>>Okay. And welcome back to the cubes live coverage here in San Francisco, California for 80 us summit 2022 Amazon web services summit 2020 New York city is coming up in the summer will be there. Check us out the cube.net. Our next guest here is Jim long. The CEO of dig also known as local. BTV a very interesting AWS customer doing some really progressive things around video and, uh, challenging the status quo in code cutting and all kinds of broadcast models. Jim, welcome to the cube. Great to see you. >>Thank you, John. Great to be here. Okay. >>So first of all, before we get into some of the disrupt option, take a minute to explain what is dig and local BTV. >>Uh, dig is all about, uh, providing, uh, edge video networking for broadcast television, basically modernizing local television and hopefully extending it to hyper local content like high schools and community government and community channels and things like that. So essentially free bringing, using the internet as an antenna to bring broadcast television to your phone, your laptop you're connected TVs. >>So if I understand it correctly, if I UN and I look at the, the materials of your site, you basically go into each market, Metro areas like New York Philly bay area, grab the tee signal out of the air. >>Yep. >>Local TV, and then open that up to everyone. Who's got, um, an >>Correct. And, uh, what, we've, where we're essentially building a hybrid network with AWS. Uh, I like to say we got all the smart and account stuff, you know, in the cloud at AWS. And we have all the dumb, fast stuff in the actual TV market. We have servers and transcoding there we work with, uh, of course, um, uh, AWS on that centrally as well. But basically that hybrid cloud allows us to be the fastest simplest and lowest cost way to get a local video. Any type could be an antenna or an IP stream to a local house. So we're, so are the local pickup and delivery people. We're not building a brand, we're not building content. We're delivering the local content to the local views. You >>Like the pipes. >>We are, we're essentially an infrastructure company. Um, we're right at that wonderful intersection of the, uh, the infrastructure and the content where I always like to play. >>I like, I love the store. I think the cost of that nature, how you're using Amazon, it's really impressive. Um, what are some of the cool things you're doing on AWS that you think's notable? >>Well, of course the, the standard issue stuff where you want to store all your data in the cloud. Right? So we, uh, and we use a quick site to, to get to that. And obviously we're using S3 and we're using media tailor, which we really like, which is cuz we first actual company on the planet. I believe that's inserting digital ads, impression based ads into local broadcast streams. So that's, that's fun because the advertisers, they like the fact that they could still do traditional TV buys and they could spice it up with digital impressions based, but ads on us. Yeah. And, and we're adding to it a real fun thing called clip it, which is user clipping. It's an app that's been running on AWS for years. It's had over half a million plays in social media. Yeah. We're combining those together and, and AWS makes it very simple to do that. >>Well, I've been using your app on my Firestick and uh, download local BTV on the app store. Um, I gotta say the calendar's awesome. And the performance is 10 times better than, than some of the other streaming apps because the other performance they crash all the time. The calendar's weird. So congratulations. Clearly you're running the cloud technology. I gotta ask you what's going on in the market? Netflix missed their earnings. The stock was down big time. Um, obviously competition what's up going on with Netflix? >>Well, what's, it's a big shift. >>What does it mean for the streaming market? >>Well, what it means is, is, is a consumer choice. It's really the golden age of consumer choice. Uh, originally back when I was a kid, it was all antenna TV. We didn't even have DBRS right. And then, uh, the cable companies and the satellite companies, the phone companies came in and took over and all of a sudden everyone started paying for TV for just linear TV. Right? And then the next thing, you know, streaming comes around, uh, Netflix shows up for, for VOD or, or SVOD, they call it cuz it's payt TV and uh, and the whole, uh, that ecosystem starts to melt down. And now you have a consumer choice market where you can pay, pay for VAD or pay for, for linear. And everyone does linear and everyone does VAD or you can use free TV. Now we correctly guessed that free TV was gonna have a huge comeback. You know, know what is it about free even obviously gen Z smarter than us boomers. They love free too. Uh, targeted advertising makes the ads less, uh, painful or less of a distraction. Uh, so we knew that free ad supported TV was gonna happen. Lots of stuff happened. And then, then the, uh, major media companies started doing their own subscription apps. Right? They're all cool. >>We like paramount plus >>Paramount plus Disney pluses, PN peacock, uh, time Warner's doing something. I mean, it's all cool, but you know, people only have so much of a big pocketbook. So what it's doing is pay TV has now become much more complicated, but also you, you know, you gotta trade off. So you saw it with Netflix, right? Yeah. Netflix is suffering from there's too much pay TV. So where are you gonna put your money on Comcast? On YouTube TV paramount plus Netflix. >>Yeah. I mean, I love the free thing. I gotta bring up something. I wanna get your reaction to a company called low cast went under, they got sued out of their deal. They were the free TV. Are you guys have issues like them? What's the cast most people don't know got was, was >>Doing same. So we started before low cast and we're uh, what we would call a permissions based system, legal system. The broadcast Mar industry, uh, is, uh, is the wild wild west. I mean, I like to say antenna TV is a direct to consumer. The antenna is a direct to consumer device and it's controlled by the channel. People it's not controlled by a platform like Comcast, right? It's not controlled by a stick. >>When you say channel, do you mean like CBS or >>Yeah, CBS or the local Korean religious cooking channel or, uh, Spanish channels or local independent to television, which is really a national treasure for us. The United States really should be making sure that local content, local channels, uh, do well local businesses, you know, with targeted advertising, Janes nail salon can, can now advertise just in San Jose and not the entire San Francisco TV market. Um, so you ha you have, have all that going on and we recognize, you know, that, that local content, but you have to have permission from the channel stuff. It's not easy because you got channels on stations. You have syndicators, it's hard to keep track of. And sometimes you, you, uh, you, you know, you have to shift things around, but, uh, low cast, uh, like another kind before it just went hog wild, illegal, trying to use a loophole, uh, didn't quite work out for 'em and, uh, >>You see, they have put out of business by the networks, the names, the big names. Yes. Content people, >>Correct. I mean the big, the big guys, but I mean, because they weren't following the rules, um, >>The rules, meaning license, the content, right. >>Well correct. Or yes, >>Basically they, they were stealing the content in the eyes of the, >>Well, there is, there is, it is a little of, a bit of a gray area between the FCC and the copyright laws that Congress made. So, um, there are people certainly out there that think there is a path there, low cast, didn't find it. We're not trying to find it. Uh, we just want to get all the free TV, uh, the bottom line. And you've seen fast channels explode recently, Pluto, uh, Samsung TV. >>And what does that all mean? >>Well, what it means is people love free TV and the best free TV out there is your local TV. So putting that on the internet and those comp, but the media companies, they have trouble with this new stuff. What's, >>What's your >>They're overthinking it. What's >>Some of this CBS, NBC, all these big guys. >>Well, those guys have a little less trouble than the people that actually, uh, they're affiliates, right? So there's 210 TV markets and the, uh, your major networks, you know, they have their own stations. And in a bit, you know, in about 39% of the population, which is about 15 to 20, is it >>Cultural or is a system system problem? >>No, it's a, it's a problem of all the, the media companies are just having trouble moving towards the new technology and, and they're, I think they're siloing it. >>So why not? You gonna let 'em die. Are you trying to do deals with em? >>Oh no, no, absolutely. For us, if we don't make money, unless stations make money, we want local TV to, to flourish. It is local TV is Neilson, just report yesterday, you know, uh, that, uh, local TV is growing. We're taking advantage of that. And I think the station groups are having a little trouble realizing that they have the original, fast channels before Pluto, before Tubi did it in movies. And, and, and what >>Are people understanding in the, in the industry? I know NA's coming up a show. Yeah, >>That's right. >>National associated of broadcasters. What's going on in that industry right now. And you're, if you get to put it down the top three problems that are opportunities to be solved, what would they be? >>Well, I think, you know, I think the, the, the, the last, the, the best one that's left is what we're doing. I have to say it, uh, I think it's worth billions. >>You free TV over the air free and stream >>O TV. Oh yeah. Over the air TV that also works with the internet, right. Public internet connected to public television stations so that everybody, including homeless people, et cetera, that, you know, they don't have a TV, they don't have an antenna, they can't afford comp. They got an >>IPhone though. >>They an iPhone. For sure. And, and so it's, it's, uh, it's a wonderful thing. It's, you know, our national broadcasting and I don't think the station groups or the major networks are taking advantage of it they're as much as they should. Yeah. And, and I don't think, you know, obviously NBC and CBS with their new apps, they're sort of done with that. They did mergers, they got, they got the virtual pay guys. I mean, YouTube TV off the ground, the only thing left is suck another shitload of good, uh, eyeballs and, and advertising. >>Well, I mean, yeah, I think that, that, and what you said earlier around subscription fatigue, I mean, nobody wants to have 20 subscriptions. >>Well, that brings up a whole new other war. That's going on that, thank goodness. We're not part of it's the platforms versus the cable companies. Right. Versus whatever. Right. Everyone's trying to be your open garden or your closed garden. They're trying to get your subscriptions in bundle self bundling it's. But I mean, it's wonderful for consumers, if you can navigate through it. Uh, we wanna, we think we'll have one of the gems in any of that everyone's want local TV. And so we'll supply that we're already doing that. We're supplying it to a couple companies, uh, free cast as a company, uh, app, a universal streaming, you know, manager, your all, all your, uh, streaming, a streaming aggregation, put your paid stuff in, put your free stuff in. They do that. And, and as, as does Roku try trying to do that fire TV, Xfinity's trying to do it. So it's all, it's a new war for the platform and hopefully we'll be on everyone. >>Well, you've been in this industry for a long time, you know, the streaming market, you know, the TV market. Um, so it's, it's good. I think it's a new battle, the shift's happening. Um, what should people know about dig local? BTV what are some of your goals for the next year or two? What are you trying to do? >>Well, what we're really trying to do is make sure that local, uh, local television thrives so that it can support wider communities. It could support hyper local content. So if you're, if you're, and we love the old paradigm and channel change, right? Forget, you know, every other app has all these boxes going by on different rows and stuff. And, and yeah, you can search and find stuff, but there's nothing like just changing channels, whether a commercial's on or, or you, you wanna see what else is on. You know, you're gonna go from local television and maybe all of a sudden, you'll see the local high school play over on another part of the, of the spectrum. And, and what we're trying to do is get those communities together. And the local high school people come over and find the local, you know, uh, Spanish, uh, Nova channel or something like that. >>So local is the new hot. >>It is. Absolutely. And by the way, it's where this high CPMs are gonna go. And the more targeted you get >>Ad revenue, >>I mean, that's for us is, is, is our number one, re we have a number of revenue streams, but targeted ads are really great for local, right? And, and so we're, we're gonna make an announce. We've >>Lost that we've lost that local, I've seen local things that local Palo Alto paper, for instance, just shut down this local sports high school coverage, our youth sports, because they don't budget, right? There's no TV community channels, like some Comcast throwaway channel. Um, we lost, we, we lo we're losing >>Local. No, I think that's a real national shame. And so I think if we can strengthen local television, I think it'll strengthen all local media. So we expect to help local radio and local newspapers. That's a bigger part of the vision. Uh, but I it's gonna happen. There's >>An education angle here too. >>There is an education angle because the bottom line is you can use linear television as a way to augment. Uh, we have a really exciting project going on in New York, uh, uh, with, uh, some of the housing, uh, projects, uh, in Harlem and, and, and the Bronx, uh, their I idea is to have the, the homework channel and they can, and literally when you have a, and both swiping and everything you can have, I mean, literally you can have a hundred schools that, that have things well, >>We know zoom schooling sucks. I mean, that didn't work. So I think you're gonna see a lot of augmentation, right. >>Amazon. >>I was just talking to some people here, AI training, machine learning, training, all here could be online in linear format. >>Yeah. And exactly. And then I think about the linear format is it's discovery television, and you can also, um, you know, you can also record it. Yeah. Right. If you see a program and you want to record it, you sit >>Record. So final minute we have left. I want to just get your thoughts on this one thing and, and ask your question. Are you looking for content? Are you, I outreach at the content providers who, >>Well, we're, we're PRI our primary mission is to get more channel local channels on which really means station groups and independence. We have a number, I mean, basically 50% of the channels in any market. When we move into it are like, this is a no-brainer. I want more eyeballs. We're Nielsen, uh, RA, uh, rated mean we support. And so we, >>How many markets are you in right now? >>We're in 21 now. And we hope to be in, uh, over 50 by the end of the year, covering more than half the United States. >>So, all right, Jim, thanks for coming on the queue. Really appreciate it. >>My pleasure. Good luck >>Recognition. Very disruptive disrupting media, um, combination of over the air TV, local with I internet. Obviously we love that with a cube. We want a cube channel anywhere possible. I'm John furry host of the queue here at AWS summit. Highing all the big trends and technologies in cloud and media back with more coverage after this short break,

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS re:Invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, and Intel, along with its ecosystem partners. >> Well welcome back to the Sands, day two, AWS re:Invent 2019, lot of buzz still going on here Dave Vellante. >> It's all buzz. >> Yeah, a jam-packed show floor, second day in a row, day two of our coverage here on theCUBE, along with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls, and we're joined by Paul Cheesbrough, who's the CTO and president of digital at the Fox Corporation. Paul, good to see you, sir. >> Thanks for having me on. >> Thanks for being with us, we appreciate that. >> Paul: I'm a big fan of theCUBE. >> So what brings you here, about your partnership with AWS, and let's just start with that, characterize a little bit about what that relationship's all about. >> Yeah, well I think re:Invent's become the go-to show for cloud computing generally. I think it's its eighth season, and certainly for my team and myself, it's the place to discover the latest product evolutions and talk to other people in my position and peers in the industry and see what's going on, so it's a great opportunity to do a bit of fact-digging and see what's going on in the industry. >> So what fact-digging are you doing right now that applies to your world, what have you seen here, maybe in the past day or two, that you said "Yep, I can see where that's playing "into the entertainment world." >> Yeah, I'd say the first thing is the ecosystem, you can see from around here the buzz and the vibe. I mean this is at a different level to what I've seen before, and that's always really good to see, so it's not just an AWS story, it's kind of the companies that they're enabling, and a lot of the innovation comes out of these smaller startups that are building on top of the platform, so spending a ton of time on that front. I'd also say Andy Jassy's keynote yesterday, really very impressive on how they've kept the foot down on new releases on the data front. So SageMaker and Redshift are two technologies we use heavily and they've continued to innovate on that front, and just getting time with the top table of AWS and the deep technical engineers who can kind of give you a view of where the company's going and where the services will be in a year or two's time is, you don't get that any other kind of place. >> You know when we first started doing theCUBE at re:Invent seven years ago, lot of tire kickers, certainly from the enterprise, lot of developers, no question, but you're way beyond kicking tires, so what are some of the things that you're doing in the cloud, you mentioned Redshift and SageMaker, what are you doing with those tools? >> Yeah, so, I mean you're a media company, so you'll understand how technology's kind of carved up, and on the enterprise side, which is all of our internal IT and networks, we've pretty much migrated all of that over the recent years into the cloud, and largely running on AWS, so storage, compute, we've retired all of our data centers bar one. All of our applications that our employees use are software as a service based, so we don't really run our own infrastructure, and on top of that we've really put a very deep data infrastructure in place where the consumer trend, the way our content's consumed these days, we've got a very direct relationship with the consumer. We stream more and more content to them, and that throws off a data trail that you've got to capture and manage, and we use Redshift and SageMaker to analyze the data on top of Redshift on that front, so the enterprise piece, we've done pretty holistically. On the digital side of our business, our products and services and our apps, they're almost entirely built natively on AWS services. Our engineers, the innovation that they're driving there, they couldn't do it without partners like AWS. And then the third and final piece to a media company's the media and the broadcast piece, how you move video around the production organization, the creative organization. And that's the bit that we're announcing here today, that partnership with AWS to kind of solve that issue. >> Yeah, so I wanted to ask you about, a big part of your transformation was data. And so you got rid of, they always talk about the heavy lifting, you got rid of that for the most part, all except one data center. What did you do with the people that were doing all of that stuff, did they just sort of go through retraining, or attrition, did they get excited about learning new tooling, how did that all go? >> Well I've been on the journey around cloud computing since 2006 in my career, so-- >> Dave: Day one, I guess it's still day one. >> In fact I purchased S3 from Werner Vogels back then. >> That was the first product, wasn't it, the first service. >> And then I met Andy soon after, and in those days, and I think some organizations experience this, the technology team were the most risk-averse, and they put every blocker in the way from moving to the cloud, 'cause they saw it as a threat, and frankly didn't understand it, so, it took a lot of pushing to get things going in those days, I think it's slightly different now, but once you're through that barrier, and people get momentum and, anyone in my position as a CTO will tell you there's no shortage of work to throw people at, so the resource that we've got within the team, I'd much rather they were building software than managing servers and pipes and doing upgrades, so we've released a ton of talent to do what I would call the value add piece, that consumers touch and feel, and moved it really kind of front of store, and that's made a big difference, some people didn't make the journey and we brought new talent in, I think that's inevitable. But yeah. >> So it's almost like you get to practice a little less and play a little more, is about what it comes down to. >> And sort of rearchitected your business around data and software, it sounds like, as opposed to, like you said, pipes. >> Yeah, but everything starts with the consumer in our business, so if you work backwards from that, they've changed their behaviors and they expect content in different forms on different devices. They expect the traditional channels of cable, they expect the new channels of mobile and streaming, and that places a lot of stress internally on how you create and produce and distribute that content, so to some degree in our industry, we had no choice, we had to change, and that's been, as a technologist driving transformation, it's been a fun ride. >> You're almost on this parallel track a little bit, you talk about the transformation you're going through with live streaming right now, that's a must, must do, must have, that's how consumers bring in their media, and yet you have to transform technologically speaking to provide this consumer transformation as well, so you have these two tracks going down that you've got to answer to, I mean what kind of complexity does that create for you, because your business is fundamentally changing, and the technology is fundamentally changing. >> And you know, I think historically, the solution to that problem was to put parallel infrastructure in place and your digital team would have their own infrastructure, your enterprise team would have their own infrastructure, and then your media and broadcast team would be on a completely different network doing their own thing, and they would all coexist, and I think the convergence at the consumer end has rippled back into a convergence within the organization as well, where, our technology teams play across those three different fields, and someone like AWS, and other partners like that are now capable of being partners across those three different fields together, so the convergence at the consumer end really does apply within the organization as well. >> So you mentioned some things you're doing with AWS, maybe you could talk about that initiative and talk about the tech, and we could talk about the outcome for the consumer. >> So I think the last bastions within any media organization in terms of transforming, you think about the media and broadcast operation, everything from the trucks and the cameras through to the edit suites, through to master control, through to the way that you play out and distribute, not only do we have a national network, but we've got local stations as well, and you overlay the digital products on top of that. It's a very complicated set of partners and direct access points at the end, and the technology that's been operating in that space hasn't changed since the 90s, genuinely hasn't, it maybe got a minor upgrade when HD came along in 2001, but it really hasn't changed, so, what we have decided to do is really re-engineer that, it's the only piece of our business that doesn't run natively on the cloud, and we're pleased to announce this week the deal with AWS as the strategic partner to really lift our video workflows in terms of how we produce, create, and really importantly distribute our video to all of those partners, in a way that really transforms the way our creatives can work as well, so, it was a pretty long process going through how you do that safely, because if you get it wrong, you go off the air, and that's really, you cannot do that, you're TV guys, you know that, and so we've been very careful. So AWS have stepped up with some great technologies, but really important they have great vision as well for it. >> So what specifically have you done, you created a new platform in the cloud? >> Yeah, so we were very very fortunate, we've just completed this deal with Disney to sell some of our assets there. It meant that actually we had a greenfield approach to this part of our business, so, for the first time ever we were unencumbered with a legacy, so a blank sheet of paper, and we came at it with the attitude of, if you were a large broadcaster starting your business today, how would you do it? And with that mindset, it takes you into a very different space, so we're working with AWS, and their media services team, and the elemental team within that, to encode our video within our sports news entertainment and local stations, we're using them to move the video from studio locations and football stadiums, and news gathering locations, remote locations, straight into the cloud, to be both managed and produced, and then it stays natively within the cloud, to be published out to distribution partners, whether it's Comcast for cable, whether it's Hulu for live TV, whether it's Apple for the VOD stuff that they do, or whether it's our own services, but that natively stays in the cloud, that workflow, and that just really enables a very different way of thinking. >> And the move is obviously a big challenge, right? I mean it's video, and it's big data. How are you solving that problem, what are the components of that that enable you to do that? >> So I think it would've been very difficult to achieve this vision if some of the products like Outposts and the local zones that AWS have announced at the show, we had early visibility and testing of those. If you're in an edit suite, editing 4K content, you can't necessarily, in a truck, you can't necessarily go back and forth to the cloud all the time, so we had the ability to kind of put a piece of the cloud on-prem or into a truck or into a studio to reduce the, eliminate the latency, and to manage that, so that's one thing. We also have architected it in a way where resilience is core and key, so if for whatever reason one part of the architecture goes down, then other bits of it can pick up the slack, and again, the way that we work with AWS on that front, they've really helped us architect something robust there. >> Yeah, how much does live come into this, I mean you can't afford a slip-up, right, I mean it's one thing to have down time, your point is, you can't go black, but just in terms of what you deliver, whether it's live news, live sports, live entertainment, it's real time. >> So we're predominantly a live company now, and it's the heart of our business, it's what we're great at doing, it's what our creative teams have done all of their lives, and if you take an NFL game on a Sunday, number of cameras, feeds, data, stats, the number of teams you've got both on location and back in the production facility, the number of games you're actually producing at the same time, on a complicated day it can be multiple games, and then the complexity around who you get the signal out to, in effect. Live is difficult, and I think that's why you haven't seen too many broadcasters go in this direction, quite yet, so we know we're an early adopter. We're being very careful and cautious around how we're kind of ramping this up, for example, we're still alongside the fiber connectivity into the cloud, we're also using satellite, so some of those decisions we've put in place as near term. >> You got some redundancies in place just as a risk management. >> Exactly, so we can slowly dial it up, and we're building new facilities around this to help make it happen as well, but the number one thing is giving the consumer a great experience. I'll give you some examples, actually, of how this'll transform the consumer experience, so, we'll be able to do both 4K and 8K natively through this infrastructure with AWS, we can't do that today. Latency will be reduced heavily, so we effectively encode the video once, and the device at the end decodes it, so that really compresses that level of latency that you'll see in a football game. And when you think about things like 5G, I don't know whether you saw Hans and the Verizon team in their announcement yesterday. Things like betting services and other things that we're getting into, you have to have close to zero latency to make those things work, so in the current broadcast chain, we encode and decode and re-encode, and all of these compression chains, and at the end of it, you've got a fairly decent quality signal, but by no means 4K or 8K, and that's one aspect, so the consumer will see a difference. The other thing is, we never want to be in a position again where we use infrastructure from 30 years ago, I mean we, no company in 2019 can afford to be in that position, so, by plugging into AWS, we kind of get that constant drip feed of innovation as it comes, and a very software-focused sort of architecture, as opposed to hardware and cables, which is, you see a lot of in broadcast. So we're pivoting not just the business, but the way we do business as well. >> So the consumer experience is much improved. As well, you mentioned live, of course the mainspring is live, that's where the content is created, but there's also an on-demand experience as well, is that, I presume compressed, so I can get to the best highlights if I miss the game, get the little mini game that I can watch and get a good flavor for it, that is compressed as well? >> Absolutely, so I mean going back to your data question earlier, so this infrastructure natively, as we're putting video through it, Amazon and AWS have the technologies to index the video in real time, to do scene detection, face recognition, a lot of those very forward-leaning technologies that I think for the last 10 years have been more science than fact, but now they're really coming to their own, so all of the video that goes through the pipes in a live form gets really in real time indexed. All of the consumption information about how the video's being consumed on the device comes back in in real time, and we can combine that into an experience, so if you're joining the live feed or coming at the video on demand asset later, you've got a much much richer experience, whether that's searching and finding the bit that you want or whether that's us curating a package of content automatically, using that metadata, so, we're excited about that. >> Talk a bit more about the search, how does that all work? >> Well I think search on a TV experience is still pretty clumsy. >> John: Amen. >> Yeah, it's definitely, and part of that's the user interface, I mean hats off to Comcast and their Xfinity product, a lot of the search now is done by voice through the remote and they're seeing a transformational difference there, but even in some of the OTT streaming services, the search and discovery, I'd use discovery in the same context, it's still clumsy, and that's entirely driven by the data, there's a reason Google are the best in the marketplace at search, because of the level of indexing that they do to create the, and I think AWS and their approach to video will be game-changing for us on this front, and they've obviously got the search technologies on the front end to enable that as well as the indexing technologies on the back end. >> How do you keep up with all the innovation, you mentioned up top that, citing Andy Jassy announce all this stuff, how do you keep up with it all, does it sometimes feel like it's going too fast to be able to absorb it all? >> No, this is a great time to be a CTO, because there's no way, we could complain about it, but the consumer's not going to stop changing the way that they demand content from us, so for me it's a combination of picking the right partner, speaking to them frequently and coming to events like this to meet my peers. I also spend a lot of time with venture capital companies, and very early stage startups to really get an idea around what's coming next over the next three to five years, and getting in early with those customers. I kind of have a mantra with my team internally, where I don't reward them necessarily for just doing business with the old incumbent legacy technology providers. I'd much rather we experiment with the next generation of companies, that's actually how we began our very early relationship with AWS and Amazon, and it's served us well. >> Well, the next time you see Joe or Troy, please give 'em our best. All right, if you will, they're always welcome on theCUBE, as are you, Paul. Paul Cheesbrough from Fox, joining us here on theCUBE, we'll be back with more coverage here live, AWS re:Invent 2019, you're watching theCUBE from the Sands. (techno music)

(futuristic music) >> From the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the Cube covering Comcast Innovation Day. Brought to you by Comcast. >> Hey welcome back Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center here in Sunnyvale, just off the runway here at Moffett Field. Really interesting place, a lot of cool toys downstairs. But we had a conversation today about customer experience and kind of next gen customer experience, and how to drive a better customer experience so that you have a better customer relationship, and we're really excited to have our next guest. She's Kristy Schaffler, the director of customer experience for Comcast California regions. Kristy, great to see you. >> Thank you! Thanks for having me here, I appreciate it. >> Absolutely, so it's funny, we had this great little panel discussion talking about customer experience, but you kept coming back to employees, and really leading with employees before you worry about what's going on with the customer. Where does that mindset come from and how should people be prioritizing employees for the benefit of customers? >> So, you know, honestly, it all comes back to Comcast itself. It is a very strong employee culture. And so the company began as a small company, family owned, and I think that's what's permeated throughout the company as a whole. So when we started to introduced the best practices for a net promoter system overall, it was an easy grasp, I think, for employees to start looking at how is it that I'm going to be able to help overall? Because I think they're all out there trying to help each other. >> Right, well its funny, right? Because there's kind of two dynamics. There's a great dynamic of helping a teammate right? And this goes back to military rule and you fight for the person that you're with, and not necessarily some great cause or old white guys that are back thousands of miles away. But it's different in terms of getting bad news up to the boss. That's a really hard problem, and nobody wants to tell the boss bad news, and in fact, a lot of times, the bad news doesn't get up. >> Exactly. >> So how do you enable people to actually share the real bad news that they might be uncomfortable or not necessarily even addressable. >> Yeah, so what we did was we introduced our employees to the concept of elevations, and so what they do is they input an issue where they're struggling with helping out the customer. There's a barrier to them to be able to deliver the service we're expecting. And what happens is once that gets input, then that actually goes up into the region, we take a look at it and say "We can't really do anything with it here, but we can bump it up to the next level." That eventually gets to a point, especially in the case of employee tools, for example, where is has to go all the way up to the headquarters and there's a team that's ready and waiting for that to happen. So, when you tell them, "Hey, there's something broken here", they have to come back and respond within two weeks. They have to be able to get back with that employee to say "Here is what we're going to do about that" or maybe put on a map to say that we're going to eventually fix that. That communication goes directly back to the person who actually inputted. So, its a direct communication between the employee who's having the issue and the software developer who may actually own that tool. >> So it goes directly-- is it a special type of ticket, if you will? >> Exactly. >> That I want a post knowing that this is a-- I've decided its a high enough priority that I'm going to take the risk, and take the personal risk or professional risk to go ahead and escalate that up the chain of command? >> Right, so what I'm so proud about is we've gone back to the team and said "Give be your number one barrier that's holding you back?" . So they work it out amongst their peers about what they think should be the top issue. Then they get everybody else to watch that issue. Once you get a number of watchers on it, it becomes elevated into the company where it becomes a big issue, and its like Hey, there's a lot of people that look at this issue, want it resolved, and so as soon as they put that in, they assign it to the area that responsible, and that is a direction communication, because as soon as they comment, anybody who's watching that elevation gets an email in their inbox with the actual comment from the person who owns it. So, its a nice targeted communication for issues that they're having. >> So, is there any fanfare when there some big one that gets voted by the broader group that "Oh my gosh, this was a really big deal."? >> So recently, we had something that came up with our Xfinity Home, and so, as you probably know, we have the ability to have security where you can actually look at your cameras on your mobile app. And one of our technicians said "Hey guys, I'm hearing this from the customer.". So what they do is they come back in and they have a huddle with their team and have the discussion, and then that manager takes that and puts it into the system. What happened was it went straight back up to the person, they actually did a software update on it, And then our Senior Vice President of Customer Experience out of our corporate headquarters said "Hey guys, congratulations, that's fantastic! This got fixed!". Then that communication went directly back to the person who input it, so it's just a celebratory moment when you can be able to get that direct feedback from the customer, comes up through the employee. The employee's owning it as an issue that they can't solve personally, but they know to get it to the right people. >> Right. So you've talked a lot earlier today about employee tools, and so, you know, as you clearly there's something that you think is a great investment, how should people think about investment in employee tools actually manifesting itself in better customer experience with the company? >> Exactly. We actually had an elevation that was associated with that, where the employee was using a tool in the home, and when he was trying to check the health of the system, they found that there was a piece of the tool that was breaking off. And so, again, they took it back to the owner of that tool, and they worked with the manufacturer to go back and redesign that tool, so that meant that the customer was able to get better service, because of their tools aren't working, that's what they depend on to be able to serve our customers. >> Right. >> And so, it's key that we take care of them. >> So, just curious, to kind of wrap it up, what has the focus on the NPS, both the score as well as the process, you know, kind of, what's happened from then? Not only the, you know, the direct result in terms of changing in the score and execution details, but more kind of the second order and unintended consequences of that focus? >> Yeah so we've definitely seen our net promoter score increase year over year, so that's very exciting, and we're celebrating that, and we're not there yet, so we still have a ways to go. But the other thing that we're seeing is that the employees are feeling empowered. They're feeling like that they can bring back issues, but something that they share with everybody, they feel like they have a sense of "I can help direct where we need to focus our time and make sure that those issues are being addressed". So, we have an employee survey. It's actually called the ENPS, so actually, we send that out every other month, and ask for employees, you know, "How do you feel about the workplace?", "Are you motivated?". We have some of the highest scores of any company of employees that are motivated because we have set up this system to basically come back and say "Let us know where you need help", and we're coming back in and helping. So, I'm excited about it. >> Great, alright Kristy, well we need to have another followup conversation about NPS another time-- >> Definitely! >> --I need to get educated, but thanks for spending a few minutes, and inviting us to attend today's event. >> Thank you so much, I appreciate it. >> Alright, she's Kristy, I'm Jeff, you're watching the Cube. We're at Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (futuristic music)

>> Of Silicon Valley. It's the Cube, covering Comcast innovation day brought to you by Comcast. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with the cube. We're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center. It's a really cool space right off of Buffet. And they're doing a lot of new technologies here. It's not the only Innovation Center in the country but it's one here in our backyard. And we're excited to be here. Comcast is having a special event talking about really CX, customer experience. They brought together a bunch of super smart people invited us to stop by and we're going to share some of that with you. And we're excited for our very first guest he's Preston Smalley, the VP of product management of Comcast, Preston great to meet you. >> Good to meet you too, Jeff. >> So really cool event today. We talked about a lot of different things about customer experience and really all the applications that are on the front edge that define that customer experience. And you guys are doing a ton of innovation there. >> No, we are I mean I think it's, we were talking just this morning about all the different ways that we're trying to meet customers, where they're at and building products really around those needs, right? >> Yes, so I think the one of the ones that doesn't get enough credit not enough conversation is the voice. And I've got the voice remote at home. And it's really fascinating, especially in the context of there's so many places that what I'm looking for might be and I don't really know what the licensing and arrangements are that you guys have set up with Hulu or with Netflix or with HBO or if it's on HBO on demand or HBO live. So to be able to have kind of a single point of reference to just push that button and say, "Stanford football," and have it show up, it's amazing. >> No, it really is and I think you know, the voice remote has been one of those big hits where you know, people always love their TV remote but, you know, a number years back we started exploring, could we put a voice you know, search capability directly into that remote. And I think what's great is people they're really leaning into it. So we're seeing a billion voice commands happening a month, >> Billion? >> A billion, one b. Through the remote and I think it's just become a part of their life. Right? And I think it's everything from the simple to saying NBC into the remote to the more complicated things like Notre Dame football or what's my WiFi password? or whatever the things they might be asking out of their device. >> So curious on the development side was like about features, but what were some of the real hurdles that you guys knew you had to overcome? And what were some of the surprise hurdles that you didn't necessarily anticipate? >> Sure. I mean, I think the ones you knew about were we've got to be able to translate speech to text and you know, there's there's existing infrastructure that allows for that and doing that with high accuracy. But the good news is we actually had a head start in organizing the content. And so we already had dealt with text based searching of all the different TV shows and movies and such. And so we had all that base of knowledge that we could then tap into. We're now at a stage where that kind of covers the basics but we're trying to understand how do you both increase the breadth and depth of the kinds of commands that you will do through the voice remote. And so you mentioned some at the beginning things like being able to search, not just the content that we bring but things like Netflix or Amazon Prime or soon Hulu. And so partnering with those companies, you get all that information in a way that works very well with the voice remote. >> Right and then you even have it bilingual, right? You even have Spanish and English. >> That's right. >> And it can flip it can switch back and forth on the fly. >> That's right, yeah, so we support both those languages, including a combo a mixed mode where in households where you're seeing both Spanish and English be interwoven, it'll actually even work in those contexts. And then recently, we've also introduced Canadian French and so we license our technology to Rogers and video Tron up in Canada. And so we've now introduced that capability as well. >> That's great, So a long time ago we interviewed Domino's and it's when they first introduced app ordering. And at first you think well app ordering but there was all this like second order benefits that Domino's replied in terms of accuracy of the orders and supply chain impact. So I'm curious if there's some, you know, kind of second order benefits that you guys are realizing with voice that maybe you didn't think, you know, what are some of the surprises that have come out of that? >> Well, that's a good, good question. I think in terms of surprises, it's the types of things that people are looking for you now have, you now have the ability to figure out what kinds of things people are interested in which you wouldn't have been able to know in a typical browse setting. So for example, we support now over 150 apps on X1 as far as third party streaming apps but we know the ones that we don't support because people are saying and into the remote, whereas we wouldn't have got that information prior. >> Right. >> And so now we can actually go and try and meet those needs. >> Now ,it's interesting. You talk about meeting people where they are and you know, one of the things that's happening today is people have all these options, right? They can get it through their Comcast service if they're doing that but you know they may want to have a direct relationship with Hulu is one that you picked out or with Netflix or this historical ones, you guys now are enabling an option for those people that choose to directly engage with those content providers and just use Comcast, as an internet provider. Tell us a little bit about what you guys are doing there. >> Yeah, sure. So obviously, we've had strength in the, in the TV space, and being able to organize and aggregate all that streaming content with your traditional television content. What we've done now is take that investment in X1 and pivot it into a new product this year, we call Xfinity flex. And what that product does is it's a streaming device that should be comfortable for an internet only subscriber that they hook up to their TV. It's 4K, HDR, wireless. And through that device, they're able to aggregate all of that streaming content in one place. So whether it's app content that they may already have an existing subscription from or it's ad supported internet content or maybe they want to buy some more content from us right? And so we'll bundle and sell those subscriptions directly and include that as well. And we've actually been pretty surprised, you know, you take something like Netflix which is highly penetrated in the United States we're pretty surprised how many people are still signing up new as a Netflix subscriber in our service and so by just making it easy and just one click away we found that people are they're opting to do that. >> Right, I'm sure they're happy to hear that in Los Gatos just down the road >> Exactly. No, they're a great partner and either way we're helping them >> Right, right >> They're trying to reach what they call kind of the Netflix nevers people that maybe just hadn't gotten Netflix prior, right? And so we're helping them with that. >> Well, it's really interesting, you know, kind of the you know, kind of TV versus computer you speeding the TV's kind of your passive experience, you're sitting on the couch and you just kind of watching where the computer was more two way and then there was dual screen kind of activity, but you guys are bringing a lot of the stuff that was only available on your pc or your phone now directly into the Comcast experience, you know whether it's YouTube or whatever. So it really it's kind of blurring those lines. But I want to shift gears a little bit about, you know, kind of the role of the internet in homes today, has now expanded beyond entertainment. It's expanded beyond information and IoT now is entering the home probably the biggest one is nested, connected thermostats and connected door bells and ring and you know, we're seeing videos from people's rings all over the place. You guys are sitting again, right in the middle of that ecosystem. So how does IoT and connected devices and thermostats and refrigerators and doorbells impacted the way you guys think about delivering internet into the home? >> Well, I think it's really been a watershed moment for the company, moving from, if you go years back to bringing internet to the wall and making it available in the home to saying look, we've got to actually really control the coverage of that WiFi in the home and make sure that it reaches all the corners of the home but then also providing the control that people want of the devices in there we know that for power users we're seeing today, 20 connected devices on the home network. And I know my house, I'm up to 50, right? And I think what customers don't have and don't want is an IT person directly in their home. They want it to just work naturally and easily. >> Right. >> And so one measurement of success that I know is how often my mother in law gives me a call saying, "Hey, Preston, yeah, this thing's not working in my house." It's got to be really easy and straightforward. >> Right and then just in terms of just being a backhauler and the internet traffic that you guys are hearing because all those connected device or your kids devices, they all want 4k streaming, they're watching movies, you know, come down and watch TV on the big screen, no, no, no, you know, I'm watching it in the room. How does that kind of change the way you guys think about delivering bandwidth cause 4K is a lot more, go to NAB, you're just going to soon be 8K's and 12K's and all kinds of crazy stuff. So your role in actually just delivering bandwidth has changed significantly over the last over a year. >> Absolutely, I mean, there was a stat on bandwidth that surprised me even just to look at it, which is in, in the last 18 years, Comcast has increased bandwidth 17 times. And it's just every, you know, we just keep increasing that because the demand is there, you know, 4K takes, you know, more than your 1080p then did your SD and the more streaming that's happening, it's just, it's requiring more bandwidth, so we're happy to provide that. You know, we now offer one gig internet across all of our homes, we reached 56 million homes, I think it's the most in the United States as far as one gig availability. And so regardless of how much bandwidth you want to take, we're going to bring that to you. And I think recognizing that we also need that coverage in the home and out of the home through Xfinity WiFi hotspots, just trying to bring that there. But you mentioned kids too, I wanted to build on that which is, you know, I'm a parent and being able to control how and where my kids go in the internet is important. And so, you know, being able to put limits, whether it's bed time limits on their devices or we've recently introduced in our testing app base limits. So you could say they can't use Instagram or they can only use it 30 minutes a day. And so being able to have that kind of control puts you in the driver's seat as the parent of kids in the home. >> Preston, I think you're going to be busy for a little while here at the innovations center. >> We are for sure. >> All right, well, thanks for spending a few minutes we could talk all day but we'll have to leave it there. >> All right, thanks Jeff. >> Thanks a lot. He's Preston, I'm Jeff. You're watching the cube. We're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center in Sunnyvale. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (distinct music)

>> Hi. I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another Cube Conversation. We're here in our Palo Alto studios and we got some really interesting guests, really interesting topic. We're going to talk about something called Computational Storage. Nader Salessi is the CEO of NGD Systems. >> Hello. >> And Scott Shadley is the VP of Marketing of NGD Systems. >> Pleasure to see ya again, Peter. >> So guys, let me set the stage and let's get in to this 'cause actually this is kind of interesting. If you think about a lot of the innovations happening in the marketplace right now and the tech industry right now, we're talking about greater densities of data, more advanced algorithms being applied against that data, greater parallelism in the compute, more I/O aggregate required but the presumption behind all this is that we're going to be flying data all over the organization and the other presumption is things like energy consumption, unlimited, who cares but we know the reality is something different. There is an intersection amongst all of that that seems to need a dressing. Nader, take us through that. >> And that's exactly what we are addressing. So we are bringing other than the energy efficiency in a large capacity storage. Instead of moving the data to do any computation on the data, we bring the computation inside the storage to do the computation locally in a distributive fashion as you have number of storage devices in a server without the need of moving the data and save energy. The main area is that it's a focus point for a lot of mega-data centers is the energy density being what per terabyte or what per terabyte per square inch and that's exactly with our technology we are addressing to have a more sufficient energy efficient computational storage into the market. >> So let me build on that a little bit. See if I got it. So that your traditional large system, you have an enormous amount of data, you have a bunch of logic dedicated to know where the data is. Find it. Once it finds it, it brings it, presents it to a CPU, a server somewhere, who then takes some degree of responsibility for formatting it and then presenting it to the application. And you're bringing that out and putting it down closer to the storage itself and so instead of having this enormous bus that's humming along at unbelievable speeds and maybe 35, 40 watts off the card, you're doing it for-- >> A fraction of that so we'll be able to do that with eight terabytes in an eight watt envelope. Or 64 terabytes to be done in a 15 watt envelope. That's the part that doesn't exist today and being able to not only do the storage part of it but bringing the application seamlessly without changing the application, bringing it down and acting on the data and just setting the subset of the results to the upper levels of the application is what market is looking for that doesn't exist today. >> So you're using, you're still using industry standard memory. You're still using industry standard form factors. What is the special sauce inside this that makes it faster and cheaper from a power standpoint? >> Very good question. So we are using a standard PCIe and MPE protocol for the drive. So we, our technology, the algorithm and the controller technology can have this large capacity of the NAND and we are flash agnostic so it could be any NAND, in fact, later on it could be any MBM. It doesn't need to be the NAND and having additional resources through the standard of the TCP/IP we can bring application down. We're not making any changes to the application. >> So we're taking a new approach to thinking about how I/O gets handled at the storage device. It's got to create some use cases, Scott. Tell us about some of the use cases. >> From a use cases perspective, you can think about it you can go to simple terms as thinking about traffic jams. If you have a traffic jam on the freeway when one lane of traffic gets stuck, well if the cars are able to actually relocate and do the movements on their own you eliminate the traffic bandwidth problem. What we can do is we allow you to say okay if I'm going to go look for a picture in a data set. Instead of having the CPU ask for all the different pictures, do the comparison and memory, tie up CPU resources, you just tell the drive go find this picture. It goes, finds this comparison picture. Tells you all about the picture, sends just that little tidbit back to you. So if you're collecting hundreds of thousands of Facebook photos today, you can analyze those and tell every person that's looking for a different photo what their photo is without having to use massive I/O bandwidth. >> So traditional high-performance computing? >> Yes. >> IOT? >> IOT. All of the AI where you're looking for things, where you're trying to have Artificial Intelligence be smarter, you have to throw CPUs and GPUs at it. Start throwing more storage at it 'cause you have to have to store all the data you're generating. Why not let the storage do some of that work? You can offload some of it from CPUs, GPUs and you can scale more effectively. >> So my colleague, David Floier, has been talking about how for example MAP and Hadoop could be accelerated pretty dramatically. But it's got to be more than just MAP? How are you supporting a range of applications. >> The of use cases totally separate, different from these use cases is for the content delivery, video delivery on the last mile or last hundred feet. So today, everybody's recording at home in their DVRs. What if it's set up having 10,000 DVRs in 10,000 homes is sitting in a central place and it has hundreds of thousands of video but everybody points to it. The new challenge with that is the security portion. With all our technology, we can do the encryption on the way out and authentication right at the storage so the concurrent users can be protected from each other. And that technology doesn't exist. >> Let me think about the business model implications now for a second. So I might enter as a private citizen. I might enter into a deal with Xfinity for example in which I agree to be the point of presense for my entire neighborhood. Is it that kind of thing we're talking about? >> Exactly. So that's the new edge delivery but with a higher security that doesn't exist today because it's a major challenge for everybody. >> Interesting. >> For the security and authentication. Even within the same household there could be multiple users that they need to be protected from each other. >> Very interesting. So Scott, you've got a fair amount of background in the systems universe. How is this technology going to change the way we think about systems? >> Yeah, so the beauty of this is we all thought MVE was going to be the savior of the world. It comes in at flash storage. It gives you the unlimited PCA bandwidth bus. The problem is we've already saturated that problem. We've got devices where a box can hold 24 MVE drives but you can only operate three or four of them at a time even with 16 lanes of PC-83. We're going to PC-84. We've still got a bottleneck because all of the I/O still has to go from the drive to host and back to drive and be managed because you can't run on traditional storage anything other than just data placement. Now, the drives are smart. They're relocating the data on it, protecting it, whatever else, but they're still not doing what can really be done with them. Adding this layer of computational storage with devices like ours, all it has to do is go ask the question and the storage can go do it's thing. So if I've got 24 drives, I can go ask 24 questions and I still have bandwidth to actually write data into that system or read other data out of that system at a random access pattern. >> So that brings us back to the question I asked earlier. Namely, to make this more general purpose, there's got to be a pretty robust software capabilities or libraries. How is that being handled so it can be made more general purpose and folks aren't building deep into the architectures specific controller elements. How is that happening? How does it work? >> So one of the biggest kricks whenever you bring something kind of new and innovative that actually solves a problem that does exist is how to get people to address it, right? 'Cause I want ease. I want to do simple. It took forever to get people to adopt SSDs and now we're telling them that we're giving them smart SSDs. What we're saying and what we're able to accomplish with what we're doing on the library front is very light touch. We're using the MVE protocol. We're tunneling through it with a host agent which is a very small modification at the host and it has that now communicate to all the different drives. So, simplifying that crossover of information is really what's important to your exact statement and we do that through C library and it's very modifiable to various different workloads. It's not tied to each workload has to be independently written. >> So the applications of enterprises of all sorts are actually trying to drive, that are more data orientated, computational orientated around that data. Get the computations closer. You guys are helping. From the new systems designs, we still think MVEOF is going to be very, very important but this could complement it. >> Exactly. >> Especially where I/O and the energy that bus becomes a crucial issue. What's on the horizon? >> Deploying this and driving the energy deficiency. It continues to be the biggest point no matter what we do. There is not enough energy in the world. With the amount of storage and server and computer that's being deployed and that's another area that we are focusing on and continue to focus to have the most optimum energy efficient in the smallest footprint in the model. >> So I got one more question. NGD Systems is not a household name. Where are you guys from? >> So we started the company about five years ago. Before that, myself as well as my two co-founders as well as a team of engineers we used to be at a company called Western Digital for a couple of years doing enterprise classes as this. Before that, I started the, in 2003, in this field for SSD, I started a product, a business line for a company called SDC Estate which we created industrial SSDs then later on became an enterprise class SSD. We became known for enterprise class SSDs in the industry. That's the heritage of the last 15, 17 years with many years of SSD development but this computational storage is already done an optimized SSD for a category that doesn't exist today and add to it a computational storage capability on top of it. >> Scott, last word? >> Yeah. Just from that perspective, we really didn't get into a lot of detail on it but the capabilities of reducing the amount of compute you need in a server whether it be a CPU, GPU or otherwise and actually being able to use intelligent storage to drive the bandwidth growth, the MVE fabric, or just the per-box density is just something that nobody's really taken a significant look at in the past. This is a definite solution to move it forward. >> So I'm going to turn that around and say software developers always find a way to fill up the space. So you can on the one hand look at it from a maybe you have low-cost CPUs but even if you have the same cost CPUs you can do so much more 'cause you can move so much more work out closer to the data. >> Correct. = All right. NGD Systems. Very, very interesting conversation. Thanks so much for coming and being on Cube. Once again, this is Peter Burris with a Cube Conversation. We've been speaking with NGD Systems. Thanks a lot for watching.

>> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at PagerDuty Summit in Downtown San Francisco. Actually, out on the wharf. It's called Pier 27, never been here before. Pretty cool venue between Pier 39 and the Bay Bridge. We're excited to have a very seasoned Silicon Valley veteran, Nick Mehta. He's the CEO of Gainsight, but look at his LinkedIn profile. He's been on startups, he's been at venture capital companies and now we hear you might may be growing a little unicorn thingy out of your head after that last round. (Nick laughs) >> I don't know about unicorn-- >> Nick, great to see you. >> But a gray hair, for sure. Seasoned, I think just means gray hair, so. >> Absolutely. >> That's growing in my head for sure. >> For people who aren't familiar with Gainsight, give them the basic overview. >> Sure, Jeff. At Gainsight, we really believe that almost every business model is shifting to ones where customers have more power. Therefore, you can't afford to just sell a customer and move on, and for a long time, businesses, the vendors had all the power. You sell a software product or hardware, you sell a device, and once the customer has it, it's up to them whether they get value. Gainsight, we're trying to help enable a shift to this concept we call customer success, where companies have to own whether or not their customers are getting value, whether they're getting the outcomes they want, whether they're using the stuff they buy, and we build a software product, a SAS application, that helps companies make sure everyone in your company is orienting your customers towards getting more value, and in the process, get them to stay with you longer, spend more money with you, and become bigger fans of your company. >> Right, I imagine a lot of people might confuse it with CRN. >> Right. >> Customer relation management and there's a big 60 storey building going up. >> I've seen the building, and we love those guys. Think of us as an adjacent product to what you might do with a Salesforce automation product like salesforce.com. We actually integrate very tightly with Salesforce, as an example, they're an investor in Gainsight. As you're managing sales with your Salesforce, you're managing your support team, you're managing other systems. How do you manage your customers and make sure they're getting value, make sure they're going to stay with you and grow over time? That's what Gainsight does. >> It's really interesting, 'cause people have been talking about the 360 degree view of the customer forever, but that's the challenge you guys went directly after with your application. >> Yeah, it's funny. That's right. I think, for a long time, people were trying to solve 360 view of the customer, but what they were really solving was 360 view of the deal, 'cause it was all about the sale, and the sale is important, it's still very important, right? It was about marketing leads and who I'm selling to and who has power and those are all really important things but now if you think about a world where the customer has power, you've got to look at 360 view of the customer. Are they getting the outcomes they're looking for? Are they adopting and using what they bought? Are they having a good experience? It's a totally different pivot on the world. It's about the customer, not the deal. >> It's interesting too to parallel that with just SAS and Cloud, because when you have a SAS relationship with a client and an ongoing subscription revenue model, you have to keep delivering value, you have to make sure they're going to pay you next month and the month after and the month after. It's not just a sell it and walk away. >> That's exactly right, Jeff. As you know, first of all, it's way cheaper to keep and grow an existing customer than to go get a new one, and because of that, the SAS business model depends on actual high retention rates. People talk about gross retention rate, basically, "Are you keeping the customers you've got?" And then also your net retention rate, are they spending more money with you over time? And the most successful SAS companies, the highest valued ones, are keeping their customers and getting them to spend more money, so that's one of the most important value drivers in SAS. >> I'm curious, when you guys deploy into a new company, a new customer, what are some of the early a-has that you just see over and over and over again that they just miss before they had this view? >> Totally, so number one is almost every company feels today like they're reactive. They find out about things but very late. A customer leaving them, somebody unhappy, a missed sales opportunity, so number one is just getting your organization to be more proactive. Number two, how do you get everyone in the company aligned around the customer? You might have somebody that cares about that one customer, but that customer is talking to support, they're working with your services team, they're going through training. How do you get everyone aligned around the customer and really have a good view across your whole organization so they're all marching for that? Number three, the third a-ha, is how do you scale that? You might have 100 customers, you might have 1,000, you might have a million. How do you scale the right approach with the right customer, whether it's a human outreach or whether it's a fully digital experience, which we can do both, of course. >> What about, there's customers that are in your sales book as a company, but then there's individuals, right, that you're interacting with. >> That's right. >> And in a big company to (mumbling) a relationship, it's not just two companies. It's thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people that are interacting at a bunch of different levels. >> I'm so glad you said that. >> How do you integrate that in? >> Yeah, totally, it's funny, because if you have a big customer and somebody says, "Is your big customer happy or not?" There's no one answer to that question. There might be one part that loves you, another part that doesn't like you, one part that's rolling out, one part that's using some new stuff, one part that's not using anything, and so you have to be able to break up that company in a lot of little pieces, we call those relationships, and then measure each of those differently and be able to drive each of those forward. So, you're totally right. It's not about one company, it's about a lot of little customers within that big customer. >> Right, now you bought into Cloud early in. I think you were actually at a VC firm looking at Cloud and obviously you're at Gainsight and SAS Application. As you look forward, you just got off a panel, what's next? Where do you see the next big evolution or revolution, if you will, in the way IT services and software are delivered? >> Totally, I think the biggest thing that's happening right now is that Cloud is just a delivery vehicle, I think everyone knows that. SAS is kind of table stakes. Mainstream companies are saying, how do I reinvent my core business by shifting to these business models that are digitally enabled? People call that digital transformation. That's what this panel we just did was all about. That's happening not just in Silicon Valley, that's happening in manufacturers and retailers and financial services companies. When they do that, they're rethinking everything about what they do, how they manage product development, how they actually sell, and also the customer experience, which is where we come in. We think the biggest thing is kind of obvious, it's digital transformation. Underneath that, you can leverage all kinds of new technologies whether it's artificial intelligence, machine learning, bots. But the transformation of mainstream businesses is happening at a rapid speed right now. >> I want to get one last point before we let you go, the impact of social, direct social back to these big companies. My favorite one is Comcast Cares. Every time my internet goes down, I jump on and I tweet-- >> Nick: Oh my God. >> Give my internet back! >> I feel for those Comcast Cares social people. They deal with a lot of mean words. >> No, this is not Xfinity Cares, this is Comcast Cares. But it's a really interesting paradox for companies, because people can reach out directly in kind of a semi public forum, which it wasn't, you know, just calling the 1800 number. How are they integrating that into this customer relationship management? >> Oh my God, we talk about the fact that customers have more power and they have bigger voices. One customer has a much bigger voice than they ever did, and so you have this amazing opportunity to either create a great advocate who could bring you new customers and new sales, or create all these detractors. I think that that public voicing of customer experience has made CEOs much more aware of why it matters. Before, a customer has a bad experience, they type up a letter and mail it to some office that nobody ever reads, and now, this CEO is seeing on her or his Facebook or Twitter feed or LinkedIn the customer upset, and I think that's making them much more aware of customer experience being really important. >> Right, right, and are you seeing, it's interesting to me, there's some senior executives, Michael Dell, Beth Comstock, just picked two out of the hat, that are super active on social-- >> Nick: Oh my gosh, yeah. >> Directly engaging with their community. There's other big companies, which I won't name, where people don't even have a LinkedIn account-- >> That's right. >> Much less a Twitter account. Is there a direct correlation that you're seeing between embracing a direct engagement with your community versus, "Eh, I don't want to say anything bad," which I think, it's either or the other. >> Yeah, I empathize with the fear, because I think people worry about saying something bad, so I get it. I think it's definitely misguided and kind of backwards. You can't stick your head in the sand anymore. Take somebody like Marc Benioff, who's so great at this, and he's on Twitter, he's advocating for causes. He's taking, maybe, controversial stands in some cases, but he's putting himself out there and he cares about his customers. Same thing with Michael Dell, same thing with Beth Comstock. There's so many great CEOs out there, so honestly, at this point, if you're not out there, you look like you have something to hide, right? (laughter) Which is not good. >> Which is not good. Alright, Nick, thanks for taking-- >> Thanks so much, Jeff. >> A few minutes, and congratulations. I saw you were a Top 50 SAS CEO of 2017, and continued success at Gainsight. >> I don't know how I made that list, but I felt honored, so thank you so much. >> Absolutely. >> I really appreciate it. >> We'll see you next time. He's Nick Mehta, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from PagerDuty Summit 2017. Thanks for watching.

(car engines) >> [Voiceover] Live from Silicon Valley, it's theCube, covering Mobile World Congress 2017. Brought to you by Intel. >> Okay welcome back everyone, we are here live in Palo Alto for the Cube's special coverage of two days of wall to wall coverage of Mobile World Congress 2017, we're doing it here in Palo Alto, covering what's happening in Barcelona, with folks over there, we've got analysts, we've got reporters, and we have friends there phoning in and sharing their commentary, certainly on Twitter as well. And we're doing it from inside our new studio in Palo Alto, and we're going to break it down. As their day ends, we're going to be analyzing and discussing the future implications of what it all means, teasing out the top news, giving our opinion and our commentary in reaction to all the breaking news. I'm John Furrier with Silicon Angle and theCube. I think the next guest is Willie Lu, who is a Facebook friend who I've been having conversations with, it's great to meet in person. He's a wireless guru, going back to his ph.D in the 90s, now chairman of the Palo Alto Research Group. Extensive experience in dealing with fixed wireless, mobile wireless, but more importantly, creating the technologies with industry to understand what's it going to take to invent the future. Willie, great to have you inside the studio. >> Thank you very much, John. >> One of the great things about having the Palo Alto studio is while everyone's out in Barcelona right now having dinner, probably going out for the evening, we get to sit inside the studio and talk about what they did today. So the big story inside Mobile World Congress in Barcelona was obviously, the devices. You're seeing Blackberry making a comeback, Nokia, you know, pumping their new muscles, bringing back the old Nokia Phone, and rolling out their new ones. Huawei, you got bringing in their Apple killer, they want to go up and down the stack. So certainly the device centric jewelry, if you will, the phone, the eye candy, the VR, the AR, the virtual reality. But also 5G. Intel, Qualcomm, Ericsson, Nokia, all the major telcos are rolling out essentially what they are calling 5G and beyond, which is essentially not just wireless, but an end to end network to be the new fabric of wireless. Not only for the devices in the phones, but the devices being the people in the cars. And the factories, and the cities, and the entertainment, this is an area that you have a lot of work in at a technical level. So I went to spend this segment talking about the picture of the future. Right? You know, obviously we need that next step up function of architecture, we need that next network. We need those next devices, that's something that you're thinking a lot about. What's your picture, what's the future look like for you? >> Yeah, thanks John. I'm the wireless mobile system architect for almost 25 to 30 years. So from my point of view, because I'm the technical eyes, from a technical point of view, when you're talking about mobile communications, normally we have three factors we have to trade off, compromise each other, okay? The first is high speed transmission, the second one is mobility, fluid mobility, the third one is capacity. Make sure capacity, right? Make sure the operator make money, right? So, before, previously in the last 20 or 30 years, our phones from the step-by-step, from 2G which is GSM or CDMA, the basic CDMA which is IS-95 to 3G which is WCDMA to the 4G which is OFGMA, including LTE. And these phones basically is still focused on one issues, even mobility issue, even high speed issue, but in the future in the 4G, 5G, 6G whatever, you know we need a very high speed. Very high speed, one giga beyond, over there. We also need a mobility, frame mobility, right? We also make sure able to make money, the operator make money, right? >> That's the number one. >> So how to, we want three, we want mobility, high speed, capacity. We, everything we need. And then single one standard is not going to work, because if you want pick LTE, a very high speed, you lose the mobility. If you pick free mobility, you lose the bandwidth. So the issue, that's the issue. We, 20 years ago, when I do the ph.D and when I was Stanford professor， I was a consulting professor at Stanford, we started the open wireless access, it's means converge a multiple standard together, converge the wifi, LTE, and the broadband wide access together in a same device. So when you have a wifi, you can go to wifi, which is very high speed, can be very very high speed in the future right? And then you go to the highway, where very fast there, you cannot get a wifi, but you can get LTE, or 3G or 2G, that's fine. So that's the research we are working on the open wireless access or open wireless architecture or OWA. And there's, it's the (inaudible) map is from TGMA, CGMA, OFDMA, to OWA. Okay, that's the technical point side. And for the device design side, my picture is for the next five years, ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, which very clear, okay? Before that, in the last 20 years, everybody their mobile phones, is still a carrier-centric mobile phone. Is means when I have a mobile phone, it's AT&T, it's AT&T, it's locked to AT&T or it's AT&T phone, right? And right now, from last year to this year, we are on a very important transition from the carrier-centric phone to a user-centric phone. Yeah probably, couple of company, Google, other company, they are working on the, on the virtualization, mobile virtualization right? Means what? Means a user can pick up different operators on the way, right? So this phone, if I don't have signal, I don't have T-mobile signal, I can using AT&T to get a LTE. And if I don't have AT&T, I can use Verizon. So we are on the way from the carrier-centric to a user-centric at the moment. >> [John] So let's stop right there, 'cus I really think you're onto something really important and I think this is, there's some history to look at. I mean if you look at wireless, I agree, this is a very carrier-centric. And for the consumers out there, you can think of just the basic concepts of most people's experience: I want to unlock my phone, right? These are kind of known terms of consumers, whether they're, it's my kids or adults. "I don't want to be stuck to the carrier" "on their plan." "I want to move my phone around." But that's just on the service. Now you want to decouple it further to the person. So, take a car. I might want to have a relationship with my car, as if I'm, going to be never buying a car, I might use autonomous cars or Uber or other services. And I get into the car and I need personalization. So this is the user-centric thing is that super important point. But now we are stuck, still stuck, in my opinion, in siloed telco stacks, meaning I'm stuck to the carrier, I have limited services, and now I want to shift that to better performance. I mean you can't look any further than hyper convergence or converged infrastructure on the data centers. So where it's networking combining. So are you taking that same approach to say that you think wireless will converge in? Is that the idea? >> Yes, when you wireless converging. Take examples: wifi, LTE, and converge together. So your phone basically is running on wifi. Actually in the priority order, wifi first. Wifi first, and then second is LTE, and then probably 3G is the second one there. So, and then if you have wifi you go wifi, and if car, the car also can be a micro base station, okay, to connect to the wifi, LTE together, and then distribute to the passengers in the car, so this is also we can, for the future, work in mobile office project. I can stay in the car, and the car itself is a sub base station, and then connect each other. There also, okay let's talking about the future picture, okay. In the next five years, okay, there's a couple companies working, already working on the mobile wifi network. So it's means if I am living in Palo Alto there, I'm moving around in my neighborhood in Palo Alto, I don't have, I don't even add AT&T, Verizon operator, I can have a mobile service because I can share all neighbor's wifi networks together as a mobile protocol. Then I can moving, I can hike, I jogging, your house, my house to there. We can share the wifi together, we call. We divide the wifi into the home wifi, and the visitor wifi we can rent the service to outside. So this called community mobile network based on wifi. That's the next five years picture. >> [John] How does that happen? I mean I just found, first of all I believe, and that's a great philosophy. And you're starting to see Xfinity do that with their current wifi, creating a little metro neighborhood network. That's really hard to pull off 'cus of the security concerns. Is it viable in the next five years, do you think that is even doable? What has to happen to make that happen? >> I think this going to be not a major issue because wifi still have a lot of bandwidth, right? And you can exchange bandwidth with security issue there. So wifi is more easy to the security than LTE, because LTE for the similar network, the spectrum is very expensive right? So that's why we cannot using a lot of overheads for security. So I always say, the most secure is wifi, then LTE. 'Cus LTE, the data, right? When you open it, there's not much overhead available for secure encryption, whatever there. So wifi you can, >> [John] So they're maximizing their signal for performance, not security. >> Yeah, not security. And wifi you can take like 40%, 30% the overhead load for the security and it's very secure. So that's not issue, that's why. That's the five, next five moment. Okay and then beyond that, when the mobile wifi neighborhood is built, right? Then we back to the traditional settled operator networks there. We'll converge together, then user for the next ten years, after ten years, user can pick up his preferred operators as he like. For example, if I'm in Palo Alto and then AT&T give me a good package, right? They give an offer, and I click my AT&T, it's go to AT&T. And I back to the Cupertino and Cupertino, >> [John] It's like network hopping. >> Yeah. >> It's like not radio hop, frequency hopping, it's network hopping. >> That's an idea, right right right. But still you need a converging network info together. >> So let's take it back to Mobile World Congress. So right now the current present is, that they're painting the picture of a 5G world where autonomous vehicles, entertainment, smart cities, and smart home are all being powered by an end-to-end, from the network to the edge, software and capabilities, from silicon software to device. >> Yes. >> So that's cool, makes a lot of sense. Now is 5G truly the enabler, that 5, 6 G is the wireless enabler for this in your view? In your picture of the future, what role does wireless play in creating this new fabric? >> Yeah, I think it's very much possible because when I say when we converge the different wireless solutions together then you have more space to focus on one direction, you focus on very high speed. We can one giga, two giga, even ten giga is enough right? And the other side, we increase the mobility issue, right? And then the other side we converge on the operator side. In the future, I mean AT&T, Verizon, it's not, they're not going to just provide the cellular mobile access only, they want to provide more service around its 5G, 6G, be new business model right? For traditional business model, you just provide the radio, the hand phone access. But in future, this operator is going to help provide more service, service-oriented platform. >> Is that consistent, that service business model, is that viable in your vision of the future. What is, or let me ask differently. What is the business model for the operator, in your vision of this multi-network world? What do they do, what kind of services are they delivering? >> I think in the future, very important service, around the ten years, around the time frame, is very important service is called mobile virtualization service. So in the future, Google can run mobile service, but they're working with AT&T and Verizon. >> [John] It's like MVL on steroids, basically, it's all doing pipe management. >> Yeah and then let's say for example, Google did a contract with AT&T for how much bandwidth every year, probably one P, or a large bandwidth. And then AT&T provides its bandwidth to Google, right? And then AT&T can do other service also, so AT&T save a lot of cost in the individual marketing. You know, right now the operator spend a lot of money for the marketing, right? But later they can cut off this cost, because Google can do marketing, right? >> [John] So it's, this is economic reconfiguration. >> [Willie] Yes. >> Okay, so here's the next question. In today's landscape of the marketplace, what would be bad behavior from your standpoint, that would screw up that future? What would be the signs that it's not going the right way in the ecosystem, because part of the things that I'm seeing with things like Intel and the big players is there's an ecosystem that needs to get agreement; That to accelerate the future, there has to be a new model, a new network. What are some signs that are warning signs for you? You know, people holding onto a certain thing, certain technology. What would be a red flag for you, if you look at the marketplace, what kind of activities would say "woah, that's not good." >> Okay, I think it depends on, for the operator, I think it's not good, in the future it's not good, you just focus on making money from the access size. Because in the future, access will be cheaper, cheaper, cheaper, cheaper. So if AT&T just focus on access revenue, it's going to red flag, okay? So you have to provide total solution, right? And from the vendor side, you cannot support one single standards. You only support LTE, it's going to dangerous. So you have to be open. So in the future, I think in the future, from my personal point of view, Comcast, AT&T, all these company, they are going to merge together. Because they want provide a converged solution, right? So in the future access will be cheaper, cheaper, cheaper, cheaper. And then you have to, they have another revenues from the other sides. >> [John] I wrote a paper in 2001 called "Broadband Starvation". And it was the beginning before wifi really hit, and then wifi hit and New York Times picked it up, was one of those stories. But we talked about the starvation from America for more bandwidth. Obviously even outside the US, you saw accelerated bandwidth, broadband penetration. I called it the "Broadband Starvation" because broadband starvation was in rural areas, so it always was limited by the actual physical connection. You know, the cable, the last mile. We all know the history of the policy side of the Arbox and the days of you know, the telephone companies. But now Comcast and now AT&T (laugh), they're the fiber to the home, there's some, or the coaxial to the home. They bring in, off the street and terminate it into the house. Wireless changes that. Is that a scenario where you see 5G going where ultimately, this notion of fiber to the home could be you know, ancient history? Or, 'cus that always, there's still construction. You got to still trench, you still got provisions, and the circuits to the homes. You know, is wireless an opportunity there? And will that free up more competition? >> Yeah, I think that's a big question, and a big picture, okay. I think from my personal experience, when we design technology for next 10 years, 15 years, the very big picture you think about is very important is: we're on the way to transition, to transition from the mobile communication to a personal communication. So previously, the mobile communication >> Personal communication, you mean people-centric? >> Yeah, people-centric. So mobile communication, previously we call mobile communication is a telecom term. Is means just for connection, just for envisioning connection, right? But in future >> [John] Endpoint, that's it. >> Yeah that's right. So we're on the way. Even at some universities, they change the course from mobile communication to personal communication. Personal communication means is: everything is personal. Personal-centric, right? So in a personal-centric, so in the future, the operator, the vendor, the provider think about, in the future, you're not only provider, information connection only, you provide anything a person needed for his life, including health, security, right? Everything there. >> [John] Transportation. >> Transportation, yeah. >> [John] Could be all digital services. >> The transportation, security. >> healthcare. >> And everything there and then each application will need a different requirements of the bandwidth, right? Especially for the health, we need lots of lots of video transmission, right? And this is going to, that's why we need a WLAN, a wireless network, is converging together. And then wireless is still a lots, lots of way we have to invent. >> The word "convergence" is back again, it's happening everywhere. Willie, thanks so much for the commentary. Love this, this is consistent with, Wikibonds had a research, siliconANGLE had a research, Peter Burris who was on our opening segment talking about not IOT, only IOT, internet of things, but IOT and P, people. Internet of People. >> [Willie] Yes, and think about IOT, okay? What's the major technologies inside the IOT? One is sensing technology, okay? The other one is wireless connection, right? You want to connect to that billion billion nodes together, so we need a multidimensional, different wireless technology. How to connect this billion billion nodes together? That's also we need wireless technology. >> I worry about that not happening because I think the telcos have been slow, and I think I'm seeing movement now with the telcos, that now is the time to make their move. NFV's viable, and now their business model is somewhat emerging. The question is, will they be fast enough to move? That's the question. >> Yeah, I think. >> Are they? >> That's also my question, because the moving, the virtualization like from Google, they're moving very fast than a traditional telco, right? So telco have to change their way of thinking in the business, right? >> I think Google should be the telco, take over the telco. >> That's why in the the next five, ten years, people just go to Google, using Google account to get access to the phone, to the mobile phone. You get a phone number from Google, right? >> They're going to call it Apple World Congress, or Google World Congress. Uber World Congress, if we don't. >> But anyway, we still need everybody work together. It's like different wireless standards converge together. And different company they also want to converge together. And then eventually, the target is very simple. It's the personal, it's the personal centric, user centric, the wireless world. That's the future. >> [John] Willie Lu here from Palo Alto Research. In here Palo Alto, a good Facebook friend guru in the wireless area all the way down from back in his ph.D days, as a practitioner and inventing the future. Great vision, I agree with it 100%. I think Intel and all the big players would agree. The ecosystem of smart movement right now is critical, and I think there's a huge opportunity to, to tie it all together there in IOT and people, a people-centric world. Congratulations on your work at the Wireless Mobile Congress that you started, and also the open, this open alliance, open wireless alliance. Congratulations. Willie Lu here inside theCube, I'm John Furrier, for more exclusive coverage of Mobile World Congress here in Palo Alto after the short break. (electronic music) (cheerful electronic music)