(bright upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to theCUBE, "Unstoppable Domains Showcase." I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We got a great discussion here called the influencers around what's going on Web 3.0. And also this new sea change, cultural change around this next generation, internet, web, cloud, all happening, Jeremiah Owyang, Industry Analyst and Founding Part of Kaleido Insights. Jeremiah, great to see you thanks for coming on I appreciate it. Ren Besnard, Vice President of Marketing and Unstoppable Domains in the middle of all the action. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on on theCUBE for this showcase. >> Wow, my pleasure. >> Thanks for having us, John. >> Jeremiah, I want to start with you. You've seen many ways refer in all of your work for over a decade now. You've seen the Web 2.0 wave now the Web 3.0 is here. And it's not, I wouldn't say hyped up it's really just ramping up. And you're seeing real practical examples. You're in the middle of all the action. What is this Web 3.0, can you frame for us? I mean, you've seen many webs. What is Web 3.0 mean, what is it all about? >> Well John, you and I worked in the Web 2.0 space and essentially that enabled peer-to-peer media where people could upload their thoughts and ideas and videos without having to rely on centralized media. Unfortunately, that distributed and decentralized movement actually became centralized on the platform which are the big social networks and big tech companies. And this has caused an uproar because the people who are creating the content did not have control, could not control their identities, and could not really monetize or make decisions. So Web 3.0 which is a moniker of a lot of different trends, including crypto, blockchain and sometimes the metaverse. Is to undo the controlling that has become centralized. And the power is now shifting back into the hands of the participants again. And in this movement, they want to have more control over their identities, their governance, the content that they're creating, how they're actually building it, and then how they're monetizing it. So in many ways it's changing the power and it's a new economic model. So that's Web 3.0. Without really even mentioning the technologies. Is that helpful? >> Yeah, it's great. And Ren, we're talking about on theCUBE many times and one notable stat I don't think it's been reported, but it's been more kind of a rumor. I hear that 30% of the Berkeley computer science students are dropping out and going into to crypto or blockchain or decentralized startups. Which means that there's a big wave coming in of talent. You're seeing startups, you're seeing a lot more formation, you're seeing a lot more, I would say it's kind of ramping up of real people, not just people with dream is actual builders out here doing stuff. What's your take on the Web 3.0 movement with all this kind of change happening from people and also the new ideas being refactored? >> I think that the competition for talent is extremely real. And we start looking at the stats, we see that there is an enormous draft of people that are moving into this space. People that are fascinated by technology and are embracing the ethos of Web 3.0. And at this stage I think it's not only engineers and developers, but we have moved into a second phase where we see that a lot of supporting functions, you know, marketing being one of them, sales, business development are being built up quite rapidly. It's not without actually reminding me of the mid 2000s, you know. When I started working with Google, at that point in time the walled gardens rightly absorbing vast, vast cohorts of young graduates and more experienced professionals that were passionate and moving into the web environment. And I think we are seeing a movement right now, which is not entirely similar except faster. >> Yeah, Jeremiah, you've seen the conversations of the cloud, I call the cloud kind of revolution. You had mobile in 2007. But you got Amazon Web Services changed the application space on how people developed in the cloud. And again, that created a lot of value. Now you're seeing the role of data as a huge part of how people are scaling and the decentralized movements. So you've got cloud which is kind of classic today, state of the art enterprise and or app developers. And you've got now decentralized wave coming, okay. You're seeing apps being developed on that architecture. Data is central in all this, right. So how, how do you view this as someone who's watching the landscape, you know, these walled gardens are hoarding all the data I mean, LinkedIn, Facebook. They're not sharing that data with anyone they're using it for themselves. So as- >> That's right. >> They can control back comes to the forefront. How do you see this market with the applications and what comes out of that? >> So the thing that we seen out of the five things that I had mentioned that are decentralizing. (Jeremiah coughing) Are the ones that have been easier to move across. Have been the ability to monetize and to build. But the data aspect has actually stayed pretty much central, frankly. What has decentralized is that the contracts, the blockchain ledgers, those have decentralized. But the funny thing is often a big portion of these blockchain networks are on Amazon 63 to 70%, same thing with (indistinct). So they're still using the Web 2.0 architectures. However, we're also seeing other forms like IPFS where the data could be spread across a wider range of folks. But right now we're still dependent on what Web 2.0. So the vision and the promise Web 3.0 when it to full decentralization is not here by any means. I'd say we're at a Web 2.25. >> Pre-Web 3.0 no, but actions there. How do you guys see the dangers, 'cause there's a lot of negative press but also there's a lot of positive press. You're seeing a lot of fraud, we've seen a lot of the crypto fraud over the past years. You've seen a lot of now positive. It's almost a self-governance thing and environment, the way the culture is. But what are the dangers, how do you guys educate people, what should people pay attention to, what should people look for to understand, you know, where to position themselves? >> Yes, so we've learned a lot from Web 1.0, Web 2.0, the sharing economy. And we are walking into Web 3.0 with eyes wide open. So people have rightfully put forth a number of challenges, the sustainability issues with excess using of computing and mining the excessive amount of scams that are happening in part due to unknown identities. Also the architecture breaks DAOn in some periods and there's a lack of regulation. This is something different though. In the last periods that we've gone through, we didn't really know what was going to happen. And we walked and think this is going to be great. The sharing economy, the gig economy, the social media's going to change the world around. It's very different now. People are a little bit jaded. So I think that's a change. And so I think we're going to see that sorted out in suss out just like we've seen with other trends. It's still very much in the early years. >> Ren, I got to get your take on this whole should influencers and should people be anonymous or should they be docs out there? You saw the board, eight guys that did that were kind of docs a little bit there. And that went viral. This is an issue, right? Because we just had a problem of fake news, fake people, fake information. And now you have a much more secure environment imutability is a wonderful thing. It's a feature, not a bug, right? So how is this all coming down? And I know you guys are in the middle of it with NFTs as authentication. Take us, what's your take on this because this is a big issue. >> Look, I think first I am extremely optimistic about technology in general. So I'm super, super bullish about this. And yet, you know, I think that while crypto has so many upsides, it's important to be super conscious and aware of the downsides that come with it to, you know. If you think about every Fortune 500 company there is always training required by all employees on internet safety, reporting of potential attacks and so on. In Web 3.0, we don't have that kind of standard reporting mechanisms yet for bad actors in that space. And so when you think about influencers in particular, they do have a responsibility to educate people about the potential, but also the dangers of the technology of Web 3.0 of crypto basically. Whether you're talking about hacks or online safety, the need for hardware, wallet, impersonators on discord, you know, security storing your seed phrase. So every actor influencer or else has got a role to play. I think that in that context to your point, it's very hard to tell whether influencers should be anonymous, oxydemous or fully docked. The decentralized nature of Web 3.0 will probably lead us to see a combination of those anonymity levels so to speak. And the movements that we've seen around some influencers identities become public are particularly interesting. I think there's probably a convergence of Web 2.O and Web 3.0 at play here, you know. Maybe occurring on the notion of 2.5. But for now I think in Web 2.0, all business founders and employees are known and they held accountable for their public comments and their actions. If Web 3.0 enables us to be anonymous, if DAOs have voting control, you know. What happens if people make comments and there is no way to know who they are, basically. What if the DAO doesn't take appropriate action? I think eventually there will be an element of community self-regulation where influencers will be acting in the best interest of their reputation. And I believe that the communities will self-regulate themselves and will create natural boundaries around what can be said or not said. >> I think that's a really good point about influencers and reputation because. Jeremiah, does it matter that you're anonymous have an icon that could be a NFT or a picture. But if I have an ongoing reputation I have trust, to this trust there. It's not like just a bot that was created just to spam someone. You know I'm starting to getting into this new way. >> You're right, and that word you said trust, that's what really this is about. But we've seen that public docs, people with their full identities have made mistakes. They have pulled the hood over people's faces and really scammed them out of a lot of money. We've seen that in the, that doesn't change anything in human behavior. So I think over time that we will see a new form of a reputation system emerge even for pseudonym and perhaps for people that are just anonymous that only show their potential wallet, address a series of numbers and letters. That form might take a new form of a Web 3.0 FICO Score. And you could look at their behaviors. Did they transact, you know, how did they behave? Were they involved in projects that were not healthy? And because all of that information is public on the chain and you can go back in time and see that. We might see a new form of a scoring emerge, of course. Who controls that scoring? That's a whole nother topic gone on controling and trust. So right now, John we do see that there's a number of projects, new NFT projects, where the founders will claim and use this as a point of differentiation that they are fully docs. So you know who they are and in their names. Secondly, we're seeing a number of products or platforms that require KYC, you know, your customers. So that's self-identification often with a government ID or credit card in order to bridge out your coins and turn that into fiat. In some cases that's required in some of these marketplaces. So we're seeing a collision here between our full names and pseudonyms and being anonymous. >> That's awesome. And I think this is the new, again, a whole new form of governance. Ren, you mentioned some comments about DAO. I want to get your thoughts again. You know, Jeremiah we've become historians over the years. We're getting old I'm a little bit older than you. (Jeremiah laughs) But we've seen the- >> You're young men. You know, I remember breaking in the business when the computer standards bodies were built to be more organic and then they became much more of a, kind of an anti-innovation environment where people, the companies would get involved, the standards organization just to slow things DAO and mark things up a little bit. So, you know, you look at DAOs like, hmm, is DAO a good thing or a bad thing. The answer is from people I talk to is, it depends. So I'd love to get your thoughts on getting momentum and becoming defacto with value, a value proposition, vis-a-vis just a DAO for the sake of having a DAO. This has been a conversation that's been kind of in the inside the baseball here, inside the ropes of the industry, but there's trade offs. Can you guys share your thoughts on when to do a DAO and when not to do a DAO and the benefits and trade offs of that? >> Sure, maybe I'll start off with a definition and then we'll go to, Ren. So a DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization, the best way to think about this It's a digital cooperative. and we've heard of worker cooperatives before. The difference is that they're using blockchain technologies in order to do three things, identity, governance, and rewards and mechanisms. They're relying on Web 2.0 tools and technologies like discord and Telegram and social networks to communicate. And as a cooperative they're trying to come up with a common goal. Ren, what's your take, that's the setup. >> So, you know for me when I started my journey into crypto and Web 3.0, I had no idea about what DAO actually meant. And an easy way for me to think of it and to grasp the nature of it was about the comparison between a DAO and perhaps a more traditional company structure, you know. In the traditional company structure, you have (indistinct), the company's led by a CEO and other executives. The DAO is a flat structure, and it's very much led by a group of core contributors. So to Jeremiah's point, you know, you get that notion of a cooperative type of structure. The decision making is very different, you know. We're talking about a super high level of transparency proposals getting submitted and voting systems using (indistinct) as opposed to, you know, management, making decisions behind closed doors. I think that speaks to a totally new form of governance. And I think we have hardly, hardly scratched the surface. We have seen recently very interesting moments in Web 3.0 culture. And we have seen how DAO suddenly have to make certain decisions and come to moments of claiming responsibility in order to police behavior of some of the members. I think that's important. I think it's going to redefine how we're thinking about that particularly new governance models. And I think it's going to pave the way for a lot of super interesting structure in the near future. >> Yeah and that's a great point. >> Go ahead, Jeremiah. >> That's a great point, Ren. Around the transparency for governance. So, John you post the question, does this make things faster or slower? And right now in the most doubts are actually pretty slow because they're set up as a flat organization. So as a response to that they're actually shifting to become representative democracies. Does that sound familiar? Or you can appoint delegates and use tokens to vote for them and they have a decision power. Almost like a committee and they can function. And so we've seen actually there sometimes are hierarchy except the person at the top is voted by those that have the tokens. In some cases, the people at the top had the most tokens. But that's a whole nother topic. So we're seeing a wide variety of governance structures. >> You know, Ren I was talking with Matt G, the Founder of Unstoppable. And I was telling him about the Domain Name System. And one little trivia note that many people don't know about is that the US government 'cause the internet was started by the US. The Department of Commerce kept that on tight leash because the international telecommunications wanted to get their hands on it because of ccTLDs and other things. So at that time, 'cause the innovation yet was isn't yet baked out. It was organically growing the governance, the rules of the road, keeping it very stable versus melding with it. So there's certain technologies that require, Jeremiah that let's keep an eye on as a community let's not formalize anything. Like the government did with the Domain Name System. Let's keep it tight and then finally released it. I think multiple years after 2004, I think it went over to the ITU. But this is a big point. I mean, if you get too structured, organic innovation can't go. What's you guys reaction to that? >> So I think, you know to take the stab at it. We have as a business, you know, thinking of Unstoppable Domains, a strong incentive to innovate. And this is what is going to be determining long-term value growth for the organization, for partners, for users, for customers. So you know the degree of formalization actually gives us a sense of purpose and a sense of action. And if you compare that to DAO, for instance, you can see how some of the upsides and downsides can pan out either way. It's not to say that there is a perfect solution. I think one of the advantages of the DAO is that you can let more people contribute. You can probably remove buyers quite effectively and you can have a high level of participation and involvement in decisions and own the upside in many ways. You know as a company, it's a slightly different setup. We have the opportunity to coordinate a very diverse and part-time workforce in a very you a different way. And we do not have to deal with the inefficiencies that might be inherent to some form of extreme decentralization. So there is a balance from an organizational structure that comes either side. >> Awesome. Jeremiah, I want to get your thoughts on a trend that you've been involved in, we've both been involved in. And you're seeing it now with the kind of social media world, the world of the role of an influencer. It's kind of moved from what was open source and influencer was a connect to someone who shared, created content enabled things to much more of a vanity. You update the photo on Instagram and having a large audience. So is there a new influencer model with Web 3.0 or is it, I control the audience I'm making money that way. Is there a shift in the influencer role or ideas that you see that should be in place for what is the role of an influencer? 'Cause as Web 3.0 comes you're going to see that role become instrumental. We've seen it in open source projects. Influencers, you know, the people who write code or ship code. So what's your take on that? Because this has been a conversation. People have been having the word influencer and redefining and reframing it. >> Sure, the influence model really hasn't changed that much, but the way that they're behaving has when it comes to Web 3.0. In this market, I mean there's a couple of things. Some of the influencers are investors. And so when you see their name on a project or a new startup, that's an indicator there's a higher level of success. You might want to pay more attention to it or not. Secondly, influencers themselves are launching their own NFT projects. So, Gary Vaynerchuk, a number of celebrities, Paris Hilton is involved. They are also doing theirs as well. Steve Aok, famous DJ launched his as well. So they're going head first and participating in building in this model. And their communities are coming around them and they're building economy. Now the difference is it's not I speak as an influencer to the fans. The difference is that the fans are now part of the community and they literally hold and own some of the economic value, whether it's tokens or the NFTs. So it's a collaborative economy, if you will, where they're all benefiting together. And that's a big difference as well. >> Can you see- >> Lastly, there's one little tactic we're seeing where marketers are air dropping NFTs, branded NFTs influencers wallet. So you can see it in there. So there's new tactics that are forming as well. Back to you. >> That's super exciting. Ren, what's your reaction to that? Because he just hit on a whole new way of how engagement's happening, how people are closed looping their votes, their votes of confidence or votes with their wallet. And the brands which are artists now influencers. I mean, this is a whole game changing instrumentation level. >> I think that what we are seeing right now is super reinvigorating as a marketeer who's been around for a few years, basically. I think that the shift in the way brands are going to communicate and engage with their audiences is profound. It's probably as revolutionary and even more revolutionary than the movement for brands in getting into digital. And you have that sentiment of a gold rush right now with a lot of brands that are trying to understand NFTs and how to actually engage with those communities and those audiences. There are many levels in which brands and influencers are going to engage. There are many influencers that actually advance the message and the mission because the explosion of content on Web 3.0 has been crazy. Part of that is due to the network effect nature of crypto. Because as Jaremiah mentioned, people are incentivized to promote projects. Holders of an NFT are also incentivized to promote it. So you end up with a fly wheel which is pretty unique of people that are hyping their project and that are educating other people about it and commenting on the ecosystem with IP right being given to NFT holders. You're going to see people promote brands instead of the brands actually having to. And so the notion of brands are gaining and delivering elements of the value to their fans is something that's super attractive, extremely interesting. And I think again, we have hardly scratched the surface of all that is possible in that particular space. >> That's interesting. You guys are bringing some great insight here. Jeremiah, the old days the word authentic was a kind of a cliche and brands like tried to be authentic. And they didn't really know what to do they called it organic, right? And now you have the trust concept with authenticity and environment like Web 3.0 where you can actually measure it and monetize it and capture it if you're actually authentic and trustworthy. >> That's right, and be because it's on blockchain, you can see how somebody's behaved with their economic behavior in the past. Of course, big corporations aren't going to have that type of trail on blockchain just yet. But individuals and executives who participate in this market might be. And we'll also see new types of affinity. Do executives do they participate in these NFT communities, do they purchase them or numerous brands like Adidas to acquire, you know, different NFT projects to participate. And of course the big brands are grabbing their domains. Of course you could talk to, Ren about that because it's owning your own name is a part of this trust and being found. >> That's awesome. Great insight guys. Closing comments, takeaways for the audience here. Each of you take a minute to share your thoughts on what you think is happening now where it goes, all right, where's it going to go? Jeremiah, we'll start with you. >> Sure, I think the vision of Web 3.0 where full decentralization happens, where the power is completely shifted to the edges. I don't think it's going to happen. I think we will reach Web 2.5. And I've been through so many tech trends where we said that the power's going to shift completely to of the end, it just doesn't. In part there's two reasons. One is the venture capital are the ones who tend to own the programs in the first place. And secondly, the startups themselves end up becoming the one-percenter. We see Airbnb and Uber are one-percenter now. So that trend happens over and over and over. Now with that said, the world will be in a better place. We will have more transparency. We will see economic power shifted to the people, the participants. And so they will have more control over the internet that they are building. >> Awesome, Ren final comments. >> I'm fully aligned with Jeremiah on the notion of control being returned to users, the notion of ownership and the notion of redistribution of the economic value that is created across all the different chains that we are going to see and all those ecosystems. I believe that we are going to witness two parallel movements of expansion. One that is going to be very lateral. When you think of crypto and Web 3.0 essentially you think of a few 100 tribes. And I think that more projects are going to be a more coalitions of individuals and entities, and those are going to exist around those projects. So you're going to see, you know, an increase in the number of tribes that one might join. And I also think that we're going to progress rapidly from the low 100 millions of crypto and NFT holders into the big hands basically. And that's going to be extreme interesting. I think that the next waves of crypto users, NFT fans are going to look very different from the early adopters that we had witnessed in the very early days. So it's not going to be your traditional model of technology adoption curves. I think the demographics are going to shift and the motivations are going to be different as well, which is going to be a wonderful time to educate and engage with new community members. >> All right, Ren and Jeremiah, thank you both for that great insight great segment breaking down Web 3.0 or Web 2.5 as Jeremiah says but we're in a better place. This is a segment with the influencers. As part of theCUBE and the Unstoppable Domain Showcase. I'm John Furrie, your host. Thanks for watching. (bright upbeat music)

>>Hello, and welcome to the cube unstoppable Doneen showcase. I'm John furrier, host of the cube. We got a great discussion here called the influencers around what's going on in web three and also this new sea change cultural change around this next generation, internet web cloud, all happening, Jeremiah yang industry analyst, and founding part of the cleaner insights. Share my great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Uh, registered vice-president of marketing at unstoppable domains in the middle of all the actions. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on on the cube for this showcase. >>My pleasure. So I think it was done >>At Jeremy. I want to start with you. You've seen many ways, but fallen all of your work for over a decade now. Um, you've seen the web 2.0 wave. Now the web three's here. Um, and it's not, I wouldn't say hyped up. It's really just ramping up and you're seeing real practical examples. Uh, you're in the middle of all the action. What is this web three? Can you frame for us that mean you've seen many waves? What is web three mean? What is it? What is it all about? >>Well, John, you and I worked in the web to space and essentially that enabled peer to peer media where people could, could upload their thoughts and ideas and videos, um, without having to rely on centralized media. And unfortunately that distributed and decentralized movement actually became centralized on the platforms or the big social networks and big tech companies. And this has caused an uproar because the people who are creating the content did not have control, could not control their identities and could not really monetize or make decisions. So web three is what is, which is a moniker of a lot of different trends, including crypto blockchain. And sometimes the metaverse is to undo the controlling that has become centralized. And the power is now shifting back into the hands of the participants again, and then this movement, they want to have more control over their identities, their governance, the content that they're creating, how they're actually building it and then how they're monetizing it. So in many ways, it's, it's changing the power and it's a new economic model. So that's web three without really even mentioning the technologies. Is that helpful? >>Yeah, that's great. And ran. We were talking about, on the cute many times and one notable stat, I don't think it's been reported, but it's been more kind of a rumor. I hear that 30% of the, um, Berkeley computer science students are dropping out and going into crypto or blockchain or decentralized startups, which means that this there's a big wave coming in of talent. You seeing startups, you're seeing a lot more formation. You're seeing a lot more, I would say, kind of ramping up of real people, not just, you know, people with a dream it's actual builders out here doing stuff. What's your take on the web three, moving with all this kind of change happening, uh, from people and also the new ideas being refactored. >>I think that the competition for talent is extremely real. And we start looking at the stats. We see that there is an draft of people that are moving into this space. People that are fascinated by technology and are embracing the ethos of web three. And at this stage, I think it's not only engineers and developers, but we have moved into a second phase where we see that a lot of supporting functions know marketing, being one of them, sales, business development, uh, are being built up quite rapidly. It's not without actually reminding me of the mid two thousands. You know, when I started, uh, working with Google at that point in time, the walled gardens rightly absorbing vast, vast cohorts of young graduates and more experienced professionals that are passionate and moving into the web environment. And I think we are seeing a movement right now, which is not entirely dissimilar, except >>Yeah, Jeremiah. You've seen the conversations over the cloud. I call the cloud kind of revolution. You had mobile in 2007, but then you got Amazon web services changed the application space on how people developed in the cloud. And again, that created a lot of value. Now you're seeing the role of data as a huge part of how people are scaling and the decentralized movement. So you've got cloud, which is kind of classic today. State-of-the-art, you know, enterprise and or app developers and you've got now decentralized wave coming. Okay. You're seeing apps being developed on that, that architecture data is central in all of this, right. So how do you view this? As, as someone who's watching the landscape, you know, these walled gardens are hoarding all the data. I mean, LinkedIn Facebook, they're not sharing that data with anyone they're using it for themselves. So as they can control back, comes to the forefront, how do you see this market with the applications and what comes out of that? >>So the thing that we've seen and out of the five things that I had mentioned that are decentralizing, the ones that have been easier to move across have been the ability to monetize and to build. But the data aspect has actually stayed pretty much central. Frankly. What has decentralized is that the contracts to block blockchain ledgers to those of decentralized. But the funny thing is often a big portion of these blockchain networks are on Amazon 63 to 70%, same thing with Stelara. So they're still using the web 2.0 architectures. However, we're also seeing other farms like IPFS, where the data could be to spread it across a wider range of folks. But right now we're still dependent on what we're to point out. So the vision and the problem with 3.0, when it comes to full de-centralization is not here by any means. I'd say we're at a web 2.2, five, >>Pre-web 3m, no actions there. What do you guys, how do you guys see the, um, the dangers? Cause there's a lot of negative press, but also is a lot of positive press. You seeing, you know, a lot of fraud, we've seen a lot of the crypto fraud over the past years. You've seen a lot of now positives, it's almost a self-governance thing and environment, the way the culture is, but what are the dangers? How do you guys educate people? What should people pay attention to? What should people look for to understand, you know, where to position themselves? >>Yes. So we've learned a lot from web one, we to the sharing economy and we are walking into two and three with eyes wide open. So people have rightfully put forth a number of challenges, the sustainability issues with excess using of computing and mining, the, um, the excessive amount of scams that are happening in part due to unknown identities. Um, also the architecture breaks down in certain periods and there's a lack of regulation. Um, this, this is something different though in the last, uh, uh, periods that we've gone through, we didn't really know what was gonna happen. And we walked in big, this is going to be great. The sharing economy, the gig economy, the social media is going to change the world. Hurrah is very different. Now people are a little bit jaded. So I think that's the big change. And so I think we're going to see that, uh, you know, soar it out and suss out just like we've seen with other prints. It's still very much in the early years, >>Right. I got to get your take on this whole, uh, should influencers and should people be anonymous or should they be doxed out there? You saw the board eight guys that did, that were kind of docs a little bit there and that went, went viral. Um, this is an issue, right? Because we, we just had a problem of fake news, uh, fake people, fake information, and now you have a much more secure environment. Immutability is a wonderful thing. It's, it's a feature, not a bug, right. So how is this all coming down? And I know you guys are in the middle of it with, uh, NFTs as, as authentication tickets. What's your take on this because this is a big issue. >>Look, I think first I am extremely optimistic about technology in general. Uh, so I'm super, super bullish about this. And yet, you know, I think that while crypto has so many upsides, it's important to be super conscious and aware of the downsides that come with it too. You know, if you think about every fortune 500 company, there is always training required by all employees on internet safety reporting of potential attacks. And so on in web three, we don't have that kind of standard reporting mechanisms yet, uh, for bad actors in that space. And so when you think about influencers in particular, they do have a responsibility to educate people about, uh, the potential, but also the dangers of the technology of web three, uh, of crypto basically, uh, whether you're talking about hacks online safety, the need for hardware impersonators on discord, uh, security, uh, storing your, your seed phrase. >>So every actor in France or ELs has got a role to play. I think that, uh, in that context, to your point, it's very hard to tell whether influencers should be, uh, anonymous, opposite inverse or footy dogs. The decentralized nature of web three will probably lead us to see a combination of those anonymity levels, um, so to speak, um, and the, uh, movements that we've seen around some influencers, identities becoming public are particularly interesting. I think there's probably a convergence of web two and web three at play here. You know, maybe a on the notion of 2.5 for, I think in way to all business founders and employees are known and they're held accountable for their public comments and actions. Um, if web three enables us to be anonymous, if dials have 14 control, you know, what happens if people make comments and there is no way to know who they are basically, uh, what if the dowel doesn't take appropriate action? I think eventually there will be an element of community self-regulation where influencers will be, uh, acting in the best interest of their reputation. And I believe that the communities will self regulate themselves and we'll create natural boundaries around what can be said or not. >>I think that's a really good point about, um, influencers and reputation because Jeremiah doesn't matter that you're anonymous. I have an icon that could be a NFT or a picture, but if I have an ongoing reputation, I have trust there's trust there. It's not like a, you know, just a bot that was created just to spam someone. It was just, you know what I'm saying? They getting into you getting into this new way. >>You're right. And that, that word you said, trust, that's what really, this is about. But we've seen that public docks people with their full identities have made mistakes. They have pulled the hood over people's faces in and really scammed them out of a lot of money. We've seen that in it that doesn't change anything in human behavior. So I think over time that we will see a new form of a reputation system emerged even for pseudonyms and perhaps for people that are just anonymous that only show their a potential, a wallet address, a series of numbers and letters. Um, that form might take a new form of a web 3.0 FICO score, and you can look at their behaviors. Did they transact? You know, how do they behave? Do they, were they involved in projects that were not healthy? And because all of that information is public on the chain and you can go back in time and see that we might see a new form of, of, of a scoring emerge. >>Of course, who controls that scoring that's a whole nother topic, gong on control and trust. So right now, John, we do see that there's a number of projects, new NFG projects, where the founders will claim and use this as a point of differentiation that they are fully docs. So you know who they are and their names. Secondly, we're seeing a number of, um, uh, products or platforms that require KYC, know your customer so that self-identification often with a government ID or a credit card in order to bridge out your, your coins and turn that into a Fiat. In some cases that's required in some of these marketplaces. So we're seeing a coalition here between, uh, full names and pseudonyms and being anonymous. >>That's awesome. And that, and I think this is the new, again, a whole new form of governance ran. You mentioned some comments about Dow. So I want to get your thoughts again, you know, Jeremiah, we become historians over the years. We're getting old, I'm a little bit older than you, but we've seen the movie war. You know, I remember breaking in the business when the computer standards bodies were built to be more organic, and then they became much more of a kind of an anti-innovation environment where people, the companies would get involved the standards organization just to slow things down and muck things up a little bit. Um, so you know, you look at Dallas like, Hmm, is a Dal, a good thing, or a bad thing that the answer is from people I talked to, is it depends. So I'd love to get your thoughts on getting momentum and becoming defacto with value, a value proposition. Vis-a-vis just adapt for the sake of having a doubt. This has been a conversation that's been kind of in the inside the baseball here, inside the ropes of the industry, but there's trade-offs, can you guys share your thoughts on when to do a Dow and when not to do a Dow and the benefits and trade-offs of that? >>Sure. Maybe I'll start off with a definition and then we'll go to rent. So a Dao, a decentralized autonomous organization, the best way to think about this. It's a digital cooperative and we've heard of worker cooperatives before the differences that they're using blockchain technologies in order to do the three things, identity governance, and rewards and mechanisms. They're relying on web 2.0 tools and technologies like discord and telegram and social networks to communicate. And there's a cooperative they're trying to come up with a common goal, um, Ren, but what's your take, that's the setup? >>So, you know, for me, when I started my journey into crypto and web tree, I had no idea about, you know, what that actually meant and, uh, an easy way for me to think of it and to grasp the nature of it was about the comparison between a dowel and perhaps a more traditional company structure. Um, you know, in a traditional company structure, you have a Yorkie, the company is led by a CEO and other executives, uh, that that was a flat structure. And it's very much led by a group of core contributors. So, uh, to Jeremiah's point, you know, you get that notion of a co-operative, uh, type of structure. The decision-making is very different. You know, we're talking about a hot, super high level of transparency proposals getting submitted and, and voting systems, using applications, as opposed to, you know, management, making decisions behind closed doors. >>I think that speaks to a totally new form of governance. And I think we have hardly, hardly scratched the surface. We have seen recently, uh, very interesting moments in web tree culture. And we have seen how that was suddenly have to make certain decisions and then come to moments of claiming responsibility, uh, in order to, uh, put his behavior, uh, of some of the members. I think that's important. I think it's going to redefine how we're thinking about that, particularly new governance models. And I think he's going to pave the way for a lot of super interesting structure in the near future. >>That's a great point, ran around the transparency for governance. So John, you posed the question, does this make things faster or slower? And right now most dowels are actually pretty slow because they're set up as a flat organization. So as a response to that, they're actually shifting to become representative democracies. Does that sound familiar where you can appoint a delegates and use tokens to vote for them? And they have a decision power, almost like a committee and they can function. And so we've seen actually there are some times our hierarchies, except the person at the top is voted by those that have the tokens. In some cases, the people at the top had the most tokens, but that's a whole nother topic. So we're seeing a wide variety of governance structures, >>You know, rent. I was talking with Matt G the founder of, and I was telling him about the domain name system. And one little trivia note that many people don't know about is that the U S government cause unit it was started by the U S the department of commerce kept that on tight leash because the international telecommunications union wanted to get their hands on it because of ccTLDs and other things. So at that time, because the innovation yet wasn't yet baked out. It was organically growing the governance, the rules of the road, keeping it very stable versus meddling with it. So there's certain technologies that require Jeremiah that let's keep an eye on as a community. Let's not formalize anything like the government did with the domain name system. Let's keep it tight. And then finally released it, I think multiple years after 2004, I think it went over to the, to the ITU, but this is a big point. I mean, if you get too structured, organic innovation, can't go, what you guys' reaction to that. >>So I think to take a stab at it, um, we have as a business, you know, thinking of unstoppable domains, a strong incentive to innovate, uh, and this is what is going to be determining longterm value growth for the organization for, uh, partners, for users, for customers. So, you know, that degree of formalization actually gives us a sense of purpose and a sense of action. And if you compare that to Dows, for instance, you can see how some of the upsides and downsides can pan out either way. It's not to say that there is a perfect solution. I think one of the advantages of the Dow is that you can let more people contribute. You can probably remove bias quite effectively, and you can have a high level of participation and involvement in decisions and all the upside in many ways. Um, you know, as a company, it's a slightly different setup. We have the opportunity to coordinate a very, uh, diverse and part-time workforce in a very, uh, you know, different way. Um, and we do not have to deal with the inefficiencies that might be, you never run to some form of extreme decentralization so that those are balanced from an organizational structure, uh, that comes, uh, either side >>Sharon. I want to get your thoughts on, on, on a trend that you've been involved in. We both been involved in, and you're seeing it now with the kind of social media world, the world of a role of an influencer it's kind of moved from what was open source and influencer was a connect to someone who shared graded content, um, enabled things to much more of a vanity that the photo on Instagram and having a large audience. Um, so is there a new influencer model with web three or is it, is it the, I control the audience I'm making money that way. Is there a shift in the influencer role or, or ideas that you see that should be in place for what is the role of an influencer? Because as web three comes, you're going to see that role become instrumental. We've seen it in open source projects, influences, you know, the people who write code or ship code. So what's your take on that because there's been a conversation with people who have been having the word influencer and redefining and reframing it. >>Sure. The influence model really hasn't changed that much, but the way that they're behaving has when it comes to at three, this market, I mean, there's a couple of things. Some of the influencers are in investors. And so when you see their name on a project or a new startup, that's an indicator, there's a higher level of success. You might want to pay more attention to it or not. Secondly, influencers themselves are launching their own NFC projects. Gary Vaynerchuk, a number of celebrities, Paris Hilton is involved and they are also doing this as well. Steve Aoki, a famous DJ launched his as well. So they're going head first and participating in building in this model. And there are communities are coming around them and they're building economies. Now the difference is it's not, I speak as an influencer to the fans. The difference is that the fans are now part of the community and they hold, they literally holding own some of the economic value, whether it's tokens or the NFTs. So it's a collaborative economy, if you will, where they're all benefiting together. And that's a, that's a big difference as well. Lastly, there's, there's one little tactic we're seeing where marketers are airdropping in FTS, branded NFTs influencers with wallet. So you can see it in there. So there's new tactics that are forming as well. Yes. >>Super exciting. Ren, what's your reaction to that? Because he just hit on a whole new way of, of how engagement's happening, how people are closed, looping their, their votes, their, their votes of confidence or votes with their wallet. Um, and some brands which are artists now, influencers. I mean, this is a whole game-changing instrumentation level. >>I think that's what we are seeing right now is super re invigorating as a marketeer who has been around for a few years, basically. Um, I think that the shift in the web brands are going to communicate and engage with our audiences is profound. It's probably as revolutionary and even more revolutionary than the movement for, uh, brands in getting into digital. And you have that sentiment of a gold rush right now with a lot of brands that are trying to understand NFTs and, and how to actually engage with those communities and those audiences, um, dominate levels in which brands and influencers are going to engage. There are many influencers that actually advanced the message and the mission because the explosion of content on web tree has been crazy. Part of that is due to the network effect nature of crypto, because as Jeremiah mentioned, people are incentivized to promote projects, holders of an NFTA, also incentivized to promote it. So you end up with a flywheel, which is pretty unique of people that are hyping the project, and that are educating other people about it and commenting on the ecosystem, uh, with IP rights, being given to NFT holders, you're going to see people pull a brand since then of the brands actually having to. And so the notion of brands, again, judging and delivering, you know, elements of the value to their fans is something that's super attractive, extremely interesting. And I think, again, we've hardly scratched the surface of all that is possible in that. >>It's interesting. You guys are bringing some great insight here, Jeremiah, the old days, the word authentic was a kind of a cliche and brands like tried to be authentic and they didn't really know what to do. They called it organic, right? And now you have the trust concept with aura authenticity and environment like web three, where you can actually measure it and monetize it and capture it if you're actually authentic and trustworthy. >>That's right. And because it's on blockchain, you can see how somebody is behave with their economic behavior. In the past, of course, big corporations. Aren't going to have that type of trail on blockchain just yet. But the individuals and executives who participate in this market might be, and we'll also see a new types of affinity. Do you executives, do they participate in these NFT communities? Do they purchase them? We're seeing numerous brands like Adidas to acquire, uh, you know, different MTV projects to participate. And of course the big brands are grabbing their domains. Of course, you can talk to rant about that because it's owning your own name as a part of this trust and being >>That's awesome. Great insight guys. Closing comments, takeaways for the audience here. Each of you take a minute to give, share your thoughts on what you think is happening now, where it goes. All right, where's it going to go, Jeremy, we'll start with you. >>Sure. Um, I think the vision of web three, where full decentralization happens, where the power is completely shifted to the edges. I don't think it's going to happen. I think we will reach web 2.5 and I've been through so many tech trends where we said that the power is going to shift completely to the end. It just doesn't, there's two reasons. One is the venture capital are the ones who tend to own the pro programs in the first place. And secondly, the, the startups themselves end up becoming the one percenters. We see Airbnb and Uber are one-percenters now. So that trend happens over and over and over. Now with that said, the world will be in a better place. We will have more transparency. We will see economic power shifted to the people, the participants. And so they will have more control over the internet that they are building. >>Right. And final, final comments, >>Um, fully aligned with Jeremiah on the notions of control, being returned to users, the notion of ownership and the notion of redistribution of the economic value that is created across all the different chains, uh, uh, that we are going to see. And, and all those ecosystems. I believe that we are going to witness to palliate movements of expansion, one that is going to be very lateral. When you think of crypto and web three, essentially you think of a few hundred tribes. Uh, and I think that more projects are going to appear more, uh, coalitions of individuals and entities, and those are going to exist around those projects. So you're going to see an increase in the number of tribes that one might join. And I also think that we're going to progress rapidly from the low hundred millions of people and an FTE holders into the billions perfectly. Uh, and that's going to be extremely interesting. I think that the next wave of crypto users and Ft fans are going to look very different from the early adopters that we had witnessed in the very early days. So it's not going to be your traditional model of technology, adoption curves. I think the demographics going to shift and the motivations are going to be different as well, which is going to be a wonderful time to educate and engage with new community members. >>All right, Ron, Jeremy, thank you both for that great insight, great segment, uh, breaking down web three or web 2.5 as Jeremiah says, but we're in a better place. This is a segment with the influencers as part of the cubes and the unstoppable domain showcase. Um, John for your hosts. Thanks for watching.

>>Welcome everyone to the cubes, continuing coverage of AWS reinvent 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. We are running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events this year to live sets to remote studios with AWS and its ecosystem partners. We've got over a hundred guests on the program this year, going deep as we enter the next decade of cloud innovation. We are pleased to welcome for the first time to the cube. John the CTO and co-founder of LaunchDarkly. John is here to talk about modern DevOps with feature management, John, welcome to the program. >>Thanks for having me, Lisa. >>Great to have you on the program. Let's talk a little bit about LaunchDarkly. I know it's been on the cube a couple of times, but it's been a while. Give the audience an overview of LaunchDarkly what it is that you do and what's new. >>Yeah. LaunchDarkly is the leading platform for feature management. We allow developers, product managers, anyone in the practice of building software to leverage feature flags, to deliver better software, faster, a better product experiences through the use of feature flags. >>And one thing that I noticed, um, on the website is you guys have some big customer names square. I noticed I also saw Adidas, NBC, at least you've got some, some pretty big organizations that are relying on LaunchDarkly to deliver and control their software. What can you tell us about it from a customer perspective? >>Yeah. You know, it's an amazing thing. We have over 30% of the fortune 100 using the LaunchDarkly platform for feature management. And, uh, you know, I think it is, it's been incredible to see how basically anyone building software can leverage feature flags to, to, to deliver better customer experience. And so the companies you named, I mean, they're all over the map in terms of the kinds of products they deliver to consumers from, uh, from square to Adidas. I mean, those are totally different companies, but, uh, I think the thing that they all have in common is that they're increasingly becoming they're, you know, they're, they're either already a software company or they're increasingly becoming a software company and that's where we help, uh, our customers, the customers that are, uh, you know, delivering more digital experiences to their consumers >>That is table stakes. These days, you mentioned all software, all companies rather becoming software companies. If they're not probably not going to be around much longer and you, you right. You mentioned, you know, w that's a, quite a variety NBC to Adidas as I talked about there, but in terms of what they have in common, talk to me a little bit about feature management. What is it and how can it help to bridge the divide between the developer folks, the business side of the organization? >>Absolutely. Uh, I think the fundamental thing that, that feature management provides, the simplest thing, that the thing that people first utilize LaunchDarkly for is to separate the, the processes of deploying software from releasing software. So it used to be in, in a pre-launch darkly world, when you deploy a soft, a new piece of software, you package the artifact that you put it out on your service, and then your entire customer base was experiencing that new version of the software. So if things were going wrong, if there was a bug, something wasn't working, right, your blast radius was enormous. Literally your entire customer base was impacted. Um, and one of the things that LaunchDarkly does, the first thing that we do, the first piece of value that we provide is we help you sort of reduce that risk. So when you release a change, you can deliver that change to a much more targeted, smaller, safer cohort of users measure the impact of what's going on. Is it, is it, are there any bugs, uh, are there any performance problems, whereas everything's smooth sailing, and if it is, then you can use LaunchDarkly to rapidly and with a lot of visibility control scale that release and scale that roll out out. And that's the most fundamental value that we provide. >>Big value there. Speaking of value, let's talk about the partnership with LaunchDarkly and AWS. I know you have a lot of experience working with AWS for many years back when you were at Atlassian, but give us an overview of the partnership and that shared developer audience that you're both working with. >>Yeah. I've got a number of years of experience working with, with, uh, AWS. So you mentioned my time private prior to starting LaunchDarkly. I was at Atlassian for many years, uh, and I was added last year. And during that time period where Atlassian was switching from, um, traditional hosting providers to, uh, to public cloud, to AWS specifically, um, and the capabilities that an unlocked, not only for our operations teams, but for our developers were pretty incredible. Um, one of the things that we, uh, we launched almost immediately on my team, uh, was the ability to sort of like preview environments, uh, through AWS hosting and have that experience not happen on the local developers, desktop, but rather in the cloud. Uh, and that was incredibly helpful for improving our velocity and helping us preview changes. Um, uh, since, since starting LaunchDarkly, I mean, we've leveraged cloud and AWS in particular from the earliest days, we started the platform, uh, on AWS and we've been consuming more and more services through AWS and, and seeing more and more value, um, from a partnership perspective, we're incredibly excited because we have a massive number of customers that are either just beginning their public cloud journey or are making significant migrations or significant infrastructure changes. >>And they're using the LaunchDarkly platform to control the release of those changes to mitigate risk. Um, we have customers using us to do migrations from one cloud provider to another, or go through modernization efforts and push change out, uh, safely, uh, as they migrate to a provider like AWS. >>Talk to me about some of the things that you've seen in the last year and a half 20 months, or more probably since the pandemic started, we've seen so much acceleration to cloud so much cloud migration. It's so many companies, not only becoming software companies, because they need to be competitive, but understanding not why move to the cloud. It's when did you, how have you, how have you helped organizations, you know, from the NBCs the media folks to, to the retailers, to, to undergo those migrations safely, but quickly in a time of such dynamics? >>Yeah, I mean, the, that, that is exactly what we saw during the pandemic, a massive amount of change, not just in the move to digital and digital experiences, but also in the need to sort of adapt to rapidly changing conditions. Uh, we had customers, uh, in for example, food delivery that were, that needed to rapidly change the way their software behaved, uh, in response to changes in regulations or guidelines around things like COVID. And our platform really was transformative for many of those organizations, as they sort of, um, needed to become more flexible and adapt, not only to changing rules and regulations, but changing consumer behavior and changing end user behavior. Um, so it was, it was an incredible year. It was, uh, a year that was sort of fraught with uncertainty, but it was a year where, you know, LaunchDarkly, our platform really helped many of our customers, um, sort of navigate the waters and, and figure out how to get, um, the experiences they needed to and the change they needed to in front of their customers rapidly. >>Yeah. Rapid being a keyword of the last 20 years, both 20, 20 years, it feels like 20 years, doesn't it? Two years guardians lived there. Um, but talk to me a little bit about some of the other trends that you're seeing from a cloud perspective. We talked about the acceleration of migration. What are some of the other trends that your customers are facing and how are, is LaunchDarkly helping them to address those trends? >>Yeah, well, one of the trends that we're seeing is, is the rapidity of change, um, is forcing companies that, um, even companies that were really software driven, uh, at their heart, uh, to iterate more rapidly. And I think there's this story around modernization that that is becoming more and more, um, common where you normally think of modernization as sort of like legacy companies, sort of non software driven companies having to make that shift and modernize their software stacks. But the rapid pace of change is, uh, it's shifting things into a world where even companies like, like my own company, like LaunchDarkly are having to modernize our stack. Our company is seven years old. Um, and some of the things that we were doing seven years ago, um, they've been eclipsed in terms of like processes, tools, technologies, and use. And so we've had to go through modernization as well to keep up with the times and to, to give our developers the quality of, of, of tools and processes that they expect. >>I think that's an important point, John, that you bring up is that modernization isn't just for legacy applications, legacy businesses, and that's, and I'll be honest. That's how I normally think about it. I don't think of a company as a young, as LaunchDarkly needed to modernize, but you bring up a point that really what it is, is an ongoing process for businesses in any industry. >>I mean, if you think about the, what the landscape looked like seven years ago and you fast forward to today, um, so many of the practices are different. Um, so even companies like us, we're having to change. I mean, uh, seven years ago, it wasn't really clear, um, that Kubernetes was going to be a platform that was, that was going to end up being the winner and sort of like the orchestration space. And so when we were starting out, um, none of our workloads were, were on Kubernetes. And even today, uh, we're not really significantly using Kubernetes. We're, we're sort of like legacy container-based. Um, and that's just us, we're, we're still a startup and we're still able to move pretty rapidly. Um, but even for us, we're, we're having to sort of revisit the technologies and use and modernize our stack, um, and kind of look around and see what's not working anymore and what we need to change. Um, it's certainly a pace that is massively different from, uh, uh, you know, a company that is, um, relying on a legacy software stack. I don't want to pretend like LaunchDarkly is, uh, I would compare us to a company that's, um, moving off of mainframes and cobalt or anything like that. Um, but it's still, uh, it's still something that we're cognizant and cognizant of and something that we have to invest in, >>But you bring up a good point is that it's it's. And as we talk about this, when we're talking with any vendor about, from the customer's perspective, it's a journey, it's the same thing that you're talking about here. It's, it's evaluating what you have under the hood what's working, what needs to be better as the markets change as the dynamics change as trends change. >>Yeah. That, that's, that's exactly how I think about it. And that's how a lot of these companies that are becoming more software driven are thinking about it too. Just sort of like assessing the catalog of tools and technologies and saying what's working, what's not working. Um, and I, I think one of the trends that we're seeing is that re-evaluation is happening more and more frequently and the frequency of new technologies and tools being adopted, uh, is increasing. And so it's something that you have to spend an enormous amount of effort, um, just to stay ahead of the game and stay ahead of what's what's modern and what's, what's the practices that we've determined are really working for organizations. >>Right? Exactly. So I mentioned a few customers by name that work with LaunchDarkly, but can you tell me an example of one of your favorite customer stories that you think really articulate the value that LaunchDarkly is delivering to your customers across industries? >>Yeah. Um, one that comes to mind is, is true car. Um, true car has been a LaunchDarkly customer for a long time. They're great partners of ours. Um, we have a case study up with them. And one of the stories that they talked about was their own cloud migration. Um, they shifted, uh, their, their workloads from one cloud provider to another and feature flags were sort of instrumental in that. So feature flags allowed them to sort of, um, gate the flow of traffic from one cloud to another. And just sort of like, uh, sort of in real time assess whether things were working or not, as they did that migration, it took a process that would have been incredibly risky, risky, and scary, and made it sort of business as usual for that. Um, so that's a company that I think of, um, that is really, that really understands the value of LaunchDarkly and has really leveraged us to our full potential. >>Awesome. Something I want to ask you about as well, is this concept of release impact compare and contrast that to like the traditional optimization focused AB testing? What's the difference? What are the similarities? >>Yeah. You know, AB testing has been around for a long time, uh, and it's used in software. Uh, definitely in the past decade has grown tremendously, uh, as a, as a piece of the software development experience. Um, but when I think about, um, the practice of building deep product experiences and contrast that to sort of like, um, uh, AB testing on a marketing site and, you know, testing out the layout of a page we're testing out, uh, you know, which call to action button color ends up creating more engagement. That's a very different world than, you know, I'm building a, I'm building a SAS product and I'm building this a new feature within that SAS product. Um, traditionally, um, you wouldn't really AB test that. Um, and part of the reason for that is it's really too expensive to build software. And it's not really a reality that most companies have where they can take a team and have them go build a feature for multiple weeks or months, um, pry it out in production and then say, you know what, that didn't work, um, that million dollar expense that we just made, we're just going to roll that back and, and, and not use it. >>So, um, that's sort of the way I think about the difference between a traditional optimization focused AB testing, where it's, it's sort of like smaller bets designed to move the needle on a metric, um, where if it doesn't work, you can turn it off versus these deep product experiences where when you're more interested in is being more quantitative about the impact of that release, but you're not necessarily interested in, um, sort of like AB testing, uh, focused, optimization, picking a winner in a short period of time. Um, one of the things that we've realized that LaunchDarkly is those are two separate tasks. Um, they're two separate processes and they require, um, different analyses and, and different tools under the hood. And so, uh, we're really excited at LaunchDarkly to be innovating on sort of both fronts. Um, not only just providing a platform for, uh, optimization focused AB testing, but providing a platform where product managers can be more quantitative about the, the capabilities that they're building and not thinking about it in terms of optimization, but just in terms of measuring the impact of the work that they're, they're shipping to customers, >>The impact. And of course, it's all outcomes focus as we talk about with customers and vendors and at any industry, last question, John, for you, as we're coming up on re-invent in-person, what are some of the things that, um, attendees can learn and see at the LaunchDarkly booth? >>Yeah. You're going to learn a lot about if you visit our booth, you're going to learn a lot about sort of like the, the direction that we're taking, which is, um, I think the exciting thing about LaunchDarkly as a platform is we really provide two capabilities for engineering teams. We help mitigate risks. We help you move more efficiently. That gives you more at bats as a team. Uh, it lets you, uh, ship more product and see whether it's working while shortly also they'll provide something on the flip side of that, which is the ability, the ability for product managers to measure whether the changes that they're making are the right changes for their customers. And when you combine those two things in one platform, you get the ability to, for the engineering team to have more at bats, to create more, uh, uh, uh, uh, change in production and see whether it's working. And then you get product managers, the ability to measure, uh, the impact on their customers. And you combine that together. And, uh, at the end of the day, what LaunchDarkly provides is the ability for you as an organization to deliver business value better, um, more quickly, um, through the R and D investments that you're making the software that you're producing. >>And that's critical. I love that baseball analogy more at bats. Fantastic. John, thank you for joining me, talking to the audience about launch directly, what you're doing, the trends that you're helping customers address the partnership with AWS and what folks can learn when they visit the LaunchDarkly booth at re-invent. We appreciate your time. >>Thank you so much, Lisa. I really enjoyed our conversation. >>Me too, for John Coda mall. I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching the cube continuous coverage of AWS reinvent 2021.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome everyone to theCUBE, continuing coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. We are running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events this year, two live sets, two remote studios with AWS, and its ecosystem partners. We've got over a hundred guests on the program this year, going deep as we enter the next decade of cloud innovation. We are pleased to welcome for the first time to theCUBE, John Kodumal, the CTO and co-founder of LaunchDarkly. John is here to talk about modern DevOps with feature management. John, welcome to the program. >> Thanks for having me, Lisa. >> Great to have you on the program. Let's talk a little bit about LaunchDarkly. I know it's been on theCUBE a couple of times, but it's been awhile. Give the audience an overview of LaunchDarkly, what it is that you do and what's new. >> Yeah. LaunchDarkly is the leading platform for feature management. We allow developers, product managers, anyone in the practice of building software to leverage feature flags, to deliver better software faster, a better product experiences through the use of feature flags. >> One thing that I noticed on the website is you guys have some big customer names, Square, I also saw Adidas, NBC, at least you've got some pretty big organizations that are relying on LaunchDarkly to deliver and control their software. What can you tell us about it from a customer perspective? >> Yeah. You know, it's an amazing thing. We have over 30% of the Fortune 100 using the LaunchDarkly platform for feature management. And, you know, I think it's been incredible to see how basically anyone building software can leverage feature flags to deliver better customer experiences. So, the companies you named, I mean, they're all over the map in terms of the kinds of products they deliver to consumers from Square to Adidas. I mean, those are totally different companies, but I think the thing that they all have in common is that they're increasingly becoming... They're either already a software company or they're increasingly becoming a software company and that's where we help our customers, the customers that are delivering more digital experiences to their consumers. >> That is table stake these days, you mentioned all software, all companies rather becoming software companies. If they're not, they're probably not going to be around much longer and you're right. You mentioned that's a quite a variety, NBC to Adidas as I talked about there, but in terms of what they have in common, talk to me a little bit about feature management. What is it and how can it help to bridge the divide between the developer folks, the business side of the organization? >> Absolutely. I think the fundamental thing that feature management provides, the simplest thing, that the thing that people first utilize LaunchDarkly for is to separate the processes of deploying software from releasing software. So it used to be in a pre-LaunchDarkly world, when you deploy a new piece of software, you package the artifact up, you put it out on your servers, and then your entire customer base was experiencing that new version of the software. So, if things were going wrong, if there was a bug, something wasn't working right, your blast radius was enormous. Literally, your entire customer base was impacted. And one of the things that LaunchDarkly does, the first thing that we do, the first piece of value that we provide is we help you sort of reduce that risk. So when you release a change, you can deliver that change to a much more targeted, smaller, safer cohort of users, measure the impact of what's going on. Are there any bugs? Are there any performance problems? Or is everything's smooth sailing? And if it is, then you can use LaunchDarkly to rapidly, and with a lot of visibility control, scale that release and scale that roll-out out. And that's the most fundamental value that we provide. >> Big value there. Speaking of value, let's talk about the partnership with LaunchDarkly and AWS. I know you have a lot of experience working with AWS for many years back when you were at Atlassian, but give us an overview of the partnership and that shared developer audience that you're both working with. >> Yeah. I've got a number of years of experience working with AWS. So, you mentioned my time prior to starting LaunchDarkly, I was at Atlassian for many years, and I was at Atlassian and during that time period where Atlassian was switching from traditional hosting providers to public cloud, to AWS specifically, and the capabilities that an unlocked, not only for our operations teams, but for our developers were pretty incredible. One of the things that we launched almost immediately on my team was the ability to like preview environments through AWS hosting and have that experience not happen on the local developers desktop, but rather in the cloud. And that was incredibly helpful for improving our velocity and helping us preview changes. Since starting LaunchDarkly, I mean, we've leveraged cloud and AWS in particular from the earliest days, we started the platform on AWS and we've been consuming more and more services through AWS and seeing more and more value. From a partnership perspective, we're incredibly excited because we have a massive number of customers that are either just beginning their public cloud journey or are making significant migrations or significant infrastructure changes, and they're using the LaunchDarkly platform to control the release of those changes to mitigate risk. We have customers using us to do migrations from one cloud provider to another, or go through modernization efforts and push change out safely as they migrate to a provider like AWS. >> Talk to me about some of the things that you've seen in the last year and a half, 20 months or more probably. Since the pandemic started, we've seen so much acceleration to cloud, so much cloud migration, so many companies, not only becoming software companies because they need to be competitive but understanding it's not why move to the cloud, it's when. How have you helped organizations, you know, from the NBC, the media folks to the retailers, to undergo those migrations safely but quickly in a time of such dynamics? >> Yeah, I mean, that is exactly what we saw during the pandemic, a massive amount of change, not just in the move to digital and digital experiences, but also in the need to sort of adapt to rapidly changing conditions. We had customers in, for example, food delivery that needed to rapidly change the way their software behaved in response to changes in regulations or guidelines around things like COVID. And our platform really was transformative for many of those organizations as they sort of needed to become more flexible and adapt, not only to changing rules and regulations, but changing consumer behavior and changing end-user behavior. So, it was an incredible year. It was a year that was sort of fraught with uncertainty, but it was a year where LaunchDarkly, our platform really helped many of our customers sort of navigate the waters and figure out how to get the experiences they needed to and the change they needed to in front of their customers rapidly. >> Yeah. Rapid being a keyword of the last 20 years, it feels like 20 years, doesn't it? Two years, 40 and slipped there. But talk to me a little bit about some of the other trends that you're seeing from a cloud perspective. We talked about the acceleration of migration. What are some of the other trends that your customers are facing and how is LaunchDarkly helping them to address those trends? >> Yeah. One of the trends that we're seeing is the rapidity of change is forcing companies that even companies that were really software driven at their heart to iterate more rapidly. I think there's this story around modernization that is becoming more and more common where you normally think of modernization as sort of like legacy companies, sort of non software-driven companies, having to make that shift and modernize their software stacks, but the rapid pace of change is it's shifting things into a world where even companies like my own company, like LaunchDarkly are having to modernize our stack. Our company is seven years old. And some of the things that we were doing seven years ago, they've been eclipsed in terms of like processes, tools, technologies, and use. And so we've had to go through modernization as well to keep up with the times and to give our developers the quality of tools and processes that they expect. >> I think that's an important point, John, that you bring up is that modernization isn't just for legacy applications, legacy businesses, and I'll be honest, that's how I normally think about it. I don't think of a company as young as LaunchDarkly needing to modernize, but you bring up a point that really what it is is an ongoing process for businesses in any industry. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you think about what the landscape looked like seven years ago and you fast forward to today, so many of the practices are different. So even companies like us, we're having to change. I mean, seven years ago, it wasn't really clear that Kubernetes was going to be a platform that was going to end up being the winner and sort of like the orchestration space. And so when we were starting out, none of our workloads were on Kubernetes. And even today, we're not really significantly using Kubernetes, we're sort of like legacy container-based. And that's just us, we're still a startup and we're still able to move pretty rapidly. But even for us, we're having to sort of like revisit the technologies and use and modernize our stack and kind of look around and see what's not working anymore and what we need to change. It's certainly a pace that is massively different from a company that is relying on a legacy software stack, I don't want to pretend like LaunchDarkly is, I would compare us to a company that's moving off of mainframes and COBOL or anything like that, but it's still something that we're cognizant of and something that we have to invest in. >> But you bring up a good point. And as we talk about this when we're talking with any vendor about, from the customer's perspective, it's a journey, it's the same thing that you're talking about here. It's evaluating what you have under the hood, what's working, what needs to be better as the markets change, as the dynamics change, as trends change. >> Yeah. That's exactly how I think about it and that's how a lot of these companies that are becoming more software-driven are thinking about it too. Just sort of like assessing the catalog of tools and technologies and saying what's working, what's not working. And I think one of the trends that we're seeing is that re-evaluation is happening more and more frequently and the frequency of new technologies and tools being adopted is increasing. And so, it's something that you have to spend an enormous amount of effort just to stay ahead of the game and stay ahead of what's modern. The practices that we've determined are really working for organizations. >> Right, exactly. So, I mentioned a few customers by name that work with LaunchDarkly, but can you tell me an example of one of your favorite customer stories that you think really articulate the value that LaunchDarkly is delivering to your customers across industries? >> Yeah. What comes to mind is TrueCar. TrueCar has been a LaunchDarkly customer for a long time. They're great partners of ours. We have a case study up with them. And one of the stories that they talked about was their own cloud migration. They shifted their workloads from one cloud provider to another and feature flags were instrumental in that. So, feature flags allowed them to sort of gate the flow of traffic from one cloud to another and to sort of in real-time assess whether things were working or not as they did that migration. It took a process that would have been incredibly risky and scary, and made it sort of business as usual for that organization. So, that's a company that I think of that really understands the value of LaunchDarkly and has really leveraged us to our full potential. >> Awesome. Something I want to ask you about as well, is this concept of release impact. Compare and contrast that to like the traditional optimization focused A/B Testing. What's the difference? What are the similarities? >> Yeah. You know, A/B Testing has been around for a long time and it's used in software, definitely in the past decade has grown tremendously as a piece of the software development experience. But when I think about the practice of building deep product experiences and contrast that to sort of like A/B testing on a marketing site, you know, testing out the layout of a page, we're testing out which call to action button color ends up creating more engagement. That's a very different world than I'm building a SaaS product and I'm building this a new feature within that SaaS product. Traditionally, you wouldn't really A/B test that. And part of the reason for that is it's really too expensive to build software. And it's not really a reality that most companies have where they can take a team and have them go build a feature for multiple weeks or months, pry it out in production and then say, "You know what, that didn't work. That million dollar expense that we just made. We're just going to roll that back and not use it." So, that's sort of the way I think about the difference between a traditional optimization focused A/B Testing, where it's sort of like smaller bets designed to move the needle on a metric where if it doesn't work, you can turn it off versus these deep product experiences where what you're more interested in is being more quantitative about the impact of that release, but you're not necessarily interested in sort of like A/B testing focused optimization, picking a winner in a short period of time. One of the things that we've realized at LaunchDarkly is those are two separate tasks, they're two separate processes, and they require different analysis and different tools under the hood. And so, we're really excited at LaunchDarkly to be innovating on sort of both fronts, not only just providing a platform for optimization focused A/B Testing, but providing a platform where product managers can be more quantitative about the capabilities that they're building and not thinking about it in terms of optimization, but just in terms of measuring the impact of the work that they're shipping to customers. >> The impact, and of course, it's all outcomes focus as we talk about with customers and vendors and at any industry. Last question, John, for you as we're coming up on re:Invent in-person, what are some of the things that attendees can learn and see at the LaunchDarkly booth? >> Yeah. You're going to learn a lot about, if you visit our booth, you're going to learn a lot about sort of like the direction that we're taking, which is I think the exciting thing about LaunchDarkly as a platform is we really provide two capabilities. For engineering teams, we help you mitigate risks. We help you move more efficiently. That gives you more at bats as a team. It lets you ship more product and see whether it's working. LaunchDarkly also though provide something on the flip side of that, which is the ability for product managers to measure whether the changes that they're making are the right changes for their customers. And when you combine those two things in one platform, you get the ability for the engineering team to have more at bats, to create more change in production and see whether it's working. And then you get product managers the ability to measure the impact on their customers. And you combine that together, and at the end of the day, what LaunchDarkly provides is the ability for you as an organization to deliver business value better, more quickly through the R&D investments that you're making, the software that you're producing. >> And that's critical. I love that baseball analogy, more at bats. Fantastic, John, thank you for joining me talking to the audience about LaunchDarkly, what you're doing, the trends that you're helping customers address, the partnership with AWS, and what folks can learn when they visit the LaunchDarkly booth at re:Invent. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much, Lisa. I really enjoyed our conversation. >> Me too, for John Kodumal, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re-Invent 2021. (upbeat music)

welcome back to the cube's presentation of the aws executive summit at re invent 2021 made possible by accenture my name is dave vellante we're going to look at how digital infrastructure is helping to transform consumer experiences specifically how an insurance company is changing its industry by incentivizing and rewarding consumers who change their behavior to live healthier lives a real passion of of mine and getting to the really root cause of health with me now are simon guest who's the chief executive officer of generality vitality gmbh and niels mueller who's the managing director at the cloud first application engineering lead for the european market at accenture gentlemen welcome to the cube thanks for having us you're very welcome simon generally vitality it's a really interesting concept that you guys have envisioned and now put into practice tell us how does it all work sure no problem and thanks for for having us on dave it's a pleasure to be here so look uh generally vitality is in its uh it's core pretty simple concepts so it's uh it's a program that you have on your phone and the idea of this program is that it's a it's a wellness coach for you as an individual and it's going to help you to understand your health and where you are in terms of the state of your health at the moment and it's going to take you on a journey to improve your your lifestyle and your wellness and hopefully help you to lead a healthier and a more sort of mindful life i guess is is the best way of summarizing it from um from our point of view with insurance company of course you know our historical role has always been to uh be the company that's there if something goes wrong you know so if unfortunately you pass away or you have sickness in your in your life or in your family's life that's that's historically been our role but what we see with generality vitality is something a little bit different so it's a program that really is uh supposed to be with you every day of your life to help you to live a healthier life it's something that we already have in in four european markets in fact in five from this week i'm a little bit behind the time so we're live already in in germany in france in austria and italy and in spain and fundamentally what we what we do dave is too is to say to customers look if you want to understand your health if you want to improve it by moving a little bit more by visiting the doctor more by eating healthier by healthy choices on a daily basis we're going to help you to do that and we're going to incentivize you for going on this journey and making healthy choices and we're going to reward you for for doing the same so you know we partner up with with great companies like garmin like adidas like big brands that are let's say invested in this health and wellness space so that we can produce really an ecosystem for customers that's all about live well make good choices be healthy have an insurance company that partners you along that journey and if you do that we're going to reward you for for that so you know we're here not just in the difficult times which of course is one of our main roles but we're here as a partner as a lifetime partner to you too to help you feel better and live a better life i love it i mean it sounds so simple but but it's i'm sure it's very complicated to to make the technology simple for the user you've got mobile involved you've got the back end and we're going to get into some of the tech but first i want to understand the member engagement and some of the lifestyle changes simon that you've analyzed what's the feedback that you're getting from your customers what does the data tell you how do the incentives work as well what what is the incentive for the the member to actually do the right thing sure look i think actually the the covered uh situation that we've had in the last sort of two years has really crystallized the fact that this is something that we really ought to be doing and something that our customers really value so i mean look just to give you a bit of a sort of information about how it works for for customers so what we try to do with them is is to get customers to understand uh their current health situation you know using their phone so uh you know we ask our customers to go through a sort of health assessment around how they live what they eat how they sleep you know and to go through that sort of process uh and to give them what a vitality age which is a sort of uh you know sort of actuarial comparison with their real age so i'm i'm 45 but unfortunately my my vitality age is 49 and it means i have some work to do to bring that back together uh and what we see is that you know two-thirds of our customers take this test every year because they want to see how they are progressing on an annual basis in terms of living a healthier life and if what if what they are doing is having an impact on their life expectancy and their lifespan and their health span so how long are they going to live healthier for so you see them really engaging in this in this approach of understanding their current situation then what we know actually because the program is built around this model that uh really activity and moving and exercise is the biggest contributor to living a healthier life we know that the majority of deaths are caused by lifestyle illness is like you know poor nutrition and smoking and drinking alcohol and not exercising and so a lot of the program is really built around getting people to move more and it's not about being an athlete it's about you know getting off the the underground one station earlier walking home or making sure you do your 10 000 steps a day and what we see is that that sort of 40 of our customers are on a regularly basis linking either their phone or their their exercise device to our program and downloading that data so that they can see how how much they are exercising and at the same time what we do is we set we set our customers weekly challenges to say look if you can move a little bit more than last week we are going to to reward you for that and we see that you know almost half of our customers are achieving this weekly goal every week and it's really a fantastic level of engagement that normally is an insurer uh we don't see the way the rewards work is is pretty simple it's similar in a way to an airline program so every good choice you make every activity you do every piece of good food that you eat when you check your on your health situation we'll give you points and the more points you get you go through through a sort of status approach of starting off at the bottom status and ending up at a gold and then a platinum status and the the higher up you get in the status that the higher the value of the rewards that we give you so almost a quarter of our customers now and this is accelerated through provide they've reached that platinum status so they are the most engaged customers that we we have and those ones who are really engaging in the in the program and what we really try to create is this sort of virtuous circle that says if you live well you make good choices you improve your health you you progress through the program and we give you better and stronger and more uh valuable rewards for for doing that and some of those rewards are are around health and wellness so it might be that you get you get a discount on on gym gear from adidas it might be that you get a discount on a uh on a device from garmin or it might be actually on other things so we also give people amazon vouchers we also give people uh discounts on holidays and another thing that we we did actually in the last year which we found really powerful is that we've given the opportunity for our customers to convert those rewards into charitable donations because we we work in generality with a with a sort of um campaign called the human safety net which is helping out the poorest people in society and some what our customers do a lot of the time is instead of taking those financial rewards for themselves they convert it into a charitable donation so we're actually also thinking wellness and feeling good and insurance and some societal good so we're really trying to create a virtuous circle of uh of engagement with our customers i mean that's a powerful cocktail i love it you got the the data because if i see the data then i can change my behavior you got the gamification piece you actually have you know hard dollar rewards you could give those to charities and and you've got the the most important which is priceless can't put a value on good health i got one more question for simon and niels i'd love you to chime in as well on this question how did you guys decide simon to engage with accenture and aws and the cloud to build out this platform what's the story behind that collaboration was there unique value that you saw that that you wanted to tap that you feel like they bring to the table what was your experience yeah look i mean we worked at accenture as well because the the the sort of construct of this vitality proposition is a pretty a pretty complex one so you mentioned that the idea is simple but the the build is not so uh is not so simple and that that's the case so accenture's been part of that journey uh from the beginning they're one of the partners that we work with but specifically around the topic of rewards uh you know we're we're a primarily european focused organization but when you take those countries that i mentioned even though we're next to each other geographically we're quite diverse and what we wanted to create was really a sustainable and reusable and consistent customer experience that allowed us to go and get to market with an increasing amount of efficiency and and to do that we needed to work with somebody who understood our business has this historical let's say investment in in the vitality concept so so knows how to bring it to life but that what then could really support us in making uh what can be a complex piece of work as simple and as as replicable as possible across multiple markets because we don't want to go reinventing the wheel every time we do we move to a new market so we need to find a balance between having a consistent product a consistent technology offer a consistent customer experience with the fact that we we operate in quite diverse markets so this was let's say the the reason for more deeply engaging with accenture on this journey thank you very much niels why don't you comment on on that as well i'd love to to get your thoughts and and really really it's kind of your role here i mean accenture global si deep expertise in industry but also technology what are your thoughts on this topic yeah i'd love to love to comment so when we started the journey it was pretty clear from the outset that we would need to build this on cloud in order to get this scalability and this ability to roll out to different markets have a central solution that can act as a template for the different markets but then also have the opportunity to localize different languages different partners for the rewards there's different reward partners in the different markets so we needed to build in an asset basically that could work as a tempos centrally standardizing things but also leaving enough flexibility to to then localize in the individual markets and if we talk about some of the more specific requirements so one one thing that gave us headaches in the beginning was the authentication of the users because each of the markets has their own systems of record where the basically the authentication needs to happen and we somehow needed to still find a holistic solution that comes through the central platform and we were able to do that at the end through the aws cognito service sort of wrapping the individual markets uh local idp systems and by now we've even extended that solution to have a standalone cloud native kind of idp solution in place for markets that do not have a local idp solution in place or don't want to use it for for this purpose yeah so you had you had data you have you had the integration you've got local laws you mentioned the flexibility you're building ecosystems that are unique to the to the local uh both language and and cultures uh please you had another comment i interrupted you yeah i know i just wanted to expand basically on the on the requirements so that was the central one being able to roll this out in a standardized way across the markets but then there were further requirements for example like being able to operate that platform with very low operations overhead there is no large i.t team behind generally vitality that you know works to serve us or can can act as this itis backbone support so we needed to have basically a solution that runs itself that runs on autopilot and that was another big big driver for first of all going to cloud but second of all making specific choices within cloud so we specifically chose to build this as a cloud native solution using for example manage database services you know with automatic backup with automatic ability to restore data that scales automatically that you know has all this built in which usually maybe a database administrator would take care of and we applied that concept basically to every component to everything we looked at we we applied this requirement of how can this run on autopilot how can we make this as much managed by itself within the cloud as possible and then land it on these services and for example we also used the the api gateway from from aws for our api services that also came in handy when for example we had some response time issues with the third party we needed to call and then we could just with a flick of a button basically introduce caching on the level of the api gateway and really improve the user experience because the data you know wasn't updated so much so it was easier to cache so these are all experiences i think that that proved in the end that we made the right choices here and the requirements that that drove that to to have a good user experience niels would you say that the architecture is is a sort of a data architecture specifically is it a decentralized data architecture with sort of federated you know centralized governance or is it more of a centralized view what if you could talk about that yeah it's it's actually a centralized platform basically so the core product is the same for all the markets and we run them as different tenants basically on top of that infrastructure so the data is separated in a way obviously by the different tenants but it's in a central place and we can analyze it in a central fashion if if the need arises from from the business and the reason i ask that simon is because essentially i look at this as a as largely a data offering for your customers and so niels you were talking about the local language and simon as well i would imagine that that the local business lines have specific requirements and specific data requirements and so you've got to build an architecture that is flexible enough to meet those needs yet at the same time can ensure data quality and governance and security that's not a trivial challenge i wonder if you both could comment on that yeah maybe maybe i'll give a start and then simon can chime in so um what we're specifically doing is managing the rewards experience right so so our solution will take care of tracking what rewards have been earned for what customer what rewards have been redeemed what rewards can be unlocked on the next level and we we foreshadow a little bit to to motivate to incentivize the customer and as that data sits in an aws database in a tenant by tenant fashion and you can run analysis on top of that maybe what you're getting into is also the let's say the exercise data the fitness device tracking data that is not specifically part of what my team has built but i'm sure simon can comment a little bit on that angle as well yeah please yeah sure sure yeah sure so look i think them the topic of data and how we use it uh in our business is a very is very interesting one because it's um it's not historically being seen let's say as the remit of insurers to go beyond the you know the the data that you need to underwrite policies or process claims or whatever it might be but actually we see that this is a whole point around being able to create some shared value in in this kind of product and and what i mean by that is uh look if you are a customer and you're buying an insurance policy it might be a life insurance or health insurance policy from from generali and we are giving you access to this uh to this program and through that program you are living a healthier life and that might have a you know a positive impact on generali in terms of you know maybe we're going to increase our market share or maybe we're going to lower claims or we're going to generate value out of that then one of the points of this program is that we then share that value back with customers through the rewards on the platform that we that we've built here and of course being able to understand that data and to quantify it and to value that data is an important part of the of the the different stages of how you of how much value you are creating and it's also interesting to know that you know in a couple of our markets we we operate in the corporate space so not with retail customers but with with organizations and one of the reasons that those companies give vitality to their employees is that they want to see things like the improved health of a workforce they want to see higher presenteeism lower absenteeism of employees and of course being able to demonstrate that there's a sort of correlation between participation in the vitality program and things like that is also is also important and as we've said the markets are very different so we need to be able to to take the data uh that we have out of the vitality program uh and be able in in the company that that i'm managing to to interpret that data so that in our insurance businesses we are able to make good decisions about the kind of insurance products we i think what's interesting to uh to make clear is that actually that the kind of health data that we generate stays purely within the vitality business itself and what we do inside the vitality business is to analyze that data and say okay is this is this also helping our insurance businesses to to drive uh yeah you know better top line and bottom line in the in the relevant business lines and this is different per company and per mark so yeah being able to interrogate that data understand it apply it in different markets and different uh distribution systems and different kinds of approaches to insurance is an is an important one yes it's an excellent example of a digital business in in you know we talk about digital transformation what does that mean this is what it means i i'd love i mean it must be really interesting board discussions because you're transforming an industry you're lowering overall cost i mean if people are getting less sick that's more profit for your company and you can choose to invest that in new products you can give back some to your corporate clients you can play that balancing act you can gain market share and and you've got some knobs to turn some levers uh for your stakeholders which is which is awesome neil something that i'm interested in i mean it must have been really important for you to figure out how to determine and measure success i mean you're obviously removed it's up it's up to generality vitality to get adoption for for their customers but at the same time the efficacy of your solution is going to determine you know the ease of of of delivery and consumption so so how did you map to the specific goals what were some of the key kpis in terms of mapping to their you know aggressive goals besides the things we already touched on i think one thing i would mention is the timeline right so we we started the team ramping in january or february and then within six months basically we had the solution built and then we went through a extensive test phase and within the next six months we had the product rolled out to three markets so this speed to value speed to market that we were able to achieve i think is one of the key um key criteria that also simon and team gave to us right there was a timeline and that timeline was not going to move so we needed to make a plan adjust to that timeline and i think it's both a testament to to the team's work that they did that we made this timeline but it also is enabled by technologies like cloud i have to say if i go back five years ten years if if you had to build in a solution like this on a corporate data center across so many different markets and each managed locally there would have been no way to do this in 12 months right that's for sure yeah i mean simon you're a technology company i mean insurance has always been a tech heavy company but but as niels just mentioned if you had to do that with it departments in each region so my question is is now you've got this it's almost like non-recurring engineering costs you've got that it took one year to actually get the first one done how fast are you able to launch into new markets just from a technology perspective not withstanding any you know local regulations and figuring out to go to market is that compressed yeah so if you are specifically technology-wise i think we would be able to set up a new market including localizations that often involves translation of because in europe you have all the different languages and so on at i would say four to six weeks we probably could stand up a localized solution in reality it takes more like six to nine months to get it rolled out because there's many other things involved obviously but just our piece of the solution we can pretty quickly localize it to a new market but but simon that means that you can spend time on those other factors you don't have to really worry so much about the technology and so you've launched in multiple european markets what do you see for the future of this program come to america you know you can fight you can find that this program in america dave but with one of our competitors we're not we're not operating so much in uh but you can find it if you want to become a customer for sure but yes you're right so look i think from from our perspective uh you know to put this kind of business into a new market it's not it's not an easy thing because what we're doing is not offering it just as a as a service on a standalone basis to customers we want to link it with with insurance business in the end we are an insurance business and we want to to see the value that comes from that so there's you know there's a lot of effort that has to go into making sure that we land it in the right way also from a customer publishing point of view with our distribution and they are they are quite different so so yeah look coming to the question of what's next i mean it comes in three stages for me so as i mentioned we are uh in five markets already uh in next in the first half of 2022 we'll also come to to the czech republic and poland uh which we're excited to to do and that will that will basically mean that we we have this business in in the seven main uh general markets in europe related to life and health business which is the most natural uh let's say fit for something like vitality then you know the next the sort of second part of that is to say okay look we have a program that's very heavily focused around uh activity and rewards and that that's a good place to start but you know wellness these days is not just about you know can you move a bit more than you did historically it's also about mental well-being it's about sleeping good it's about mindfulness it's about being able to have a more holistic approach to well-being and and covert has taught us and customer feedback has taught us actually that this is something where we need to to go and here we need to have the technology to move there as well so to be able to work with partners that are not just based on on on physical activity but also also on mindfulness so this is how one other way we'll develop the proposition and i think the third one which is more strategic and and we are you know really looking into is there's clearly something in the whole uh perception of incentives and rewards which drives a level of engagement between an insurer like generali and its customers that it hasn't had historically so i think we need to learn you know forget you know forgetting about the specific one of vitality being a wellness program but if there's an insurer there's a role for us to play where we offer incentives to customers to do something in a specific way and reward them for doing that and it creates value for us as an insurer then then this is probably you know a place we want to investigate more and to be able to do that in in other areas means we need to have the technology available that is as i said before replicable faster market can adapt quickly to to other ideas that we have so we can go and test those in in different markets so yes we have to we have to complete our scope on vitality we have to get that to scale and be able to manage all of this data at scale all of those rewards at real scale and uh to have the technology that allows us to do that without without thinking about it too much and then to say okay how do we widen the proposition and how do we take the concept of vitality that sits behind vitality to see if we can apply it to other areas of our business and that's really what the future is is going to look like for us you know the the isolation era really taught us that if you're not a digital business you're out of business and pre-kov a lot of these stories were kind of buried uh but the companies that have invested in digital are now thriving and this is an awesome example jeff another point is that jeff amebacher one of the founders of cloudera early facebook employee famously said about 10 12 years ago the best and greatest engineering minds of our my generation are trying to figure out how to get people to click on ads and this is a wonderful example of how to use data to change people's lives so guys congratulations best of luck really awesome example of applying technology to create an important societal outcome really appreciate you your time on the cube thank you thanks bye-bye all right and thanks for watching this segment of thecube's presentation of the aws executive summit at reinvent 2021 made possible by accenture keep it right there for more deep dives [Music] you

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent 2021 made possible by Accenture. My name is Dave Vellante. We're going to look at how digital infrastructure is helping to transform consumer experiences, specifically how an insurance company is changing its industry by incentivizing and rewarding consumers who changed their behavior to live healthier lives, a real passion of mine, and getting to the really root cause of health. With me now are Simon Guest, who's the Chief Executive Officer of Generali Vitality, GmbH, and Nils Muller-Sheffer, who's the Managing Director at the Cloud First Application Engineering Lead for the European market at Accenture. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> You're very welcome Simon. Simon, Generali Vitality is a really interesting concept that you guys have envisioned and now put it into practice. Tell us how does it all work? >> Sure. No problem. And thanks for having us on David, pleasure to be here. So look, Generali Vitality is in its core a pretty simple concept. It's a program that you have on your phone. And the idea of this program is that it's a wellness coach for you as an individual, and it's going to help you to understand your health and where you are in terms of the state of your health at the moment, and it's going to take you on a journey to improve your lifestyle and your wellness, and hopefully help you to live a healthier and a more sort of mindful life, I guess, is the best way of summarizing it. From our point of view as an insurance company, of course, our historical role has always been to be the company that's there if something goes wrong. So if unfortunately you pass away or you have sickness in your life or your family's life, that's historically been our role. But what we see with Generali Vitality is something a little bit different. So it's a program that really is supposed to be with you every day of your life to help you to live a healthier life. It's something that we already have in for European markets and in fact, in five from this week, I'm a little bit behind the times. So we're live already in Germany, in France, in Austria, in Italy and in Spain. And fundamentally what we do Dave, is to say to customers, "Look, if you want to understand your health, if you want to improve it by moving a little bit more, or by visiting the doctor more, by eating healthier, by healthy choices on a daily basis, we're going to help you to do that. And we're going to incentivize you for going on this journey and making healthy choices. And we're going to reward you for doing the same." So, we partner up with great companies like Garmin, like Adidas, like big brands that are, let's say, invested in this health and wellness space so that we can produce really an ecosystem for customers that's all about live well, make good choices, be healthy, have an insurance company that partners you along that journey. And if you do that, we've going to reward you for that. So, we're here not just in a difficult times, which of course is one of our main roles, but we're here as a partner, as a lifetime partner to you to help you feel better and live a better life. >> I love it, I mean, it sounds so simple, but I'm sure it's very complicated to make the technology simple for the user. You've got mobile involved, you've got the back end and we're going to get into some of the tech, but first I want to understand the member engagement and some of the lifestyle changes Simon that you've analyzed. What's the feedback that you're getting from your customers? What does the data tell you? How do the incentives work as well? What is the incentive for the member to actually do the right thing? >> Sure, I think actually that the COVID situation that we've had in the last sort of two years is really crystallized the fact that this is something that we really ought to be doing and something that our customers really value. Just to give you a bit of a sort of information about how it works for our customers. So what we try to do with them, is to get customers to understand their current health situation, using their phone. So, we asked our customers to go through a sort of health assessments around how they live, what they eat, how they sleep, and to go through that sort of process and to give them all the Vitality age, which is a sort of actuarial comparison with their real age. So I'm 45, but unfortunately my Vitality age is 49 and it means I have some work to do to bring that back together. And what we see is that, two thirds of our customers take this test every year because they want to see how they are progressing on an annual basis in terms of living a healthier life. And if what they are doing is having an impact on their life expectancy and their lifespan and their health span. So how long are they going to live healthier for? So you see them really engaging in this approach of understanding that current situation. Then what we know actually, because the program is built around this model that's really activity and moving, and exercise is the biggest contributors to living a healthier life. We know that the majority of deaths are caused by lifestyle illnesses like poor nutrition and smoking and drinking alcohol and not exercising. And so a lot of the program is really built around getting people to move more. And it's not about being an athlete. It's about, getting off the underground one station earlier and walking home or making sure you do your 10,000 steps a day. And what we see is that that sort of 40% of our customers are on a regularly basis linking either their phone or their exercise device to our program and downloading that data so that they can see how much they are exercising. And at the same time, what we do is we set our customers weekly challenges to say, look, if you can move a little bit more than last week, we are go into to reward you for that. And we see that almost half of our customers are achieving this weekly goal every week. And it's really a level of engagement that normally as an insurer, we don't see. The way that rewards work is pretty simple. It's similar in a way to an airline program. So every good choice you make every activity to every piece of good food that you eat. When you check your on your health situation, we'll give you points. And the more points you get, you go through through a sort of status approach of starting off at the bottom status and ending up at a golden and a platinum status. And the higher up you get in the status, the higher the value of the rewards that we give you. So almost a quarter of our customers now, and this has accelerated through COVID have reached that platinum status. So they are the most engaged customers that we have and those ones who are really engaging in the program. And what we really tried to create is this sort of virtuous circle that says If you live well, you make good choices, you improve your health, you progress through the program and we give you better and stronger and more valuable rewards for doing that. And some of those rewards are around health and wellness. So it might be that you get a discounts on gym gear from Adidas, it might be that you get a discount on a device from Garmin, or it might be actually on other things. We also give people Amazon vouchers. We also give people discounts on holidays. And another thing that we did actually in the last year, which we found really powerful is that we've given the opportunity for our customers to convert those rewards into charitable donations. Because we work in generosity with a sort of campaign called The Human Safety Net, which is helping out the poorest people in society. And so what our customers do a lot of the time is instead of taking those financial rewards for themselves, they convert it into a charitable donation. So we're actually also linking wellness and feeling good and insurance and some societal goods. So we're really trying to create a virtuous circle of engagement with our customers. >> That's a powerful cocktail. I love it. You've got the data, because if I see the data, then I can change my behavior. You've got the gamification piece. You actually have hard dollar rewards. You could give those to charities and you've got the most important, which is priceless, you can't put a value on good health. I got one more question for Simon and Nils I'd love for you to chime in as well on this question. How did you guys decide, Simon, to engage with Accenture and AWS and the cloud to build out this platform? What's the story behind that collaboration? Was there unique value that you saw that you wanted to tap, that you feel like they bring to the table? What was your experience? >> Yeah, we work with Accenture as well because the sort of constructs of this Vitality proposition is a pretty complex one. So you mentioned that the idea is simple, but the build is not so simple and that's the case. So Accenture has been part of that journey from the beginning. They are one of the partners that we work with, but specifically around the topic of rewards, we're primarily European focused organization, but when you take those countries that I mentioned, even though we're next to each other geographically, we're quite diverse. And what we wanted to create was really a sustainable and reusable and consistent customer experience that allowed us to go get to market with an increasing amounts of efficiency. And to do that, we needed to work with somebody who understood our business, has this historical, let's say investment in the Vitality concepts and so knows how to bring it to life, but then could really support us in making what can be a complex piece of work, as simple, as replicable as possible across multiple markets, because we don't want to go reinventing the wheel every time we knew we moved to a new market. So we need to find a balance between having a consistent product, a consistent technology offer, a consistent customer experience with the fact that we operate in quite diverse markets. So this was, let's say the reason for more deeply engaging with Accenture on this journey. >> Thank you very much, Nils, why don't you comment on that as well? I'd love to get your thoughts and really is kind of your role here, an Accenture global SI, deep expertise in industry, but also technology, what are your thoughts on this topic? >> Yeah, I'd love to love to comment. So when we started the journey, it was pretty clear from the outset that we would need to build this on cloud in order to get this scalability and this ability to roll out to different markets, have a central solution that can act as a template for the different markets, but then also have the opportunity to localize different languages, different partners for the rewards, there's different reward partners in the different markets. So we needed to build an asset basically that could work as a template, centrally standardizing things, but also leaving enough flexibility to then localize in the individual markets. And if we talk about some of the most specific requirements, so one thing that gave us headaches in the beginning was the authentication of the users because each of the markets has their own systems of record where the, basically the authentication needs to happen. And if we somehow needed to still find a holistic solution that comes through the central platform, and we were able to do that at the end through the AWS cognitive service, sort of wrapping the individual markets, local IDP systems. And by now we've even extended that solution to have a standalone cloud native kind of IDP solution in place for markets that do not have a local IDP solution in place, or don't want to use it for this purpose. >> So you had data, you had the integration, you've got local laws, you mentioned the flexibility, you're building ecosystems that are unique to the local, both language and cultures. Please, you had another comment, I interrupted you. >> No, I just wanted to expand basically on the requirements. So that was the central one being able to roll this out in a standardized way across the markets, but then there were further requirements. For example, like being able to operate the platform with very low operations overhead. There is no large IT team behind Generali Vitality that, works disservice or can act as this backbone support. So we needed to have basically a solution that runs itself that runs on autopilot. And that was another big, big driver for first of all, going to cloud, but second of all, making specific choices within cloud. So we specifically chose to build this as a cloud native solution using for example, managed database services, with automatic backup, with automatic ability to restore data that scales automatically that has all this built in which usually maybe in a database administrator would take care of. And we applied that concept basically to every component, to everything we looked at, we applied this requirement of how can this run on autopilot? How can we make this as much managed by itself within the cloud as possible, and then lend it on these services. For example, we also use the API gateway from AWS for our API services that also came in handy when, for example, we had some response time issues with the third party we needed to call. And then we could just with a flick of a button basically, introduced caching on the level of the API gateway and really improve the user experience because the data wasn't updated so much, so it was easier to cache. So these are all experiences I think that that proved in the end that we made the right choices here and the requirements that drove that to have a good user experience. >> Would you say that the architecture is a sort of a, data architecture specifically, is it a decentralized data architecture with sort of federated, centralized governance? Or is it more of a centralized view, wonder if you could talk about that? >> Yeah, it's actually a centralized platform basically. So the core product is the same for all the markets and we run them as different tenants basically on top of the infrastructure. So the data is separated in a way, obviously by the different tenants, but it's in a central place and we can analyze it in a central fashion if the need arises from the business. >> And the reason I asked that Simon is because essentially I look at this as largely a data offering for your customers. And so Nils, you were talking about the local language and Simon as well. I would imagine that the local business lines have specific requirements and specific data requirements. And so you've got to build an architecture that is flexible enough to meet those needs yet at the same time can ensure data quality and governance and security. And that's not a trivial challenge. I wonder if you both could comment on that. >> Yeah, maybe I'll give a start and then Simon can chime in. So what we're specifically doing is managing the rewards experience, so our solution will take care of tracking what rewards have been earned for what customer, what rewards have been redeemed, what rewards can be unlocked on the next level, and we foreshadow a little bit to motivate incentivize the customer and asset that data sits in an AWS database by tenant fashion. And you can run analysis on top of that. Maybe what you're getting into is also the, let's say the exercise data, the fitness device tracking data that is not specifically part of what my team has built, but I'm sure Simon can comment a little bit on that angle as well. >> Yeah, please. >> Yeah, sure. I think the topic of data and how we use it in our business is a very interesting one because it's not historically been seen, let's say as the remit of insurance to go beyond the data that you need to underwrite policies or process claims or whatever it might be. But actually we see that this is a whole point around being able to create some shared value in this kind of products. And what I mean by that is, if you are a customer and you're buying an insurance policy, it might be a life insurance or health insurance policy from Generali, and we're not giving you access to this program. And through that program, you are living a healthier life and that might have a positive impact on generosity in terms of, maybe we're going to increase our market share, or maybe we are going through lower claims, or we're going to generate value of that then. One of the points of this program is we then share that value back with customers, through the rewards on the platform that we've built here. And of course, being able to understand that data and to quantify it and to value that data is an important part of the different stages of how much value you are creating. And it's also interesting to know that, in a couple of our markets, we operate in the corporate space. So not with retail customers, but with organizations. And one of the reasons that those companies give Vitality to their employees is that they want to see things like the improved health of a workforce. They want to see higher presenteeism, lower absenteeism of employees, and of course, being able to demonstrate that there's a sort of correlation between participation in the Vitality program and things like that is also important. And as we've said, the markets are very different. So we need to be able to take the data that we have out of the Vitality Program and be able in the company that I'm managing to interpret that data so that in our insurance businesses, we are able to make good decisions about kind of insurance product we have. I think what's interesting to make clear is that actually that the kind of health data that we generate states purely within the Vitality business itself and what we do inside the Vitality business is to analyze that data and say, is this also helping our insurance businesses to drive better top line and bottom line in the relevant business lines? And this is different per company. Being able to interrogate that data, understand it, apply it in different markets, in different distribution systems and different kinds of approaches to insurance is an important one, yes. >> It's an excellent example of a digital business and we talked about digital transformation. What does that mean? This is what it means. It must be really interesting board discussions because you're transforming an industry, you're lowering overall costs. I mean, if people are getting less sick, that's more profit for your company and you can choose to invest that in new products, you can give back some to your corporate clients, you can play that balancing act, you can gain market share. And you've got some knobs to turn, some levers, for your stakeholders, which is awesome. Nils, something that I'm interested in, it must've been really important for you to figure out how to determine and measure success. Obviously it's up to Generali Vitality to get adoption for their customers, but at the same time, the efficacy of your solution is going to determine, the ease of delivery and consumption. So, how did you map to the specific goals? What were some of the key KPIs in terms of mapping to their aggressive goals. >> Besides the things we already touched on, I think one thing I would mention is the timeline. So, we started the team ramping in January, February, and then within six months basically, we had the solution built and then we went through a extensive test phase. And within the next six months we had the product rolled out to three markets. So this speed to value, speed to market that we were able to achieve, I think is one of the key criteria that also Simon and team gave to us. There was a timeline and that time I was not going to move. So we needed to make a plan, adjust to that timeline. And I think it's both a testament to the team's work that we met this timeline, but it also is enabled by a technology stack cloud. I have to say, if I go back five years, 10 years, if you had to build in a solution like this on a corporate data center across so many different markets and each managed locally, there would've been no way to do this in 12 months, that's for sure. >> Yeah, Simon, you're a technology company. I mean, insurance has always been a tech heavy company, but as Nils just mentioned, if you had to do that with IT departments in each region. So my question is now you've got this, it's almost like nonrecurring engineering costs, it took one year to actually get the first one done, how fast are you able to launch into new markets just from a technology perspective, not withstanding local regulations and figuring out the go to market? Is that compressed? >> So you asked specifically technology-wise I think we would be able to set up a new market, including localizations that often involves translation of, because in Europe you have all the different languages and so on, I would say four to six weeks, we probably could stand up a localized solution. In reality, it takes more like six to nine months to get it rolled out because there's many other things involved, obviously, but just our piece of the solution, we can pretty quickly localize it to a new market. >> But Simon, that means that you can spend time on those other factors, you don't have to really worry so much about the technology. And so you've launched in multiple European markets, what do you see for the future of this program? Come to America. >> You can find that this program in America Dave, but with one of our competitors, we're not operating so much in the US, but you can find it if you want to become a customer for sure. But yes, you're right. I think from our perspective, to put this kind of business into a new market is not an easy thing because what we're doing is not offering it just as a service on a standalone basis to customers, we want to link it with insurance business. In the end, we are an insurance business, and we want to see the value that comes from that. So there's a lot of effort that has to go into making sure that we land it in the right way, also from a customer proposition points of view with our distribution, they are all quite different. Coming to the question of what's next? It comes in three stages for me. So as I mentioned, we are in five markets already. In the first half of 2022, we'll also come to the Czech Republic and Poland, which we're excited to do. And that will basically mean that we have this business in the seven main Generali markets in Europe related to life and health business, which is the most natural at let's say fit for something like Vitality. Then, the sort of second part of that is to say, we have a program that is very heavily focused around activity and rewards, and that's a good place to start, but, wellness these days is not just about, can you move a bit more than you did historically, it's also about mental wellbeing, it's about sleeping good, it's about mindfulness, it's about being able to have a more holistic approach to wellbeing and COVID has taught us, and customer feedback has taught is actually that this is something where we need to go. And here we need to have the technology to move there as well. So to be able to work with partners that are not just based on physical activity, but also on mindfulness. So this is how one other way we will develop the proposition. And I think the third one, which is more strategic and we are really looking into is, there's clearly something in the whole perception of incentives and rewards, which drives a level of engagement between an insurer like Generali and its customers that it hasn't had historically. So I think we need to learn, forgetting about the specific one or Vitality being a wellness program, but if there's an insurer, there's a role for us to play where we offer incentives to customers to do something in a specific way and reward them for doing that. And it creates value for us as an insurer, then this is probably a place that we'd want to investigate more. And to be able to do that in other areas means we need to have the technology available, that is, as I said before, replicable faster market can adapt quickly to other ideas that we have, so we can go and test those in different markets. So yes, we have to, we have to complete our scope on Vitality, We have to get that to scale and be able to manage all of this data at scale, all of those rewards that real scale, and to have the technology that allows us to do that without thinking about it too much. And then to say, okay, how do we widen the proposition? And how do we take the concept that sits behind Vitality to see if we can apply it to other areas of our business. And that's really what the future is going to look like for us. >> The isolation era really taught us that if you're not a digital business, you're out of business, and pre COVID, a lot of these stories were kind of buried, but the companies that have invested in digital are now thriving. And this is an awesome example, and another point is that Jeff Hammerbacher, one of the founders of Cloudera, early Facebook employee, famously said about 10, 12 years ago, "The best and greatest engineering minds of my generation are trying to figure out how to get people to click on ads." And this is a wonderful example of how to use data to change people's lives. So guys, congratulations, best of luck, really awesome example of applying technology to create an important societal outcome. Really appreciate your time on theCUBE. Thank you. >> Bye-bye. >> All right, and thanks for watching this segment of theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent 2021 made possible by Accenture. Keep it right there for more deep dives. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, It's theCube, with digital coverage, of Actifio data-driven 2020, brought to you by Actifio. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCube coverage of Actifio Data-driven 2020. Really excited to, dig into a fun topic. I have a Cube alumni with us he is a DevOps author, and researcher Gene Kim. Unicorn Project is the most recent, Gene, great to see you, thanks so much for joining us. >> Stu, great to see you again, here at the Actifio conference, this is all fantastic. >> Yeah, so your new book, it was much awaited out there, you know, Unicorn's always discussed out there, but you know, the Phoenix Project, as I said, is really this seminal, book when people say, What is that DevOps thing and how do I do it? So, why don't you give us a little bit as to The Unicorn Project, why is it important? Why we're excited to dig into this and, we'll, we'll tie it into the discussion we're having here for the next normal, at Actifio. >> For sure, yeah, in fact, yeah. As you might have heard in the keynote address, you know, the what, what vexed me, after the Phoenix project came out in 2013 is that there is still looming problems that still remain, seven years after the Phoenix project was written. And, you know, these problems I think are very important, around you and what does it really take to enable developers to truly be productive, instead of being locked in a tundra of technical debt. Two is, you know, how do we unlock truly the power of data so that we can help everyone make better decisions, whether it's a developer, or anyone, within the business units and the organizations that we serve. And then three is like, what are really the behaviors that we need from leadership to make these amazing transformations possible? And so The Unicorn Project really is, the fifth project retold, but instead of through the eyes of Ops leadership, is told through the eyes, of a phenomenal developer. And so it was amazing to revisit the, the Phoenix project universe, I in the same timeline, but told from a different point of view. And it was such a fun project to work on, just because, you know, to relive the story, and just expose all these other problems, not happening, not on the side, but from, the development and data side. >> Yeah. They've always these characters in there that, I know I personally, and many people I talked to can, you know, really associate with, there was a return of certain characters, quite prominent, like Brent, you know, don't be the bottleneck in your system. It's great, if you're a fighter firefighter, and can solve everything, but if everything has to come through you, you know, Pedro is always going off, he's getting no sleep and, you know, you'd just get stressed out. You talked a bit more, about the organization and there are the five ideals in the book. So maybe if you can, you know, strongly recommend, of course, anybody at ending active you, got a copy of the books they'll be able to read the whole thing, but, you know, give us the bumper sticker on some of those key learnings. >> Yeah, for sure, yeah. So the five ideals represents five ideas, I think are just very important, for everyone, the organization, serves, especially leadership. The first ideal is locality and simplicity. In other words, when you need to get something done, we should be able to get it done within our team, without having to do a lot of communication coordination, with people outside of our team. The worst, the most horrible feeling is that in order, to do a small little thing, you actually have, to have a, coordinated action that spans 15 teams, right. And that's why you can't get anything done, right? And so that's so much the hallmark of large complex organizations. The second ideal is that what I think the outcomes are, which is focused flow and joy, you know, I've not just now started to for the first time in 20 years, self identify, not as an ops person, but as a developer. And, I really now understand, why we got into technology in the first place. This so that we can solve the business problem at hand unencumbered by minute share. And that allows for a sense of focus flow and even joy. And I love how Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, describe it. He said, flow is a state that we feel when we love our work, so much that we lose track of time, and maybe even sense of self. And so I think we all in technology understand, you know, that that is how it is on the best of days and how terrible it is, you know, when we don't have that sense of flow. Third ideal is improvement of daily work, being even more important than daily work itself. The notion is greatness is never free, we must create it and must prioritize it, for the psychological safety. And the fifth is customer focus. So those are all the things I think are so important, for modern leaders, because it really defines the future of work. >> Yeah, we love that flow and it happens otherwise we're stuck, in that waiting place as you quoted Dr. Csi. So one of my favorite books there, there also. So Gene, for this audience here, there was, you know, yes, CICD is wonderful and I need to be able to move and ship fast, but the real transformational power, for that organization was unlocking the value of data, which is, I think something that everybody here can. So maybe to talk a little bit about that you know, we, there there's, we've almost talked too much, you know, data is the new oil and things like that, but it's that, you know, that allowing everybody to tap in and leverage, you know, real time what's happening there were just at the early parts of the industry being able to unlock that future. >> Oh yeah, I love that phrase. Data is new oil, especially since oil, you know, the last 50 years, the standard Port 500 was dominated by, you know, resource extraction oil company and so forth. And now that is no longer true, it's dominated by the tech giants. And, Columbia there was a Columbia journalism review article that said, data's not only the new oil, is really the new soil. And for me, you know, my area of passion for the last seven years has been studying the DevOps enterprise community where, we're taking all the learnings that were really pioneered by the tech giants, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Microsoft, and seeing how they're being adopted by the largest, most complex organizations on the planet, the best known brands across every industry vertical. And it's so true that, you know, where the real learning gets exploited right, is through data. I realized, this is how we get to know our customers better. This is how we understand their wants and needs. This is how we test, and make offers to them to see if they like it or not to see if they value it or not. And, and so for me, one of the best examples, of this was, the target transformation and Adidas how it was just an amazing example of, to what links they went to, to liberate developers from, being shackled by ancient systems of records, data warehouses, and truly enabled developers to get access to the data they need modify it, even delete information, all without having to be dependent on, you know, integration teams that were essentially holding them hostage for six to nine months. And, these programs really enable some of the most strategic programs at their organizations, you know, enabling hundreds of projects over the years. So, I think that is really, just showing to what extent, the value that is created by unlocking data for individuals. And sorry Stu, one more thing that I'm just always dazzled by my friend, Chris Berg. He told me that, somewhere between a third and a half of all company employees use data in their daily work. They either use data or manipulate data as part of the daily work, which, you know, that, population is actually larger than the number of developers in an organization. So it just shows you how big this problem is, and how much value we can create by addressing this problem. >> Well, it's interesting if it's only a third, we still have work to do. What we've been saying for years is, you know, when you talk about digital transformation, the thing that separates those that have transformed and those that haven't is data needs to be at the core. I just can't be doing things the way I was or doing things off intuition, you know, being data-driven, I'm sure you know, the same Gene, if you're not, if you don't have data, you know, you're just some other person with an opinion. >> Yeah, yeah. That's it this is a great point. And in Risto Siilasmaa's amazing book, Transforming Nokia, I mean, he was, he said exactly that. And he said something that was even more astonishing. He said, there's not only at the core, but data also has to be at the edges. You know, he was describing at Amazon, anyone can do an experiment @booking.com. Anyone can do an experiment to see, if they can create value for the customer. They don't need approvals from, committees or their manager. This is something that is really truly part of everyone's daily work. And so, to me, that was a huge aha moment that says, you know, to what degree, you know. Our cultures need to change so that we can not only, use data, but also create learnings and create new data, you know, that the rest of the organization can learn from as well. >> Yeah. One of the other things I definitely, you know, felt in your book, you synthesize so much of the learnings that you've had over the years from like the DevOps enterprise summit. The question I have for you is, you know, you hear some of these, you know, great stories, but the question is, our companies, are they moving fast enough? Have they transformed the entire business or have they taken, you know, we've got one slice of the business that is kind of modernized and we're going to get to the other 30 pieces along the way, but you know, there's wholesale change, you know, 2020 has had such a big impact. What's your thoughts on, you know, how we are doing in the enterprise on pace of change these days? >> That's a great question. I mean, I think some people, when they ask me, you know, how far are we into kind of total adoption of DevOps? It's a newer better way of working. And I would say probably somewhere between 5 and 7%, right, and the math I would take them through is, you know, there are about 20 million developers on the planet of which at best, I think, a million of them are working in a DevOps type way. But yet now that's only growing. I think it was an amazing presentation at DevOps surprise summit in London that was virtual from nationwide building society, the largest organization of its kind. It's a large financially mutually owned organization for housing in the UK. And, they touched about how, you know, post COVID post lockdown suddenly they found themselves able to do them reckless things that would have normally taken four years, in four weeks. And I think that's what almost every organization is learning these days is, when survival is at stake, you know, we can throw the rules out of the window, right. And do things in a way that are safe and responsible, but, you know, create satisfy the business urgent needs, like, you know, provisioning tens of thousand people to work from home safely. You know, I think the shows, I think it's such a powerful proof point of what technology can do when it is unleashed from, you know, perhaps unnecessarily burdensome rules and process. And I think the other point I would make Stu is that, what has been so rewarding is the population of these technology leaders presenting at DevOps enterprise, they're all being promoted, they're all being, being given new responsibilities because they, are demonstrating that they have the best longterm interest of the organization at heart. And, they're being given even more responsibilities because, to make a bigger impact through the organization. So I'm incredibly optimistic about the direction we're heading and even the pace we're going at. >> Well, Gene definitely 2020 has put a real highlight on how fast things have changed, not just work from home, but, but the homeschooling, you know, telehealth, there are so many things out there where there was no choice, but to move forward. So the, the second presentation you participated in was talking about that next normal. So give us a little bit of, you know, what does that mean? You know, what, what we should be looking at going forward? >> Yeah, it was great to catch up with my friend Paul Forte, who I've known for many, many years, and now, now a VP of sales at the Actifio and yeah, I think it is amazing that academic Dr. Colada Perez, she said, you know, in every turning point, you know, where, there's such a the stage for decades of economic prosperity usually comes, by something exactly like what we're going through now, a huge economic recession or depression, following a period of intense re regulations there's new, technology that's unlocking, you know, new ways of working. And she pointed exactly to what's happening in the Covid pandemic in terms of, how much, the way we're working is being revolutionized, not by choice, but out of necessity. And, you know, as she said, you know, we're now learning to what degree we can actually do our daily work without getting on airplanes or, you know, meeting people in person. So, I'm a hue, I have so many friends in the travel industry, right. I think we all want normalcy to return, but I think we are learning, you know, potentially, you know, there are more efficient ways to do things, that don't require a day of travel for a couple hour meeting and day to return, right. So, yeah, I think this is being demonstrated. I think this will unlock a whole bunch of ways of interacting that will create efficiency. So I don't think we're going, as you suggested, right. There will be a new normal, but the new normal is not going to be the same as your old normal. And I think it will be, in general for the better. >> So, Gene, you, you've gone to gotten to see some of the transformation happening in the organizations when it comes to developers, you know, the, the DevOps enterprise summit, the, the state of DevOps, you know. I think five years ago, we knew how important developers were, but there was such a gap between, well, the developers are kind of in the corner, they don't pay for anything. They're not tied to the enterprise. And today it feels like we have a more cohesive story that there, there is that if you put in The Unicorn Project, it's, you know, business and IT, you know. IT, and the developers can actually drive that change and the survival of the business. So, you know, are we there yet success or net developers now have a seat at the table? Or, you know, what do you see on that, that we still need to do? >> Yeah, I think we're still, I mean, I think we're getting there, we're closer than ever. And as my friend, Chris O'Malley the CEO of the famously resurgent mainframe vendor Compuware said, you know, it is, everyone is aware that you can't do any major initiatives these days without some investment in technology, right? In fact, you can't invest in anything without technology. So I think that is now better understood than ever. And, yeah, just the digital, it's a whole digital disruption, I think is really, no one needs to be convinced that if we organize large complex organizations, don't change, they're at a risk of, you know, being decimated by the organizations that can change using an exploiting technology, you know, to their benefit and to the other person's detriment. So, and that primarily comes through software and who creates software developers. So I, by the way, I love the Stripe it was a CFO for Stripe who said, the largest, constraint for them is, and their peers is not access to capital, it is access development talent. I think when you have CFOs talking like that, right. It does says it's suggested something really has changed in the economic environment that we all compete in. >> So, I mentioned that on the research side, one of the things I've loved reading over the years is that, fundamental discussion that, going faster does not mean, that I am sacrificing security, or, you know, the product itself, you know, in the last couple of years, it's, you know, what separates those really high performing companies, and, you know, just kind of the middle of the ground. So, what, what, what advice would you give out there, to make sure that I'm moving my company more along to those high performing methods. >> Yeah, but just to resonate with that, I was interviewing a friend of mine, Mike Nygaard, long time friend of mine, and we were talking on and we were recalling the first time we both heard the famous 2009 presentation doing 10 deploys a day, every day at flicker, by John Allspaw and Paul Hammond. And we were both incredulous, right there? We thought it was irresponsible reckless, and maybe even immoral what they were doing, because, you know, I think most organizations were doing three a year, and that was very problematic. How could one do 10 deploys a day. And I think, what we now know, with the size of evidence, especially through the state of DevOps research, is that, you know, for six years, 35,000 plus respondents, the only way that you can be reliable, and secure, is to do smaller deployments more frequently, right? It makes you, be able to respond quicker in the marketplace, allows you to have better stability and reliability in the operational environment, allows you to be more secure. It allows you to be able to, you know, increase market share, increase productivity, and, you know, have happier employees. So, you know, at this point, I think the research is so decisive, that, you know, we can, as a whole book accelerate, that really makes the case for that, that this is something that I now have moral certainty or even absolute certainty oh, right. It's, you know, self evident to me, and it, I think we should have confidence that that really is true. >> Wonderful work, Gene, thanks so much for giving us the update. I really appreciate it, some really good sessions here in Actifio, as well as the book. Thanks so much, great to talk to you. >> Stu is always a pleasure to see you again, and thank you so much. >> Alright, that's our coverage from Actifio Data-driven, be sure to check out thecube.net for all of the, on demand content, as well as, as I said, if you were part of the show, definitely recommend reading Gene's book, The Unicorn Project. I'm Stu Miniman. And thank you for watching the cube. (soft upbeat music)

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. Hi, >>I'm stupid, man. And welcome to another cube conversation. I'm here in our Boston area studio. And of course, the intersection of networking and security has always been a hot topic. Even Mawr, if you look at it in 2020 everybody working from home their stresses and strains and a lot more changes than usual for what corporate I t has to deal with. Happy to welcome to the program. Tom Bonkowski. Hey, is the director of product marketing with Net Scout. We're gonna get into some of those topics. Um or Tom, thanks so much for joining us. Welcome. Alright. Eso you came to Donetsk out by way of the Arbor Networks acquisition. Ah, few years ago when I want to give our audience just a little bit about your background, what your team works on and we're gonna be talking about the the edge defense. A solution Said >>Sure. Yes, I I've been with Arbor Networks for over 10 years. I've been the director of product marketing for the DDOS line of products during that time and when we came over to Netsch e still have kind of continue that role. So I'm basically responsible for anything that you know to do with the Arbor Adidas Solutions. We have solutions for the service Friars of the world, large enterprises in the world. >>Yeah, maybe it would help if you just refresh our audience so, you know, generally out in the marketplace. You know d das? It's, you know, attacks on the internet. If I if I was, you know, a big provider technology. It's like, Hey, why can't I get to that website? Oh, they had a DDOS attack that hit them. But you know when when it comes to the enterprise you talked about about service brighter also, you know, when is this hitting them? You know, who are the ones causing this kind of thing? It just kind of give our audience a little bit of level. Said if you would in 2020. >>Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, Adidas attacks have been around for over 20 years. This isn't anything new, as you know, um, but the reality is is as that these attacks have been getting bigger. We're getting more frequent. They're getting more complex. Um, and like I said before, I've been here for over 10 years, and I feel like I say that every single year, but it is absolutely true. Um, and you know, the service Fridays of the world Bear the brunt of this. This problem, they're the ones taking on these large attacks. They're the ones trying to stop it not only to protect their own infrastructure, but also potentially the target, which could or could not be one of their customers. There's a lot of collateral damage associated with the details attacks, especially from a service buyer's perspective, because it impacts everything running on their backbone or in their whatever facility that this attack is flowing through. And then, obviously, you have potentially the target of these attacks, which could be any enterprise, any large government, whatever its very indiscriminate, uh, anyone could be a potential target on br. All >>right. And for for the enterprises themselves, you know, how are they making sure that they are protecting their perimeter? Where does Netsch out? You know, fit in tow, helping protect them against the sort of malicious >>attack. Yeah. So when When it comes to protecting your perimeter in particular. Let's let's talk about where we are today in this whole cove in 19 Pandemic. Um, a zoo. We all know this. This caused a massive work slash. Uh, you know, learn from home scenarios never seen before. And you know the quote. New perimeter is everyone who was once inside the organization now home coming back in, right. And, you know, the the Internet inbound Internet circuit, the firewall, the VPN, gateway, the load master all now coming from the opposite direction that maybe they were utilized in the past. Um, it is really the new perimeter, and it is has become very crucial to maintain business continuity, especially in this time. But as we'll talk about it also has become very vulnerable to to DDOs attacks in particular. And, you know, one of the areas that we'll talk about it is how one particular piece of that infrastructure, the VPN gateway, is actually become not only one of the most critical pieces in that chain of communication, but also one of the most vulnerable pieces to simply because it was never anticipated that this many users would would utilize that VPN gateway, and it was never designed for that on. Therefore, it's running at, you know, high or near capacity or at capacity, and it and it could be toppled over pretty easily with fairly small DDOS attacks. We'll get into that a little bit later. Yeah, >>absolutely, Tom. So I've had so many conversations over the last few months about, you know, the ripple effects of what? Work from home. Or, you know, if we think about however things play out in the next few months, it really will be almost work from anywhere. Um, is what will happen on Dwell. Everyone is working at home. That doesn't mean that some of those bad actors out there have gone away. In fact, you know, every company I talked to that's involved with security has seen way need to raise our capabilities and often are getting mawr attacks out there. What have you been seeing out there in the marketplace? You know, how have things been so far in 2020 when it when it comes, toe your space? >>Yeah, I know the same thing. So I'm gonna put up a chart here. And this is a chart which shows, uh DDOs attacks during the first, um, of six months of 2000 and 20 and this data comes from what we call our cyber threat horizon. This is This is a free online portal that anyone could access and see this information if they wish, But it's fueled by the deployment of our products all over the world. So our our DDOS protection products are utilized by a majority of the world's Internet service fighters. And from that deployment, they send this information about DDOS attack activity like, you know, the size of attack. Who is being tacked? Who was being attacked? Where is it coming from? The protocols or vector is being used, etcetera. So we we gather this information on a daily basis presented in this portal. So what this represents is the first six months of 2000 and 20 and as you can see, there's been over 4.8 million attacks thus far in 2000 and 20. That's about 15% higher than last year at the same exact time period. But if you look at the chart a little bit closer, we snapped the line at February, sort of the start of the global pandemic and the lock down periods, if you will and what you can see February, March, April May as it is an uptick in the number of DDOS attacks almost up to 36% in in May. Eso all this is happening during the time of this lock down, right? All this is happening where organizations are struggling to maintain a new a new normal. If you are this. But this is continuity, right? Eso what you represented before you said before that organizations are still struggling with cyber attacks. In fact, probably more is exactly what's happened to in the DDOS realm. And then finally like if you look at June, you see this little drop off there and you know, here everyone talking about the new normal, the new normal is not the new normal. Possibly. It's still too soon to tell. I think we'll wait for another couple of months here. But the bottom line is that during the midst of all this, as organizations trying to maintain some level of this canoe, they're also being faced with cyber threats like Adidas attacks to like they've never seen before. So amazing challenge that that folks have faced out there. >>Yeah, Tom, there's a few spaces in the marketplace that were already very important, you know, really top of mind from the business. I think about automation security being to the ones that come up most often. And when I talked to the participant in the space they like, I thought I was busy in 2019 and had ah lot playing for 2020 and oh, my gosh. I had no idea what 2020 was really going to bring. So that that data that you showed, you know, you're talking about millions of attacks, and you know that that increase, they're putting a focus on it. Even mawr here. So ah, lot of work for people to be done. So but bring us inside a little bit. Uh, you know how Net Scout, How are you helping customers? What invite you have for them, You know, how do we make sure that we can curb, You know, the the the impact of these attacks? Which is that in the millions? >>Sure. So let's go back to that. That inbound infrastructure now, right? Where everyone working from home, coming into the in down router hitting a firewall and but more likely, hitting a VPN gateway of some sort. That's what's allowing them to get access into these internal resource. Is that VPN? Gateway? As I mentioned before, uh, has been crucial during this time, but it also has been very susceptible to denounce attacks that VPN gateways a zwelling that firewall these air. You know what was referred to a state ful devices? They have to track TCP state in order to work properly? Well, there are three types of DDOS attacks, if you will, to make things simple. One is the volumetric attack, which people normally think of as a DDOS attack. It is designed to saturate that that inbound circuit that that Internet facing router interface, right? Um, and then their application layer taxis. They're very small, stealthy attacks. They're going after specific application servers. They're trying to bleed off. Resource is there. And then there's an attack called state exhaustion attacks these air, specifically designed to go after stay full devices like firewalls or, in today's world, the VPN gateway, and it doesn't take much. It takes a small 100 megabit per second attack lasting for 5 10 minutes to potentially fill the state tables in some of these VPN gateways, especially in light of the fact that they weren't prepared or designed to take on all the legitimate users right there coming in as a result of the pandemic. So the key to stopping these sorts of attacks the state full attacks and protecting at VPN Gateway is to put something on premise that iss stateless, meaning it has the ability to inspect packets using stateless packet processing technology. And we have such products are our product, which we call the Arbor edge defense eyes designed to stop all types of attacks. But in this in this particular environment, uh, it is our excels at stopping state exhaustion attacks, and you deploy it just inside the Internet router and in front of the VPN gateway or that firewall there, it could pick off short lived state exhaustion attacks and protect the availability of the VPN, gateway and firewall. Now, if you're relying upon which rating organizations do relying upon a cloud based data protection service, which we have to we have something called Arbor Cloud. Uh, it may not be able to stop those attacks in time, So you're running a little risk by relying on more traditional cloud based protection services. That's why you need this product Arbor Edge defense on premise, because it will react instantaneously and protect that VPN gateway from going on and maintain that business continuity for you. >>You know, Tom, when I think about that that footprint that you have in a customer's environment, you know, in addition to the D DOS services, it would seem like that Ah, prime opportunity that that there's other services and applications that could be run there. Is that the case with with your your solution to >>Well, if I understand what you mean by the services, well, we have the ability Thio conducted fully managed services that Are you going with that? >>Yeah, I e think Think that Yeah, that z one of right. Understand how how that service works. Yes. >>So? So the our bridge defense, um, is a system that once you have it configured, you design it for protecting sort of the interior services like the protective VPN gateway firewalls. Any other application running internal in the event of a large attack that we've been talking that will fill that Internet pipe, It has a feature called Cloud Signaling, where it will intelligently call for help upstream to either in Arbor Cloud service. This is a fully managed details protection service. We have global scrubbing centers, uh, and or call your I S P, who may you may be getting your data protection service from already. So it has the ability to link the on premise with the with the cloud based protection. And this hybrid approach to protection is absolutely industry best practice. This is this is how you protect yourself from the multiple vector DDOs attacks, as we mentioned previously. Now, if you're an organization that maybe doesn't have enough experience, uh doesn't want to deal with the on Prem our bridge defense. You know, we have you covered there, too. We have the ability to manage that that scenario or that device for you. We have to manage the ability to manage not only the arbor edge of the fence, but they also integration in the arbor cloud. So that whole hybrid scenario that we're talking about could be fully managed by, um, you know, by our folks who do this every single day 24 7. >>Yeah, it's any breakdown. Is thio your customers as toe. You know, when they choose that that that fully managed solution versus on Prem recommendation we've had for a long time is you wanna have your i t focused on things that have differentiation in your environment and seems like a natural thing that, you know, your team has the expertise. Eso What is that decision point as to whether they do it themselves or go with the manage solution? >>I think it really just has to do with the culture and the experience of the company. Really, What we're seeing is some of the smaller organizations that, you know, you have smaller teams, right? That wear multiple hats. They just cannot stay abreast of the latest threats. Indeed, us A. Z I mentioned before these things were getting more and more complex. So I think they're they're coming to the conclusion that all right, this is something that I can't do my by myself anyway for the large attacks. I need a cloud based service, part of some sort. I need someone to help me there anyway. So why don't they just handled the whole thing? Why don't they just handle the on premise component and in the cloud based component of this and make sure that it's running is officially as possible. But you know, even that said, it's not just the smaller org's. We're seeing larger organs do it, too, just to push things off their plates. Let's let's leave Dido's to the experts again because I can't do about myself. Anyway. >>Tom, I I saw a video. I think it was you that did actually talking about how our bridge defense is the first and last defense. When, when, when it comes to DDOS may explain that a little bit or audience. >>Yeah, So our tagline for the product is first and last line of defense. The first lines which we've been talking about all along here, is the ability to stop the inbound DDOS attacks. Now it also acts as the last line of defense, too. So, as we were alluding to before, you know, all you here during this time of the pandemic is watch out for you know, Kobe 19 related ransomware and things like that, right? Um, because the Arbit edge defense, it's just inside the rotter and outside that for a while, it is literally the last component in that cybersecurity change before the let's look from the outbound perspective packets, leaving the enterprising going out to the Internet. It is the last piece of product in that security chain, right, for it leaves the Internet. The arbor edge of the fence has the ability to consume threat intelligence not only from our own atlas system, which we spoke about earlier about third parties to via sticks and taxi. It has the ability to consume threat intelligence. And they're sitting on that. That last piece of you know, the security pipe, if you will or chain it has the ability to intercept. Uh, indicators of compromise have come from internal compromise devices that have made it through the entire security chain. Outgoing. Reach outside the farewell. Now it's one last one last line of defense, if you will, that has ability to recognize and stop that internal indicator compromise. And this is going to help stop the proliferation of malware that, and ultimately avoid that data breach that everyone is fearful. So it has a dual role. It could protect you from inbound DDOS attacks and Uncle also gonna as his last line defense stopping the proliferation this now where we're talking about? Yeah. Great, >>Tom. That actually refers I was curious about you know what other things your your your device did. And you know, there's the intelligence baked into their toe have kind of a multipurpose when you're in that environment. All right, Tom, I want to give you the last word here. You know, cos today they often need to react very fast to be able to deal with, you know, the changing dynamics of their business. You know, spinning up resource is everybody, you know, working from home. And like so, you know, what final advice do you have for them And, you know, give us the final >>word? Yeah. You know, during this time, president times, You know, we all unfortunately thought to me remain very vigilant when it comes to protecting our organization from cyberattacks. One of the one of the areas that seems to get overlooked as eyes DDOs protection. Right? Everyone is focused on malware and things like that, but don't overlook DDOs attacks. These things were happening on a daily basis, as I showed you over almost five million so far this year. Uh, it is an absolute part. Maintain the availability of your organization. It's part of the security Triad, as we know. And, you know, it's it's really their thio, you know? Do you disrupt your business continuity if you are getting hit, So don't overlook your and don't under underestimate your videos protection. All >>right, Well, Tom Bonkowski, thank you so much for the update and, uh, appreciate everything you shared. >>Welcome. All >>right. Be sure to check out the cube dot net for lots more coverage from the Cube. I'm still madman. Thanks for watching.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of next level network experience event brought to >>you by info blocks. Okay, welcome back, everyone. This is the Cube's coverage of the next level networking experience. Virtual event within four blocks. I'm John Furrow, your host of the Cube. We're here in our Palo Alto, Calif. Studios as part of our remote access during Covic, getting the interviews and the stories and sharing that with you. We got a great guest here, then savages the network operations manager at Morgan School District in Utah. A customer of info blocks to share a story. Then thanks for coming on. >>Thanks for having >>me. First of all, the Red Sox had a plus interview. I would say right now is gonna go great. Go Sox. Which baseball was in season. Great to have you on. Um, >>we'll get there. We'll >>get there. Um, my Yankee fans say when I say that. But anyway, Miss baseball, um, you know. But that brings up covert 19 baseball season sports. Life has been impacted. Your district. Like many school districts around the world, we're told to shut down, send workers home. That meant sending kids home, too. So we got the educators, get the administration, and you've got the kids all going home. >>Yeah. >>What did you do to keep things going? Because then stop. They had to do the remote learning and new things were emerging. New patterns, new traffic, new kinds of experiences. What did you learn? What's going on? >>Well, first we tried to lock the doors and pretend we weren't there, but they found us. Um, really? I mean, real quickly in our school district, we're not a 1 to 1 operation, so the, uh that caused a big change for us. Um, we had to quickly adapt. And we chose to use chromebooks because that's what we have for the students to use in their classes. So getting that, uh, squared away and send out into the family's was was a big challenge. But then on top of that being the school district, we then had to decide. Okay, how do we protect and filter provide the filtering that the students are gonna need even though they're at home? So there's some relative safety there when they're online and and accessing your email and things like that. So those were. Our two are probably our two. Biggest hurdles was, you know, ramping up the devices and then and then providing, making sure, you know, the network access from a filtering and consistency standpoint was going to work. >>You know, I got to ask you because I see this kind of disruption you don't You don't read about this in the i t. Manual around disaster recovery and, you know, disruption to operations. But essentially, the whole thing changes, but you still got to connect to the network, DNS. You gotta get the access to the content. You got content, you get systems. You got security all to be managed while in flight of dealing with connection points that remote. So you've got the disruption and the craziness of that, and then you've got this big I o t experiment basically edge of the network, you know, in all over the place. You know, on one hand, you kind of geek out and say, Wow, this is really kind of a challenge is an opportunity to solve the problem at the same time, you know, What do you do? So take us through that because that's a is a challenge of locking down the security in a borderless environment. People are everywhere. The students business has to get done. You got to resolve to. The resource is >>so thankfully, we had migrated If it blocks several years ago. Um and just this last, I would say in October, I finally got us on. Ah, cloud the blocks. One threat defense Cloud portion of it too. So from a security standpoint, we already had a really good, um foundation in place from both the DNs aspect and the DNS security aspect. Um so that was to be honest, most users. It was seamless transition. In many regards, both users didn't even realize they were being, You know, pushed through the info blocks is cloud DNs server, you know, which was providing security and filtering. So that was a big plus for us because it it was less man hours. We had to spend troubleshooting people's DNS resolutions. Why sites Wouldn't you know? Maybe they weren't being filtered correctly. All that was was to be honest, perfect. Where other platforms we had previously were just a nightmare to manage, >>like, for example, of the old way versus the new way here and marital, is it? What files configuration will take us through? What? You >>know, it was like a separate. It was a separate product content filter that works in conjunction with the firewall. Um, and I'm not going to name the company's name. I don't want, you know, even though many company but it seemed with that product we were spending, on average about 3 to 4 hours a day fixing false positives just from a filtering aspect because it would interfere with the DNS. And it does. It didn't really do it. I mean, how it filters is not based on DNS. Totally right. So by migrating temple blocks are DNS and the filtering the security is all handling at the DNs level. And it was just much more, um, to be I mean, frankly, honestly, is much more invisible to the end user. So >>more efficient. You decouple filtering from DNs resolution. Got it. All right, this is the big topic. I've been talking with info blocks people on this program in this event is on how this new d d I layer DNs d XP and I p address management kind of altogether super important. It's critical infrastructure Yeah. No spoilers, Enterprise. You're borderless institution. Same thing you go to school as a customer. How does the d I lay out this foundational security play for delivering this next level experience? What's your take on that? >>Well, for our like, for a school platform, we we use it in a number of ways. Besides, I mean, the filtering is huge, but just for the ability, like, for example, one of the components is is response policy zones or DNS firewalls what they call it, and that allows you one to manage, um, traditional, like DNS names, right? P addresses you can. You can manage those by creating essentially a zone that is like a white list of blacklist rewrite. So you've got a lot of control, and again it's filtering at the DNs level, so it's looking based on DNS responses inquiry. The other aspect of that is, is the feeds that you receive from info blocks. So by subscribing to those, we, um we have access to a lot of information that info Blocks and their partners have created identifying, you know, bad actors, malware attack vectors based on again DNs, uh, traffic, if you will, and so that takes a load office. Not having to worry. I'm trying to do all that on our own. I mean, we've seen a lot of attacks minimized because of the feeds themselves. So that again frees us up. We're a very small school district. In some regards, there's a I am the only network person in the district, and there's like, a total of four of us that manage, you know, kind of the support aspect. And so, being able to not have to spend time researching or tracking down, you know, breaches and attacks as much because of the DNS. Security frees me up to do other things, you know, like in the more standard networking realm, from a design and implementation. >>Great. Thanks for sharing that. I want to ask about security as a very competitive space security here and everyone promising it different things at different security things. You know, by I gotta ask you, why did you guys decide to use info blocks and what's the reason behind it? >>Well, to be frankly honest, I'm actually in info blocks trainer and I've been training for 15 years, so I kind of had an agenda when I first took this job to help out the school district. In my experience, I've been doing working in networking for over 20 years. And in my experience, I ever boxes one of the most easy and in best managed DNS solutions that I've come across. So, um, you know, I might be a little biased, but I'm okay with that. And so I I pushed us to be honest, to get there and then from the security aspect has all that has evolved. It just makes to me it makes sense. Why not wrap the more things you can maybe wrapped together. And so you know, when you're talking about attacks, over 90% of attacks use DNS. So if I have a solution that is already providing my DNS and then wraps the security into it, it just makes the most sense for me. >>Yeah. I mean, go back. The info box is DNA. You got cricket. Liu Stuart Bailey, the founder, was this is zero. This didn't just wake up one day and decided to start up these air practitioners early days of the Internet. They know DNS cold and DNS is we've been evolved. I mean, and when it needs that when you get into the DNS. Hacks and then you realize Okay, let's build an abstraction layer. You've seen Internet navigation discovery, all the stuff that's been proven. It is a critical infrastructure. >>Well, and to be honest, it's It's one of those services that you can't can't filter the firewall right. You have to have it. You have to. It's that foundation layer. And so it makes sense that Attackers air leveraging it because the fire will has to let it through in and out. And so it's a natural, almost a natural path for them to break in. So having something that speaks native DNS as part of your security platform makes more sense because it it can understand and see those attacks, the more sophisticated they become as well. >>So I gotta ask you, since you're very familiar info blocks and you're actually deploying its great solution. But I got this new DD I Layer, which is an abstraction, is always a great evolution. Take away complexity and more functionality. Cloud certainly cloud natives everywhere. That's but if it's for what is the update, if if I'm watching this month, you know I've been running DNS and I know it's out there. It's been running everything. And I got a update, my foundation of my business. I got to make my DNS rock solid. What's the new update? What's info blocks doing now? I know they got DNS chops seeing that on it. What's new about info blocks? What do you say? >>Well, it's, you know, they have a couple things that they've been trying to modify over the last several years. In my opinion, making more DNS like a you know, like software as a service, you know, service on demand, type of approach. That's a yes. So you have the cloud components to where you can take a lot of the heavy lifting, maybe off of your network team's shoulders. Because it is, it is. Um, I think people will be surprised how many customers out there. I have, ah, teams that are managing the DNS and even the D HCP aspect that that's not really what their experiences and then they don't They don't have, ah, true, maybe background Indians, and so having something that can help make that easier. It's almost, you know, hey, maybe used this term it almost sounds like it's too simple, but it's almost like a plug and play approached for some. For some environments, you know you're able to pop that in, and a lot of probably the problems they've been dealing with and not realizing what the root cause was will be fixed. So that's always a huge component with with info blocks. But their security is really what's come about in the last several years, Um, and and back as a school district, you know, our besides securing traffic, which every customer has to do, um, we have our you know, we're We have a lot of laws and regulations around filtering with with students and teachers. So anyone that's using a campus own device And so for us this I don't think people realized that the maturity that the filtering aspect of the blocks one defence now it's it's really evolved over the last couple of years. It's become a really, really good product and, like I said earlier, just work seamlessly with the data security. So it is going to be using >>an SD Wan unpacked everything. You go regular root level DNs is it? So I gotta ask you. How is the info blocks helping you keep network services running in system secure? >>Well, I think I think we're more on just the DNs d It does R d eight DNS and DCP. So from that standpoint, you know, in the five years almost we've been running that aspect. We have had very little if if maybe one or two incidents of problems with, you know from a DNS TCP so so are our users are able to connect, you know, when they turn on their computer To them, the Internet's up. You know, there's no there's no bumps in the road stopping them from from being able to connect. So that's a huge thing. You know, you don't have to deal with those Those constant issues again is a small team that just takes time away from the big projects. You're trying to, um, and then to the being able to now combine things. Security filtering solution. Uh, that alone has probably saved us. Oh, we'll probably you know, upwards of 500 man hours in the last eight months. So where normally we would be spending those hours again, troubleshooting issues that false positives, things like that. And there's a small team that just sucks the life out of you when you have to. You always spend time on that. >>I mean, you always chasing your tails. Almost. You want to be productive. Automation plays >>a >>key role in that, >>right? Yeah. >>So I got to ask you, you know, just a general question. I'm curious. You know, one of the things I see is sprawling of devices. WiFi was a great example that put an access point up a rogue access point, you know, as you get more connections. De HCP was amazing about this is awesome. But also, you had also de HCP problem. You got the the key Management is not just around slinging more d HDP around. So you got the trend? Is more connections on the eyepiece? Not how does info blocks make that easier? Because for people who may not know, the DNS ends announcing TCP and IP address management. They're all kind of tied together. Right? So this >>is the >>magic of DD I in my head. I want to get your thoughts on how you see that. Evolving. >>Yeah, I think that's another kind of back twice. It's kind of almost like a plug and play for a lot of customer environments. They're getting, you know, you're getting the DSP, DNs and eye Pam all wrapped in once you have this product that speaks, well, those languages, if you will and that And, um along with some of the reporting services and things of that nature. Um, when I look for, like, a Mac address in my influx database, I'm not just going to get ah, Mac address and what the i p addresses. I'm not just going to get the DNs like the host name. Maybe you know, the beauty and fully qualified domain name. Either I have the ability to bring in all this information that one. The client is communicating with the DCP DNS server on top of things like metadata that you can configure in the database to help really color in the picture of your network. So when you're looking at what device is using this I p when we talk about rogue devices or things like that, uh, I can get so much more information out of info blocks that almost almost to the point where you're almost being able to nail down the location of where the devices that even if it's a wireless client because it works in conjunction with some of our wireless appointments, too. So within, you know, a matter of minutes we have almost all the information we would need to take whatever action is appropriate for something like that, that getting used to take us hours and hours to troubleshoot. >>Appreciate a lot of the other interviews I've done with the info blocks, folks. One of the things that came out of them is the trailing. You can see the trail they're getting. They got to get in somewhere. DNS is the footprints of there you got? That's the traffic, and that's been helping on a potential attacks in D DOS is, for example, no one knows what that is, but DNS is what he said. A lot of the surface areas, DNS. With the hackers are makes it easier to find things. >>Well, you know, by integrating with the cloud I've I've got, you know, that the cloud based with the blocks one, it added a advanced DNS security, which helps protect skins Adidas as well as any cast to help provide more availability because I'm pushing on my DNs traffic through those cloud servers. It's like I've I'm almost equivalent of a very large organization that would normally spend millions of millions of dollars trying to do this on their own. So I'm getting the benefits and kind of the equivalent from that cloud hybrid approach that normally we would never have have. The resource is, >>Well, then I really appreciate you taking the time out of your busy day to remote into the Cube studios. Talk about next level networking experience, so I want to just ask you, just put your experience hat on. You've been You've seen some waves. You've seen the technology evolve when you hear next level networking and when you hear next level networking experience almost two separate meetings. But next level networking means next level. Next level networking experience means is some experience behind it. One of those two phrases mean to you next level networking and next level networking experience. >>Well, to me, I always look at it as the evolution of being able to have a user experience that's consistent no matter where you're located, with your home in your office and special with in today's environment. We have to be able to provide that consistent experience. But what I think what a lot of people may not think about or my overlook if you're just, you know, more of an end user is along with that experience, it has to be a consistent excess security approach. So if I'm an end user, um, I should be able to have the access the, um and the security, which, you know, you know, filtering all that fun stuff to not just allow me the connectivity, but to bring me, you know, that to keep the secure wherever I met. And ah, um, I think schools, you know, obviously with code and in the one the one that everyone was forced to do. But I think businesses And generally I think that's, you know, years ago, Cisco when I worked with Cisco, we talked about, you know, the remote user of the mobile user and how Cisco is kind of leading, uh, the way on that. And I think, you know, with the nature of things like this pandemic, I think being able to have your your users again have that consistent experience, no matter where they're at is going to be key. And so that's how I see when I think of the network evolution, I think that's how it it has to go. >>Well, we appreciate your your time sharing your insights Has a lot of a lot of people are learning that you've got to pour the concrete to build the building. DNS becoming kind of critical infrastructure. But final question for you. I got you here, you know? How you doing? Actually, schools looks like they're gonna have some either fully virtual for the next semester or some sort of time or set schedule. There's all kinds of different approaches. This is the end of the day. It's still is this big i o t experiment from a traffic standpoint. So new expectations create new solutions. What do you see on the horizon? What challenges do you see as you ride this way? Because you've got a hold down the fort, their school district for 3000 students. And you got the administration and the faculty. So you know What are you expecting? And what do you hope to see Evolve Or what do you want to stay away from? What's your opinion? >>I think? I think my my biggest concern is, you know, making sure our like, our students and staff don't, uh, you know, run into trouble on by say that more from, you know, you know, by being, you know, being exposed to attacks, you know, their data with Delta becomes, you know, comes back to our data as a district. But, you know, the student data, I think I think, you know, with anything kids are very vulnerable. Ah, very role, vulnerable targets for many reasons. You know, they're quick to use technology that quick to use, like social media, things like that. But they're they're probably the first ones to do security Does not, you know, across their mind. So I think my big my big concern is as we're moving this, you know, hybrid, hybrid approach where kids can be in school where they're going to be at home. Maybe they'll change from the days of the week. It'll fluctuate, uh, keeping them secure, you know, protecting them from themselves. Maybe in a way, if I have to be the guy is kind of the grumpy old dad it looked at. I'm okay with wearing that hat. I think that's my biggest. Our concern is providing that type of, uh, stability and security. So parents at the end of that could be, you know, I have more peace of mind that their kids you know, our online even more. It's great >>that you can bring that experience because, you know, new new environments, like whether it zooming or using, try and get the different software tools that are out there that were built for on premise premises. You have now potentially a click here. Click there. They could be a target. So, you know, being safe and getting the job done to make sure they have up time. So the remote access it again. If you've got a new edge now, right? So the edge of the network is the home. Exactly. Yeah. Your service area just got bigger. >>Yeah. Yeah, we're in. You know, I'm everybody's guest, whether they like it or not. >>I appreciate that. Appreciate your time and good luck. And let's stay in touch. Thanks for your time. >>Hey, thanks for having me. You guys have a good rest of your weekend? Day two. State State. >>Thank you very much. It's the Cube's coverage with info blocks for a special next level networking experience. Pop up event. I'm John for the Cube. Your host. Thanks for watching. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

(spirited music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are in the Palo Alto Studios for a CUBE Conversation. Part of our Western Digital Data Makes Possible Series, really looking at a lot of cool applications. At the end of the day, data's underneath everything. There's infrastructure and storage that's holding that, but it's much more exciting to talk about the applications. We're excited to have somebody who's kind of on the cutting edge of a next chapter of something you're probably familiar with. He's Steven Webster, and he is the founder and CEO of Asensei. Steven, great to see you. >> Likewise, likewise. >> So, you guys are taking, I think everyone's familiar with Fitbits, as probably one of the earliest iterations of a biometric feedback, for getting more steps. At the end of the day, get more steps. And you guys are really taking it to the next level, which is, I think you call it connected coaching, so I wondered if you could give everyone a quick overview, and then we'll dig into it a little bit. >> Yeah, I think we're all very familiar now with connected fitness in hindsight, as a category that appeared and emerged, as, like you say, first it was activity trackers. We saw those trackers primarily move into smartwatches, and the category's got life in it, life in it left. I see companies like Flywheel and Peloton, we all know Peloton now. >> [Jeff] Right. >> We're starting to make the fitness equipment itself, the treadmill, the bike, connected. So, there's plenty of growth in that category. But our view is that tracking isn't teaching, and counting and cheering isn't coaching. And so we see this opportunity for this new category that's emerging alongside connected fitness, and that's what we call connected coaching. >> Connected coaching. So the biggest word, obviously, instead of fitness tracker, to the connected coaching, is coaching. >> Yeah. >> So, you guys really think that the coaching piece of it is core. And are you targeting high-end athletes, or is this for the person that just wants to take a step up from their fitness tracker? Where in the coaching spectrum are you guys targeting? >> I saw your shoe dog, Phil Knight, founder of Nike, a book on the shelf behind you there, and his co-founder, Bill Bowerman, has a great quote that's immortalized in Nike offices and stores around the world: "If you have a body, you're an athlete." So, that's how we think about our audience. Our customer base is anyone that wants to unlock their athletic potential. I think if you look at elite sports, and elite athletes, and Olympic athletes, they've had access to this kind of technology going back to the Sydney Olympics, so we're really trying to consumerize that technology and make it available to the people that want to be those athletes, but aren't those athletes yet. You might call it the weekend warrior, or just the committed athlete, that would identify, identify themselves according to a sport that they play. >> So, there's different parts of coaching, right? One, is kind of knowing the techniques, so that you've got the best practices by which to try to practice. >> [Steven] Yep. >> And then there's actually coaching to those techniques, so people practice, right? Practice doesn't make perfect. It's perfect practice that makes perfect. >> [Steven] You stole our line, which we stole from someone else. >> So, what are you doing? How do you observe the athlete? How do you communicate with the athlete? How do you make course corrections to the athlete to move it from simply tracking to coaching? >> [Steven] I mean, it starts with, you have to see everything and miss nothing. So, you need to have eyes on the athlete, and there's really two ways we think you can do that. One is, you're using cameras and computer vision. I think most of us are familiar with technologies like Microsoft Connect, where an external camera can allow you to see the skeleton and the biomechanics of the athlete. And that's a big thing for us. We talk about the from to being from just measuring biometrics: how's your heart rate, how much exertion are you making, how much power are you laying down. We need to move from biometrics to biomechanics, and that means looking at technique, and posture, and movement, and timing. So, we're all familiar with cameras, but we think the more important innovation is the emergence of smart clothing, or smart apparel, and the ability to take sensors that would have been discrete, hard components, and infuse those sensors into smart apparel. We've actually created a reference design for a motion capture sensor, and a network of those sensors infused in your apparel allows us to recover your skeleton, but as easily as pulling on a shirt or shorts. >> [Jeff] So you've actually come up with a reference design. So, obviously, begs a question: you're not working with any one particular apparel manufacturer. You really want to come up with a standard and publish the standard by which anyone could really define, capture, and record body movements, and to convert those movements from the clothing into a model. >> No, that's exactly it. We have no desire to be in the apparel industry. We have no desire to unseat Nike, Adidas, or Under Armour. We're actually licensing our technology royalty-free. We just want to accelerate the adoption of smart apparel. And I think the thing about smart apparel is, no one's going to walk into Niketown and say, "Where's the smart apparel department? "I don't want dumb apparel anymore." There needs to be a compelling reason to buy digitally enhanced apparel, and we think one of the most compelling reasons to buy that is so that we can be coached in the sport of our choice. >> [Jeff] So, then you're starting out with rowing, I believe, is your first sport, right? >> [Steven] That's correct, yeah. >> And so the other really important piece of it, is if people don't have smart apparel, or the smart apparel's not there yet, or maybe when they have smart apparel, there's a lot of opportunities to bring in other data sources beyond just that single set. >> [Steven] And that's absolutely key. When I think about biomechanics, that's what goes in, but there's also what comes out. Good form isn't just aesthetic. Good form is in any given sport. Good form and good technique is about organizing yourself so that you perform most efficiently and perform most effectively. Yeah, so you corrected a point in that we've chosen rowing as one of the sports. Rowing is all about technique. It's all about posture. It's all about form. If you've got two rowers who, essentially, have the same strength, the same cardiovascular capability, the one with the best technique will make the boat move faster. But for the sport of rowing, we also get a tremendous amount of telemetry coming off the rowing machine itself. A force curve weakened on every single pull of that handle. We can see how you're laying down that force, and we can read those force curves. We can look at them and tell things like, are you using your legs enough? Are you opening your back too late or too early? Are you dominant on your arms, where you shouldn't be? Is your technique breaking down at higher stroke rates, but is good at lower stroke rates? So it's a good place for us to start. We can take all of that knowledge and information and coach the athlete. And then when we get down to more marginal gains, we can start to look at their posture and form through that technology like smart apparel. >> There's the understanding what they're doing, and understanding the effort relative to best practices, but there's also, within their journey. Maybe today, they're working on cardio, and tomorrow, they're working on form. The next day, they're working on sprints. So the actual best practices in coaching a sport or particular activity, how are you addressing that? How are you bringing in that expertise beyond just the biometric information? >> [Steven] So yeah, we don't think technology is replacing coaches. We just think that coaches that use technology will replace coaches that don't. It's not an algorithm that's trying to coach you. We're taking the knowledge and the expertise of world-class coaches in the sport, that athletes want to follow, and we're taking that coaching, and essentially, think of it as putting it into a learning management system. And then for any given athlete, Just think of it the way a coach coaches. If you walked into a rowing club, I don't know if you've ever rowed before or not, but a coach will look at you, they'll sit you on a rowing machine or sit you on a boat, and just look at you and decide, what's the one next thing that I'm going to teach you that's going to make you better? And really, that's the art of coaching right there. It's looking for that next improvement, that next marginal gain. It's not just about being able to look at the athlete, but then decide where's the improvement that we want to coach the athlete? And then the whole sports psychology of, how do you coach his improvements? >> Because there's the whole hammer versus carrot. That's another thing. You need to learn how the individual athlete responds, what types of things do they respond better to? Do they like to get yelled? Do they like to be encouraged? Did they like it at the beginning? Did they like it at the end? So, do you guys incorporate some of these softer coaching techniques into the application? >> Our team have all coached sport at university-level typically. We care a lot and we think a lot about the role of the coach. The coach's job is to attach technique to the athlete's body. It's to take what's in your head and what you've seen done before, and give that to the athlete, so absolutely, we're thinking about how do you establish the correct coaching cues. How do you positively reinforce, not just negatively reinforce? Is that person a kinesthetic learner, where they need to feel how to do it correctly? Are they a more visual learner, where they respond better to metaphor? Now, one of the really interesting things with a digital coach is the more people we teach, the better we can get at teaching, because we can start to use some of the techniques of enlarged datasets, and looking at what's working and what's not working. In fact, it's the same technology we would use in marketing or advertising, to segment an audience, and target content. >> Right. >> [Steven] We can take that same technology and apply it how we think about coaching sports. >> So is your initial target to help active coaches that are looking for an edge? Or are you trying to go for the weakend warrior, if you will? Where's your initial market? >> For rowing, we've actually zeroed in on three athletes, where we have a point of view that Asensei can be of help. I'll tell you who the three are. First, is the high school athlete who wants to go to college and get recruited. So, we're selling to the parent as much as we're selling to the student. >> [Jeff] That's an easy one. Just show up and be tall. >> Well, show up, be tall, but also what's your 2k time? How fast can you row 2,000 meters? That's a pretty important benchmark. So for that high school athlete, that's a very specific audience where we're bringing very specific coaches. In fact, the coach that we're launching with to that market, his story is one of, high school to college to national team, and he just came back from the Olympics in Rio. The second athlete that we're looking at is the person who never wants to go on the water, but likes that indoor rowing machine, so it's that CrossFit athlete or it's an indoor rower. And again, we have a very specific coach who coaches indoor rowing. And then the third target customer is-- >> What's that person's motivation, just to get a better time? >> Interesting, in that community, there's a lot of competitiveness, so yeah, it's about I want to get good at this, I want to get better at this. Maybe enter local competitions, either inside your gym or your box. This weekend, in Boston, we have just had one of the largest indoor world, it was the World Indoor Rowing Championships, the C.R.A.S.H B's. There's these huge indoor rowing competitions, so that's a very competitive athlete. And then finally we have, what would be the master's rower or the person for whom rowing is. There's lots of people who don't identify themselves as a rower, but they'll get on a rowing machine two or three times a week, whether it's in their gym or whether it's at home. Your focus is strength, conditioning, working out, but staying injury-free, and just fun and fitness. I think Palaton validated the existence of that market, and we see a lot of people wanting to do that with a rowing machine, and not with a bike. >> I think most of these people will or will not have access to a primary coach, and this augments it, or does this become their primary coach based on where they are in their athletic life? >> [Steven] I think it's both, and certainly, and certainly, we're able to support both. I think when you're that high school rower that wants to make college, you're probably a member of either your school rowing crew or you're a member of a club, but you spend a tremendous amount of time on an erg, the indoor rowing machine, and your practice is unsupervised. Even though you know what you should be doing, there's nobody there in that moment watching you log those 10,000 meters. One of our advisors is, actually, a two-times Olympic world medalist from team Great Britain, Helen Glover. And Helen, I have a great quote from Helen, where she calculated for the Rio Olympics, in the final of the Rio Olympics, every stroke she took in the final, she'd taken 16,000 strokes in practice, which talks to the importance of the quality of that practice, and making sure it's supervised. >> The bigger take on the old 10,000 reps, right? 16,000 per stroke. >> Right? >> Kind of looking forward, right, what were some of the biggest challenges you had to overcome? And then, as you looked forward, right, since the beginning, were ubiquitous, and there's 3D goggles, and there'll be outside-in centers for that whole world. How do you see this world evolving in the immediate short-term for you guys to have success, and then, just down the road a year or two? >> That's a really good question. I think in the short-term, I think it's incumbent on us to just stay really focused in a single community, and get that product right for them. It's more about introducing people to the idea. This is a category creation exercise, so we need to go through that adoption curve of find the early adopters, find the early majority, and before we take that technology anywhere towards our mass market, we need to nail the experience for that early majority. And we think that it's largely going to be in the sport of rowing or with rowers. The cross participation studies in rowing are pretty strong for other sports. Typically, somewhere between 60-80% of rowers weight lift, bike, run, and take part in yoga, whether yoga for mobility and flexibility. There's immediately adjacent markets available to us where the rowers are already in those markets. We're going to stick there for awhile, and really just nail the experience down. >> And is it a big reach to go from tracking to coaching? I mean, these people are all super data focused, right? The beauty of rowing, as you mentioned, it's all about your 2k period. It's one single metric. And they're running, and they're biking, and they're doing all kinds of data-based things, but you're trying to get them to think really more on terms of the coaching versus just the tracking. Has that been hard for them to accept? Do you have any kind of feel for the adoption or the other thing, I would imagine, I spent all this money for these expensive clothing. Is this a killer app that I can now justify having? >> Right, right, right. >> Maybe fancier connected clothes, rather than just simply tracking my time? >> I mean, I think, talking about pricing in the first instance. What we're finding with consumers that we've been testing with, is if you can compare the price of a shirt to the price of shirt without sensors, it's really the wrong value proposition. The question we ask is, How much money are you spending on your CrossFit box membership or your Equinox gym membership? The cost of a personal trainer is easily upwards of $75-100 for an hour. Now, we can give you 24/7 access to that personal coaching. You'll pay the same in a year as you would pay in an hour for coaching. I think for price, it's someone who's already thinking about paying for personal coaching and personal training, that's really where the pricing market is. >> That's interesting, we see that time and time again. We did an interview with Knightscope, and they have security robots, and basically, it's the same thing. They're priced comparisons was the hourly rate for a human counterpart, or we can give it to you for a much less hourly rate. And now, you don't just get it for an hour, you get it for as long as you want to use it. Well, it's exciting times. You guys in the market in terms of when you're going G80? Have a feel for-- >> Any minute now. >> Any minute now? >> We have people using the product, giving us feedback. My phone's switched off. That's the quietest it's been for awhile. But we have people using the product right now, giving us feedback on the product. We're really excited. One in three people, when we ask, the metric that matters for us is net promoter score. How likely would someone recommend asensei to someone else? One in three athletes are giving us a 10 out of 10, so we feel really good about the experience. Now, we're just focused on making sure we have enough content in place from our coaches. General availability is anytime soon. >> [Jeff] Good. Very exciting. >> Yeah, we're excited. >> Thanks for taking a few minutes of your day, and I actually know some rowers, so we'll have to look into the application. >> Right, introduce us. Good stuff. >> He's Steven Webster, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. We're having a CUBE Conversation in our Palo Alto Studios. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

>> And we're back, this is George Gilbert from Wikibon, and I'm here with Aman Naimat at Demandbase, the pioneers in the next gen AI generation of CRM. So Aman, let's continue where we left off. So we're talking about natural language processing, and I think most people are familiar with it more on the B to C technology, where the big internet providers have sort of accumulated a lot of voice data and have learned how to process it and convert it into text. So tell us how B to B NLP is different, to use a lot of acronyms. In other words, how you're using it to build up a map of relationships between businesses. >> Right, yeah, we call it the demand graph. So it's an interesting question, because firstly, it turns out that, while very different, B to B is also, the language is quite boring. It doesn't evolve as fast as consumer concepts. And so it makes the problem much more approachable from a language understanding point of view. So natural language processing or natural language understanding is all about how machines can understand and store and take action on language. So while we were working on this four or five years ago, and that's my background as well, it turned out the problem was simpler, because human language is very rich, and natural language processing converting voice to text is trivial compared to understanding meaning of things and words, which is much more difficult. Or even the sense of the word, apparently in English each word has six meanings, right? We call them word senses. So the problem was only simpler because B to B language doesn't tend to evolve as fast as regular language, because terms stick in an industry. The challenge with B to B and why it was different is that each industry or sub-industry has a very specific language and jargon and acronyms. So to really understand that industry, you need to come from that industry. So if you go back to the CRM example of what happened 10, 20 years ago, you would have a sales person that would come from that industry if you wanted to sell into it. And that still happens in some traditional companies, right? So the idea was to be able to replicate the knowledge that they would have as if they came from that industry. So it's the language, the vocabularies, and then ultimately have a way of storing and taking action on it. It's very analogous to what Google had done with Knowledge Graph. >> Alright, so two questions I guess. First is, it sounds almost like a translation problem, in the sense that you have some base language primitives, like partner, supplier, competitor, customer. But that the language in each industry is different, and so you have to map those down to those sort of primitives. So tell us the process. You don't have on staff people who translate from every industry. >> I mean that was the whole, writing logical rules or expressions for language, which use conventional good old fashioned AI. >> You mean this was the rules-based knowledge engineering? >> That's right. And that clearly did not succeed, because it is impossible to do it. >> The old quip which was, one researcher said, "Every time I fired a rules engineer, "my accuracy score would go up." (chuckles) >> That's right, and now the problem is because language is evolving, and the context is so different. So even pharmaceutical companies in the US or in the Bay Area would use different language than pharma in Europe or in Switzerland. And so it's just impossible to be able to quantify the variations. >> George: To do it manually. >> To do it manually, it's impossible. It's certainly not possible for a small startup. And we did try having it be generated. In the early days we used to have crowdsource workers validate the machine. But it turned out that they couldn't do it either, because they didn't understand the pharmaceutical language either, right? So in the end, the only way to do that was to have some sort of model and some seed data to be able to validate it, or to hire experts and to have small samples of data to validate. So going back to the graph, right, it turns out that when we have seen sophisticated AI work, you know, towards complex problems, so for example predicting your next connection on LinkedIn, or your next friend, or what ads should you see on Facebook, they have used network-based data, social graph data, or in the case of Google, it's the Knowledge Graph, of how things are connected. And somehow machine learning and AI systems based on network data tend to be more powerful and more intuitive than other types of models. >> So OK, when you say model, help us with an example of, you're representing a business and who it's connected to and its place in the world. >> So the demand graph is basically as Demandbase, who are our customers, who are their partners, who are their suppliers, who are their competitors. And utilizing that network of companies in a manner that we have network of friends on LinkedIn or Facebook. And it turns out that businesses are extremely social in nature. In fact, we found out that the connections between companies have more signal, and are more predictive of acquisition or predicting the next customer, than even the Facebook social graph. So it's much easier to utilize the business graph, the B to B business graph, to predict the next customer, than to say, predict your next friend on Facebook. >> OK, so that's a perfect analogy. So tell us about the raw material you churn through on the web, and then how you learn what that terminology might be. You've boot-strapped a little bit, now you have all this data, and you have to make sense out of new terms, and then you build this graph of who this business is related to. >> That's right, and the hardest part is to be able to handle rumors and to be able to handle jokes, like, "Isn't it time for Microsoft to just buy Salesforce?" Question mark, smiley face. You know, so it's a challenging problem. But we were lucky that business language and business press is definitely more boring than, you know, people talking about movies. >> George: Or Reddit. >> Or Reddit, right. So the way we work is we process the entire business internet, or the entire internet. And initially we used to crawl it ourselves, but soon realized that Common Crawl, which is an open source foundation that has crawled the internet and put at least a large chunk of it, and that really enabled us to stop the crawling. And we read the entire internet and look at, ultimately we're interested in businesses, 'cause that's the world we are, in business, B to B marketing and B to B sales. We look at wherever there's a company mentioned or a business person or business title mentioned, and then ignore everything else. 'Cause if it doesn't have a company or a business person, we don't care. Right, so, or a business product. So we read the entire internet, and try to then infer that this is, Amazon is mentioned in it, then we figure out, is it Amazon the company, or is it Amazon the river? So that's problem number one. So we call it the entity linking problem. And then we try to understand and piece together the various expressions of relationships between companies expressed in text. It could be a press release, it could be a competitive analysis, it could be announcement of a new product. It could be a supply chain relationship. It could be a rumor. And then it also turns out the internet's very noisy, so we look at corroboration across multiple disparate sources-- >> George: Interesting, to decide-- >> Is it true? >> George: To signal is it real. >> Right, yeah, 'cause there's a lot of fake news out there. (George laughs) So we look at corroboration and the sources to be able to infer if we can have confidence in this. >> I can imagine this could be applied to-- >> A lot of other problems. >> Political issues. So OK, you've got all these sources, give us some specific examples of feeds, of sources, and then help us understand. 'Cause I don't think we've heard a lot about the notion of boot-strapping, and it sounds like you're generalizing, which is not something that most of us are familiar with who have a surface-level familiarity with machine learning. >> I think there was a lot of research like, not to credit Google too much, but... Boot-strapping methods were used by Sergei I think was the first person, and then he gave up 'cause they founded Google and they moved on. And since then in 2003, 2004, there was a lot of research around this topic. You know, and it's in the genre of unsupervised machine learning models. And in the real world, because there's less labeled data, we tend to find that to be an extremely effective method, to learn language and obviously now with deep learning, it's also being utilized more, unsupervised methods. But the idea is really to, and this was around five years ago when we started building this graph, and I obviously don't know how the Google Knowledge Graph is built, but I can assume it's a similar technique. We don't tend to talk about how commercial products work that much. But the idea is basically to generalize models or learn from a small seed, so let's say I put in seed like Nike and Adidas, and say they compete, right? And then if you look at the entire internet and look at all the expressions of how Nike and Adidas are expressed together in language, it could be, you know, "I think "Nike shoes are better than Adidas." >> Ah, so it's not just that you find an opinion that they're better than, but you find all the expressions that explain that they're different and they're competition. >> That's right. But we also find cases where somebody's saying, "I bought Nike and Adidas," or, "Nike and Adidas shoes are sold here." So we have to be able to be smart enough to discern when it's something else and not competition. >> OK, so you've told us how this graph gets built out. So the suppliers, the partners, the customers, the competitors, now you've got this foundation-- >> And people and products as well. >> OK, people, products. You've got this really rich foundation. Now you build and application on top of it. Tell us about CRM with that foundation. >> Yeah, I mean we have the demand graph, in which we tie in also things around basic data that you could find from graphics and intent that we've also built. But it also turns out that the knowledge graph itself, our initial intuition was that we'll just expose this to end users, and they'll be able to figure it out. But it was just too complicated. It really needed another level of machinery and AI on top to take advantage of the graph, and to be able to build prescriptive actions. And action could be, or to solve a business problem. A problem could be, I'm an IOT startup, I'm looking for manufacturing companies who will buy my product. Or it could be, I am a venture capital firm, I want to understand what other venture capital firms are investing in. Or, hey, I'm Tesla, and I'm looking for a new supplier for the new Tesla screen. Or you know, things of that nature. So then we apply and build specific models, more machine learning, or layers of machine learning, to then solve specific business problems. Like the reinforcement learning to understand next best action. >> And are these models associated with one of your customers? >> No, they're general purpose, they're packaged applications. >> OK, tell us more, so what was the base level technology that you started with in terms of the being able to manage a customer conversation, a marketing conversation, and then how did that get richer over time? >> Yeah, I mean we take our proprietary data sets that we've accumulated over the years and manufactured over the years, and then co-mingle with customer data, which we keep private, 'cause they own the data. And the technology is generic, but you're right, the model being generated by the machine is specific to every customer. So obviously the next best action model for a pharmaceutical company is based on doctors visiting, and is this person an oncologist, or what they're researching online. And that model is very different than a model for Demandbase for example, or Salesforce. >> Is it that the algorithm's different, or it's trained on different data? >> It's trained on different data. It's the same code, I mean we only have 20, 30 data scientists, so we're obviously not going to build custom code for... So the idea is it's the same model, but the same meta model is trained on different data. So public data, but also customers' private data. >> And how much does the customer, let's say your customer's Tesla, how much of it is them running some of their data through this boot-strapping process, versus how much of it is, your model is set up and it just automatically once you've boot-strapped it, it automatically starts learning from the interactions with the Tesla, with Tesla itself from all the different partners and customers? >> Right, I think you know, we have found, most startups are just learning over small data sets, which are customer-centric. What we have found is real magic happens when you take private data and combine it with large amounts of public data. So at Demandbase, we have massive amounts of public and proprietary data. And then we plug in, and we have to tell you that our client is Tesla, so it understands the localized graph, and knows the Tesla ecosystem, and that's based on public data sets and our proprietary data. Then we also bring in your private slice whenever possible. >> George: Private...? >> Slice of data. So we have code that can plug into your web site, and then start understanding interactions that your customers are having. And then based on that, we're able to train our models. As much as possible, we try to automate the data capture process, so in essence using a sensor or using a pixel on your web site, and then we take that private stream of data and include it in our graph and merge it in, and that's where we find... Our data by itself is not as powerful as our data mixed with your private data. >> So I guess one way to think about it would be, there's a skeletal graph, and that may be sounding too minimalistic, there's a graph. But let's say you take Tesla as the example, you tell them what data you need from them, and that trains the meta models, and then it fleshes out the graph of the Tesla ecosystem. >> Right, whatever data we couldn't get or infer, from the outside. And we have a lot of proprietary data, where we see online traffic, business traffic, what people are reading, who's interested in what, for hundreds of millions of people. We have developed that technology. So we know a lot without actually getting people's private slice. But you know, whenever possible, we want the maximum impact. >> So... >> It's actually simple, and let's divorce the words graphs for a second. It's really about, let's say that I know you, right, and there's some information you can tell me about you. But imagine if I google your name, and I read every document about you, every video you have produced, every blog you have written, then I have the best of both knowledge, right, your private data from maybe your social graph on Facebook, and then your public data. And then if I knew, you know... If I partnered with Forbes and they told me you logged in and read something on Forbes, then they'll get me that data, so now I really have a deep understanding of what you're interested in, who you are, what's your language, you know, what are you interested in. It's that, sort of simplified, but similar, at a much larger scale. >> Alright, let's take a pause at this point and then we'll come back with part three. >> Excellent.