foreign continued coverage of AWS re invent my name is Savannah Peterson and I am very excited to be joined by two brilliant blokes in the space of efficiency and performance whether you're on Prem or in the cloud today's discussion is going to be fascinating please welcome Brad and Simon to the show how are you Simon coming in from the UK how you feeling well thank you excellent and Brad we have you coming in from Seattle how are you this morning doing fine thank you excellent and feeling bookish given your background love that I know that you both really care about efficiency and performance it's a very hot topic both of the show and in the industry right now I'm curious I'm going to open it up with you Simon what challenges and I think you've actually continued to tackle these throughout the course of your career what challenges were you facing and wanting to solve when you started yellow dog um really we're just looking at cloud and coming from an on-premise environment really wanted to be able to make accessing Cloud particularly a volume to be simple and straightforward um if you look at today at the number of instance types available from the major Cloud providers there's more than seven thousand different instance types whereas on-prem you go along you select your processes you select your systems it's already be really easy when you hit the cloud you've just got this amazing amount of choice so really it was all about how can you make Intelligent Decisions for you know are you going to run your workload how to match it with what you've got on premise and that was really the inspiration for Rafael so staying there for just a second what does yellow dog provide customers is a SAS system so um you get to it by accessing through the yellow platform and what it allows people to do is to be able to make Intelligent Decisions about where to run their workload would that be on premise or in the cloud it has a wealth of information it understands the costs the performance the latency and the availability of every different instance type in all different clouds it really allows people to uh to be able to make use of that information provision exactly what they need and to be able to run their workloads yeah it also includes a provisioner and it also includes a scheduler as well which is a cloud native scheduler so it's designed to be able to cope with um with cloud in terms of things like spots and interruptions and be able to uh to reschedule and fail over between clouds if there's ever need to do so yeah that sounds incredible and I know this means a lot for partners like AMD Brad talk to me about the partnership and what this means for AMD for your customers yeah absolutely it you know we're excited to be aligned with the uh with a company like yellow dog it's it's um you know the the importance of compute is becoming more and more prevalent every day and it's it's always been top of mind but especially now when you think about what the uh what the economy and the rest of the world is kind of facing over the next you know probably a year or longer it's so important that um that you're able to maximize your dollars and your spend and doing away with uh with uh with absolute certainty that you've got the right type of people behind you uh ensuring that you're your dollars are being spent very wisely and the great thing about yell dogs that they have tremendous insight into uh into cost optimization computer optimization across the entire Globe their their indexes is quite remarkable and what it does is it allows uh customers to actually see just how performant and cost efficient AMD is so it allows us to really put our best foot forward and and gives customers a chance to understand something that they probably weren't uh more familiar with the fact that uh that AMD uh is a tremendous a tremendous value in the marketplace yeah and and uh Simon can you tell us a little bit more about the yellow dog index I'm glad you brought that up Brad yes the yellow index is uh is essentially it's live it's available for anyone to access you can just go to index.yam.tech and you'll be able to see pretty much every single instance type that's available from all the major Cloud providers and be able to make your selection are you looking for GPU type nodes are you looking for AMD processors are you looking just for performance essentially what you're able to do is create a live view of effectively what's available in different data centers around the world and the price at this moment in time also just uh as Brad mentioned in terms of you know cost efficiency and uh and being taking green values seriously as we should we should do the yellow index also has the ability to be able to see at that point in time where the best place to be at a runner job is based upon the lowest carbon impact of running at this moment in time and that for many organizations gives an amazing Insight in not just about being able to find the the understand fishing processes but being able to ensure the greenest energy possible is powering that process when you want to be able to run your workload it's so powerful what you just said and I think when we exactly it's not just about it's not just about power but it's about place when we are are looking at Global Computing at scale what I know that there's ESG advantages in and ESG being a very hot topic when we're talking about AMW on AWS and and and leveraging tools like yellow dog what other sorts of advantages Beyond being least carbon impactful can your Mutual customers benefit from so it's not like I say there's many other features you know a very important thing when you're running a high performance Computing workload is being able to match the instruction set that you're running on premise and then being able to use that in the cloud as well and also to be able to make Intelligent Decisions of where should something run should would something be more efficient um to build on premise should we always try and maximize our on-premise resources before going into the cloud there's a lot about being able to just be able to make decisions and yellow itself it makes thousands of decisions per second to be in a workout where the the best and most optimized places to to run your workload yeah so Brad you work with a lot of companies at scale what type of scale is possible when leveraging Technologies like AMD and yellow dog combined well you know I love the fact that you mentioned uh you know HPC and it's one of the areas that actually is most exciting for for me personally and for and for AMD with the combination of yellow dog and AWS and AWS launched the very first HPC uh instance type last year and you know we're we're we haven't even begun to answer a question we haven't gotten to see um the full-scale capability in the cloud when it comes to these uh these very coordinated and very refined workloads that are running at massive scale and and uh you know we've got some some products we'll be launched in the near future as well that are incredibly performant and you know to be honest I don't think I don't think we have even come close to seeing the scale relative to somebody's very optimized workloads in HPC uh that that we're capable of so um we're excited we're excited for the next few years to see how how we can wrap in um some of the tremendous success that AMD has had on-prem in these these these massive compute centers and replicating that same success inside AWS with companies like yellow dog it's uh it we're excited to see what uh what's what's going to come forward can you give us a preview of anything on the record that gets you really excited about the future I was going to ask you what what had you looking forward to 2023 and Beyond but nothing well not nothing official of course uh but um I will say this you know AMD has recently successful had the launch for Genoa uh it's our next next-gen release and it is um it is proving to be it absolutely is the dominant compute engine it at this point that exists and you know when you start to couple that with the the prowess of AWS you know you could see that over time becoming something potentially that um you know um can really start to change the compute landscape quite a bit so we're hopeful that you know in the future we'll have something along those lines uh with AWS and others and um we're very uh we're very bullish in that area love it uh Simon what about you you've been passionate about low carbon I.T for a long time is carbon neutral Tech in our future what I realize is a bold and lofty claim for you but feel free to give us any of your future predictions um yeah so well I started here trying to build solutions for you know many years ago so 2006 um I was part of a team that launched the the world's lowest powered Windows PC that was actually based on the AMD technology back then so uh you can tell that AMD have been working on a low power for us for a long time in terms of carbon neutral yes I think um certainly there's a there's a few data centers around the world now that are getting very close to uh to carbon neutral some of which may have already achieved it so that's really interesting but so you know the the second part of that is really the the manufacturer of everything that goes into those Services systems and being able to to get to uh you know a net zero on those over a period of time and when we do that which is yeah not without challenges but but certainly possible then we really will have carbon neutral I.T which will be uh a benefit to everyone you know mankind itself yeah casual statement and I have to say that I wholeheartedly agree I think that it's one of the greater challenges of Our Generation especially as what we're able to do in HPC in particular since we're talking about it is only going to grow and scale and magnitude and the amount of data that we have to organize certain process is is wild even today so I love that I'm curious is there anything that you can share with us that's in the pipeline for Yellow Dog anything coming up in the future that's very exciting um so we're coming up very soon um we're going to release something called um version 4 again log which contains um what we call a resource framework which is all about making sure you've got everything you need before you run a job either on-prem or in the cloud so that might be anything from making sure you've got the right licenses making sure that your data is all in the right location making sure you've got all aspects of your workflow ready before you start launching compute and start really but you know burning through dollars with computer could potentially sat there uh not not doing anything until other tasks keep catch up so we're really excited about this new V4 release which will uh which will come out very soon awesome we can't wait to learn more about that hopefully here again on the cube Brad what do Partnerships with companies like yellowdog meme for you and for the customers that you're able to serve yeah it's it's incredibly important I it's you know there's one of the difficulties in in compute that we have today especially in Cloud compute there's there's so much available at this point I mean there was a point in time it was very simple and straightforward it's not even close to being that anymore green so you know one of the things I love about yellow dog itself is actually it does a great they do a great job of making very complex situations and environments fairly simple to understand especially from a business perspective and so one of the things that we love about it is it actually helps our customers you know the AMD direct customers better understand how to properly use our technology and to get the most out of it and so it's difficult for us to articulate that message because you know we are a Semiconductor Company so sometimes it's a little tough to be able to articulate workloads and applications in the way that our customer base will be able to understand but you know it's it's so critical to have companies like yellow dog in the middle that can actually you know make that translation for us directly to the customer um you know and and especially too when you start thinking about ESG and environmental relationships and I'd like to make a comment and one of the things that is fantastic about AMD AWS and yellow we all share the same Mission and we're very public about those missions about just being better to the to the planet and um you know AMD has taken some very aggressive uh targets through 2025 much beyond anything that the industry has expected and you know because of that we are you know we are the most um we are the most power efficient xa6 product on the marketplace and it's not even close and you know I look forward to the day when uh you know you start looking at instance types inside these public Cloud providers in conjunction with the old dog and you can actually even start to see maybe potentially what that carbon footprint is based on those decisions you make on compute and um you know considering that more than half to spend for everybody is generally compute in these environments it's critical to really know what your true impact in the world is and um it's just one of the best parts about a partnership like this oh what a wonderful note to close on and I love both the Synergy between all the partners on a technology level but most importantly on a mission level because none of it matters if we don't have a planet that we can continue to innovate on so I'm I'm really grateful that you're both here fighting a good fight working together and also making a lot of information available for companies of all different sizes as they're navigating very complex decision trees in and operating their stack so thank you both Simon and Brad I really appreciate your time it's been incredibly insightful and thank you to our audience for tuning in to our continuing coverage of AWS re invent here on thecube my name is Savannah Peterson and I look forward to learning more with you soon foreign [Music]

>>thank you everyone for joining. I'm here today to talk about English controllers. AP Gateways and service mention communities three very hot topics that are also frequently confusing. So I'm Richard Lee, founder CEO of Ambassador Labs, formerly known as Data Wire. We sponsor a number of popular open source projects that are part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, including telepresence and Ambassador, which is a kubernetes native AP gateway. And most of what I'm going to talk about today is related to our work around ambassador. Uh huh. So I want to start by talking about application architecture, er and workflow on kubernetes and how applications that are being built on kubernetes really differ from how they used to be built. So when you're building applications on kubernetes, the traditional architectures is the very famous monolith, and the monolith is a central piece of software. It's one giant thing that you build, deployed run, and the value of a monolith is it's really simple. And if you think about the monolithic development process, more importantly, is the architecture er is really reflecting that workflow. So with the monolith, you have a very centralized development process. You tend not to release too frequently because you have all these different development teams that are working on different features, and then you decide in advance when you're going to release that particular pieces offering. Everyone works towards that release train, and you have specialized teams. You have a development team which has all your developers. You have a Q A team. You have a release team, you have an operations team, so that's your typical development organization and workflow with a monolithic application. As organization shift to micro >>services, they adopt a very different development paradigm. It's a decentralized development paradigm where you have lots of different independent teams that are simultaneously working on different parts of the application, and those application components are really shipped as independent services. And so you really have a continuous release cycle because instead of synchronizing all your teams around one particular vehicle, you have so many different release vehicles that each team is able to ship a soon as they're ready. And so we call this full cycle development because that team is >>really responsible, not just for the coding of that micro service, but also the testing and the release and operations of that service. Um, >>so this is a huge change, particularly with workflow. And there's a lot of implications for this, s o. I have a diagram here that just try to visualize a little bit more the difference in organization >>with the monolith. You have everyone who works on this monolith with micro services. You have the yellow folks work on the Yellow Micro Service, and the purple folks work on the Purple Micro Service and maybe just one person work on the Orange Micro Service and so forth. >>So there's a lot more diversity around your teams and your micro services, and it lets you really adjust the granularity of your development to your specific business need. So how do users actually access your micro services? Well, with the monolith, it's pretty straightforward. You have one big thing. So you just tell the Internet while I have this one big thing on the Internet, make sure you send all your travel to the big thing. But when you have micro services and you have a bunch of different micro services, how do users actually access these micro services? So the solution is an AP gateway, so the gateway consolidates all access to your micro services, so requests come from the Internet. They go to your AP gateway. The AP Gateway looks at these requests, and based on the nature of these requests, it routes them to the appropriate micro service. And because the AP gateway is centralizing thing access to all the micro services, it also really helps you simplify authentication, observe ability, routing all these different crosscutting concerns. Because instead of implementing authentication in each >>of your micro services, which would be a maintenance nightmare and a security nightmare, you put all your authentication in your AP gateway. So if you look at this world of micro services, AP gateways are really important part of your infrastructure, which are really necessary and pre micro services. Pre kubernetes Unhappy Gateway Well valuable was much more optional. So that's one of the really big things around. Recognizing with the micro services architecture er, you >>really need to start thinking much more about maybe a gateway. The other consideration within a P A gateway is around your management workflow because, as I mentioned, each team is actually response for their own micro service, which also means each team needs to be able to independently manage the gateway. So Team A working on that micro service needs to be able to tell the AP at Gateway. This this is >>how I want you to write. Request to my micro service, and the Purple team needs to be able to say something different for how purple requests get right into the Purple Micro Service. So that's also really important consideration as you think about AP gateways and how it fits in your architecture. Because it's not just about your architecture. It's also about your workflow. So let me talk about a PR gateways on kubernetes. I'm going to start by talking about ingress. So ingress is the process of getting traffic from the Internet to services inside the cluster kubernetes. From an architectural perspective, it actually has a requirement that all the different pods in a kubernetes cluster needs to communicate with each other. And as a consequence, what Kubernetes does is it creates its own private network space for all these pods, and each pod gets its own I p address. So this makes things very, very simple for inter pod communication. Cooper in any is, on the other hand, does not say very much around how traffic should actually get into the cluster. So there's a lot of detail around how traffic actually, once it's in the cluster, how you routed around the cluster and it's very opinionated about how this works but getting traffic into the cluster. There's a lot of different options on there's multiple strategies pot i p. There's ingress. There's low bounce of resource is there's no port. >>I'm not gonna go into exhaustive detail on all these different options on. I'm going to just talk about the most common approach that most organizations take today. So the most common strategy for routing is coupling an external load balancer with an ingress controller. And so an external load balancer can be >>ah, Harvard load balancer. It could be a virtual machine. It could be a cloud load balancer. But the key requirement for an external load balancer >>is to be able to attack to stable I people he address so that you can actually map a domain name and DNS to that particular external load balancer and that external load balancer, usually but not always well, then route traffic and pass that traffic straight through to your ingress controller, and then your English controller takes that traffic and then routes it internally inside >>kubernetes to the various pods that are running your micro services. There are >>other approaches, but this is the most common approach. And the reason for this is that the alternative approaches really required each of your micro services to be exposed outside of the cluster, which causes a lot of challenges around management and deployment and maintenance that you generally want to avoid. So I've been talking about in English controller. What exactly is an English controller? So in English controller is an application that can process rules according to the kubernetes English specifications. Strangely, Kubernetes is not actually ship with a built in English controller. Um, I say strangely because you think, well, getting traffic into a cluster is probably a pretty common requirement. And it is. It turns out that this is complex enough that there's no one size fits all English controller. And so there is a set of ingress >>rules that are part of the kubernetes English specifications at specified how traffic gets route into the cluster >>and then you need a proxy that can actually route this traffic to these different pods. And so an increase controller really translates between the kubernetes configuration and the >>proxy configuration and common proxies for ingress. Controllers include H a proxy envoy Proxy or Engine X. So >>let me talk a little bit more about these common proxies. So all these proxies and there >>are many other proxies I'm just highlighting what I consider to be probably the most three most well established proxies. Uh, h a proxy, uh, Engine X and envoy proxies. So H a proxy is managed by a plastic technology start in 2000 and one, um, the H a proxy organization actually creates an ingress controller. And before they kept created ingress controller, there was an open source project called Voyager, which built in ingress Controller on >>H a proxy engine X managed by engine. Xing, subsequently acquired by F five Also open source started a little bit later. The proxy in 2004. And there's the engine Xing breast, which is a community project. Um, that's the most popular a zwelling the engine Next Inc Kubernetes English project which is maintained by the company. This is a common source of confusion because sometimes people will think that they're using the ingress engine X ingress controller, and it's not clear if they're using this commercially supported version or the open source version, and they actually, although they have very similar names, uh, they actually have different functionality. Finally. Envoy Proxy, the newest entrant to the proxy market originally developed by engineers that lift the ride sharing company. They subsequently donated it to the cloud. Native Computing Foundation Envoy has become probably the most popular cloud native proxy. It's used by Ambassador uh, the A P a. Gateway. It's using the SDO service mash. It's using VM Ware Contour. It's been used by Amazon and at mesh. It's probably the most common proxy in the cloud native world. So, as I mentioned, there's a lot of different options for ingress. Controller is the most common. Is the engine X ingress controller, not the one maintained by Engine X Inc but the one that's part of the Cooper Nannies project? Um, ambassador is the most popular envoy based option. Another common option is the SDO Gateway, which is directly integrated with the SDO mesh, and that's >>actually part of Dr Enterprise. So with all these choices around English controller. How do you actually decide? Well, the reality is the ingress specifications very limited. >>And the reason for this is that getting traffic into the cluster there's a lot of nuance into how you want to do that. And it turns out it's very challenging to create a generic one size fits all specifications because of the vast diversity of implementations and choices that are available to end users. And so you don't see English specifying anything around resilience. So if >>you want to specify a time out or rate limiting, it's not possible in dresses really limited to support for http. So if you're using GSPC or Web sockets, you can't use the ingress specifications, um, different ways of routing >>authentication. The list goes on and on. And so what happens is that different English controllers extend the core ingress specifications to support these use cases in different ways. Yeah, so engine X ingress they actually use a combination of config maps and the English Resource is plus custom annotations that extend the ingress to really let you configure a lot of additional extensions. Um, that is exposing the engineers ingress with Ambassador. We actually use custom resource definitions different CRTs that extend kubernetes itself to configure ambassador. And one of the benefits of the CRD approach is that we can create a standard schema that's actually validated by kubernetes. So when you do a coup control apply of an ambassador CRD coop Control can immediately validate and tell >>you if you're actually applying a valid schema in format for your ambassador configuration on As I previously mentioned, ambassadors built on envoy proxy, >>it's the Gateway also uses C R D s they can to use a necks tension of the service match CRD s as opposed to dedicated Gateway C R D s on again sdo Gateway is built on envoy privacy. So I've been talking a lot about English controllers. But the title of my talk was really about AP gateways and English controllers and service smashed. So what's the difference between an English controller and an AP gateway? So to recap, an immigrant controller processes kubernetes English routing rules and a P I. G. Wave is a central point for managing all your traffic to community services. It typically has additional functionality such as authentication, observe, ability, a >>developer portal and so forth. So what you find Is that not all Ap gateways or English controllers? Because some MP gateways don't support kubernetes at all. S o eso you can't make the can't be ingress controllers and not all ingrates. Controllers support the functionality such as authentication, observe, ability, developer portal >>that you would typically associate with an AP gateway. So, generally speaking, um, AP gateways that run on kubernetes should be considered a super set oven ingress controller. But if the A p a gateway doesn't run on kubernetes, then it's an AP gateway and not an increase controller. Yeah, so what's the difference between a service Machin and AP Gateway? So an AP gateway is really >>focused on traffic into and out of a cluster, so the political term for this is North South traffic. A service mesh is focused on traffic between services in a cluster East West traffic. All service meshes need >>an AP gateway, so it's Theo includes a basic ingress or a P a gateway called the SDO gateway, because a service mention needs traffic from the Internet to be routed into the mesh >>before it can actually do anything Omelet. Proxy, as I mentioned, is the most common proxy for both mesh and gateways. Dr. Enterprise provides an envoy based solution out of the box. >>Uh, SDO Gateway. The reason Dr does this is because, as I mentioned, kubernetes doesn't come package with an ingress. Uh, it makes sense for Dr Enterprise to provide something that's easy to get going. No extra steps required because with Dr Enterprise, you can deploy it and get going. Get exposed on the Internet without any additional software. Dr. Enterprise can also be easily upgraded to ambassador because they're both built on envoy and interest. Consistent routing. Semantics. It also with Ambassador. You get >>greater security for for single sign on. There's a lot of security by default that's configured directly into Ambassador Better control over TLS. Things like that. Um And then finally, there's commercial support that's actually available for Ambassador. SDO is an open source project that has a has a very broad community but no commercial support options. So to recap, ingress controllers and AP gateways are critical pieces of your cloud native stack. So make sure that you choose something that works well for you. >>And I think a lot of times organizations don't think critically enough about the AP gateway until they're much further down the Cuban and a journey. Considerations around how to choose that a p a gateway include functionality such as How does it do with traffic management and >>observe ability? Doesn't support the protocols that you need also nonfunctional requirements such as Does it integrate with your workflow? Do you offer commercial support? Can you get commercial support for this on a P? A. Gateway is focused on north south traffic, so traffic into and out of your kubernetes cluster. A service match is focused on East West traffic, so traffic between different services inside the same cluster. Dr. Enterprise includes SDO Gateway out of the box easy to use but can also be extended with ambassador for enhanced functionality and security. So thank you for your time. Hope this was helpful in understanding the difference between a P gateways, English controllers and service meshes and how you should be thinking about that on your kubernetes deployment

( bright upbeat music) >> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube conversation. >> Hey, welcome back. You're ready, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we are still getting through COVID. It's a hot August day here in San Francisco Bay Area. It is 99, somebody said in the city that's hot, but we're still getting through it. We're still reaching out to the community, we're still talking to leaders in all the areas that we cover. And one of the really interesting areas is natural language processing. And it's a small kind of subset. We'll get into it a little bit more detail, we are very specific place within the applied AI world. And one of my very good friends and Cube alumni, who's really an expert in the space, he's coming back for his second startup in the space. And we're joined by Ben, he's Ben Chung, the Co-founder of Ogmagod. Did I get that right Ben, Ogmagod. >> That's correct. That's right. >> Great to see you again. >> Thank you for inviting to the show. >> Well, I love it. One of the topics that we've been covering a lot Ben is applied AI. 'Cause there's just so much kind of conversation about artificial intelligence, the machine learning is kind of this global big thing. And it kind of reminds me of kind of big data or cloud, in the generic it's interesting but it's really not that interesting, 'cause that's really not where it gets applied. Where I think what's much more interesting and why I wanted to have you back on is, where is it actually being applied in applications? And where are we seeing it in solutions? And where is it actually changing people's lives, changing people's days, changing people's behavior, and you seem to have a propensity for this stuff. It was five years ago, I looked July five years ago, we had you on and you had found Genie, which was a natural anti processing company focused on scheduling. Successful exit, sold that to Microsoft and they baked it into who knows, there probably baked in all over the place. Left there now you've done it again. So before we get into it. What so intriguing to you about natural language processing for all the different kind of opportunities that you might go after from an AI perspective? What's special about this realm that keeps drawing you back? >> Yeah, sure, I mean it, to be honest it was not anything premeditated, I kind of stumbled on it. I before this, I was more like an infrastructure guy spent a number of years at VMware and had a blast there and learned a lot. Then I kind of just stumble on it. Because when we started doing the startup, we didn't intend it to be a AI startup or anything like that. We just had a problem that my co-founder Charles Lee and I really wanted to solve, which is to help people, solve people's scheduling problem. But very shortly after getting into and start looking at some use cases, we thought that the easiest way is to communicate with people like humans do to help them do the scheduling. And that's kind of how I stumbled on it. And it wasn't until that I stumbled on it that I realized that it has a lot of attraction to me, because I throughout my whole life, I'm always very interested in the human emotions of it, how humans relate to each other. And that's always been the hidden side project thing, I do traveling to figure out stuff and get a little bit of that. But once I start getting into this field, I realized that there's a lot about it, about humanity and how humans communicate that it was kind of like a hidden interest for me. That now suddenly coming out and it kind of just got me hooked. >> Right, that's awesome. So one of the things and we'll just get into it is people are a little bit familiar with natural language processing, probably from Siri and from Google and from Alexa and increasingly some of these tools but I think, you kind of rapidly find out beyond what's the weather and play a song and tell me a joke that the functionality is relatively limited. So when people think about natural language and they have that as a reference point, how do you help them see that it's a lot more than, asking Siri for the weather. >> Yeah, there are a lot of capability but also hopefully not offensive to some of the tech visionaries. Just as a guy who is dealing with it every day, there are also lots of limitation is not nearly to the degree of refinements. Like what might being preach out there saying that the machines are going to take over everything in one day, we have a lot of struggles that are very basic stuff with machines. However, there has been definitely a lot of breakthroughs in the last few years and that's why I'm dedicating my life and my time into this area because I think that it just, there's going to be huge amount of innovation continuously going in this area. So that's at the high level, but if you talk about, in terms of artificial intelligence and in general, I think, I have my own understanding, I'm more like an apply guy, lot of academics so what I'm going to say might make some academics cringe because I'm more like a everyday practical guy and try to re conciliate these concepts myself. The way that I view is that artificial intelligence has really tried to help mimic some human capabilities that originally thought that is the domain of human, only humans are able to do it, but machines now try to demonstrate that machine can do it, like as though the humans could. So and then usually people get that mixed up with machine learning, to me is actually quite different thing. Artificial intelligence just like what I mentioned, machine learning is just a technique or a science or way of applying like to leverage this capability, machine learning capability in solving these artificial intelligent problems, to make it more achievable to raise the bar on it. So I don't think we should use them interchangeably, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Because today machine learning is the big deal that are making the progress wise, tomorrow might be something else to help improve artificial intelligence. And in the past, it was something else before machine learning. So it's a progression, the machine learning is the very powerful and popular technique right now to being used. Now within artificial intelligence, I think you mentioned that there are various different domains and topics, there is like object recognition deals with image processing, there's speech detection, there's a video and what I would call action or situation detection. And then there's natural language processing, which is the domain that I'm in that is really in that stage of where we seeing quite a bit of break through, but it's not quite there yet. Whereas versus speech detection and image processing actually has done a tremendous progress in the past. So and in you can say that like the innovation there is not as obvious or as leap frogging as the natural language processing. >> Right, so some of the other examples that we know about that are shared often for machine learning or say, the visual thing, can you identify a chihuahua from the blueberry muffin, which sounds kind of funny until you see the pictures, they actually look very, very similar. And the noise stated that Google and their Google Photos, right, has so many pictures such a huge and diverse data set in which to train the machines to identify a chihuahua versus a blueberry muffin. Or you take the case in Tesla, if you've watched any of their autonomous vehicle stuff and their computer vision process and they have the fleet, hundreds of thousands of cars that are recording across many, many cameras reporting back every night. With natural language processing you don't have that kind of a data set. So when you think about training the machine to the way that I speak, which is different than the way you speak and the little nuances, even if we're trying to say the same thing, I would imagine that the variety in the data set is so much higher and the quantity of the data set is so much lower that's got to be a kind of special machine learning challenge. >> Yes, it is. I think the people say that there is, we are at the cusp of, being able to understand language in general, I don't believe that we are very far away from that. And even if when you narrow scope to say, like focus on one single language like English, even within that, we still very far from it. So I think the reality, at least for me, speaking from the ground level, kind of person tried to make use of these capabilities is that you really have to narrow it to a very narrow domain to focus on and bound it. And my previous startup is really that our assistant to help you schedule meetings, that assistant doesn't understand anything else other than scheduling, we were only able to train it to really focus on doing scheduling, if you try to ask it about joke or ask anything else, it wouldn't be able to understand that. So, I think the reality on the ground at least from what I see of a practical application and being successful at it, you really need to like have a very narrow domain in which you apply these capabilities. And then in terms of technology being used broadly in natural language processing in my view there are two parts of it, one is the input, which is sometimes call natural language understanding. And then that part is actually very good progress. And then the other part is the natural language generation, meaning that the machine knows how to compose sentences and generate back to you, that is still very, very early days. So there is that break up and then if you go further, I don't want to bore you Jeff here with all these different nuances, but when you look at natural language understanding, there are a lot of areas like what we call topic extraction or entity extraction, event extraction. So that's to extract the right things and understand those things from the sentences, there is sentimental analysis knowing that where some a sentence expresses somebody angry or some different kinds of emotions, there is summarization, meaning that I can take sets of texts or paragraphs of text and summarize with fewer words for you. So and then there is like dialogue management, which manages the dialogue with the person. So they're like these various different fields within it. So the deeper you look, there's like the more stuff within it and there's more challenges. So it's not like a blanket statement, say like, "Hey, we could conquer on this." And if you digging deep there's some good progress in certain this area. But some areas like it's really just getting started. >> Right, well we talked about in getting ready for this call and kind of reviewing some of the high level concepts of and you brought up, what is the vocab? So first you have to just learn what is the vocabulary, which a lot of people probably think it stops there. But really then what is the meaning of the vocabulary, but even more important is the intent, right, which is all driven by context. And so the complexity, beyond vocabulary is super high and extremely nuanced. So how do you start to approach algorithmically, to start to call out these things like intent or I mean, people talk about sentiment all the time, that's kind of an old marketing thing, but when you're talking about specific details, to drive a conversation, and you're also oh, by the way, converting back and forth between voice and text to run the algorithms in a text based system, I assume inside the computer, not a voice system. How do you start to identify and programmatically define intent and context? >> Yeah, just to share a little anecdote, like one of the most interesting part of, since I started this journey six years ago and also interesting was a very frustrating part is that, especially when I was doing the scheduling system, is that how sloppy people are with their communication and how little that they say they communicate to you and expect you to understand. And when we were doing the scheduling assistant, we're constantly challenged by somebody telling us certain things and we look at it's like, well, what do they mean exactly? For example, like one of the simple thing that we used to talk a lot with new people coming on the team about is that when people say they want to schedule next week, they don't necessarily mean next week, what they mean is not this week. So it doesn't, if you like take it literally and you say, "Oh, sorry, Jeff, there is no time available next week." And actually Jeff probably not even remember that he told you to schedule next week, to what he remember, what he told you not to schedule it this week. So when you come back to them and say, "Jeff, you have nothing available this week or next week." And Jeff might say like, while your assistant is kind of dumb, like, why are you asking me this question? If there was nothing available next week, just scheduled the week after next week. But the problem is that you literally said next week, so if we took you literally, we would cause unhappiness for you. But we kind of have to guess like what exactly you mean. So don't like this a good example where they're like lot of sloppiness and lot of contextual things that we have to take into account when we communicate what humans, or when we try to understand what they say. So yeah, is exactly your point is not like mathematics is not simple logic. There are a lot of things to it. So the way that I look at it, there are really two parts of it. There's the science part and then there's art part to it. The science part is like what people normally talk about and I mentioned earlier, you have to narrow your domain to a very narrow domain. Because you cannot, you don't have the luxury of collecting infinite data set like Google does. You as a startup, or any team within a corporation, you cannot expect to have that kind of data set that Google or Microsoft or Facebook has. So without the data set, huge data set, so you want to deliver something with a smaller data set. So you have to narrow your domain. So that's one of the science part. The other part is I think people talk about all the time to be very disciplined about data collection and creating training data sets so that you have a very clean and good training data set. So these two are very important on the science part and that's expected. But I think a lot of people don't realize this, what I would call the art part of it, is really there are two parts to that. One is exactly like what you said Jeff is to narrow your domain or make some assumption within the domain, so that you can make some guesses about the context because the user is not giving it to you verbally or giving you to you into text. A lot of us we find out visually by looking at the person as we communicate with them. Or even harder we have some kind of empathetic understanding or situational understanding, meaning that there is some knowledge that we know that Jeff is in this situation, therefore, I understand what he's saying right now means this or that Jeff is a tech guy like me, therefore, he's saying certain thing, I have the empathetic understanding that he meant this as a tech guy. So that's a really hard kind of part of it to capture or make some good guesses about the context. So that's one part. The other part is that you can only guess so much. So you have to really design the user experience, you have to be very careful how you design the user experience to try what you don't know. So that it's not frustrating to the user or to put guardrails in place such that the user doesn't go out of balm and start going to the place where you are not trained for that you don't have to understand it. >> Right, because it's so interesting, 'cause we talked about that before that so much of communication, it's not hard to know that communication is really hard, emails are horrible. We have a hard time as humans, unless we're looking at each other and pick up all these nonverbal cues that add additional context and am I being heard, am I being understood? Does this person seem to understand what I'm trying to say? Is it not getting in? I mean, there's so many these kind of nonverbal cues as you've expressed, that really support the communication of ideas beyond simply the words in which we speak. So and then the other thing you got to worry about too, as you said, ultimately, it's user experience if the user experience sucks, for instance, if you're just super slow, 'cause you're not ready to make some guesses on context and it just takes for a long time, people are not going to to use the thing. So I'm curious on the presentation of the results, right? Lots of different ways that that can happen. Lots of different ways to screw it up. But how do you do it in such a way that it's actually adding value to some specific task or job and maybe this is a good segue to talk about what you're doing now at Ogmagod, I'm sorry I have to look again. I haven't memorized that yet. 'Cause what you're also doing if I recall is you're taking out an additional group of data and additional datasets in beyond simply this conversational flow. But ultimately, you've got to suck it in, as you said, you've got to do the analysis on it. But at the end of the day, it's really about effective presentation of that data in a way that people can do something with it. So tell us a little bit about what you're doing now beyond scheduling in the old days. >> Sure, yeah, I left Microsoft late last year and started a new startup. It's called Ogmagod. And what we do is to help salespeople to be more effective, understand the customer better so that they have higher probability of winning the deal or to be able to shorten the sales cycle. And oftentimes, a lot of the sales cycle got LinkedIn is because of the lack of understanding and there's also, I say, we focus on B2B sales. So for B2B salespeople, the world's really changed a lot since the internet came about. In the old days is really about, tell it to explain what your product is and so that your customer understand your product, but the new days is really about not explaining your product because the customer can find out everything about your product by looking at your website or maybe your marketing people did do such a good job, they already communicated to the customer exactly what your product does. But really to win out against other people you really like almost like a consultant to go to your customer and say, like, I have done your job, almost like I've done your job before I know about your company. And let me try to help you to fix this problem. And our product fit in as part of that, but our focus is let's fix this problem. So how would you be able to talk like that, like you've done this job before? Like you worked at this company before? How do you get at the level of information that you can present yourself that way to the customer and differentiate yourself against all the other people who try to get their attention, all the people sending them email every day automatically, how do you differentiate that? So we felt that the way that you do it is really have the depth of understanding where your customer that is unrivaled by anybody else. Now sure, you can do that, you can Google your customer all day, reorder news report, know all the leadership, could follow them on social media-- >> Right, they're supposed to be doing all this stuff, right Ben, they're supposed to be doing all this stuff and with Google and the internet there's no excuse anymore. It's like, how did you not do your homework? You just have to get the Yellow Pages. >> Yeah, why didn't you do your work? Yes, people get beat up by their management saying like, "Oh, how come you miss this? "It's right there go on Google." But the truth is that you have to be empathetic to a salesperson. A lot of people don't realize that for a salesperson, every salesperson, you might own 300 accounts in your territory. And a lot of times in terms of companies, there might be thousands of companies in your territory. Are you going to spend seven hours, follow all these 300 companies and read all tweet. Check out the thousands of employees in each of these company, their LinkedIn profiles, look at their job listings, look at all the news articles. It's impossible to do as a human, as a person. If you do that you'll be sitting in your computer all day and you never even get to the door to have a conversation with the customer. So that is the challenge so I felt like salespeople really put up impossible tasks, because all this information out there, you're expected it to know. And if you screwed up because you didn't check, then it's your fault. But then on the same time, how can they check all 300 accounts and be on top of everything? So, what we thought is that like, "Hey, we made a lot of progress "on natural language processing "and natural language understanding." And salespeople what they look for is a quite narrow domain. They are looking for some very specific thing related to what they selling, and very specific projects, pinpoints budget related to what they're selling. So it's a very narrow domain, we felt like it's not super narrow. It's a little bit broader than I would say scheduling. But it's still very narrow the kind of things that they're looking for. They're looking for those buying triggers. They're looking for problem statements within the customers that relate to what they selling. So we think that we can use, develop a bunch of machine learning models and use what's available in terms of the web. What's out there on the web, the type of information out there. And to be able to say, like, salesperson, you don't need to go and keep up and scan, all the tweets and all the news and everything else for these 300 companies that you cover, we'll scan all of them, we will put them into our machine learning pipeline and filter out all the junk, because there are lots of junk out there, like Nike, that's like, I don't know, hundreds of news release probably per week. And most of them are not relevant to you. It doesn't make sense for you to read all of those. So but how about we read all of them and we extract out, we it's difficult topic extraction, we extract out the topic that you're looking for and then we organize it and present to you. Not just we extracting out the topic. Once we get the topic how about we look up all the people that are related to that topic in the company for you so that you can call on them. So you know what you want to talk to them about, which is this topic or this pin point. And you know who to talk to, these are the people. So that's what we do. That's that's really interesting. It's been a tagline around here for a long time, right separating the signal from the noise. And I think what you have identified, right is, as you said, now we live in the age where all the information is out there. In fact, there's too much information. So you should be able to find what you're looking for. But to your point, there's too much. So how do you find the filter? How do you find the trusted kind of conduit for information so that you're not just simply overwhelmed that what you're talking about, if I hear you right, is you're actually querying publicly available data for particular types of I imagine phrases, keywords, sentences, digital transformation initiative, blah, blah, blah. And then basically then coalescing the ecosystem around that particular data point. And then how do you then present that back to the salesperson who's trying to figure out what he's going to work on today. >> B2B salespeople, they start with an opportunity. So opportunity is actually a very concrete word at least in the tech B2B sales-- >> We know, we see the 60 stories in downtown San Francisco will validate statement. (laughs) >> Yes, so yeah, so it starts with the word opportunity. So the output is a set of potential opportunity. So it speaks to the salespersons language and say, when you use us, we don't just say "Hey, Jeff, there's this news article about Twilio and you cover Twilio, that's interesting to you." "Oh, there's a guy at Twilio that matches the kind of persona that you sell into." We don't start with that, we start with, "Jeff, there are six Opportunities for you at Twilio. "Let's explain what those things are." And then explain the people behind these opportunities so that you can start qualify them. So get you started, right way in your vocabulary in a package that you understand. So that I think that's what differentiates us. >> Right, and at some point in time, would you potentially just thinking logically down the road, you have some type of Salesforce API. So it just pumps into whatever their existing system is. That they're working every day. And then it describes based on the algorithm, why the system identified this opportunity, what the attributes are that flagged it, who are the right people, et cetera. Awesome, so what kind of data are you requiring-- >> Yes, you are designing our product wise. >> (laughs) Since Dave and John, watch this. They're going to want to talk to you, I'm sure. But what type of data sets are you querying? >> There are lots of them. We learned most of it by through the process working for salespeople, meaning that we work for salespeople, we may be quote, unquote, stand behind their back and see what they're searching. They're searching LinkedIn. They're searching jobs. They're searching endless court transcripts, they're looking at 10K 10Q's, they dig up various, some people are very, very creative, digging out various parts of the web and find really good information. The challenge is that they can't do this to scale. They can't do it for 300 accounts, 'cause we're doing for one accounts very is laborious. So there are various different places that we can find information. And in terms of the pattern that we're looking for. It's not just keyword, it's really concepts. We call it a topic. We really looking for very specific topics that the salesperson looks for. And that's not just a word, because sometimes words is very misleading. For example, I tell you one of the common words in tech is called Jenkins. Jenkins is a very popular technologies, continuous delivery technologies step but Jenkins is also happens to be a very common last name for people. >> (laughs) Well, I'm always reminded of our Intel days with all the acronyms, but my favorite is ASP 'Cause you could use ASP twice in the same sentence and mean two different things, right? Average selling price or application service provider back in the days before we call them clouds, but yeah, so the nuances is so tricky. So within kind of what you're doing then and as you described working within defined data sets and keeping the UX and user experience pretty dialed in and within the rails, are there particular types of opportunities in terms of B2B types of opportunities that fit better that have kind of a richer data set, a higher efficacy in the returns what do you kind of seeing in terms of great opportunities for you guys. >> We're still early, so I can't tell you that like from a global view because we are like less than one year old experience, quite honestly. But so far we are being led by the customer. So meaning that there is an interesting customer, they ask us to look for certain topics or certain things. And we always find it to my surprise, because and that really is, like, I'm constantly surprised by how much is there out in the web, like what you were saying, like customer ask us to look for something. And I thought for sure, this thing we couldn't do it, we can find it. And we gave it a try and low and behold, there it is. It's out there. So, to be honest, I can't tell you at this point, because I have not run into any limits. But that is because we are still a very young startup. And we are not like Google. We're not trying to be all encompassing looking for everything and looking over everything. We're just looking over everything that a salesperson wants, that's it. >> So I'm going to make you jump up a couple levels. Since you've been thinking about this and working on this for a long time, there's a lot of conversation about machines taking everybody's jobs, then there's the whole kind of sidetrack launch to that, which is no, it's all about helping people do better jobs and helping people do more higher value work and less drudgery. I mean, that sounds so consistent with what you're talking about, I wonder as somebody down in the weeds of artificial intelligence, if you can kind of tell us your vision of how this is going to unfold over the next several years, is it just going to be many, many, many little applications that slowly before we know it are going to have moved, along many fronts very far, or do you still see it's such a fundamental human thing in terms of the communication that the these machines will get better at learning, but ultimately, they can kind of fulfill this promise of taking care of the drudgery and freeing up the people to make what are actually much harder decisions from a computer's point of view than maybe the things that we think about that a three year old could ascertain with very little extra effort. >> Yeah, if you take a look at what we do and hopefully it didn't sound like we're underselling our startup but a lot of it really is we taking away to time consumer and also grunt work process of the data collection and cleaning up the data. The humans, the real human intelligence should be focused on data analysis to be able to derive lots of insights of the data. So and to be able to formulate a strategy, how to win the account, how to win the deal. That's what's the human intelligence should be focused on. The other part by struggling with doing the Google search and in return 300 entries, in 30 different pages and you have to click through each one and then give up the first week, that kind of data collection data hunting work, we are really, it should not, I don't think it's worthy, quite honestly, for a very educated person to deal with. And we can invest it back in helping the human to do what the humans are really good at is that, how do I talk to Jeff? And I'm going to get a deal out to Jeff, how can I help and through helping him solving his problem, how can I take the burden of solving the problem from Jeff's head and solve the problem for him? That's what human intelligence for me as a salesperson, I would prefer to do that instead of sitting in front of my desk and doing googling, so net net what I'm trying to say using ourselves as an example is that we're not taking over the job of a salesperson, there was no way that we can close a deal for you. But what we're doing is that we're empowering you so that you look like you're on top of 300 accounts and you talk to any of those accounts, you'll be able to talk to the people, your customer, their particular customer, like you know them inside out. And without you being the superhuman to be able to do all this stuff, but as far as that customer is concerned, sounds like you were on top of all this stuff all day and that's all you do, you have no other customers, they're the only customer. In fact, you on top of 300 customers. So that's kind of the value that we see, to provide to the human is to allow you to scale by removing these grunt work that are preventing you from scaling or living up to your potential how you wanted to present yourself, how you want to deliver yourself. There's no way that we can be smarter than human, no way. I just don't see it not in my lifetime. >> I just love, we've had a lot of conversations over the years and you talking about the difficulty in training the computers on some really nuanced kind of human things versus the things that they're very very good at and keeping the AI in the right guard wheel is probably just as important as keeping the user interface in the right lane as well to make sure that it's a mutually beneficial exchange and one doesn't go off and completely miss the benefit to the other. Well, Ben, it's a great story. Really exciting place to dedicate yourself and we are just digging watching the story and we're going to enjoy watching this one unfold. So thanks for taking a few minutes in sharing your insight on natural language processing and this applied machine learning techniques. >> Thank you, Jeff. It's always a pleasure. >> Yep, all right. He's Ben, am Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (bright upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> From the SiliconANGLE media office, in Boston Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. (upbeat music) Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, welcome to this cube conversation. This is part of our CIO series and Jason Thomas is here, he's the CIO of Cole, Scott, and Kissane. CSK is Florida's largest civil defense law firm. Cube along Jason Thomas, great to see you again, thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> So, let's talk a little bit about, the firm. largest firm in Florida, the focus is on Civil Defense, so you got lawyers, you got paralegals running around, you got demanding clients. What's the business like that's driving your technology strategy? >> so when I I'm new to legal, so this, I've been here about almost four years now, so I started January. a whole different world. I came from, from Startup Biotech, that line of business and a completely different animal. it's some of what you imagine, very always on the go, very busy, lot of business, we open dozens of cases a day, new cases, so a lot of things going on. >> Really event driven? >> Yeah very, very busy, so and you know technology's, you know the firm has taken stance that, technology is very important, to the firm and, we want to use the best technology possible, to make us as efficient as possible, so that's the chief driver, for tech at the law firm. >> So tech, you know, 15 years ago, whatever it was like, take an email to SaaS, right? So, but I would imagine you're focusing a lot on just attorney and employee productivity, maybe collaboration, document management, compliance. Are those some of the hot topics? And how are you applying technology to deal with those? >> Yep, so that is a big drive, efficiency, using technology to be efficient, and to make our folks productive. What we don't want to see, and that you see sometimes, you throw a whole bunch of technology at folks thinking that it's going to make them efficient and productive, and actually, it could be the greatest technology in the world for one place, and apply it, and you put it in another firm, and it makes us unproductive, so that's kind of the magic there. Kind of a trick to figuring out, what is it that actually is going to make us productive? >> Are there pretty clear swim lanes in your firm? Or is there a lot of shadow IT going on? Because I would imagine a lot of the frustration of, you know, IT folks is, you get the shadow IT, they bring in a point product, and that IT goes, "CIO's calling clean up this crime scene," and is that a problem in your firm specifically? Or even your industry? Or is it pretty much hey, let the tech folks figure out what the right tool for the job is? >> so in my mind the trick here is, it's not going to be any one person, or any practice group that's going to define what's the best option, what's the best tech. I mean thankfully for me, I do try and drive most of the tech out the firm, but the key is, you have to understand how the business runs. Just because it's cool tech, or it's working at one firm, doesn't mean it's going to apply or work in others. So, I spent a lot of time, in conversations with, a lot of the partners and associates. I try to make myself available as much, just to chat, see what they're doing. see what could make them more efficient. Sometimes if you don't ask, they don't even tell you, but if you ask the question, you can learn a lot in 20 minutes from somebody. And that kind of helps me decide, okay, what is going to make sense, or what's the next thing I should be looking at, to help folks out. >> So basically, Columbo questions, for those of you who remember Columbo, kind of ask your basic questions? What about work flow, how do you spend your time? What kinds of questions would you ask attorneys? >> honestly they could be calling about something completely unrelated to what, you know, what I'm thinking. It just could be as simple as, "Hey I'm this thing with this program where I'm trying to do X and this is the way we're doing now. Is there a better way to do it?" Or, it could be as simple as, we just kind of fall into the conversation based on other things. You know. They just want to talk to somebody sometimes. But they're not necessarily going to bring it up, or just don't have the time, they don't have the time. >> So a lot of times in theCUBE we get caught up, We love the tech, we talk about data science, and machine learning, and block chains and everything else, but then there's this basic blocking and tackling, that the CIO has to worry about. I wondered if you could share your perspectives based on your experience, just in terms of, some of the advice you might give to, organizations that are maybe growing, maybe haven't had the experience of a CIO that's been around the block, maybe in different industries? But some of the basic blocking and tackling that you see, that maybe doesn't happen in organizations, that really needs to happen. >> the expectation, or when you're thinking about, thinking about what the next thing is for the firm, or for your company, you also want to kind of think, you want to think long term as well. You want to think three to five years out. So, if we do this now and based on our current, growth projections, will this work for us in three years? Will this work for us in five years? Or what's our game plan? Maybe we start small, and, expand from there, but you don't want to just plan for the immediate you want to plan for the future. That's kind of, I think that's what CIO should be doing. It's not just about the tech, or is it going to work in our environment, but is it going to work for us down the road. Because we don't want, nobody, CFOs don't want to hear, and CEOs don't want to hear that, hey, yeah we just bought this thing last year, but, yeah we're going to have to buy something new now because it doesn't work anymore. >> But it does happen sometimes? >> It happens all the time, you know. >> Right, I remember, it goes a ways back now, but the federal rules of civil procedure, I think it was 2006, and everybody was rushing to plug holes because the courts ruled that electronic material was evidentiary, for whatever, seven years or something. So everybody was like okay, we need to have a system that allows us to comply. So, they went out and bought email archiving systems, which they knew they were going to have to throw away in three or four year. So how do you deal with it? Do you face that? Especially in a compliance oriented world, and you just try to sort of balance the cost and the throw away nature of that initiative with something more strategic? How do you deal with that? And how do you communicate that to the powers that be? >> Number one, no one likes to be held at gunpoint, number one, and especially my boss, so. I mean he gets it right, I mean there's regulations. But I will say, nothing happens as fast as everyone says it's going to happen. so there's always that idea. There's always this panic, oh we've got to put this in, and honestly I feel like tech folks use an excuse, and of course I do too. Say like, oh you all this is awesome. You know, we get to put something new in and, you know no one's going to say no and, it's not always the best approach, and again you kind of have to look at it long term, holistically for the business. You know, what is really going to happen in a few years? Is this technology going to even be a thing in a few years? Or is it just like, just to satisfy an immediate solution? Because again, I don't want, the last thing I hate doing is putting something in and telling my boss that it has to be replaced. He hates hearing that, and I don't want to tell him that either, quite frankly it's embarrassing. >> I don't blame your boss. >> Yeah it's embarrassing, it's just, let's do it right the first time. >> How do you do planning? I mean obviously there's a technology component, of planning, but I'm inferring from what you say that the end of technology is kind of the, the last thing you should be worrying about. You should be worried about the direction of the firm, the business, the growth plan, how do you do, as CIO, planning and how do you align that with the business? >> conversations, so lots of conversations. Lots of conversations with the attorneys. continued conversations with my boss, the CEO, and sometimes I'm not really great about it sometimes. And, you know, weeks will go by, you know, and I won't even have a conversation with him, about what's going on, and he wants to know what's going on. He doesn't understand all of it, but in those, you know, 15, 20 minute conversations, you'll be surprised what you'll learn. What's going on in the business that you didn't, or I didn't know about, and from there I can make decisions about, you know, six months from now, or next year, or during budgeting season, what it is that we need because, budgeting season is not really the time that you need to try and figure out what you want to do for next year. You want to have a plan months before that. You know, You already want to have kind of an idea of what you want to do, I mean, I've been talking to my CFO since, the beginning of summer about things we want to do for 2020. you know, six months, nine months, ahead of time, so. >> So, do you do basically annual planning? Do you try to look out further? Do you formally document that stuff? >> Every quarter, so we have, we kind of have most of the conversations with our, with my CFO and COO. every quarter we have kind of a list of projects/ what is it we want to do for the next couple quarters. We just kind of, track that and based on what we're seeing and how we do, then we, basically we plan each quarter, is how it comes down to. And we have a, we'll call it a white board, a virtual white board of what we're doing and what we want to do. >> But relatively near the midterm planning, you know doing like five year plannings though right? >> No. >> Waste of time to try to do that, or? At least in your business, maybe in pharmaceuticals? >> At least for us it was really, it's hard for us, to do that because of how quickly we grew over the last, again I've only been here almost four years, but even when I started, in 2015, I think we had somewhere around 300 plus attorneys. Now we're somewhere in the 475 range, I'm not saying no one saw that happening, but I don't think we expected that. I mean business has been great and we're happy, and we're fortunate to have it, but you can only plan so much. but do the best you can with the data you have. >> And for organization structure, you report to the CFO, is that correct? >> CEO. >> CEO? Okay so the, so you're a peer essentially of the CFO, is that right? >> Yeah. >> So you talk to the CFO about budgeting? >> Yeah. >> So you've got the CEO's >> More of the nitty gritty you know the details and numbers. >> What's that conversation like? Is it obviously you've got to justify, show a business case, or is it more sort of hate space? >> So here's the good news. I got lucky again. the CFO is very technology forward and so he understands that it drives a lot of efficiencies within the firm. So he gets it but he's been in the history long enough to get it and knows that we can, again he's efficiency a lot, but there's just a lot of efficiencies, and a lot of inefficiencies seen in a lot of what folks do in law firms that no one takes the time to sit down and say okay why do you do it like this? there's got to be a better way. Well this is the way I just do it, and so, we've been able to kind of adjust a lot of those work flows, or change those work flows to make it more cost effective for the business. Like even things simple as, just manage print service, you know, do we store 100 toners in the back somewhere and then wait for someone to, say that they're out of toners? That's not very efficient. and it's very expensive actually, so you put in a much more efficient process in place for toners. Because we're a paperless firm, but you know, I mean we still have to print, so. >> So, the joke about the paperless office was something like paperless bathroom. So, the other way around, I want to ask you about security. Are you the defacto Chief Information Security Officer, or do you have a CISO, or? >> I do not have a CISO that is me, so that'll be me. >> So, that is you. Alright so let's talk security. So, what is the state of security and as you see it? it's constantly evolving. Security practitioners tell us that they got so many tools, they got, they might have a SEC ops team, you may or may not, it may be something embedded in your team, but they've got to respond, they've got to respond, sometimes it's hard to figure out what they should respond to, prioritization, the data, keeping up with the bad guys, all that stuff. What's your state of security? >> so I think these days, it's not really, it's not really about having the best firewall, or the best, outside protection, so I think a lot of the attacks that are happening now, not that they don't happen form the outside, but a lot of it is a lot of social engineering, and a lot of everything. They're taking advantage of the the ignorance of the users, for lack of a better way to say it, so a lot of it's coming in through email, malicious links, and they're taking advantage of the inside, and bad practices, and bad policies, and/or lack of So, I think based on what we see in the news now, and what you read about, it seems like there's a breech every week somewhere. And when it comes down to it you find out that X company didn't, didn't use a strong hashing. For assaulting, on the hashes for their passwords. Like simple simple, just basic basic stuff. It's not like some massive operation like you see in a movie where you know, they're making this big plan to break in a building and it pans out and they're sneaking in you know, from the ceiling and all that kind of stuff. They're just basic stuff, they're just passwords. How can passwords, reused passwords, just databases of passwords everywhere, out in the dark where you can just buy, and they're just utilizing simple stuff like that. It's not even complicated anymore, it's just, it's a lot of social engineering. >> Often times I say that bad user behavior trumps good security every time, I wanted to ask you about the state of the self security in the industry. So you are reinforced, we were there, and Steven Schmidt stood up and he said, "Look at this narrative from the vendor community that says security is broken, isn't productive. It hurts the industry at the same time." I was at VM world recently a couple months ago, last month actually, Pat Kelsinger basically stood up and said security is broken and we're here to fix it, they bought, you know made a big acquisition of carbon black a local company, so you have these two different, you know, polarizing opinions, I don't necessarily feel like the state of security is great. I look back every year I say do I feel more secure or not, you know remember art cove yellow, every year RSA would write his letter. but what are your thoughts on that? Are you basically saying hey, it's, a lot of times it's user behavior, it's things that maybe, you know it's education, is security a do over? I guess is my question. >> A do over in the sense that I think it just comes out to basic education. I have, you'd be, we're in tech and we understand security and we have all these grand ideas and technologies and vendors and software that we use to do different things on all these fancy dashboards. But, if you ask the basic person off the street about, I think I saw a skit on Twitter the other day and you know there was this guy going around asking them, asking people, you know, what's your Facebook password, or you know how complex is it and they'll just give them their passwords and stuff you know, and I mean there's just a lack of basic education, so all us security buffs walk around, and they don't understand what we're talking about, but they don't need to understand what we're talking about. We just need to be able to look, to just have a basic security awareness and training with folks. I have a friend who works in industry, or in a nonprofit that does, that helps folks who've been you know kind of, harassed or abused online. And she's saying, she's telling me, she's like, "Look you guys are great you're really smart, but these folks, they don't know the basic stuff like hey you know someone keeps logging into my internet, and I keep seeing someone, you know, these weird things in my yard, like cameras in my yard and, can I do this with my phone, and oh well I can't use, like, my dogs name for my Facebook password? Like this is just basic stuff that nobody knows. It's not because they're stupid it's just, they just don't know." And so, like we're up here, and your average everyday person is just on this level. >> How about ransom ware? Obviously a hot topic in the business. what should people be, what should they know and what should they be doing? >> at a basic level security ware is training, it's very simple to do, there's a lot of, no that I'm, pushing products there's plenty of products out there. Secure great ones that kind of help your user, or teach them what not to do, or what to look for. we run a fishing campaign in our firm every once in a while and at this point no one clicks on anything without asking. I mean I get direct emails and I say hey, how's this look? Does it look like I should click it or, you know, does it look legit, I mean it's great. They ask now, they know not to do it. Whereas, I mean that's how they get you. That's how they get most of these places. Especially from we get a lot of, we constantly hear about small firms or smaller clients/companies getting hacked, we constantly get emails from them all the time. They'll get hacked and then we'll get the the emails with the links or whatever. that's one on the user side. On the IT side, we just really need to take it back to the basics, let's make sure we have, backups, and a backup policy, and a data protection policy, and an instant response plan. Let's have a plan here, let's not react when something happens, let's just have a plan. Honestly at our firm, we do have backups, we have layered strategy, but there's just some basic things that we don't do, like you know, IT folks, we don't, we don't keep things on our desktop. Let's start with us, you know we're supposed to be the leadership, in this regard, so let's not keep stuff on our desk let's keep stuff on the network. Let's keep it protected. Make sure it's part of the backup schedule. things like that, I think you just start there, because I was you know, I was just reading about, there's an article that came out yesterday, I think it was Washington Post, and it was talking about the ransomer incident in Baltimore a few months ago. They're just now finding out that the, even the IT folks had stuff on their local computers that couldn't be recovered, important documentation. So, this is just data protection 101. You know, we've got to take it back to the basics, take it back. >> Last question, is just kind of your career, so you mentioned before, you were in, I think you said health care, or? >> Yeah so I worked with MSP, so I worked with a lot of start ups. >> So, how'd you get here how'd you become a CIO? People out there may be, you know people in tech, they aspire perhaps to stay in tech, but they want maybe more of a management role. What was your path, and what kind of advice would you give them? >> what I would say is, so it worked out where, I was I was a lead at the company I was at here in Mass at the time, and so long story short my wife had an opportunity in Orlando, we moved, and I said I would never work for a law firm, ever. because I was, when my current boss found out I was coming we have a, a long relationship. When I was in, grew up in Florida and so part of that yeah, okay so I was in the right place at the right time and I knew somebody, that's why it's important to stay on top of networking. Always be networking, not for any other reason, just get to know people, you know. the tough thing that I had growing in the industry, I didn't get involved early on, which I should've. I should've gone to events, things like that. Get to know folks because if the people don't know you, why are they going to hire you? It's easier to get in somewhere, or get an opportunity, if they at least know you, or know your name, or know somebody that knows you. That's number one, so I'm big on that. as soon as I moved back here I've already started, I have quarterly lunches with some of the CIOs at different firms, I just put myself put there. Just hey I'm here, want to get together for lunch? It's that simple. number two make sure this is what you want to do, it's a lot of it, and you hear this all the time, a lot of it has to do with personalities and people. You're managing personalities and people half the time. You are not just doing the tech. If you think you're just going to be doing tech, or you're just going to be doing cool stuff, not the case. So, make sure you can, you know, make sure you know what you're getting into because it's, it's very challenging. >> Now that's great, great advice, so network, it's not, I like to say it's not who you know it's who knows you, so get out there. And then, Love it because, a lot of times I would imagine it's thankless. Right, you hear, >> Yep. >> You hear a lot of the chatter when something goes wrong, >> It's like a defense of a football team, you know, it's fine until, >> Until somebody scores. >> And someone gets sacked you know what I mean, otherwise no one cares. >> Alright Jason well thanks for the update, really appreciate you coming on theCUBE again. >> Thank you. >> Alright you're welcome, alright keep it right there buddy. We will be back with our next segment, right after this short break. (mood music)

>> (Narrator) From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Sumo Logic Illuminate 2018. Now, here's Jeff Frick. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at Sumo Logic Illuminate at the Hyatt Regency at San Francisco airport in Burlingame, about 600 people. The second year this conference, about triple the amount of people that they had last year. A lot of buzz, a lot of activities, some really creative things that I've never seen in the conference world with the silent disco kind of treatment for the training is pretty cool. Everyone's in the same room listening to their own, in training, I've never seen that before. We're excited to have, fresh off the keynote, the leader of this party, President and CEO of Sumo Logic, Ramin Sayar. Ramin, great job on the keynote today. >> Great, thank you for having me today. >> Absolutely. >> Thanks for being here. >> So, a lot of passion really came through. It struck me and it was palatable in your keynote, really reaching out to the community and talking about being on this mission together. I wonder if you can speak a little bit to how important community is to you, to the company, and what you guys are trying to accomplish. >> Well the interesting thing about that, Jeff, is that that's really innate in our culture and that's part of, one of the reasons why I actually joined Sumo. Specifically, one of our core values is we're in it with our customers. And that permeates all the way through to every action that every employee takes every single day, and ultimately, is seen and felt here at an event like Illuminate. So when we talked about community, is we're living and breathing the same thing that a lot of our customers are every single day. All the challenges that they're dealing with, the cloud, the cost, the migrations, the training. And so the more we get intelligent in terms of using our own service, the better it is for the rest of the users in our community, so that was a big theme for not just what we wanted people to take away, but also naturally as part of the announcements we made around some of the new intelligence. >> Right, right. I think it's an under-reported kind of attribute of SaaS-based business models, in that you are in bed with your customer because you're taking money from them every month, or whatever the frequency is, so you've got to have this ongoing relationship and continue to deliver value. And we've heard that time and time again, we heard it from the MLB guy on stage, we had another partner on-- >> Samsung, the smart things. >> The smartphone, but we had another one here. But just talking about working together with your teams collaboratively to execute on the objectives at hand. Not just here's some stuff, I'll take the money, good luck, we'll see you next year. >> Yeah, interesting enough you point out something that's a precursor to being successful in the SaaS business, and that is, you're having to get reelected every single year. But we don't wait 'til every single year, we try to make sure from the moment we land a new customer that we help them understand what it's going to take for them to get, not just instant value, but ongoing value out of our service. And we often times make sure they also understand they we're actually living and breathing the same experience they are, so there's that trusted advisor relationship, not just a vendor relationship. >> Right. The other great thing I'd love to see, and I think we first interviewed Sumo at our first AWS San Francisco 2013, You guys definitely picked the right rocket ship to strap onto. But one of the things that we love to watch is kind of the change of a company from an application space to a platform space. 'Cause nobody has a line item for new platform, nobody wants to buy a new platform. I tried to launch a platform company as a platform, it doesn't work, you got to have an app. So that's what you guys did, but you've got the infrastructure and the architecture in place that's now allowing you to get into the platform play and the slide that really jumped out to me, and I took a picture of it on my camera, was the diversity of roles in organizations that have Sumo Logic. After, I think they've had 60 months, you start seeing customer success people, design people, quality assurance people, these are not engineers. This is not reliability, this is a whole separate set of people that are using this great tool that you guys have built to solve some different business objectives, and maybe the ones when they started the company. >> Well, that's predicated on how we started the company. We never started the company to be a silo tool use for one part of the organization. It was always meant for how do we take what was typically in the back room only to select few of folks in security or operations to other parts of the organization, thereby democratizing like we've been talking about. And so, over the last few years, since you mentioned AWS and the reinvent show, we spent an enormous amount of energy and investment in terms of making sure that we're constantly listening to our users, we're constantly redesigning and iterating on a user experience, so that we can actually extend from the power users that might be in development or operations or security, into these other teams that you've been mentioning. And now we're seeing evidence of that, which is phenomenal. >> So it's, you know, we go to so many shows, we talk to a lot of smart people, it's really fun. And one of the things that I've come to believe in terms of how do you drive innovation... Some really simple things, you give more people access to more data with the tools to manipulate it and then the ability to make decisions based on that data. And that was really a big part of your theme, in terms of, you know, some of the new product releases that you announced and also again what we just talked about in terms of the use cases, is giving more people the tools and the data so they can actually make innovative steps instead of just funneling it through you know, asking somebody to run a BI report for me or this or that. That's not the way anymore. >> You're spot on. And I think we're still earning that right, to be honest with you. And while we've seen massive adoption in terms of various profiles of users and the types of data, I think we're honestly just scratching the surface here. And specifically what I mean by that is, we've announced some interesting things around industry benchmarks and community insights and obviously the modern app report that you talked about and covered before, but there's also a different subset of users that are now embarking on and leveraging a platform like this, and those are the data engineers, and those are the data scientists, because they don't want to be left on the back room. They also want, just like security operations or analysts or development teams, to be able to collaborate, be able to iterate, be able to share their own experience with not just the service, but how they're to getting value out of this. And so what's most refreshing, and honestly something that we pay very close attention to, is the types of roles and users that are here. And you see people from interesting enough product or finance or success report to your comment, but that's innate in the value of something like this that we're referring to in terms of machine data analytics platform. >> Right. So you guys are in such a good spot with the machine data. The MLB guy was interesting. He just threw up a slide with a whole bunch of really big numbers. But even more than that, we were at an AT&T show on Monday that the conversation's all about 5G, and the big thing about 5G 100X, 100X more throughput than 4G, designed for machine-to-machine interaction. I mean, the tsunami of data that we've been living through up 'til now is going to be dwarfed by this continuing tsunami when we get 5G internet of things, industrial internet of things. You guys are pretty well positioned to take advantage of this big, giant trend. >> We are. But we're also being very conscious and prescriptive how we approach it. So we've been maniacally focused first on the new applications, and therefore the new architectures associated with these applications that are being built and born and bred in the cloud. Then we extended it to those that are being lifted and shifted, because we had to earn the trust and the right there, particularly those that were running traditionally on-prem, we want to rewrite the front end, and in doing so, we had to often times interface and interact and get sign-off by security. And so that naturally led us into the CISO, in the security operations analyst teams starting to understand, "What's going on over there? "Why are those guys using that service, and why aren't we?" So then we extended our opportunity to security analytics play, and you naturally pointed out there's other opportunities into connected devices, industrial IOT, and what we heard from some of our customers today, in consumer IOT. But we're going to go to it gradually. We're also going to go to it through partners, and really extend the platform as customers use it for those use cases, not necessarily how we see fit always. >> I wonder if you can dig a little deeper into how security has changed. You've been in the industry for a long time, go Gauchos, I saw you went to Santa Barbara, my daughter's at Santa Barbara now, so we're all about the Gauchos. But you've seen how security has changed from this walled garden or moat around the castle, however you wanted to describe it, into being baked everywhere, up and down the stack, throughout the applications, throughout the infrastructure, and how that's really changed everyone being involved in security, regardless of what your day job is or what your title is. >> See that's what's the interesting thing. You heard it from MLB and Neil. There's a shortage of security professionals that are out there, so it's no longer just a duty and a responsibility of security operations or analysts; it's everyone upstream. And that's the power of what Sumo provides. It can't be an afterthought. And so what we're helping understand for our customers to understand is, as you architect these new workloads, specifically looking at micro services or containers or cloud, put some forethought and insight into what does that mean from not just an operational perspective, how do you instrument, collect, and log and events and metrics, but also from a security perspective. And so when you're able to leverage one platform to do so, it actually is a connecting mechanism, meaning that it's bringing these teams together versus isolating and siloing them like in the past. >> Right, right. I'd love to jump... You did a little bit in your report and now you announced some of the benchmarks and stuff about how you're able to aggregate, anonymize and aggregate back end data from a lot of different customers to start to share that information. To use BI and machine intelligence to optimize. To use benchmarks and to help your customers do a better job. And you're sitting on a boatload of data. And it's really a great way to provide another layer of value, beyond just the core functions of the products. >> I totally agree. And we are still early in that journey, though. And as I mentioned earlier in the announcements today, one of the ways that we're fixated on making sure we continue to get more data is constantly look for ways that we can bend that cost curve down for our customers. So that they can start to ingest more their tier-two, tier-three data or their lower-performing data so we can get more intelligent, more smart, and also provide that value, add back into the community and the service. So we felt that we weren't ready before because we needed to see multiple sets of years across multiple different types of data sets to be able to launch and release something like global insights. We started actually three years ago with a modern app report, because that was usage-based, not survey-based. And it's really interesting-- >> Real data. >> Because it's real data, right? But we were contemplating, even three years ago when we did the report, do we start to put out some of these benchmarks? And we felt that we were too early, because we needed more data, we needed different types of data from across different geographies, different types of usage, different technologies, and so we held off. And so that was one of the things that we've been paying very close attention to, and what the announcement today was all centered on is, yes, we've been talking about some insights around the industry, but you as the community of users here are helping us get smart and helping each other get smarter, and we're going to start to allow you guys to compare yourselves, back to your question, around, "Am I best in class from an operational KPI perspective?" And what does that mean? From utilization versus cost. And, "Am I best in class from a key risk perspective?" From a security perspective, for example. And how does that compare to others? And when you're staring the reality of that type of data in your face, it forces you to do something, take action. And the whole premise here is insights and intelligence. And so the more forthcoming, transparent we are with our customers in terms of these types of insights and intelligence, the more they're going to be using and adopting the platform, and hopefully, together as a community, getting smarter, more efficient. >> The graphic you showed, you get a whole bunch of green lights and one yellow light, all the eyes go right to... "What the heck, what's my yellow light?" Alright, I give you the last word on a word that you used again a number of times in your keynote, and that's trust. >> Yes. >> At the end of the day, that is such an important word in all types of relationships, but certainly in business relationships. Why're you putting the focus on that? Clearly it's important, you're highlighting trust. In fact I think you said, "We are your trusted steward for your data." Really important attribute for this company. >> Well that's been something early on, Jeff, in our architecture and things we did in terms of guaranteeing data sovereignty, privacy, encryption. We took no short change or shortcuts in terms of how we architect the service, eight-plus years ago. And we don't take any of those now. And the trust comment is because we have to trust, we have to build the trust and relationship, not just in terms of the value they're getting out of using the service, but that we're going to make sure that we keep their data safe and secure. Because we are PCI certified. We are also HIPAA certified, SOC type one, type two, we're doing GPR, all these other attestations and stuff that our customers have to face, we're also facing. So together, we're actually creating a trusted network, and that's the strategy here, is to create that trusted network. To share the insights. >> Well the passion comes through. And again, congratulations on the show, and the success, and we continue to enjoy watching the ride. >> Thank you very much for being part of it. It's great to be here with you. >> He's Ramin, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at Sumo Logic Illuminate 2018. Thanks for watching. (inquisitive electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE, covering VeeamOn 2018. Brought to you my Veeam. >> Welcome back to Chicago everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, and we are covering VeeamOn 2018, #VeaamOn. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my cohost Stuart Miniman, Duncan Epping is here, Chief Technologist, Storage and Availability at VMWare and the world's number one blogger in virtualization, Yellow Bricks, yellow-bricks.com. Duncan, thanks very much coming to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> No problem, my pleasure, it's been a while. I actually hoped to be on the show probably six, seven, eight years ago, I don't know how long it is, but I've watched many episodes. So it's great to be part of it. >> Well great, Duncan one of the biggest problems is you're so busy, every year at VM World you were totally booked up, so no thanks so much we're so glad we could do this. >> So Stu and I remember the peer insight we did many many years ago back when we had Boonyon on recently, and he was talking about when VMWare sort of created virtualization, it pushed the bottle neck around. It created a lot of stress on the storage systems. And WMWare for years dealt with that through API integration and the like and very well sort of covered. But I wonder if you could take us through your perspectives of the journey of storage at VMWare and generally, or specifically, and virtualization generally. >> Yeah, it's a good question. I think everyone that has been part of the community has faced all of the different challenges from a storage perspective. I mean, Stu, you now what kind of problem EMC had when VMWare first started doing virtualization. And I think the key reasons for these were fairly straightforward. When we started virtualization and we started leveraging shared storage systems, those shared storage systems were never designed with virtualization in the back of their minds. They were designed for physical workloads, maybe one or two machines connected to it, you know in larger volume it may be 10 or 15, but not 10 or 15 physical hosts with hundred of virtual machines. So we started noticing is that from a performance perspective systems were lagging, we were doing all sorts of things to the storage systems that they weren't expecting, virtual machine snapshots. They were seeing IO patterns that they had never seen before. Instead of sequential IO we had a lot of random IOs so we had to start doing different things from a storage perspective so as you said, we started with APIs, we had the vSPhere APIs for IO filtering, we have the Divi APIs, the array integration, so that we can offload some of the functionality, but of course on top of that what we started doing within VMWare is we started exploring what we could do smarter from a storage point from our stance. So not just looking at how we can help the ecosystem, but also what we can do from our perspective, so there were two main efforts over the past couple of years. The first one is virtual volumes. It has taken a while before the adoption ramped up. I think part of that is mainly because a lot of our customer base was still on vSphere 5.5. Now that we're starting to see broader adoption of vSphere 6.0 and actually 6.5 and 6.7, we're starting to see the adoption of stuff like virtual volumes go up as well. That is also due to the fact that our partners like Pure Storage, Nimble, HP with 3PAR has been pushing or have been pushing VVols tremendously. So they've done a great job, and we're starting to see a lot of customers adopting VVols, and that way we're getting around some of the limitations that we have from a traditional storage perspective. >> Explain that, what are customers telling you about the benefits that they're getting out of VVols and VVol and VVol adoption? >> Well, there's two main things. It kind of depends on what kind of problems you're facing, but a lot of customers come to us with management issues and scalability issues. From a scalability perspective we have larger customers that literally have thousands of volumes. If you look at an E6 cluster today you're limited in terms of the numbers of volumes you can connect to a cluster. So that's one thing. As soon as they start moving to VVols now they're not managing those individual volumes anymore but they're managing the storage system as a whole, and they start creating policies, and that's where the management aspect comes into play. So it becomes a lot easier to manage, because instead of having thousands of volumes to select from, they don't normally have to look at a spreadsheet, for instance, to figure out where to place a virtual machine, now they simply make a policy and the policy engine will figure out where to place that virtual machine. >> Dave: It sounds like cloud. >> It actually is, you know, the cloud version of, cloudified version of storage I would say. But it brings a lot of benefits. And the funny thing is that we've been talking about policies and policy engines for a long time, even in the cloud, but try to come up with one cloud that actually has a decent policy engine. Hardly anyone has that today. From a storage perspective I think storage policy based management framework that VMWare has is quite unique. Well now we're starting to see that popping up in other areas, and that's the strange thing about it. >> Always back to the software mainframe Stu. >> Yeah, and Duncan one of the things we've really seen, a transition for, it took us about a decade to try and fix storage in a virtualized environment, and today most things are built either understanding virtualization, or at least that's part of the puzzle, and then of course VVols led us into was the ability for vSANs. Help us kind of transition that threshold as to how that's just kind of a given underneath for vSAN and other solutions like it. >> Yeah, if you look at vSAN it has been around for a while. The beta was in 2013, as you guys know. We have a large adoption, at least we saw a large increase over the last couple of years, I would say the last two years. You guys have spoken with Yangbing before, so you know about the business side of vSAN, I'm not going to cover that, but if you look at it from a technology perspective we stared developing this 2008, 2009, that's when we started thinking about what we could do different from a storage perspective. There were already some companies doing something in the hyperverge space and we figured we could do something significantly different than they were doing. They had a storage solution that sat on top of the hypervisor, we own the hypervisor so we can create something that sits within the hypervisor, and that's when we started looking at including these different technologies, so we started looking in how can we introduce things like deduplication and compression? What can we do with for ROBO solutions? Can we do something like stretch clustering in an easy way? There are a lot of stretch cluster solutions out there, but if you look at a stretch clustering solution today it typically takes weeks to implement that. If you look at something like vSAN, it was our aim to actually to be able to deploy something like that from a storage perspective within hours instead of weeks, right? And we've been able to achieve that, and it has been a huge undertaking, but I think it's fair to say that it has been rather successful. >> All right, Duncan, help connect the dots to where we are here at VeeamOn. It's funny, I think Veeam started out heavily in virtualization, still heavily involved in virtualization, they've got a v in the beginning of their name. When I hear the keynote this morning, a lot of hyper, reminded me of before we had, before hyperconverge fully took over, VMWare tried to call it a hypervisor converge system around VMWare, so talk to us a little bit about data protection, the Veeam relationship and how that fits into things like vSAN and vSphere? >> Yeah I think, I talk to a lot of customers as a Chief Technologist, it's part of my role to talk to customers and have discussions about what's on top of their mind. Data protection is always one of those things that comes up. I would say it's always in the top three. Whenever you talk to a CIO, a CTO, protection of the data, availability of data, resiliency, reliability, it's fairly important. Veeam of course, for us, is a great partner. Primarily because of the simplicity of the features and the products that they offer. Whenever I talk to a customer and they explain how difficult it is to manage their backup and recovery solutions I always point them to a partner like Veeam simply because it's going to make their life a lot easier if you ask me. And I can see that Veeam is slowly transitioning. As you mentioned, the v is in front of the name. The v is in front of our name as well, but we know that it's not, the whole world isn't just VMWare and the whole world isn't just virtual. There's a lot of other different solutions out there, and actually Veeam's looking at other revenue streams as well. I would argue, though, if you're looking at something like the edge space which I think that more or less exploring at looking at things like IoT, there's going to be some form of virtualization within that, whether that's VMWare based or another solution of course is going to be the question. That is something that we'll need to figure out in the upcoming years, but I think there's a big opportunity out there. If you ask me, the keynote was really interesting. I kind of missed the end of details. I'm hoping that the closing keynote is going to give some more details on what they will be doing in the IoT space, how they see their solution evolving from that point of view because it's a market that's still being developed, but that's definitely going to be interesting. >> So Duncan it's interesting to hear you say that when you talk to customers data protection is in the top three, even amongst CIOs. It used to not be that way. Data protection was always a bolt on, it was an afterthought, it was kind of one size fits all. What's changed? >> Well I think the importance of the data has changed. If you look over the last 10 years whenever you talk to any company out there that has lost any significant amount of data they understand what the value was of the data that they were hosting. I think the big difference over the past 10 years is in the past we had applications like email, maybe some file services and that's it. But now everything revolves around applications, and that's also the shift that I'm seeing in the industry. Also from an IT perspective, right? In the past, over the past decade I think everyone has been focused on the infrastructure layer. If you look at something like VBlock, very much infrastructure focused. If you look at something like hyperconverged solutions, very much infrastructure focused. But now whenever we talk to customers, customers are more and more interested in what we can do for the application layer. What kind of benefits do we have for Exchange, for Oracle, for SAP, you name it? I think that's also a big change that's happening in the industry right now. One of the things from a technical perspective, and there may be others, but when VMWare really became prominent it was wonderful but we were reducing the number of physical resources, and the one workload that took a lot of physical resources was backup, and then sort of Veeam swept in and took advantage of that sea change. What's the technical constraint now when you think about things like multi cloud and SaaS and IoT, data's much more distributed, it's out of the control necessarily of a single platform. So from a technicals perspective, what's the big challenge and sort of the gate to architectures today? >> Well as you said, the distribution of data is the big challenge as it stands right now from a technical perspective. I think the biggest challenge that most of the players in this space, and not just Veeam, some other players as well, will have is trying to figure out how to control and manage their data. Other platforms are facing similar challenges. And no one really has solved this problem yet. We're starting to see some players in this space that have solutions that sit out in Azure, that sit out in Google Cloud, but it's a very challenging solution, and I think if you ask me, and this is something that I've said internally as well, the company that is capable of managing and owning the data is the company that's probably going to be most successful in the cloud war that's now happening. I think that's the most critical aspect. Workloads can move around, but data is very difficult to move around and own as well. >> Duncan one of the discontinuities we see in the marketplace that you mentioned earlier, wondering if you can talk to, in the enterprise in the data center, how do we get them to get to that next version? Comfortable with it, it's stable, it works. I look at the cloud, I'm running Microsoft Azure or AWS I'm running the version that they want. How do we help close that gap? Because from a security standpoint, from a features standpoint, we need to move there, but you know it seems to be just one of the greatest disconnects we see between kind of my data center and somebody else's cloud. >> That is a great question. I think we had a lot of challenges in the past. I think it's fair to say with vSphere 5.0 it was a great release, 5.5 among great releases. But the challenges that we have from an upgrade perspective was typically V centered and all of the components connected to it. It's not just the vSphere platform but if you look at the vSphere platform, the challenges that we had were all of the components integrating with it, whether that's something like vROps, VRA's, or VREalize Automation, but it could also be something like Evermar or maybe Veeam. So there were so many different components we had to take into account. So what we started doing within VMWare was simplifying the architecture from a vSPhere perspective. If you look at vSAN for instance, it used to be a solution where we had multiple functions spread out across different virtual machines. I'm now trying to bring that back into a single virtual machine again. Actually dumbing it down, making it easier to upgrade. So that is something that is actively happening within VMWare, and it is something that we started with 6.0, and that's also the reason why we see the adoption from 6.0 to 6.5 and 6.5 to 6.7, is at a must faster pace than 5, in the 5 code stream, so 5 to 5.1, for instance, took a lot longer for a lot of customers or 5.1 to 6.0, took extremely long for a lot of customers. It's the key reason is complexity from our infrastructure stand. While we're changing that, we're evolving that in the upcoming years. >> Duncan it's the last question here, but as the technologist, things that you're looking at that are exciting to you, that you know, get your juices flowing? >> Yeah, that's an interesting one because it's something that I've been thinking about recently. I've been doing vSphere for the last, well wasn't even called vSphere back then, but I've been doing this for the last 12 years, virtualization. Thirteen years maybe something like that. At least as a consultant and then as a technologist and technical marketing, but recently I'm starting to look more and more at the edge space. For computing, IoT, I think that's a really interesting space, especially because there isn't really significant market. Well, there is a significant market out there, but there isn't really one player out there that really stands out. No one has really figured out what customers would like to do with it and how our customers are going to use it. So the edge computing space and IoT's a really interesting thing and especially because of the distributed aspect is one of the things that I've been always been passionate about, vSphere clusters, which is a distributed mechanism. So distributed computing is definitely something that has my interest. >> All right if you care about virtualization, VMWare, follow the yellow brick road, yellow-bricks.com. Duncan, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me guys. >> You're welcome. All right, keep it right there buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE live from Chicago, VeeamOn 2018. We'll be right back. (techno music)

>> Narrator: From San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Samsung Developer Conference 2017. Brought to you by Samsung. >> Welcome back everyone. Live here in San Francisco at Moscone West is the exclusive coverage from theCUBE SiliconANGLE Media of the SDC 2017. I'm John Furrier the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media and the co-host of theCUBE. My next guest is Amy Jo Kim who is the CEO of Shufflebrain. It's the parent company of gamethinking.io, a variety of other projects, and expert in the convergence of design, gaming, computer science, and et cetera. Welcome to theCUBE. >> It's a pleasure to be here. >> Thanks for coming on. Obviously we've been seeing the trend, the convergence trend for a while certainly in the tech industry. Computer science and social science coming together, that was our motto when we started our company eight years ago. But really to me the flashpoint was Steve Jobs had the technology-liberal arts crossroads. That really kind of spawned the beginning of a creative generation start thinking about the devices, how it all intersects, and not the pure play handheld. So gamers here at Samsung Development Conference and developers bring game mechanics in. That's communities, gamification, games themselves, user interface. What's your reaction to all this? You've designed a great bunch of interfaces. >> I'm, I think it's fantastic. I think what we're seeing is really a flashpoint that has several trends converging. One of the trends we have is developers, the folks here, you know are right here at this wonderful conference, they've grown up with games. They're familiar with the lexicon of games, with how games work. And so it's very natural for them when they start to build their own apps and say what will make this engaging to turn to games and look for inspiration in games? So that's been going on for a while and it's accelerating. We're also seeing that mobile technology, mobile phones, have become so ubiquitous that most of the traffic coming in on many people's experiences 70%, I recently ran a promotion for Shufflebrain, 70% of our traffic was mobile total traffic. So the ubiquity of mobile phones means that everybody's got a potential gaming machine or a machine where they can have a light, fun, engaging experience right in their pocket. So as you noted, we've moved away from single purpose game consoles, handheld or otherwise they still exist, but more and more what we see is the best games and the best game like experiences that might not be games but they the feel and the pull of games. Those are showing up on mobile phones like Samsung. >> And the screens are awesome. I'll say my Note 8 here is awesome and bigger and better and the graphics. But it's a generational shift too. Like my son was, we're designing a new app and we're kind of sitting at the drawing board and he's like, "Dad, you're a search generation. "No one searches anymore. "You actually type on the keyboard, that's like so old." So he brings up a point which is illuminated here. Which is you see voice touch, voice activation. Harman's got now the kind of interface with this audio. You're seeing cars all over the air with software. This is really the computer science, computer engineering culture interfacing with art. Where new user experiences are coming that quite frankly don't look the same. >> Exactly that's such a good point. So what's happening is that a lot of the user experiences, the back end neural networks, the AI, the sophisticated bots that we've been seeing in gaming for the last five or six years are trickling into the mainstream. And that's what you always see. Gaming is the canary in a coal mine. What we see now happening in games and what we saw a few years ago is becoming more mainstream. So if we look now at what's happening in gaming, that gives us a clue to 18 to 24 months out for app developers. >> Yeah we brought this up on day one. You nailed it. It's an early indicator. >> That's right. >> What are you seeing in that area? Because you're in the vanguard of the user interface so you have a computer science background. You understand how communities work. Which by the way, you look at anything from blockchain ICOs to game communities, community is the most important aspect right now in the world. The community role of the people are so important. You don't have a network effect. You don't have input output into the quote neural aspect of the interface because now people are involved. Not just software and data bits. I need a notification from my friend if they're right around the corner from me. So it's the role of people. >> Exactly, so I'm a multiplayer game designer. The teams I work with, because it's always a team effort, are multiplayer games. Rock Band, Covet Fashion is a more recent one. And so we've known for a long time in the gaming industry that if you want to drive deep lasting engagement, you need to create a multiplayer experience and some sort of community around that. What you'll hear gamers say is "You know, I'm kind of tired of that game "but my friends need me. "It's where my friends are, my team needs me." So that's part of what drives long term engagement. >> John: The socialization piece. >> Exactly. What we're seeing now and the opportunity I think for developers even outside of gaming is we're seeing the intersection of gaming, a style of gaming that's sort of I would call them gaming systems versus game mechanics. We're seeing gaming systems find their way into social media. Musical.ly is a great example. And Discord is another example. Discord is a platform started by gamers but now it's merging into just other people. That's for communication. Sort of like a next generation Slack but mobile and for gamers. Covet Fashion, a game I worked on with a brilliant team who actually came up with the idea at CrowdStar, really merged a cooperative game mechanic like you might see in say Portal 2 or Left for Dead with social media and very lightweight voting systems of the users themselves playing a crucial role in what's good or not. Just like in Facebook or in Instagram, your feed is going to show you what gets liked a lot, what gets popular. And games are starting to incorporate this too so that the players themselves become almost like the game pieces and become a big part of what's entertaining. We see networks like Twitch with a huge rush of popularity. That is people delivering entertainment to each other. It's not scripted. So this user generated content, this systems which let people be entertaining to each other, is the huge push that's going on in gaming. And we have, part of what makes a game so exciting, is when the game makes interacting with other people lower friction or more magical but it's still the people that makes it exciting. >> Amy Jo this is amazing. I think that you're right on it. Because remember when I was a gamer, single player game on the computer, you got bored. I mastered it. Then comes multiplayer. But you're bringing up a new dynamic which is the dynamic nature of the people themselves. And I think Twitch had an interesting experiment where the comments, which we know on Twitch are pretty bad, drove the game experience. So now you have the people being part of the input to the game itself. I mean isn't Life a game in a way? >> Sure, you could look at Life the game. I think that that's a semantic issue. There are people that really enjoy looking at life as a game And if you define a game as a structured activity with roles and goals, sure you could look at it that way. What I think is most exciting is not so much what is and isn't a game but the bleeding over of gaming systems into places like digital health and education and enterprise and fashion, and those are, and genealogy. Right now I have a client who's merging a game like experience with a genealogy crowd source experience. So I think what I'd like to leave you with and to understand is the first wave of this we called gamification where people got very excited about the visible markers of progress that are in games like points and badges and leaderboards. And that's a great opening door, but that's not where the magic is. Where the magic is is in the underlying systems that drive you toward mastery of something you care about. And that's the explosion we're seeing now. So you say what am I seeing? I'm seeing clients come to me, a game designer, in all kinds, banking, call centers, SaaS products, change transformation in companies as well as all kinds of consumer products, saying we tried gamification. It just worked in the short term. We want what makes games interesting in the long term. First of all you said the most important thing which is other people. But it's not just other people. It's other people in a playful and mastery based environment that helps you get better at something you care about getting better at. >> So this great so take me through what game system. What I hear you saying is, okay, people think of gamification as a one trick pony, a shortcut to something. You're taking a much more wholistic approach saying the game system. What does that mean? What is a game system? Because you're, what I hear you saying, is that this is like a fabric. It's not like, or an operating system maybe. How should people think of a game... >> It's a methodology or a system. A good way to think about this, are you familiar with design thinking? >> Mm-hmm. >> Are you familiar with an agile approach or Agile Lean UX? Those are systems. Those are methodologies. Those are approaches to creating great products. And they help you. Game thinking is similar. It's got elements of design thinking, elements of Agile, but it adds game design. The difference between strong game design and gamification is game design is about bringing systems to life from the inside out. And so game thinking is as much about how you bring your product to life as it is about anything that you put into the product once it's brought to life. Which is where gamification usually comes in. So it's really about building a learning architecture into the core of your game using feedback loops and using simple systems. And one more thing. Every complex system starts as a simple system that works. So it's really about building core systems and then bringing them to life with the right approach and the right people. >> It's like having a kernel or a small building block. If you overthink it you could get in trouble. >> Right. But you also have to have the right building block so you build a strong foundation. >> Yeah I remember the old days when game engines came out. There was no market for game engines when the first games came out. Then someone said hey why don't we just take the game engine and become a game engine. That was an interesting dynamic that spawned a lot of innovation. Is there an analogy to that happening now where there's new innovations that people can build on top of? Is it open source? Is there an equivalent? I'm trying to figure out where that next level up is going to be because right now we've gone like this and then we see a new level with AR and these new kinds of games and you're bringing this kind of integrated system approach is coming. >> Right so I think there's two thing that have to happen for those to take off. One of which is technology based. You have to have engines. So Unity's rise has been tremendous for the gaming industry. Many many simple game-like experiences are being built in Unity, not from scratch. And other tools like that. And then ARKit from Apple is causing an explosion of really interesting work happening, making it easier to create and experiment with an experience like Pokemon Go. So those are the bottom-up tools based changes that are really accelerating innovation in our industry. Now at the time, none of that will work if you don't have the customer demand and the customer hunger. So the other thing that's happening is that customers are being trained by Pokemon Go and things like that that oh, this is how AR could work. We've seen that VR has kind of stalled out but again, that's a special purpose hardware that's not something easy that you can get on your mobile phone in between all the other things you do. So I think it can't be overstated how powerful it is to have these platforms combined with a huge consumer base on mobile, with phones in their pocket, ready to have a compelling game-like experience that doesn't necessarily have to be a game. The world is waiting for those. >> Yeah and your point about VR, you don't want a build it they will come mentality. You got to focus on the magic formula which is-- >> Customer demand. >> Call it sticky. But some could say look it's got to be a utility and that mastery component is critical whether it's learning, friendship, or some human dopamine effect right. >> Well that's exactly what we do at gamethinking.io. We help teams and companies create a product that customers love and come back to from the ground up using gaming techniques. So anyone who's interested, that's what we do. And the reason we help people do that is it's hard, and it's incredibly high leverage. >> Yeah and you got to have the expertise to do it. And it really is. It sounds like gamethinking.io, you're going to bring architecture. It's not just going to be jump on the grenade that someone throws a project at you. Sure, if it's a big project maybe. But you're kind of train the trainer it sounds like, you're teaching people to fish if you will. >> It's product development. Gamification is often a marketing campaign. We're talking about product development. If you want to build lasting engagement and you're a product leader, then you can use these techniques to build it from the ground up but it's not a silver bullet. >> Give a plug for what you do at Shufflebrain about your company and share some advice for folks watching that might be interested. Like I want to transform my Web 2.0, my 1.0 web responsive app, or my offshore built mobile app that I hired someone to just iOS it and Android it. I want to actually build from the ground up a new architecture that's going to be, have a lot of headroom, I really want to build it from the ground up with good design thinking, game system, game thinking, with the game systems, all the magic potentially in there. What do they do? I don't know do you call the, you know there's no Yellow Pages anymore. Do you Google search it? >> Thank you that was a great setup because that's, I mean I wish that I had had this years ago when I doing a venture funded startup. I needed help. So that's why I do what I do. So what we do is take 20 years of what works and what doesn't in game and product design and turn it into a step by step toolkit with templates, instruction, training, and coaching. And let me give you a specific tip. So there's, it's a whole system we use, but one of the things that you do and if anybody wants to try this it will amaze you if you're able to do it right, one of the things that the greatest game designers, the Will Wrights and folks at CrowdStar and Harmonics, what they do is when they're bringing a new game idea to life, first of all they find out aggressively as much about what's wrong with their ideas, what's right with it, through iterative, low fidelity testing early. Secondly they test it on their superfans that shortcut for high need, high value, early adopters. Not your target market but people that can get you to your target market. Knowing how to find and identify and then leverage your superfans for very early product testing and iteration, that's how you bring your core systems to life. Not with your ultimate target market. Most people don't know this. Knowing this, and then finding those people and leveraging them will turn what's often a failure into success. >> John: That's gold. >> It's complete gold. Let me just tell you why. Because if you're able to ask very product-focused questions, again with my guidance, of these people, you can build your product around what you know they want rather than guessing. >> And you can also help the person, might have blind spot, your customer, understand what superfans are saying. Sometimes it's like they're just giving you the answer right there early on. >> That's such a good point. And when you're inside of it- >> And I have bias. I'm an entrepreneur. Oh no I want to hear what I want to hear. I'm going to change the world. (laughs) Not really. >> That's why when I was an entrepreneur I knew all this stuff but I needed a coach when I was doing this. Because you can't see outside of your bubble and that's part of the value of doing this. >> Amy, the URL is? >> Gamethinking.io. >> Gamthinking.io. Amy Jo is a coach, she is an entrepreneur, venture backed, probably has some scar tissue from that but now she's kicking ass and taking names on gamethinking.io. Great mind. Thank you for sharing an amazing tutorial. You know that's free consulting here on theCUBE right here from and expert. >> It's what I love to do. Thank you for having me. >> Amy Jo here on theCUBE. Live in San Francisco at the Samsung Developer Conference, I'm John Furrier back with more here in theCUBE after this short break. (techno music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. (electronic music) >> Hello everyone, welcome back to live coverage. This is theCUBE at VMworld 2017, our eighth year covering VMworld, going back to 2010. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE, and my co-host this segment, Justin Warren, industry analyst, and our guest, Alan Cohen, Chief Commercial Officer, COO for Illumio. Great to see you, CUBE alumni. Special guest appearance, guest analyst appearance, but also Chief Commercial Officer, Illumio is a security start-up, growing. Thanks for coming on. >> It's not even a startup anymore. >> Justin: It's technically a startup. >> John: After five years, it's not a startup. >> It's not a startup right, you raise $270 million, it's not exactly a startup. >> (laughs) That's true. Well, welcome back. >> Alan: Thank you. >> Welcome back from vacation. Justin and I were talking before you came on, look at, let's go get you on and get some commentary going. >> Alan: Okay. >> You're an industry vet, again, in security, some perspective, but industry perspective, you've seen this VMware cycle many times. What's your analysis right now, obviously stock's 107, they don't to a cloud, no big catback, so it's good. You've made a decision. What's your take on this? >> I've been coming to VMworld for a long time, as you guys have as well, and from my perspective, this was probably the biggest or most significant transition in the history of the company. If you think about the level of dialogue, obviously there's a lot about NSX, which came from the Nicira, I'm always happy about. But, if you hear about, talking about cloud, and kind of talking about a post-infrastructure world, about capabilities, about control, about security, about being able to manage your compute in multiple environments, this is, I think, the beginning of a fundamentally different era. I always think about VMware, this is the company that defined virtualization. No one will argue with that point, so when they come out and they start talking about how are your computes going to operate in multiple environments? And how you're going to put that together, this is not cloud-washing, this is a fairly, all right they have fully acknowledged that the cloud is not a fad, the cloud is not for third tier workloads, this is mainstream computing. I think this is the third wave of computing and VMware is starting to put its markers down for the type of role that it intends to play in this transition. >> Yeah, I agree. >> We have to argue if you don't agree (laughs). >> I'll mostly agree with you, how about that? >> All right that's good. >> At this show, VMware has stopped apologizing for existing. I think, previously, they've been trying to say, "No, no we're a cloud too, "in fact, we're better than cloud "and you shouldn't be using it." It forced customers to choose between two of their children, really, like which one do you love more? And customers don't like that. Whereas at this show, I think it's finally being recognized that customers want to be able to use cloud, as well as use VMware, so that they're taking a more partnership approach to that and it's more about the ecosystem. And, agree, they're not about the infrastructure so much, they're not about the Hypervisor, they're about what you run on top of that. But, I still think there's a lot of infrastructure in that because VMware is fundamentally an infrastructure. >> Alan: Well, you got to get paid, right? >> That's right, (Alan laughs) and there's a lot of stuff out there that's already on VMware. What do you think about the approach? Like with cloud, they have a lot of people doing things in new ways and you mentioned this is the third wave of computing that we're doing it a new way. A lot of VMware stuff is really the whole reason it was popular is that we have people doing things a particular way on physical hardware and then they kept doing more or less the same thing, only on virtual hardware. What do you say about people who are still essentially going to be doing virtual hardware, they're just running it on cloud now? That's not really changing much. >> The way I think about it is: Are you going to be the Chevy Volt or are you going to be a Tesla? What I mean by that, and by the way now GM has the Bolt, which is their move toward Tesla, which is that if you look at the auto industry, they talk about hybrid and you talk about it, and you talk to Elon Musk and he goes, "Hybrids are bullshit." Either you're burning gas, or you're using electricity. To me, this cloud movement is about electricity, which is: I'm going to use cloud-native controls, I'm going to use cloud-native services, I'm going to be using Python and Ruby, and I'm going to have scripting, and I'm going to act like DevOps. And so, cloud is not just a physical place where I rent cycles from Amazon or Azure, it is a way of computing that's got a distributed, dynamic, heterogeneous, and hybrid. When you're in your virtualization on top of cloud, you're still in your Chevy Volt moment, but when you say, "I'm going to actually be native "across all of these environments," then you're really moving into the Tesla movement. >> Hold on. Let me smoke a little bit, I'll pass it over to you because that's complete fantasy. Right now the reality is, is that-- >> It's legal here in LA, in Las Vegas. >> (laughs) I don't think so yet, is it? >> Only outside. >> You can go to Walgreens across the street. >> Whatever you're smoking is good stuff. No, I agree, cloud obviously as a future scenario, there's no debate, but the reality is, like the Volt, Tesla is a one-trick pony. So, greenfield-- >> But, once again, I'm not disagreeing with you, John, but my point is that VMware and most of the IT industry is not there. Most companies don't have DevOps people, you run up and down, you go to all of these shows, ask these guys how many of these guys does Ruby, Python, real scripting, they don't do that. They still have Lu-Wise and management consults and they have the old IT, but this is the beginning movement-- >> They've got legacy bag, I mean we call it legacy baggage in the business, we know what that is. >> Heritage systems. (all laugh) >> Well, Gelsinger was here, I had him in at one o'clock and I kind of, sometimes VMware, they make the technical mistake in PR, they don't really get sometimes where to position things, but the Google announcement was very strategic intent, but they kind of made it a land grab and they tried to overplay their hand, in my opinion, on that one thing, it's strategic intent. This audience, they're not DevOps ready, they're Ops trying to do Dev, so they're not truly ready. So, it's okay to say, "Here's Amazon. "Great, that's today, if you want to do that, "let's get going, checking the boxes, "we're hitting the milestones." And then to dump a headroom deal announcement, that's more headroom, which is cool, but not push it on the Ops guys. >> Here's the opportunity and here's the risk: If Amazon is a $16 billion a year business, it's a rounding error in IT spend. When you take the hype away, nothing against it, and I love that prices are cheaper at Amazon and you can buy a Dot in the fruit aisle, that would totally-- >> John: I think the margins are like 60% (laughs). >> On your cloud. >> My wife took a picture of a rib steak and it said $18, now $13.99, I said, "Fantastic, thank you, Jeff Bezos. "We're eating well, "and we're going to have a little extra money." What I think this transition is not about infrastructure, it's about how IT people do their job. >> John: That's a main point. >> Justin: That's a big, big change. >> Yeah. >> Okay, in this show today doing your job, Justin I want you to comment on this because you were talking with Stu about it. I'm a VMware customer, what do I care about right now in my world? Just today. >> Well, in my world I've got conflicting things, I need to get my job done now. There's nothing different about the IT job, really, which is a shame because some of it needs to change, but there is a gradual realization that it's not about IT, it's not about building infrastructure for the sake of, "Because I like shiny infrastructure." It's, "I'm being paid by my business "to do IT things in service of the business." I have customers who are buying Apples, or using Apple docs, you're laundering. >> In IT you're paid for an outcome. You don't create the outcome. The way IT works is business creates the outcome, IT helps fulfill the outcome, unless you work-- >> John: Is IT a department today? >> Yeah, it's still a department. >> It's still a department? >> Yeah, it is, but it's a department in the same way that, well finance is important, but it's actually the business. Sales is part, they're all integrated. In a really well-run business, they're all integrated. >> How do you know what a real business is? You go to a building, you go to the main offices, you visit the marketing floor, you visit the IT floor. Tell me what the decor is like. They'll tell you what they care about in a business. (John laughs) I've been in a lot of IT shops, not the beautiful shiny glass windows because it's perceived as a back office cost center. >> Digital transformation is always about taking costs, that's table stakes, but now some of the tech vendors need to understand that as you get more business focused, you got to start thinking about driving top line. >> You're also thinking about being in the product. For example, my company, we have three of the four top SAS vendors, as Illumio customers, we do the micro-segmentation for them. We're not their micro-segmentation, we're a component in the software they sell you guys. >> Justin: You're an input. >> Yeah, you are a commodity in the mix of what somebody's building and I think that's going to be one of the changes. The move to cloud, it's not rent or buy, it's not per hour per server, or call Michael Dell and send me a bunch of Q-series, or whatever the heck it's called, it's increasingly saying, "We have these outcomes, we have these dates, "we have these deliverables, "what am I doing to support that and be part of that?" >> Justin: That's it, it's a support function. It's a very important support function, but there's very few businesses, like digital transformation, I don't like that as a term-- >> What the heck does that mean? >> It means something to do with fingers. >> Alan: You use it a lot, what does it really mean, digital transformation? >> To me, first of all, I'm not a big hype person, I like the buzz word in the sense that it does have a relevance now in terms of doing business digitally means you're completely 100% technology-enabled in your business. That means IT is a power function, not a cost center, it's completely native, like electricity in the company-- >> Unless, let's say I have two customers, I have the Yellow Cab company of Las Vegas and I have Uber or Lyft as a customer. My role, as a technologist, or technology provider, is dramatically different in either one of those-- >> Digital transformation to me is a mindset of things like, "I'm going to do a blockchain, "I'm going to start changing the game, "I'm going to use technology "to change the value equation for my customer." It's not IT conversation in the sense of, let's buy more servers to make something happen for the guy who had a request in that saying, "Let's use technology digitally to change the outcomes." >> But, given that, if we assume that that's true, then there's two ways of doing that. Either we have the IT people need to learn more about business, or the business people need to learn more about IT. >> That's right. >> Which one do you think should happen? Traditionally-- >> I think they're on a collision course. >> I don't think you can survive as a senior executive in most businesses anymore by saying, "Oh, I'll get my CIO in here." >> I would like to believe that that's true, but when people say that it should be a strategic resource and so on, and yet we spend decades outsourcing IT to someone else. If it's really truly important to your business, why aren't you doing it yourself? >> Justin, it's a great question and here's my observations, just thinking out loud here. One, just from a Silicon Valley perspective, looking at entrepreneurial as a canary in the coalmine, you've seen over the past 10-15 years, recently past 10, entrepreneurs have become developer entrepreneurs, product entrepreneurs, have become very savvy on the business side. That's the programmer. When we see Travis with Uber, no VC, they got smart because they could educate themselves. AngelList, Venture Hacks, there's a lot of data out there, so I see some signs of developers specifically building apps because user design is really important, they are leading into, what I call, the street MBA. They're not actually getting an MBA, they don't read the Wall Street Journal, but they're learning about some business concepts that they have to understand to program. IT I think is still getting there, but not as much as the developers. >> Here's a great question that I've learned over the years, and look, I'm coming out of the IT side, as we all are. When I visit a customer and I try to sell them my product, my first question is, "If I didn't exist, what would you do? "And if you don't buy my product, what happens in your business?" And if they're saying, "I have this other alternative." Or it's like, "Ah, we'll do it next year." I mean, maybe I can sell them some product, but what they're really telling me is, "I don't matter." >> All right, let's change the conversation a little bit, just move to another direction I want to get your thoughts on. And I should have, on the intro, given you more prompts, Alan. You were also involved in Nicira, the startup that VMware had bought-- >> Alan: Before all this NSX stuff, I was early. >> Hold on, let me finish the intro. We've interviewed Martin Casado. Stu talks to us all the time, I'm sure Chess has been hearing on the other set, "Oh, hey Martin Casado." It was a great interview, of course they're on theCUBE directory. But, you were there when it was just developing and then boom, software-defined networking, it's going to save the world. NSX has become very important to VMware, what's your thoughts on that? What does the alumni from Nicira and that folks that are still here and outside of VMware think about what's it's turned into? Is it relevant? And where is it going? >> Look, I could have not predicted five years ago when Nicira was acquired by VMware, it would be the heart of everything that their CEO and their team is talking about, if you want to know if that's important, go to the directory of sessions and one out of every three are about NSX. But, I think what it really means is there's a recognition that the network component, which is what really NSX represents, is the part that's going to allow them to transcend the traditional software-defined data center. I have two connections, so Steve Herrod is my investor, Steve is the inventor of the software-defined data center. That was the old Kool-Aid, not the new Kool-Aid. We've left the software-defined data center, we've moved into this cloud era and for them NSX is their driving force on being able to extend the VMware control plane into environments they used to never play in before. That's imminently clear. >> John: Justin, what's your take on NSX? >> NSX is the compatibility mechanism for being able do VMware in multiple places, so I think it's very, very important for VMware as a company. I don't think it's the only solution to that particular problem of being able to have networks that move around, it's possible to do it in other ways. For example, cloud-native type things, will do the networking thing in a different way. But, the network hasn't really undergone the same kind of change that happened in server or it did in storage, it's been pretty much the same for a long, long time. >> You've had an industry structurally dominated by one company, things don't change when-- >> Justin: And it still is, yeah. >> John: Security, security, because we've got a little bit of time I want to get to security. You guys are in the security space. >> Thanks for noticing. >> (laughs) I still don't know what you did, I'm only kidding. Steve Harrod is your investor, former CEO of VMware, very relevant for folks watching. Guys, security Pat Gelsinger said years ago it should be a duo, we've got to fix this. Nothing has really happened. What is the state of the union, if you will, of security? Where the frig is it going? What the hell's going on with security? >> There's two issues with that. If we put our industry analyst hat on, security is the largest segment of IT where nobody owns 5% market share, so there's not gorilla force that can drive that. VMware was the gorilla force driving virtualization, Cisco drove networking, EMC, in the early days, drove storage, but when you get to security you have this kind of-- >> John: Diluted. >> It's like the Balkans, it's like feudal states. >> Justin: It's a ghastly nightmare. >> What I think what Pat was talking about, which we also subscribe to, there are some movements in security, which micro-segmentation is one of them, which are kind of reinstalling a form of forensic hygiene into saying, "Your practices, if they occur, "they will reduce the risk profile." But, I think 50% of the security solutions and categories-- >> So, if I've lost my teeth, I don't get cavities. That kind of thing going on. >> If you're a doctor and you're making rounds in the hospital, you wash your hands or you put on gloves. >> And that's where we are. That is the stage we are at with security is we're at the stage where surgeons didn't believe they should wash their hands because they knew better and they'd say, "No, this couldn't possibly be making patients sick." People have finally realized that people get sick and the germ theory is real and we should wash our hands. >> Your network makes you sick. Your network is the carrier. Everything that's happening in network is effectively the Typhoid Mary of security. (John laughs) We're building flat, fast, unsegmented Layer 3 networks, which allow viruses to move at the speed of light across your environment. So, movements like, what's that called App Defense? >> Justin: App Defense, yep. >> App Defense or micro-segmentation from Illumio and Vmware, are the kind of new hygiene and new practices that are going to reduce the wide-spread disease growing. >> From an evolution theory, then the genetics of networks are effed up. This is what you're saying, we need to fix-- >> No, the networks are getting back to what they were supposed to do. Networks move packets from point A to point D. >> The dumb network? >> Alan: Yes, the dumber the better. >> Okay. You agree? >> Alan: Dumb them down. >> Dumb networks, smart end points. Smart networks doesn't scale as well as smart end points, and we're seeing that with edge computing, for example. Distributed networking is a hard problem and there is so much compute going out there, everything has a computer in it, they're just getting tinier and tinier. If we rely on the network to secure all of that, we're doomed. >> Better off at the end point. And this fuels the whole IoT edge thing, straight up one of the key wave slides out there. >> What you're going to have is a lot of telemetry points and you're going to have a lot of enforcement points. Our architecture is compatible with this, VMware is moving in this direction, other people are, but the people that are clinging to the gum up my network with all kinds of crap, because actually people want it to go the other way. If you think about it, the Internet was built to move packets from point A to point B in case of a nuclear war and, other than routing, there wasn't a whole lot-- >> We still might have that problem (laughs) >> Yeah, well there's always that (laughs). >> Fingers crossed. >> Guys, we got to break, next segment. Al, I'll give you the last word, just give a quick plug for Illumio. Thanks for coming on and being a special guest analyst, as usual, great stuff. Little slow from vacation, you're usually a little snappier. >> Alan: Little slow off the vacation mark. >> Yeah, come on. Back in Italy-- >> Too much Brunello di Motalcino, yeah. >> John: (laughs) Quick plug for Illumio, do a quick plug. >> We're really great to be here. John, you and I talked recently, Illumio is growing very rapidly, clearly we are probably emerging as one of the leaders in this micro-segmentation movement. >> John: A wannabe gorilla. >> What's that? >> You're a wannabe gorilla, go big or go home. >> We are, well, gorillas have to start as little gorillas first, we're not a wannabe gorilla, we're just gorillas growing really rapidly. It takes a lot more food at the zoo to keep us going. About 200 people growing rapidly, just moved into Asia, Pat, we got a guy in your part of the world we work with. >> First of all, it's not a zoo, it's still a jungle. The zoo is not yet established. >> That's true. We're going to establish the zoo. Things are great at Illumio. We have amazing things on the floor here today of, basically the system will actually write its own security policy for you. It's a lot of movement into machine learning, a lot of good stuff. >> All right. Guys, thanks so much. Alan Cohen with Illumio, >> Alan: Thank you. >> Chief Commercial Officer. And Justin Warren, analyst, I'm John Furrier. More live coverage from VMworld after this short break. (electronic music)

>> From Phoenix, Arizona, The Cube at Catalyst Contracts. Here's your host, Jeff Frick. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We are in Phoenix, Arizona at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference. It's funny, seems something about Phoenix that this is where all the great women in tech conferences are. We were here two years ago for our first Grace Hopper and it's really fun to return now to this one, the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference, which, a little bit smaller, about 400 people, their fourth year, but again it's all about empowering girls, empowering women to think differently, to take charge and to be more successful so really excited for our next guest, Jim McCarthy, brought in to motivate the troops. >> That's right. >> So first off, welcome. >> Thank you. >> So-- >> Thanks Jeff. >> Your keynote was all about a career without regret, have a great impact on what you care about. That is so topical right now, and especially these people that talk about, you know, the millennials and you know, kind of the younger generation coming up, they want to do things that they care about >> Yeah, I think all the research indicates millennials, more than maybe prior generations, really are looking for work that has impact and has meaning. >> Is it because they can? You know, that things are a little bit easier, they know they're not necessarily y'know, suffering to get by? Why do you think there's the change and then once you've made that decision, how do you implement that in kind of your day to day life? >> Well I'm not sure I could explain how the millennials are perhaps different, maybe they just see some of the challenges in our world like climate change for example and realize wow, there's some very serious challenges we face. That might be why they're looking for more of an impact, but in terms of what to do to find more meaning in life I always encourage people to do work that they really love, that they're passionate about, and in this conference a lot of the women have talked about passion and what you're good at and really doing that 'cause that's what you're going to be most successful at. >> Right, but that's a really common theme >> Yeah. >> We've heard that forever, to close your parachute, y'know, if you could find something that you get paid well and you're passionate about, but often times there's a conflict, right? Sometimes it's just harder, people get stuck in something that they're not happy with, but they're not really willing to make the change, not really willing to make the investment or take the chance so what are some of the things you tell people that are specific actionable, that will help them y'know, make those changes to get some place where they're y'know, feeling better about what they're working on? >> Well, so for me part of my talk was I talk about how I had a career in Silicone Valley, early employee at Yahoo! and different internet companies and then about three and a half years ago I was diagnosed with cancer and that was a big wake up call for me. And even though my health seems to be okay right now, it really sort of helped me realize that wow, I'm not going to live forever and by embracing my mortality I've started living much more fully and I decided okay, if I wanted to be a motivational speaker, I always wanted to, never had the courage to do it, I thought okay, I'm not going to live forever, I might as well dive into it, have the courage to try even if I fail. But at least I'll be happy and I'm not living a life with regrets. >> Right. >> So that was part of my workshop yesterday. >> So that's really interesting and a powerful story I mean, we often hear when there's these, y'know, kind of life changing events, these big moments, y'know that is the catalyst. Does it take that to make the change? Can people do it without the change? I mean, we can't hardly get anyone to lift up their face out of email. (laughing) I mean, how do we do it without that or does it really take that? I mean, is that really what happens, whether it's yourself or a loved one or someone you care about, it's interesting 'cause that's powerful catalyst >> Yeah so, I think for some people it does take getting, y'know, hit with a ton of bricks like that in order to really realize what they need to do and have the courage to do it and just realize y'know, this may not work out but I'm just going to go for it. In part of my workshops I try to help people think about their mortality, think about if you were to die today, how would you feel about your relationships. If you were to die today, how would you feel about the work that you've done. And then I always have them write out action plans for okay, based on what I wrote, based on what we discussed, what do you want to change in your life and what's the deadline to do it? So that's kind of the process that I use in my workshops so it's not just nice story and inspiration but it's really okay, how can we bring this back to what am I going to do with my career, what am I going to do with my relationships and there's also very practical things that people can do that I think will help them a lot, one is mindfulness to reduce their stress, one is affirmation in which you can actually train your brain to be much more positive thinking and there's a lot of neuroscience behind that today which shows that you can actually sculpt your brain to have a much more positive attitude. So those are some and then the goal setting is important too. So -- and then gratitude, I'm sorry, there's another practice. So these are very, this is not just nice ideas but actually daily practices you can do, mindfulness and meditation, gratitude and affirmations, these are all things that can really have a daily impact in a very positive way. >> Right, and I'm sure people say, "Jim, that sounds great, I printed it out, it's on my fridge, but jeez, I wake up, I have 472 unread emails, the boss is calling me," how do I really actually do it? I want to do it but I'm drowning in email, whoever invented email is problematic, I'm glad that young kids don't use it 'cause it's going to die soon. (laughing) But y'know, practically, what do you tell folks? >> What I tell people is if you meditated 10 minutes a day, that's about 1% of your waking hours and that 1% would improve the other 99% of your waking hours and meditation used to be very weird and funky and new-agey and now you see more and more people saying, "No actually, 10 minutes of mindfulness or meditation or breathing or whatever can make a huge positive impact on your health both physically and mentally". There's all sorts of very serious scientific research, neuroscience, which underscores that. So if you invest 10 minutes of your day in being at peace, reducing stress, focusing on your breathing, then the other 99% of your day is going to be calmer, you're not going to be freaking out so much, you get an email in your inbox that you may not like but you can say, "okay, let me breath, okay let me think about this, okay", don't have to do an immediate flame mail response and then you're doing a lot less damage control in your life and you're being much more focused on how do I want to spend my day. And so that is one way to reduce your stress and yet still get stuff done, the most important stuff done. >> It's interesting, I have an unwritten book that I always wanted to write, kind of on some of the things you said before about y'know, don't forget your death bed, 'cause at some point you're going to be laying on your death bed-- >> That would be the title of your book? >> And you're going to have those questions. >> Yeah >> Yeah Y'know, did I do what I want to do? Did I spend too much time at the office, or too much time at the beach or too much time with the kids or not? >> Well if I can say, there's a woman who wrote a book named "The Top Five Regrets of the Dying" and regret number two was "I wish I had worked less". And every single man in her survey that she talked to said "I wish I had worked less". And these are men on their deathbeds. But it applies to a lot of women as well. >> So I want to shift gears a little bit, back to your tech days, >> Yeah (laughing) >> Just looking at your background, obviously some of our homework and you y'know, you did a summer at McKenzie, you're kind of at the leading edge of business and smart people and you -- >> You're too kind Jeff, okay? (laughing) >> No, and then you decide I haven't finished the story, and then you go to San Jose Mercury News to work in classifieds. >> Actually to do marketing. >> To do marketing >> Yeah >> But you were involved in classifieds and I only bring up the classifieds 'cause it's interesting because then you left and went to Yahoo!, right at the main, I mean really at a pivotal time in the transformation of classifieds moving from the newspaper to online. >> Yes >> So you lived kind of this digital transformation long before Uber and some of the other examples that are so often cited. >> Yeah. >> So I'd just love to get kind of your perspective on, y'know, kind of digital transformation, it happened, this was 97 so what 20 years ago, I can't believe it's 20 years ago, to now and then in the context of what you're doing now. >> So I graduated from business school in 1996, and went to the San Jose Mercury News and was doing marketing things. But right when I was graduating I was like, "Oh jeez, y'know this internet thing is going to be huge!", and after a few months at the Mercury News, I said, "Look, I really want to do something with internet", and they said, "Sorry, can't do that, keep helping us sell papers." And I said, "Well screw this!", and so I went to Yahoo! In July 1997, I was employee number 258 and I was hired to be a product manager for Yahoo! classifieds, so realizing, 'cause I remember sitting in the Mercury News at my computer and looking at, wow, Yahoo! has some like, online classifieds for autos? And careers? And this is way better than the newspaper! I can have long descriptions here and you can even see pictures of things, so I went to Yahoo! classifieds and out of that we created Yahoo! Autos, Yahoo! Careers Yahoo! Personals, Yahoo! Real Estate. And yes, this absolutely-- And then later there was the category killers where there was Match.com, where there was Monster or Monster Board, and on down the line-- >> Monster Park, remember Monster Park, one of the first sponsored stadiums back in the day. >> Yeah, yeah. >> After 3Com. Excuse me, I'm sorry to interrupt. >> No it's okay. So it was an amazing transformation and it was one of these things where the internet just does things so much better and you could say it also sort of helped destroy an industry, right? I mean, I'm certainly a big believer in the power of local newspapers and investigative journalism, and that's really been damaged a lot from the last 20 years, but sometimes it's like this technological imperative where the web is so much better, people have to figure out different business models, different ways to fund their journalism, different revenue models that work. But I mean it's just amazing to see what's gone on with how classifieds has developed, e-commerce has developed. I worked later on Yahoo! Auctions and Shopping, you can talk about that more if you want. >> Yeah, a friend of mine works at the Yellow Pages, I was like dude, you probably need to get a new job. >> Really? Still? >> It's YP.com now. Well turns out they have a huge online business which is good for them. No still, I was like c'mon, (laughing) You need to get out of that. >> Gosh (laughing). >> So, anyway. It's just interesting, the digital transformation that we're under now y'know, has happened over and over again, we just happen to be kind of in the current iteration, sometimes people forget-- >> Yes, yeah. >> That there was a time before Google, it was called AltaVista (laughing) or WebCrawler if you want to go back even further. Anyway, we regress. So Jim, what're you working on now, what're you looking forward to in the next six months, any special projects? You just traveling the country and spreading good word? >> I travel the country and I travel internationally doing my workshop. So basically the workshop's where I teach companies how to build happy, high performance teams. >> Awesome. >> And in the workshop, some of them are a little bit more, much more sort of inspirational and about mortality and about what you want to do for life purpose, I have a workshop called, "Happiness Workshop: Keep Calm and Get Stuff Done" and then so there's ones which are much more goal setting, there's more which are inspirational and yeah, I travel and teach companies how to -- whether it's an hour workshop or a six hour workshop, that's what I do. >> Jim, thanks for stopping by, it's a great story and I think it's just so important, y'know there's a lot of great inspirational stories out there but really y'know, how you do you help people, give them actionable things that they can put on the fridge, put on their calender and-- >> And have in their daily routine. >> Right and do it right, and do change behavior 'cause it's hard to change attitude, really hard, and the way you do it is you change behavior, that you can actually change. Thanks for-- >> Yeah, yeah. >> Thanks for sharing a few minutes with us. >> Thank you Jeff, very kind of you. >> Absolutely >> Thank you >> Jim McCarthy, I'm Jeff Frick, we're in Phoenix, Arizona at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference, you're watching The Cube. Thanks for watching.