Cloud. I'm not really clear on what exactly Google's objectives are. So I want to get clarity on that. >> I think it's going to be developers, and one of the things we're going to dig into as the OpenSource. theCUBE coverage here in San Francisco, live coverage of three days wall-to-wall, (mumbles) Dave Vallante, stay with us. thecube.net is where you can find the live feed if you're watching this on SiliconANGLE or around the web, or with Syndicate. Go to thecube.net to get all the content, and siliconangle.com has a Cloud special this week. The team is putting out a ton of content. Covering the news, critical analysis, and what it means and the impact of Google Cloud into the industry and to their customers. So I'm John Furrier, Dave Vallante, stay with us, live coverage here, be right back. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering AWS reInvent 2017, presented by AWS, intel, and our ecosystem of partners >> Hello everyone, welcome to the Cube here, live in Las Vegas for Amazon web services, AWS annual conference reInvent 2017 and I'm John Furrier here, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, co-host of the Cube. We are here for our fifth year in a row as Amazon Web Services continues to go on a thundering pace of product announcements and massive growth and we're here with two live sets, we're growing so much, there's so much action, there's two cubes, double barrel shotgun of innovation and data we're sharing with you, go to SiliconAngle.com, check out all the stories, all the news and we're hear kicking it of with an analysis, getting ready for tomorrow, the big day, today's officially the partner day, Sunday night they had Midnight Madness, the first ever event for Amazon, where they used the March Madness, kind of copied Cube Madness if you follow the Cube and they do a little preview, I'm here with Justin Moore and Keith Townsend, two great analysts in the community, guys and co-host this week at the cube. First of all thanks for co-hosting the Cube this week and thanks for coming by >> It's a pleasure >> Nice being here with my 50,000 closest friends (laughs) >> It's so good to have you guys here, one, the hosting but more importantly more Cloud thinking men but we've been watching this evolution, both when the Amazon start, I know you both have been involved in the game, in the Cloud watching it and participating but watching just like the tipping point, you're starting to see that moment where, people are calling this the Vmware 2008 moment, Where it's like oh my God its kind of gone mainstream but its still got a community, can they keep that alive? Meanwhile everybody is just getting blown away by Amazon, no matter what is being said, they're clearly the leader in Cloud, Microsoft pedaling as fast as they can, cobbling together their legacy Cloud, to try to keep up. Google, a new guard company looking really good with developers but not international, not a lot of things there yet but certainly looking great and then you got everybody else. >> Keith: Is there anybody else, really? >> As Dave Alonzo would say, what horses are on the track? >> Yeah there's lots of smaller players who are calling themselves Cloud, they're much more like, manage service providers and collocation kind of things, its not really Cloud they way you would think of it from the AWS kind of perspective. >> I've been talking to a lot of Fortune 500's lately and all of their internal customers, when they describe what they want, they're describing AWS, Azure and Google compute and everything else is just not even part of the discussion >> Yeah it needs to look like AWS, that's like the bench mark so this is what it is >> Total gold standard, the bell weather, let's talk about Amazon because I was writing a post on Forbes, I posted about kind of, trying to tell the story in a way that was kind of understood by the mainstream, still not really truly understood but they're changing the game, they're just kind of minding their knitting, they're just all steam ahead, you know, why look in the rear view mirror when your top dog? Why do that but the game is changing, they're constantly introducing new stuff, serverless is the hot trend that we've been tracking, you're seeing it here, you're seeing real developer centric, customer centric announcements. Even during the analysts meeting I heard rumblings, we can't even keep up with all the news, it's so massive so just thundering pace of announcements. Where's the innovation? What's Amazon doing now? What do they gotta do to distance themselves from the field? >> It's interesting, I reckon the competitors to Amazon are actually distancing themselves from AWS, they're trying to find their own way of doing things because you cannot AWS AWS >> Keith: Rackspace learned that a couple years ago right? >> Yeah, trying to compete head on, you're gonna lose so then we see Google is pushing really really hard, machine oiling and they are in top systems, a lot of people are using them for that big data and genomics research, Microsoft is all about office 365 and their traditional enterprise applications that all of their customers today, they know and love >> Yeah so Microsoft is doing what Microsoft does, which is taking care of their enterprise customers and I think this is where AWS needs to innovate in and its not maybe a technical innovation more than a operating and sales approach to how they treat enterprise customers. Enterprise customers still I think, are struggling to this date on how to interact with AWS and AWS is still trying to figure out how do they sale and help manage enterprise accounts. >> So let's separate IT because obviously two factors are merging, the CXO which is traditional IT, which we're all familiar with and a new kind of developer model is emerging and I won't say it's developer speeds and fees, developer programs, where developers are shaping the agenda. It used to be CXO's have the cash, they drive everything. Now you got this developer mojo and I can see early signs of a cult here, where all the innovation that's come in the field, is from customers saying screw it, I don't need the big dog telling me, the old guard, the old CIO up there, I'm just gonna go do it, get out of my way, three feet in the Cloud dust, get a prototype up and running. So you guys see that dynamic, with this cultural shift, what's your thoughts? >> Cloud is a state of mind... (laughs) It's a way of operating the business, its not so much about the infrastructure, its not so much about the services that live on top of it, it's how you use them and that way of doing things that the developers like, is that they get to pick and choose their favorite tools from what they think is the best solution and a lot of the time that's been AWS and then they blend them together and they just stitch this system together based on the favorite tools that they have and that just lives in a completely different level of abstraction than what we've seen before. >> And the speed too, I mean that's just changing the game too, right? >> Well you can do that a lot faster than waiting, raise a PO, wait for three months for someone to rack ans stack a whole bunch of gear, wait for everything to clear through purchasing and then you get access to the enterprise, anointed correct thing, so we saw it the same with sales floors, where people would... sales guys would just go with a credit card and just say, yes I'll have some of that, thanks >> It's much more than a credit card, VMware worked their re-Cloud air service a couple years, said, I can take your credit card, build a data center, my son a developer, in college, I gave him that solution, he looked at it, he was like what's a load balancer, why do I need to configure a firewall, I just want to build a application man, I just want to build, I just want to code, and AWS has figured that out, how to get developers back to what they love to do, which is solving problems via code and you see it, even before the start of this show, there's a lot of hoodies and shorts at this conference, compared to the culture that we see at a lot of other and past shows. >> I find it inspirational, so couple key points, so I asked Andy Jassy, an exclusive one on one with him last Monday and I asked him, you know, he was talking and he made a comment to me and I'll tell you the story here, he says, you know, we have a conversation inside Amazon, this is Andy talking about if we were gonna start Amazon all over again, cause he tells the story about the scar tissue and all the pain they went through with S3. He says if we're going to do it all over again, we would use Lambda, and the serverless trend is interesting because now that speaks to your son's objective, I don't need routers, I don't need load balances, I don't need gear... >> What do you mean how many CPUs I need? I don't know >> What's a patch? >> You tell me, alright, yeah >> Load Linux? What's Linux? So, okay if that's the norm, the driver has to be a new programming methodology, not agile, we're talking about compose ability and a level where no one says, oh I need Oracle for that or I need Mongodb for that, there's just data bases. So a whole new things happening where this choice that used to be the religious war between vendor A or B... serverless could change the game on this >> We're just gonna end up with a new religious war I think, it's gonna be, instead of Vim versus Emacs, it's gonna be should I use Amazon Lambda or should I use Google Cloud functions, it's gonna be one of those, which programming language is the best. >> Okay old guard, new guard, it's a term that Jassy uses, I like it because I'm old, so maybe I'm old guard trying to be new guard, old guard means legacy, he's really talking about Oracle, IBM, probably say Microsoft, so move over and put them in that bucket, so new guard players, clearly Amazon, saying they're new guard, but Google's new guard in Cloud, they're not really trying to do anything legacy, they have legacy infrastructure but they're approaching a... a market from a new guard perspective. What's you guys take on old guard, new guard and do you agree with that statement and what do the old guards have to do to be cool with the new school? >> So the Cube has been at almost every major conference, this year, take an example, what some of the old guard is trying to do, NetApp is trying to get into the Cloud conversation. Google has none of that legacy concern of needing to sell boxes, you look at a solution like Kubernetes, Kubernetes has come on and taken over the container orchestration conversation because Google doesn't need to make money off of Kubernetes, they don't need it to sell more boxes, there's a bit of freedom... >> They may have moved some work loads off Amazon, don't you think? >> It's a great way to move work loads out of Amazon, AWS has joined the CNCF because they no longer have a choice in the matter, Kubernetes has won the containers war so because of that, these new school competitors can compete in ways that a HPE, Dell EMC, etc., simply can't. >> Josh I gotta ask you this, I agree with what he's saying, I'll take it one step further, the old guards trying to slow the game down, move the goal post as an expression, they gotta try to slow this freight train down because otherwise it could be less than it does and they have leverage, they've got customers, they have market power, even Oracle I would say is in that category so they gotta kind of slow the game down but is the scale and the unprecedented amount of announcements, the differentiator as more services come on, their thesis here at Amazon, as I release more services faster, more available capability thus more, total address full markets available. Do you buy those two things, slowing down and services being the advantage? >> That's interesting I think it's more of a scatter gun approach in a way, it's like you know, fail fast. So if we throw enough services out there, throw enough stuff at the wall, we'll just find the ones that work and concentrate on those, as someone who tries to keep up with what Amazon is doing and this happens with developers as well. When you release 800 new services in a year, name them all, as a human that's really really difficult to manage. So I think in some ways it's a little bit... >> I've got four kids I can't even name, I get them all confused >> It's a little bit like Microsoft Word, it's got 800 billion different features but for any given customer they're gonna use maybe 10% of them and yet all of them are there because different customers use a different 10%. I think that's a little bit what Amazon is going for, kind of ubiquitous market coverage, as much market as it can possibly get, it's a lot like it's retail strategy, we want to be in everything, where some of the competitors are being a little bit more focused about saying well rather than just being a generic service that covers everything, we're gonna focus on particular areas that we think have enough value in that for it to be worth that time. >> Okay I wanna ask you guys a question about value creation, entrepreneurial, the startups, companies that are trying to go, you kind of see, certainly in Silicon Valley, where I live, startups are getting pummeled, if they were born before 2012, they're really going.6.. they try to go big but they're mostly going home. Barracuda Networks just announced this week that they're gonna go private, private equity's squabbling up all these companies that have pretty good sizeable funding, 100 million dollar invests from Andressen Horowitz, Graylog, Sequoia, big names, folding tent and being acquired which is code words for we can't got public and even big public companies that don't have a Cloud player, kind of retooling. So the question is, are we at a point now where scale and speed of the game is causing some havoc in the market place. >> Well look no further than what's going on in Europe now, the Cube is at HPE reInvent. HPE's discover in Europe and HPE is a completely different company than it was three years ago as a direct result of what Amazon has done in the Cloud space and gobbling up all of these smaller accounts and new opportunity. You mentioned it earlier, HPE is still HPE, HPE is gonna get that interview or session with the CIO, Meg makes the call, someones going to pick up the line. >> Now Antonio >> Yeah, now Antonio But AWS has been changing that story, impacting and taking the air out. HPE chose a interesting approach, get smaller, become more agile, Dell chose the opposite route of getting bigger to compete, we'll see which one plays out, in the meantime 18 billion dollar run rate and no sign of slowing down. >> 18 billion dollar run rate with 40% growth on that bassline is pretty significant, I think they might even be doing better than that next quarter but that speaks to the traction, it's not just startups, those numbers aren't just startups. Airbnb is a big company now but they started out small. We use Amazon, a lot of people use Amazon, they're winning big enterprise deals, why? What do you guys think, what's the reason why? >> You know what... Go a little bit intuitive here, look at VMware on AWS, I've been kind of critical of that solution but it is a easy win, if VMware made the exact same announcement on IBM, the year before at VM world... the Fortune 500's I talk to don't consider that Cloud, the exact same solution and AWS is Cloud, that's the Cloud check box. AWS, they do a much better job at controlling their brand Kleenex but they are the Kleenex, they are the Xerox of Cloud, you don't have Cloud unless you have AWS from a enterprise perspective, that's what Azure, Google Compute, and all the other Cloud providers have to compete against >> First of all those guys are incomplete in their Cloud and that's just on a feature by feature basis, I do agree it's kind of like Outlook or Word, I like Outlook because it's more bloated than Word and less useful but my point is, that's the name of the game, getting functional value creation. So final question for you guys is, as we look at reInvent this week obviously I looked at the industry day yesterday and the board, a lot of Alexa repeats. So you can see what sessions are repeating so that's a indicator of popularity so Alexa's got traction, serverless with Lambda. What do you guys see as the big, so far, early show buzz? >> I'm hearing a lot about containers, containers and like you say, things like Lambda and Alexa, anything that has AI machine learning in it, that's very hot at the moment whether or not it's just hype and the bubble on that will pop in a few years, I personally think that that is mostly hype and hot air but it'll settle down and there'll be some real value in there. That's where I'm seeing the noise. >> So over at the RA, they have the container kind of show, it's a show within a show and I'm hearing similarities with containers but not just containers, to your point, serverless, it was a term that we struggled with a couple years ago, now it's generally accepted, you know what, I can just write code and that code can be executed without regard to infrastructure operations. That has proved to be insanely popular right now. >> Okay final question, I'll start it, we're gonna end this on this last segment, I know I wanna get one more in, that's the buzz. I wanna ask you guys, what tea leaves are you reading, what signals are you looking for? Because remember Amazon is very scripted up right now, you can see them on message, I'm trying to poke holes, and which tea leaves, smelling it, putting my ear, ear to the ground, think about that question, my view is, I'm looking at, is this developer trend a cultural shift and to what extent is that developer traction in terms of mind share and love of the brand, Kleenex, the Cloud, the real Cloud, and how much will that tip the CXO conversation. Where's that power shift? So me, I'm trying to read what the tea leaves are saying, if this developer tipping point happens at this scale, developers could really be in the drivers seat. Not just oh developers are in charge, I'm talking about really making the decisions on all big deployments, that's my tea leaf read. What are you looking at? >> So I'm talking to a lot of vendors, their number one reason for being at AWS, when I say vendors, vendors that we see at traditional infrastructure shows, they're here to talk to new audiences, to that developer audience that you mentioned and what I want to know from them, more than just interest, do these developers have money? One of those challenges that all of these Cloudy type companies have faced is that the developers fall in love with them, Docker is a great example, developers fell in love with Docker, millions of downloads. However that doesn't translate to POs and purchases, do these guys actually have the buying power to see through that initial contact all the way to the sale of the solution. >> Influence the buying decisions and IT, thoughts? >> You made the same comment I think earlier about 2008 VM world, it has a very similar vibe to me here, I'm seeing that this is now the crossover between where it was developers, where it was all hoodies and tracksuits and pink hair, I'm seeing a lot of suits, seeing a lot of money floating around this conference, so I'm starting to think that this is the point where AWS is starting its transition from being the new guard to the old guard, they would love to be IBM, IBM made a lot of money. >> Turning into an old guard is very good financially >> It makes you a lot of money. So I'm looking to see where on that transition are we and how long can AWS maintain that momentum of being a new guard company. >> If they can hold the line on new guard they win everything as long as they could in my opinion. Alright, I'm John Furrier here with Justin Moore and Keith Townsend kicking off the first day of three days of wall to wall coverage here at AWS reInvent, stay tuned for more analysis opinion, commentary, of course go to SiliconANGLE.com for all the exclusive interviews with Andy Jassy and all the top executives of Amazon. We'll be back with more after this short break. (slow futuristic music)