>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital Experience Brought to You by Dell Technologies. Hello, everyone, and welcome Back to the cubes. Continuing coverage of Del Tech World 2020. This is David Dante With Me is Tom Sweet. He's the EVP and chief financial officer of Dell Technologies. Tom is great to see you. Thanks for coming on The Virtual Cube. >>Dave is always good to see you. And thanks for having me. It's always good to have a conversation with you. >>I actually don't think I've spent a lot of time talking to folks from jail, but I don't think you and I have talked since the pandemic hit. So you know, what's the macro picture? You know, you and I was usually start with the big picture. And, of course, the impact of the pandemic and kind of the big waves that you're seeing out. There may be some of the changes that you're navigating >>Well, you know, it's it's been uninterested near David's. You and I both know, right, and so we way clearly did a number of tactical actions as we worked our way through the pandemic in the early days to make sure our team members could work and we're safe and then pivoted to making sure we could, you know, help our customers and get them up in productive from a work from home perspective, you know? And so it's and then we've evolved into Then, you know, how do you think your way through? Um, you know, what's the what's the work? How do you work your way through? What do you look like on the other end? And so we've been spending a lot of time thinking about investments. Where do we put Capital Toe work to position the organization for success? Post Cobain, whenever that might be, by the way, and and so that's been the focus in, you know, really spending a lot of time on investment areas. The whole macro dynamic has been interesting is, you know, way went through this huge trough in Q two in terms of GDP and global GDP. You know, we're working our way out of that at a macro level. It's very interesting as you go across the globe and look at the various countries and regions and how they're recovering at very different paces. You know, the business has been uninterested in business in terms of what we do, and our PC business has been quite strong. And we've seen a big shift with the work from home and learn from home dynamics with strong demand from government and education. Three infrastructure business R I s G business has been a bit softer, just a zoo Companies have pivoted, but all in all, I think we're working our way through it. I e think the actions we took to preserve liquidity and protect the P and L early in the pandemic have paid off for us. And, uh, we're now focused on how do we position Post Post when we get through this whole cova dynamic? >>You know, way both seen a couple of pretty severe downturns. I think about the dot com downturn and then the financial crisis. I'm actually kind of surprised and impressed the way that that not just our industry, but all industries have worked through this. I guess in hindsight, that shouldn't be surprising given the pace of technology. But I remember those two that I just mentioned. People were flat footed. I remember Ed Zander joking when he was a son. Anybody wanna buy a server? And it was just there was business wasn't being transacted. And that's different this time around, Uh, industries have have responded and you know, technology, of course, is is at the heart of that. But were you surprised at all by the by the pace of I don't want to say recovery, but resiliency, I guess >>a little bit to be honest day. I mean I mean, it does highlight the fact that at the heart of what most companies are you know are doing these days is technology and how they evolve their business model, how how they interact with their customers. And so clearly, if you you think all the way back with our industry date back to the early two thousands and we had a with the bump with the dot com bust and people shut down, I t spending, you know. And now I don't think you can really do that if you think about where you need to be from a business model perspective. So I think there's been a maturation and a recognition that technology plays a key role. But But it has been surprising about how fast it's pivoted. To be honest with you in the sense of, you know, I think of the very distinct cycles is would come through the Coba dynamic. Big PC demand early innings. You know, we saw some recovering the I S G spend in Q two in our quarter second quarter a little bit better than Q one. You know, as companies readjusted spin eso, it's The organizations across in our customer base have have adjusted quite well. Clearly, there is vertical implications. If you're in the airline industry or some of the hospitality, you're you're being a bit more cautious, right? But all in all, it's been a It's been an interesting journey for all of us. >>Yeah, I mean, at the height of the pandemic, you saw, you know, some people taking actions. Obviously, they were freezing I t projects. They were starting to do layoffs or freezing new hires. That's moderated based on the data that we've seen. I just published the other day that we're starting to see some, you know, slow thawing of that tight grip on I t. What are you seeing? Both externally and maybe as the CFO. What are you doing internally? Well, >>if you talk to my CEO should probably give you a different answer day that I'm about to give you because you know, I'm a extraordinarily balanced guy in my point of view, right? But, you know, look, I think externally we're seeing targeted investments happening by customers that are moving projects forward. I think there's a bit of caution, and I do think this whole evolution off. How do customers want to consume? I t is evolving, you know. Is it a cat expand? Is it a Is it a financing structure? Is it a as a service and consumption model type? You know, So those three economic models around I t. Or changing and evolving. But I think overall, what we've seen is some level off, you know, cautious, you know, cautiousness. But yet, you know, targeted and investment with our customers and in an internally, Quite frankly, we're continuing to invest. We have capabilities that we need to evolve. You know, we're working. We're very focused on transformational projects that enable our customers to do business with us easier. On the other hand, we're being very tight around. What do I need to do from, You know, some of those old run the business types spend and how doe I streamline that while still supporting the business properly. So it's a bit of a balance right now. >>Yeah, and you obviously have the advantage of large portfolio parts of your portfolio exposed. Like you said, some of the on Prem stuff. But then you've got the certainly the laptop in the work from home shift. A couple of questions there. One is, first of all, you know, Della was largely a larger work from home culture than the average. The average Let's say the average is on a 15 to 20% of employees work from home. You're probably higher than that. And and But now we're seeing that people are expecting at least double that long term are gonna work from home. So you were, you know, somewhat, maybe more prepared than than most. But then again, you have that tailwind on one side of your business. Your supply chain did very well, unlike some of your competitors that we saw early in the pandemic, you know? So it seems like you've managed that pretty well. Maybe your thoughts. >>Yeah. Okay. We do have a culture that provided flexibility. We've been on this journey for roughly 10 years about having our people have some flexibility where they work. And so we had roughly 20 25,000 people working remotely, or some are in some hybrid fashion before the pandemic. You know, obviously, right now, 90% of our workforce is is remote. We think, you know, post pandemic, you know that it's gonna look like something like, you know, you know, 45 50% of the organization is probably gonna be in some sort of hybrid or remote setting. You know, that's the feedback our team members are giving us. And, uh and so you know, we have been fortunate to be able to have the culture that pivoted quite frank quite quickly, I should say, as we worked our way through this from a supply chain perspective Look our supply chain has done. Team has done a terrific job on sort of navigating the barriers and the challenges put up by a covert 19 crisis. But I'll go further back that if you and I talked about this before, think about what's happened with our supply chain and global supply chains over the last couple of years and whether it's the US China dynamic and how do you work your way through that? You know, and how do you ensure continuity of supply for our customers? And so that that teams done a great job? You know, we have long term relationships with many of our key suppliers, which has been helpful. And, you know, as you know, we have one of the largest, if not the largest, technology by in the industry. So it has helped us in terms of making sure we have capability and availability for custom. >>Let's talk a little bit about some of the strategy and the value levers that you guys talk about. You've always hit on industry consolidation, integration delivering. You've seen the 13 D with the movie you're gonna make with VM Ware. How have things changed? There has a pandemic changed your thinking at all, And how are you doing in terms of those turning those knobs? >>You know, first, it has not changed our thinking in the sense of some of those keep long term value creation activities we've been focused on and platforms we've been focused on around Hey, you know, we know that in the where we where we sell where we compete, that the industry is not a, you know, a rapidly growing industry. And so you grow organically by consolidation and share gain, and that's what we've been focused on. You couple that with the innovation engine we have with Dell Technologies. And, uh, including our, you know, way need to including that VM ware. You know, we've got a new, extraordinary patent portfolio and we've got these what we think are unique solutions and capability. So we're pushing hard on the innovation engine, and then you couple that with the capital work we've been doing around, how do you delivering the balance sheet? Getting the company reposition back towards investment grade. And we've made really good progress on that. You know will pay down $5.5 billion of debt this year, which will again position us closer to those investment grade like metrics. And so those those platforms are pillars, if you will, of our strategy, haven't changed. But in addition to that, you know, we are looking at where do you grow and how do you continue to grow at a pace, perhaps at GDP GDP plus, which is sort of where we think you know, is the long term framework we've got to be thinking about. So that's where you get into these adjacency is like, How do you How do you further driving a multi cloud hybrid cloud? How do you think about the opportunity with Telco, with five G roll out that's happening across the globe and the investment that's going to go into that the whole edge computing the edge cloud is of interest to us. And so there's a number of these emerging areas that we think are pretty interesting, and their adjacent and fit nicely into what we do is a, you know is, quite frankly, that essential infrastructure company. So that's the focus we've been driving about. How do we set up both continue on our core mission of consolidation, innovation and delivering as well as how do you set up some of these growth vectors as we move forward? >>Well, in one of the other levers you filed the 13 d, I don't know what you can share with us. Some of it gets confused. How much is fact sometimes and how much is speculation. But, I mean, I've said that it appears that one of the things that you're looking at is creating an equilibrium in terms of the balance sheets of both companies. Uh, keep getting them both that investment grade. What can you tell us about what you're thinking there? >>Yeah, I look, you know, obviously we did file a 13 D in mid July, which essentially said we were contemplating whether you know, a potential spin of our 81% ownership interest out to the Dell Technology shareholders. And so we're continuing to work with the VM Ware team on, you know, what does that look like with a couple of fundamental principles, which is Hey, you know, we have both benefited from this better together story. And so how do we keep that differentiation in some type of a long term operating agreement or operating framework? But at the same point in time, you know, you know, do the potentially look at it spend that unlocks value for both sets of shareholders of both companies, right? VM ware gets additional flexibility from a from a strategic perspective, they don't have the Dell balance sheet. Dell Technologies balance sheets sitting on top of them from the Dell Technologies perspective. You know, we presumably as part of this would be some type of a dividend stream. But by being were out to its share. What shareholders? We get the opportunity to accelerate our delivering story and get back closer to investment grade or right at investment grade, depending upon how this all works out. So we think there's a number of really interesting value levers here, right at the same point in time, wanting to protect what's been really good about the relationship in the way we've gone to market, the way we've innovated. And so that's the balance were walking right now. And you know there's work to do is we work with being where to see. If this makes sense, can we get it done? But But we're early innings and and we may end up not doing anything honestly, But I mean, that's that's sort of the thinking that we're working through right now. >>Well, it's an interesting thought exercise, if nothing else. And so e I look at it when when you combine del in the M. C when you did the acquisition. Now you became VM Ware's most important partner. Just even if it's in terms of revenue because you've got a massive distribution channel. So there's there's that inherent value in that relationship, independent of anything else. The flip side of that is VM Ware has been, you know, awesome acquire of companies. Uh, you know, inorganic r and D, if you will. And some pretty cool R and D A Z Well, so it's gonna be really interesting toe watch how that plays out. I think we wait and see. That's a comment, you know, >>we're working through it and we'll see where we end up. But, you know, you've highlighted a couple of great points. I mean, our, you know, our go to market reach, you know, it is extraordinary. And VM Ware has benefited from that. We've benefited from the VM Ware relationship with some of their technologies is we've integrated those into our combined solution. So it's been a it's been a win win, and that's the balance of how do you keep that, Aziz. Well, as you know, quite frankly, provide some value back to your shareholders. >>Well, we've seen that not just the the uplift of the market. But clearly the speculation has caused some unlocking of value and may bring some others from the sidelines. But I wanted to ask you about I've been talking about this automation mandate. I think there was one. Certainly. There was one before the pandemic, and now it's even accentuated. Um, can you talk a little bit about how you're applying automation, thio your business and maybe what you're seeing with customers? How that could affect, you know, the long term productivity of your business? Maybe new ways to work. What can you tell us there? >>Yeah, Look, I mean, we we have a pretty significant automation agenda within Dell Technologies, both from an internal perspective as well as the automation and a I am and machine learning capabilities were embedding into our solutions to help our customers Dr their automation agendas. Internally, what we've been focused on is how do I simplify? How do I take complexity out? You know, how doe I providing a richer mawr interactive experience with our customers? How doe I lean into service needs service capabilities, all those areas that are ripe for automation and my finance organization alone Right now, I think I have over 125 automation projects going right now is we? We look at how we simplify from a customer. Perspective is I go out and talk to customers. They're also doing much the same thing that we're doing, which is how did they take complexity out of their process? How do they streamline? How are they? How do they drive? Responsiveness and customer, uh, you know, customer experience at a much higher level. And so it's all you know. It's all war walking down this pathway of process simplification, automation, which includes technology, investment, obviously which is, you know, helpful from our perspective. And so there's a agenda out there is Aziz. We talked with customers in terms of in a commonality as we talked with customers. And then the other point I'd give you Dave, is that just as you think about, you know, as I talked to my peers out in the industry, I mean, many of us are driving automation agendas. Have a lot of that, you know, with focused on taking touch out, enrichment of job and capabilities, enrichment of, you know, we gotta build skill sets to drive that. So there is a big theme across the industry in this area, and I think it's gonna do nothing but accelerate. Quite frankly, Aziz, we work our way forward. >>Yeah, I've talked to a bunch of customers in this topic, and it seems to be sort of three paths. Actually, one path is there's. There's a lot of low hanging fruit and easy wins. And but the problem with that is a lot of times it's just paving the cow path with automation. You know, the other is you got to do the hard work of really digging into the process and the third that I've seen, which is kind of interesting to which is kind of what you're alluding to is your free up. You know, some of the mundane tasks, and you let the people who really understand the process rethink that process. And then you go into a deeper automation agenda, and that seems toe that will turn millions into billions. >>That's the value. Add their game. I mean, it's that third framework that you laid out, which is you have to do the work around process. But then again, how doe I then you know over time is I is. I have the experts help us on the automation capabilities. Once we've identified, what are the appropriate processes or functions to be automated? How do you then pivot resource tomb or higher value add activity across the organization and that Z when you when you do that, you unlock, I think, a terrific value creation opportunity, which we're very focused on. >>And I know there's always a big concern about jobs with automation. But the reality is, if you look at the data from the U. S. And Europe of the last couple of decades, the productivity trend is clear. It's it's gone down. And if you think about the big problems that we face in the world, whether it's climate change, your national debt or health care, you know you know hunger, you just can't throw people at that problem. You gotta have a combinations of people in machines. And so well, there may be, you know, a short term impact. I'm kind of an optimist. I know you are a swell >>No, it Zuno. Obviously, this is a tough time for a lot of businesses and customers. As we work our way through the pandemic and and including, you know, and and some have adjusted their workforce, you know, and part of its from the economic reality. But part of it is also a skill set. Dynamic is a reshaping workforce. And but I do think automation plays a key role. And how do you enable skill sets to evolve and get again re allocated Thio other value creation activity. So there is, you know, unfortunately, are probably gonna be some short term disruptions in certain areas. But on the other hand, if you think about the long term gain and the productivity gains that we all need to drive, you know you can't do it without automation and thinking your way through streamlining and taking complexity out of the organization. >>So my last question has come back the productivity We're talking about work from home. Do you feel like you've had a bump in productivity? As a result? Maybe there was some short term disruption. But you know, what's your what's your data or your gut say, in terms of the impact on your organization and then maybe on your customers as well in terms of the program. So >>I think it's been fairly similar between us and our customers. I waas concerned when we went to a work from home back in March that we were gonna lose productivity and, you know, and I thought it was gonna be a productivity drain, you know, a czar. Team members were juggling work and their family dynamics and situation is in. Obviously in the middle of that are in the early innings of this covert crisis. What we have seen, in fact, is actually, we've seen productivity improved pre Koba to where we are today. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that we're giving our team members one flexibility on how they do their job. But we're giving them time back there, and they're not commuting. There's less meetings that are consuming time, you know, and the responsiveness in the capabilities of the order such that we're moving through decisions and projects. I think, at a faster pace, quite frankly. And so it's been an interesting and, I think to me a bit of a surprising result from what we've seen as I talked to customers and I'm the executive sponsor on a number of extraordinary, very large multinational customers. It's pretty much the same response. You know, the similar experience, right, that they've seen similar results that we have. So now what you don't want this to be is that you're doing it on the backs of the team members working 15 or 16 hours a day. You've got to find the right balance. But the fact that we're giving them flexibility to jump out during the middle of Daito tend to some family members or help with, you know, their Children's learning. Then they're back in maybe a little bit later during the day. I mean, I do think that we've been able to a culture that's pretty interesting that is paying dividends for us right now. >>Yeah, it's ironic that this hit at the beginning of of 2020 it's clear that it's gonna be a different decade than it was last decade, which I guess every decade is Tom Tom Sweet. It was great to have you on the Cube. Thanks so much. Always a pleasure speaking with you. >>Always, always great to see you. Thanks for having me. >>You're welcome. And thank you for watching everybody says Dave Volonte, you're watching our coverage, the cubes coverage of del Tech World 2020. But right back after this short break

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity. >> Good morning everyone. You are watching theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite 2019 here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside of Stu Miniman. We are joined by Donovan Brown. He is the Principal Cloud Advocate Manager of Methods and Practices Organizations at Microsoft. (laughing) A mouthful of a title. >> Yes. >> Rebecca: We are thrilled to welcome you on. >> Thank you so much. >> You are the man in the black shirt. >> I have been dubbed the man in the black shirt. >> So tell us what that's all about. You're absolutely famous. Whenever we were saying Donovan Brown's going to be here. "The man in the black shirt?" >> Yes. >> So what's that about? >> So it was interesting. The first time I ever got to keynote in an event was in New York in 2015 for Scott Guthrie, the guy who only wears a red shirt. And I remember, I was literally, and this is no exaggeration, wearing this exact black shirt, right, because I bring it with me and I can tell because the tag in the back is worn more than the other black shirts I have just like this one. And I bring this one out for big events because I was in a keynote yesterday and I knew I was going to be on your show today. And I wore it and it looked good on camera. I felt really good. I'm an ex-athlete. We're very superstitious. I'm like I have to wear that shirt in every keynote that I do from now on because if you look further back, you'll see me in blue shirts and all other colored shirts. But from that day forward, it's going to be hard pressed for you to find me on camera on stage without this black shirt on or a black shirt of some type. And there's a really cool story about the black shirt that was. This is what\ I knew it was a thing. So I pack about six or seven black shirts in every luggage. I'm flying overseas to Germany to go Kampf to do a keynote for, I think it was Azure Saturday. Flights were really messed up. they had to check my bag which makes me very uncomfortable because they lose stuff. I'm not too worried about it, it'll be okay. Check my bag, get to Europe. They've been advertising that the black shirt is coming for months and they lose my luggage. And I am now, heart's pounding out of my chest. (laughing) We go to the airport. I'm shopping in the airport because I don't even have luggage. I cannot find a black shirt and I am just thinking this is devastating. How am I going to go to a conference who's been promoting "the black shirt's coming" not wearing a black shirt? And my luggage does not show up. I show up at the event I'm thinking okay, maybe I'll get lucky and the actual conference shirt will be black and then we're all good. I walk in and all I see are white shirts. I'm like this could not be worse. And then now the speakers show up. They're wearing blue shirts, I'm like this cannot be happening. So I'm depressed, I'm walking to the back and everyone's starts saying, "Donovan's here, Donovan's here." And I'm looking to find my polo, my blue polo I'm going to put on. They're like no, no, no, no Donovan. They printed one black shirt just for me. I was like oh my goodness, this is so awesome. So I put the black shirt on, then I put a jacket on over it and I go out and I tell the story of how hard it was to get here, that they lost my luggage, I'm not myself without a black shirt. But this team had my back. And when I unzipped my shirt, the whole place just starts clapping 'cause I'm wearing >> Oh, I love it. >> a black shirt. >> Exactly. So now to be seen without a black shirt is weird. Jessica Dean works for me. We were in Singapore together and it was an off day. So I just wore a normal shirt. She had to take a double take, "Oh no, is that Donovan, my manager "'cause he's not wearing a black shirt?" I don't wear them all the time but if I'm on camera, on stage you're going to see me in a black shirt. >> Rebecca: All right, I like it. >> Well, Donovan, great story. Your team, Methods and Practices makes up a broad spectrum of activities and was relatively recently rebranded. >> Yeah. >> We've talked to some of your team members on theCUBE before, so tell our audience a little bit about the bridges Microsoft's building to help the people. >> Great. No, so that's been great. Originally, I built a team called The League. Right, there's a really small group of just DevOps focused diehards. And we still exist. A matter of fact, we're doing a meet and greet tonight at 4:30 where you can come and meet all five of the original League members. Eventually, I got tasked with a much bigger team. I tell the story. I was in Norway, I went to sleep, I had four direct reports. I literally woke up and I had 20 people reporting to me and I'm like what just happened? And the team's spanned out a lot more than just DevOps. So having it branded as the DevOps Guy doesn't really yield very well for people who aren't diehard DevOps people. And what we feared was, "Donovan there's people who are afraid of DevOps "who now report to you." You can't be that DevOps guy anymore. You have to broaden what you do so that you can actually focus on the IT pros in the world, the modern operations people, the lift and shift with Jeremy, with what Jeramiah's doing for me right, with the lift and shift of workloads . And you still have to own DevOps. So what I did is I pulled back, reduced my direct reports to four and now I have teams underneath me. Abel Wang now runs DevOps. He's going to be the new DevOps guy for me. Jeramiah runs our lift and shift. Rick Klaus or you know the Hat, he runs all my IT Pro and then Emily who's just an amazing speaker for us, runs all of my modern operations. So we span those four big areas right. Modern operations which is sort of like the ops side of DevOps, IT pros which are the low level infrastructure, diehard Windows server admins and then we have DevOps run by Abel which is still, the majority of The League is over there. And then we have obviously the IT pros, modern ops, DevOps and then the left and shift with Jeramiah. >> I'd like to speak a little bit as to why you've got these different groups? How do you share information across the teams but you know really meet customers where they are and help them along 'cause my background's infrastructure. >> Donovan: Sure. >> And that DevOps, was like that religion pounding at you, that absolutely, I mean, I've got a closet full of hoodies but I'm not a developer. Understand? >> Understood. (laughs) It's interesting because when you look at where our customers are today, getting into the cloud is not something you do overnight. It takes lots of steps. You might start with a lift and shift, right? You might start with just adding some Azure in a hybrid scenario to your on-prem scenario. So my IT pros are looking after that group of people that they're still on prem majority, they're trying to dip those toes into the cloud. They want to start using things like file shares or backups or something that they can have, disaster recovery offsite while they're still running the majority of what they're doing on-prem. So there's always an Azure pool to all four of the teams that I actually run. But I need them to take care of where our customers are today and it's not just force them to be where we want them tomorrow and they're not ready to go there. So it's kind of interesting that my team's kind of have every one of those stages of migration from I'm on-prem, do I need to lift and shift do I need to do modern operations, do I need to be doing full-blown DevOps pull all up? So, I think it's a nice group of people that kind of fit the spectrum of where our customers are going to be taking that journey from where they are to enter the cloud. So I love it. >> One of the things you said was getting to the cloud doesn't happen overnight. >> No, it does not. >> Well, you can say that again because there is still a lot of skepticism and reluctance and nervousness. How do you, we talked so much about this digital transformation and technology is not the hard part. It's the people that pose the biggest challenges to actually making it happen. >> Donovan: Right. >> So we're talking about meeting customers where they are in terms of the tools they need. But where do you meet them in terms of where they are just in their approach and their mindset, in terms of their cloud readiness? >> You listen. Believe it or not, you can't just go and tell people something. You need to listen to them, find out what hurts and then start with that one thing is what I tell people. Focus on what hurts the most first. Don't do a big bang change of any type. I think that's a recipe for disaster. There's too many variables that could go wrong. But when I sit down with a customer is like tell me where you are, tell me what hurts, like what are you afraid of? Is it a compliancies? Let me go get you in contact with someone who can tell you about all the comp. We have over 90 certifications on Azure. Let me. whatever your fear is, I bet you I can get you in touch with someone that's going to help you get past that fear. But I don't say just lift, shift, move it all like stop wasting, like no. Let's focus on that one thing. And what you're going to do is you're going to start to build confidence and trust with that customer. And they know that I'm not there just trying to rip and replace you and get out high levels of ACR. I'm trying to succeed with you, right, empower every person in every organization on the planet to achieve more. You do that by teaching them first, by helping them first. You can sell them last, right? You shouldn't have to sell them at all once they trust that what we we're trying to do together is partner with you. I look at every customer more as a partner than a customer, like how can I come with you and we do better things together than either one of us could have done apart. >> You're a cloud psychologist? Almost, right because I always put myself in their position. If I was a customer, what would I want that vendor to do for me? How would they make me feel comfortable and that's the way that I lead. Right, I don't want you going in there selling anything right. We're here to educate them and if we're doing our job on the product side, the answer is going to be obvious that you need to be coming with us to Azure. >> All right. So Donovan, you mentioned you used to be an athlete? >> Donovan: Yes. >> According to your bio, you're still a bit of an athlete. >> Donovan: A little bit, a little bit. >> So there's the professional air hockey thing which has a tie to something going on with the field. Give us a little bit of background. I've got an air hockey table in my basement. Any tips for those of us that aren't, you know? You were ranked 11th in the world. >> At one point, yeah, though I went to the World Championships. It was interesting because that World Championships I wasn't prepared. My wife plays as well. We were like we're just going to go, we're going to support the tournament. We had no expectations whatsoever. Next thing you know, I'm in the round playing for the top 10 in the world. And that's when it got too serious for me and I lost, because I started taking it too serious. I put too much pressure on myself. But professionally, air hockey's like professional foosball or pool. It's grown men taking this sport way too seriously. It's the way I'd describe it. It is not what you see at Chuck E. Cheese. And what was interesting is Damien Brady who works for me found that there is an AI operated air hockey table here on this floor. And my wife was like, oh my gosh, we have to find this machine. Someone tape Donovan playing it. Six seconds later, my first shot I scored it. And I just looked at the poor people who built it and I'm like yeah, I'm a professional air hockey player. This thing is so not ready for professional time but they took down all my information and said we'd love to consult with you. I said I'd love to consult with you too because this could be a lot of fun. Maybe also a great way for professionals to practice, right, because you don't always have someone who's willing to play hours and hours which it takes to get at the professional level. But to have an AI system that I could even teach up my attack, forcing me to play outside of my comfort zone, to try something other than a left wall under or right well over but have to do more cuts because it knows to search for that. I can see a lot of great applications for the professionalized player with this type of AI. It would actually get a lot better. Literally, someone behind me started laughing. "That didn't take long" because it in six seconds I had scored on it already. I'm like okay, I was hoping it was going to be harder than this. >> I'm thinking back to our Dave Cahill interview of AI for everyone, and this is AI for professional air hockey players. >> It is and in one of my demos, Kendra Havens showed AI inside of your IDE. And I remember I tell the story that I remember I started writing software back in the 90s. I remember driving to a software store. You remember we used to have to drive and you'd buy a box and the box would be really heavy because the manuals are in there, and not to mention a stack of floppy discs that you're going to spend hours putting in your computer. And I bought visual C++ 1.52 was my first compiler. I remember going home so excited. And it had like syntax highlighting and that was like this cool new thing and you had all these great breakpoints and line numbers. And now Kendra's on stage typing this repetitives task and then the editor stops her and says, "It looks like you need to do this a little bit more. "You want me to do this for you?" And I'm like what just happened? This is not syntax highlighting. This is literally watching what you do, identifying a repetitive task, seeing the pattern in your code and suggesting that I can finish writing this code for you. It's unbelievable. >> You bring up a great point. Back when I used to write, it was programming. >> Yes. >> And we said programming was you learn the structure, you learn the logic and you write all the lines of what's going to be there. Coding on the other hand usually is taking something that is there, pulling in the pieces, making the modification. >> Right. >> It sounds like we're talking about even the next generation where the intelligence is going to take over. >> It's built right inside of your IDE which is amazing. You were talking about artificial intelligence, not only for the air hockey. But I love the fact that in Azure, we have so many cognitive services and you just like pick these off the shelf. When I wanted to learn artificial intelligence when I was in the university, you had to go for another language called Lisp. That scared half of us away from artificial intelligence because you have to learn another language just to go do this cool thing that back then was very difficult to do and you could barely get it to play chess, let alone play air hockey. But today, cognitive services search, decision-making, chat bots, they're so easy. Anyone, even a non developer, can start adding the power of AI into their products thanks to the stuff that we're doing in Azure. And this is just lighting up all these new possibilities for us, air hockey, drones that are able to put out fires. I've just seen amazing stuff where they're able to use AI and they add it with as little as two lines of code. And all of a sudden, your app is so much more powerful than it was before. >> Donovan, one of the things that really struck me over the last couple years, looking at Microsoft, is it used to be, you'd think about the Microsoft stack. When I think about developers it's like, oh wait are you a .NET person? Well, you're going to be there. The keynote this morning, one of your team members was on stage with Scott Hanselman and was you know choose your language, choose your tools and you're going to have all of them out there. So talk to us a little bit about that transition inside Microsoft. >> Sure. One of the mantras that I've been saying for a while is "any language, any platform". No one believes me . So I had to start proving it. I'm like so I got on stage one year. It was interesting and this is a really rough year because I flew with three laptops. One had Mac OS on it, one of them had Linux on it and one of them had Windows. And what I did is I created a voting app and what I would do is I'd get on stage and say okay everyone that's in this session, go to this URL and start voting. They got to pick what computer I use, they got to pick what language I programmed in and they got to pick where in Azure-eyed I deployed it to. Was it to an app service was it to Docker? I'm like I'm going to prove to you I can do any language in any platform. So I honestly did not know what demo I was going to do. 20 minutes later, after showing them some slides, I would go back to the app and say what did you pick? And I would move that computer in front of me and right there on stage completely create a complete CI/CD pipeline for the language that that audience chose to whatever resources that they wanted on whatever platform that they wanted me. Was like, have I proven this to you enough or not? And I did that demo for an entire year. Any language that you want me to program in and any platform you want me to target, I'm going to do that right now and I don't even know what it's going to be. You're going to choose it for me. I can't remember the last time I did a .NET demo on stage. I did Python this week when I was on stage with Jason Zander. I saw a lot of Python and Go and other demos this year. We love .NET. Don't get us wrong but everyone knows we can .NET. What we're trying to prove right now is that we can do a lot of other things. It does not matter what language you program in. It does not matter where you want to deploy. Microsoft is here to help you. It's a company created by developers and we're still obsessed with developers, not just .NET developers, all developers even the citizen developer which is a developer which is a developer who doesn't have to see the code anymore but wants to be able to add that value to what they're doing in their organization. So if you're a developer, Microsoft is here to help full-stop. It's a powerful mission and a powerful message that you are really empowering everyone here. >> Donovan: Right. >> Excellent. >> And how many developers only program in one language now, right? I thought I remember I used to be a C++ programmer and I thought that was it, right. I knew the best language, I knew the fastest language. And then all of a sudden, I knew CSharp and I knew Java and I knew JavaScript and I brought a lot of PowerShell right now and I write it on and noticed like wow, no one knows one language. But I never leave Visual Studio code. I deploy all my workloads into Azure. I didn't have to change my infrastructure or my tools to switch languages. I just switched languages that fit whatever the problem was that I was trying to solve. So I live the mantra that we tell our customers. I don't just do .NET development. Although I love .NET and it's my go-to language if I'm starting from scratch but sometimes I'm going to go help in an open source project that's written in some other language and I want to be able to help them. With Visual Studio online, we made that extremely easy. I don't even have to set up my development machine anymore. I can only click a link in a GitHub repository and the environment I need will be provisioned for me. I'll use it, check in my commits and then throw it away when I'm done. It's the world of being a developer now and I always giggle 'cause I'm thinking I had to drive to a store and buy my first compiler and now I can have an entire environment in minutes that is ready to rock and roll. It's just I wish I would learn how to program now and not when I was on bulletin boards asking for help and waiting three days for someone to respond. I didn't have Stack Overflow or search engines and things like that. It's just an amazing time to be a developer. >> Yes, indeed. Indeed it is Donovan Brown, the man in the black shirt. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> My pleasure. Thank you for having me. >> It was really fun. Thank you. >> Take care. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. (upbeat music)

[Music] live from cambridge massachusetts extracting the signal from the noise it's the cube covering the MIT chief data officer and information quality symposium now your host dave Volante and paul Gillett hi buddy welcome back to Cambridge Massachusetts we're at MIT Paul Gillan and myself are here for two days and we're really pleased to have sandy Pentland on he's the director of MIT Media labs entrepreneurship program just coming off a keynote mr. Alex sandy Pentland Spellman thanks for coming with you how'd you get that name sandy was that the color you know my dad was named Alex too so I had to get the diminutive so Alexander turns into Zander or Sasha or sandy ah excellent so man it's stuck so we learned from your keynote today that like your mom said hey if every other kid jumps off the bridge do you and the answer should be yes why is that well if your other friends or presumably as rational as you and have same sort of values as you and if they're doing something that looks crazy they must have a piece of information you don't like maybe Godzilla is coming bridges come and it really is time to get off but and so so while it's used as a metaphor for doing the irrational things it's actually shows that using your social context can be most rational because it's a way of getting information that you don't otherwise have so you broke down your talk to chief data officers and new types of analysis smarter organizations smarter networks and then really interesting new new architecture if we could sort of break those down sure you talked about sort of networks not individual nodes as really should be the focus to understand behavior can you unpack that a little well it's a little bit like the bridge or metaphor you know a lot of what we learn a lot of our behavior comes from watching other people we're not even conscious of it but you know if everybody else starts you know wearing a certain sort of shoe or or you know acting in a certain or using a phrase in business like all these new sort of buzz phrases like oh you have to - because it's to fit in it means something it's it's part of being hyper formants and being part of your group but that's not in data analytics today today what they look at is just your personal properties not what you're exposed to and the group that you're part of so they would look at the guy on the bridge and they say he's not going to jump because he doesn't have that information but on the other hand if all of other people who like him are making a different decision he probably is going to jump and your research has been you dig into organizations and you've found the relationship between productivity and this type of analysis has been pretty substantial very substantive offenses a ssin and outside of the organization dealing with customers so people focus on things like personality history various sort of training things like that what we find is compared to the pattern of interaction with other people so who do you talk to when and what situations those other factors are tiny they're often a whole order of magnitude less important than just do you talk to all the people in your group do you talk outside of your group do if you violate the org chart and talk to other people if you do you're almost certainly one of the high productivity high innovation people so what what impact does this have or were the implications of this on organizations which historically have been have been highly Madonn hierarchies reporting structures all of these institutions that we evolved in the post-world War two ERA is this working against their productivity well what they did is is they set some simple rules in that they could deal with and wrap their head around but what we find is that those simple rules are exactly the opposite of what you need for innovation and because really what they're doing is they're enforcing silos they're enforcing atomization of the work and everybody talks about we need to be more fluid we need to be more innovative we need to be able to move faster and what that requires is better communication habits and so what we find when we measure the communication habits is that that's exactly right better communication habits lead to more innovative organizations what's really amazing is almost no organization does it so people don't know does everybody talk to everybody in this group do they talk outside of the group there's no graphic there's no visualization and when you give a group a visualization of their pattern of organization of communication they change it and they become more innovative they become more productive I'm sure you're familiar with holacracy this idea that of doing away with with organizational boundaries and sort of do titles and sure everybody talks to everyone is that in your view a better way to structure an organization think that's too extreme but it's headed in the right direction I mean so what we're talking first of all people try to do this without any data so you know everybody's the same well everybody really isn't the same and how would you know if you're behaving as well as the same as other people or I mean there's no data so so what I'm suggesting is something that's sort of halfway between the two yeah you can have leaders you can have organization in there but you also have to have good flow of ideas and what that means is you have to make talking outside your org chart a value it's something you're rewarded for it means that including everybody in the loop in your organization is something you ought to be rewarded for and of course that requires data so the sorts of things we do with peoples we make displays could just be piece of paper that shows the patterns of communication and we give it to everybody and you know what people actually know what to do with it when you give it to them they say well gee you know this group of people is all talking to each other but they're not talking to that group maybe they ought to talk to each other it's that simple but in the lack of data you can't feel so you instrumented people essentially with let's badges and you could measure conversations at the watercooler yeah they're their frequency their duration not the content not the content just that's the activity just is it happening right and is it happening between groups just just people from this group go to that other groups water cooler stuff like that and that actually is enough to really make a substantial difference in the corporation and you gave an example of you were able to predict trending stories on Twitter better than the internal mechanism and Twitter did I understand that Kerina so what we've done by studying organizations like this and coming up with these sort of rules of how people behave so the notion that people learn from each other and that it's the patterns of communication that matter you can encode that along with machine learning and suddenly you get something that looks like machine learning but in many ways it's more powerful and more reliable and so we have a spin-out called Endor and what that does is it lets your average guy who can use a spreadsheet do something that's really competitive with the best machine learning groups in the world and that's pretty exciting because everybody has these reams of data but what they don't have is a whole bunch of PhDs who can study it for six months and and come up with a machine learning algorithm to do it they have a bunch of guys that are smart know the business but they don't know the machine learning so it endured doesn't supply something like a spreadsheet to be able to allow the normal guy to do as good as the machine learning guys there's a lot of focus right now on anticipating predicting customer behavior better a lot of us been focused on on individuals understanding individuals better is that wrongheaded I mean should marketers be looking more at this group theory and treating customers more as buckets of similar behaviors it's not it's not buckets but treating people as individuals is is a mistake because while people do have individual preferences most of those preferences are learned from other people it's keeping up with the Jones it's fitting in its it's learning what the best practice is so you can predict people better from the company they keep than you can from their demographics always virtually every single time you can do better from the company they keep than from the standard sort of data so what that means is when you do analysis you need to look at the relationships between people and at one level it's sort of obvious you analyze somebody personally without knowing something about their relationships right about you know the type of things they do the places they go those are important but they're usually not in the data and what I find is I do this with a lot of big organizations and what I find is you look at their data analytics it's all based on individuals and it's not based on the context to those individuals absolutely I want to ask you further about that because when I think of the surveys that I fill out they're always about my personal preference Yahoo I want to do I can't remember ever filling out a survey that asked me about what my peer group does are you saying that those are the questions we should be asking yeah exactly right and of course you want to get data about that you want to know if if you go to these locations all the time to go to that restaurant you go to this sort of entertainment who else goes there what are they by what's trending in your group because it's not the general population and these not necessary people I know but they're people I identify with Yammer haps that's why I go to certain restaurants not because my friends go there but because people who I aspire to be like yeah there yeah and and the other way around you go there and you say well gosh these other people are like me because they go here too and I see that they're you know wearing different sort of clothes or they're by or the simplest thing you go to restaurants you see other people all buying the mushi yes maybe I should try the mushi I usually don't like it but seems to work well and this is I like this restaurant and everybody else who comes here likes it so I'll try it right it's that simple so it's important to point out we're talking about the predictive analytics Capas they're probably people watching might say this Sandi's crazy we mean we don't want it personalized we want to personalize the customer experience still I'm presuming sure but when we're talking about predictive analytics you're saying the the community the peer group is a much better predictor than the individual that's right yeah okay so I want to come back to the the org chart these are you saying that org charts shouldn't necessarily change but the incentives should or your previous thing to do is you have an org chart but the incentives that are across the entire organization is good communication within the box you're in and good communication outside of the box and to put those incentives in place you need to have data you need to be able to have some way of estimating does everybody talk to each other do they talk to the rest of the organization and there's a variety of ways you can do that we do it with little badges we do it by analyzing phone call data email is not so good because email is not really a social relationship it's just this this little formal thing you do often but by using things like the badges like the phone calls surveys for that matter right you can give people feedback about are they communicating in the right way are they communicating with other parts of the organization and by visualizing that to people they'll begin to do the right thing you had this notion of network tuning oh you don't want an insufficiently diverse network but you don't want a network that's too dense you might find the sweet spot in the middle desert how do you actually implement that that tuning well the first thing is is you have to measure okay you have to know how dense is the social interaction the communication pattern because if you don't know that there's nothing to - right and then what you want to ask is you want to ask the signal property of something being two dances the same ideas go around then around and around so you look at the graph that you get from this data and you ask you know this Joe talked to Bob talk to Mary talk to Joe talk to you know is it full of cycles like that and if it's too full of cycles then that's a problem right because it's the same people talking to each other same ideas going around and there's some nice mathematical formulas for major in it they're sort of hard to put into English but it has to do with if you look at the flow of ideas are you getting a sufficiently diverse set of ideas coming to you or is it just the same people all talking to each other so are you sort of cut off from the rest of the world in your book social physics you talk about rewards and incentives isms and one of the things that struck me as you say that that rewards that people are actually more motivated by rewards for others than for themselves correct me if I'm wrong if paraphrasing you wrong there but but there's but but rewarding the group or or doing something good for somebody else is actually a powerful incentive is it is that the true the case well you said it almost right so so if you want to change behavior these social incentives are more powerful than financial incentives so if you have everybody in a group let's say and people are rewarded by the behavior of the other people in the group what will they do well they'll talk to the other people about doing the right thing because their reward my reward depends on your behavior so I'm gonna talk to you about it okay and your reward depends on it you'll talk and I don't know so what we're doing is we're creating much more communication around this problem and social pressure because you know if you don't do it you're screwing me and and you know I may not be a big thing but you're gonna think twice about that whereas some small financial award usually it's not such a big thing for people so if you think people talk a lot about you know persona persona marketing when I first met John Fourier he had this idea of affinity rank which was his version of you know peer group PageRank hmm do you do you hear a lot about you know get a lot of questions about persona persona marketing and and what does your research show in terms of how we should be appealing to that persona so sorry good questions about that some time and I don't know what he really originally intended but the way people often imply it is very static you have a particular persona that's fixed for all parts of your life well that's not true I mean you could be a baseball coach for your kid and a banker during the day and a member of a church and those are three different personas and what defines those personas it's the group that you're interacting with it's it's the the people you learn with and try and fit in so your persona is a variable thing and the thing that's the key to it is what are the groups that you're you're interacting with so if I analyzed your groups of interactions I'd see three different clusters I'd see the baseball one I'd say the banking one I'd see the church group one and then I would know that you have three personas and I could tell which one you're in typically by seeing who you're spending time with right now is the risk of applying this idea of behaviors influenced by groups is there the risk of falling over into profiling and essentially treating people anticipating behaviors based upon characteristics that may not be indicative of how any individual might act back credit alcoholics as you example right I don't get a job because people like people who are similar to me tend to be alcoholics let's say this is different though so this is not people who are similar to you if you hang out with alcoholics all the time then they're really eyes are good on that you're an alcoholic it may not be yes and there is a risk of over identifying or or extrapolating but it's different than people like me I mean if you go to the you know the dingy bars were beers or a buck and everybody gets wasted and you do that repeatedly you're talking about behaviors rather than characteristics behaviors rather than characteristics right I mean you know if you drink a lot maybe you drink a lot so we have a question from the crowd so it says real time makes persona very difficult yeah so it was come back to furriers premise was I was Twitter data you know such is changing very rapidly so are there social platforms that you see that can inform in real time to help us sort of get a better understanding of persona and affinity group affinity well there are data sources that do that right so first as if I look at telephone data or credit card data even for that matter sure this geo-located I can ask but what sort of people buy here or what sort of people are in this bar or restaurant and I can look at their demographics and where they go to I showed an example of that in San Francisco using data from San Francisco so there is this data which means that any app that's interested in it that has sufficient breadth and although sufficient adoption can do these sorts of analyses can you give an example of how you're working with the many organizations now I'm sure you can't name them but can you give an example of how you're applying these principles practically now whether it's in law enforcement or in consumer marketing how are you putting these to work well there's a bunch of different things that that go together with this view of you know it's the flow of ideas that's the important thing not the demographics so talk about behavior change and we're working with a small country to change their traffic safety by enrolling people in small groups where you know the benefit I get for driving right depends on your safety and we're good buddies we know that that's how you sign up sign up with your buddies and what that means is I'm going to talk to you about your driving if you're driving in a dangerous way and that we've seen in small experiments is a lot more effective than giving you points on your driver's license or discount on your insurance the social relationships so so that's an example another example is we're beginning a project to look at unemployment and what we see is is that people have a hard time getting re-employed don't have diverse enough social networks and it sounds kind of common sense but they don't physically get out enough compared to the people that do get jobs so what's the obvious thing well you encouraged them to get out more you make it easier for them to get out more so those are some examples when you talk about health care what you can do is you can say well look you know I don't know particular things you're doing but based on the behavior that you show right and the behavior of the people you hang with you may be at much higher risk of diabetes and it's not any particular behavior this is the way medical stuff is always pitched is you know it's this behavior that beer every combination of things all right and so you're not really aware that you're doing anything bad but if all your buds are at risk of it then you probably are too because you're probably doing a lot of the same sort of behaviors and medicine is a place where people are willing to give up some of the privacy because the consequences are so important so we're looking at people who are interested in personalized medicine and are willing to you know share their data about where they go and what they spend time doing in order to get statistics back from the people they spend time with about what are the risk factors they pick up from the people around them and the behaviors they engage in um your message this to the cdos today was you know you were sort of joking you're measuring that right and a lot of times they weren't a lot of the non-intuitive things your research has found so I wanna talk about the data and access to the data and how the CBO can you know affect change in their organization a lot of the data lives in silos I mean if they certainly think of social data Facebook LinkedIn yeah Twitter you mentioned credit card data is that a problem or is data becoming more accessible through api's or is it still just sort of a battle to get that data architecture running well it's a it's a battle and in fact actually it's a political and very passionate battle and it revolves around who controls the data and privacy is a big part of that so one of the messages is that to be able to get really ditch data sources you have to engage with the customer a lot so people are more than willing our research we've set up you know entire cities where we've changed the rules and we've found that people are more than willing to volunteer very detailed personal data under two conditions one is they have to know that it's safe so you're not reselling it you're handling it in a secure way it's not going to get out in some way and the other is that they get value for it and they can see the value so it's not spreading out and they're part of the discussion so you know you want more personalized medicine people are willing to share right because it's important to them or for their family you know if you want to share we're willing to share very personal stuff about their kids they would never do that but if it results in the kid getting a better education more opportunity yeah they're absolutely willing so that leads to a great segue into enigma yeah you talked about enigma as a potential security layer for the internet but also potential privacy yeah solution so talk about enigma where it's at yeah what it is where it's at and how it potentially could permeate yeah so we've been building architectures and working with this sort of problem this conundrum basically datas and silos people feel paranoid and probably correctly about their data leaky now companies don't have access to data don't know what to do with it and a lot of it has to do with safe sharing another aspect of this problem is cybersecurity you're getting increasing the amount of attacks done stuff bad for companies bad for people it's just going to get worse and we actually know what the answers to these things are the answers our data is encrypted all the time everywhere you do the computation on encrypted data you never transmit it you never unencrypted it to be able to do things we also know that in terms of control of the data is possible to build fairly simple permission mechanisms so that you know the computer just won't share it in the wrong places and if it does you know skyrockets go up and the cop scum you can build systems like that today but the part that's never been able never allowed that to happen is you need to keep track of a lot of things in a way that's not hackable you need to know that somebody doesn't just short-circuit it or take it out the back and what's interesting is the mechanisms that are in Bitcoin give you exactly that power so you whatever you feel about Bitcoin you know it's speculative bubble or whatever the blockchain which is part of it is this open ledger that is unhackable and and has the following characteristics that's amazing it's called trustless what that means is you can work with a bunch of crooks and still know that the ledger that you're keeping is correct because it doesn't require trusting people to work with them it's something where everybody has to agree to be able to get things and it works it works in Bitcoin at scale over the whole world and so what we've done is adapted that technology to be able to build a system called enigma which takes data in an encrypted form computes on it in an encrypted form transmits it according to the person's permissions and only that way in an encrypted form and you know it provides this layer of security and privacy that we've never had before there have been some projects that come close to this but know we're pretty excited about this and and what I think you're going to see is you're going to see some of the big financial institutions trying to use it among themselves some of the big logistics some of the big medical things trying to use it in in hotspots where they have real problems but the hope is is that it gets spread among the general population so it becomes quite literally the privacy and security level that doesn't have Warren Buffett might be right that it might fail as a currency but the technology has really inspired some new innovations that's right so so it's essentially a distributed it's not a walled garden it's a distributed black box that's what you're describing you never exposed the data that's right you don't need a trusted third party that's getting attacked that's right nobody has to stamp that this is correct because the moment you do that first of all other people are controlling you and the second thing is is there a point of attack so it gets rid of that trusted third party centralization makes it distributed you can have again a bunch of bad actors in the system it doesn't hurt it's peer-to-peer where you have to have 51% of the people being bad before things really go bad how do you solve the problem of performing calculations on encrypted data because they're classic techniques actually it's been known for over 20 years how to do that but there are two pieces missing one piece is it wasn't efficient it scaled really poorly and what we did is came up with a way of solving that by making it essentially multi scale so it's it's a distributed solution for this that brings the cost down to something that's linear in the number of elements which is a real change and the second is keeping track of all of the stuff in a way that's secure it's fine to have an addition that's secure you know but if that isn't better than a whole system that secure it doesn't do you any good and so that's where the blockchain comes in it gives you this accounting mechanism for knowing which computations are being done who has access to them what the keys are things like that so Google glass was sort of incubated in MIT Media labs and well before yeah my group you go right in your group and yeah it didn't take off me because it's just not cool it looks kind of goofy but now enigma has a lot of potential solving a huge problem are you can open-source it what do you yeah it's an open-source system we hope to get more people involved in it and right now we're looking for some test beds to show how well it works and make sure that all the things are dotted and crossed and so forth and where can people learn more about it oh go to a nygma dot media dot mit.edu all right sandy we're way over our time so obviously you were interesting so thanks keep right there buddy Paul and I we right back with our next guest we're live from see this is the cube right back [Music]