>> Hi, I'm Natalie Ehrlich and welcome to the AWS startup showcase presented by The Cube. We have an amazing lineup of great guests who will share their insights on the latest innovations and solutions and leveraging cloud scale data in AI, security and life sciences. And now we're joined by the co-founders and co-CEOs of The Cube, Dave Vellante and John Furrier. Thank you gentlemen for joining me. >> Hey Natalie. >> Hey Natalie. >> How are you doing. Hey John. >> Well, I'd love to get your insights here, let's kick it off and what are you looking forward to. >> Dave, I think one of the things that we've been doing on the cube for 11 years is looking at the signal in the marketplace. I wanted to focus on this because AI is cutting across all industries. So we're seeing that with cybersecurity and life sciences, it's the first time we've had a life sciences track in the showcase, which is amazing because it shows that growth of the cloud scale. So I'm super excited by that. And I think that's going to showcase some new business models and of course the keynotes Ali Ghodsi, who's the CEO Data bricks pushing a billion dollars in revenue, clear validation that startups can go from zero to a billion dollars in revenues. So that should be really interesting. And of course the top venture capitalists coming in to talk about what the enterprise dynamics are all about. And what about you, Dave? >> You know, I thought it was an interesting mix and choice of startups. When you think about, you know, AI security and healthcare, and I've been thinking about that. Healthcare is the perfect industry, it is ripe for disruption. If you think about healthcare, you know, we all complain how expensive it is not transparent. There's a lot of discussion about, you know, can everybody have equal access that certainly with COVID the staff is burned out. There's a real divergence and diversity of the quality of healthcare and you know, it all results in patients not being happy, and I mean, if you had to do an NPS score on the patients and healthcare will be pretty low, John, you know. So when I think about, you know, AI and security in the context of healthcare in cloud, I ask questions like when are machines going to be able to better meet or make better diagnoses than doctors? And that's starting. I mean, it's really in assistance putting into play today. But I think when you think about cheaper and more accurate image analysis, when you think about the overall patient experience and trust and personalized medicine, self-service, you know, remote medicine that we've seen during the COVID pandemic, disease tracking, language translation, I mean, there are so many things where the cloud and data, and then it can help. And then at the end of it, it's all about, okay, how do I authenticate? How do I deal with privacy and personal information and tamper resistance? And that's where the security play comes in. So it's a very interesting mix of startups. I think that I'm really looking forward to hearing from... >> You know Natalie one of the things we talked about, some of these companies, Dave, we've talked a lot of these companies and to me the business model innovations that are coming out of two factors, the pandemic is kind of coming to an end so that accelerated and really showed who had the right stuff in my opinion. So you were either on the wrong side or right side of history when it comes to the pandemic and as we look back, as we come out of it with clear growth in certain companies and certain companies that adopted let's say cloud. And the other one is cloud scale. So the focus of these startup showcases is really to focus on how startups can align with the enterprise buyers and create the new kind of refactoring business models to go from, you know, a re-pivot or refactoring to more value. And the other thing that's interesting is that the business model isn't just for the good guys. If you look at say ransomware, for instance, the business model of hackers is gone completely amazing too. They're kicking it but in terms of revenue, they have their own they're well-funded machines on how to extort cash from companies. So there's a lot of security issues around the business model as well. So to me, the business model innovation with cloud-scale tech, with the pandemic forcing function, you've seen a lot of new kinds of decision-making in enterprises. You seeing how enterprise buyers are changing their decision criteria, and frankly their existing suppliers. So if you're an old guard supplier, you're going to be potentially out because if you didn't deliver during the pandemic, this is the issue that everyone's talking about. And it's kind of not publicized in the press very much, but this is actually happening. >> Well thank you both very much for joining me to kick off our AWS startup showcase. Now we're going to go to our very special guest Ali Ghodsi and John Furrier will seat with him for a fireside chat and Dave and I will see you on the other side. >> Okay, Ali great to see you. Thanks for coming on our AWS startup showcase, our second edition, second batch, season two, whatever we want to call it it's our second version of this new series where we feature, you know, the hottest startups coming out of the AWS ecosystem. And you're one of them, I've been there, but you're not a startup anymore, you're here pushing serious success on the revenue side and company. Congratulations and great to see you. >> Likewise. Thank you so much, good to see you again. >> You know I remember the first time we chatted on The Cube, you weren't really doing much software revenue, you were really talking about the new revolution in data. And you were all in on cloud. And I will say that from day one, you were always adamant that it was cloud cloud scale before anyone was really talking about it. And at that time it was on premises with Hadoop and those kinds of things. You saw that early. I remember that conversation, boy, that bet paid out great. So congratulations. >> Thank you so much. >> So I've got to ask you to jump right in. Enterprises are making decisions differently now and you are an example of that company that has gone from literally zero software sales to pushing a billion dollars as it's being reported. Certainly the success of Data bricks has been written about, but what's not written about is the success of how you guys align with the changing criteria for the enterprise customer. Take us through that and these companies here are aligning the same thing and enterprises want to change. They want to be in the right side of history. What's the success formula? >> Yeah. I mean, basically what we always did was look a few years out, the how can we help these enterprises, future proof, what they're trying to achieve, right? They have, you know, 30 years of legacy software and, you know baggage, and they have compliance and regulations, how do we help them move to the future? So we try to identify those kinds of secular trends that we think are going to maybe you see them a little bit right now, cloud was one of them, but it gets more and more and more. So we identified those and there were sort of three or four of those that we kind of latched onto. And then every year the passes, we're a little bit more right. Cause it's a secular trend in the market. And then eventually, it becomes a force that you can't kind of fight anymore. >> Yeah. And I just want to put a plug for your clubhouse talks with Andreessen Horowitz. You're always on clubhouse talking about, you know, I won't say the killer instinct, but being a CEO in a time where there's so much change going on, you're constantly under pressure. It's a lonely job at the top, I know that, but you've made some good calls. What was some of the key moments that you can point to, where you were like, okay, the wave is coming in now, we'd better get on it. What were some of those key decisions? Cause a lot of these startups want to be in your position, and a lot of buyers want to take advantage of the technology that's coming. They got to figure it out. What was some of those key inflection points for you? >> So if you're just listening to what everybody's saying, you're going to miss those trends. So then you're just going with the stream. So, Juan you mentioned that cloud. Cloud was a thing at the time, we thought it's going to be the thing that takes over everything. Today it's actually multi-cloud. So multi-cloud is a thing, it's more and more people are thinking, wow, I'm paying a lot's to the cloud vendors, do I want to buy more from them or do I want to have some optionality? So that's one. Two, open. They're worried about lock-in, you know, lock-in has happened for many, many decades. So they want open architectures, open source, open standards. So that's the second one that we bet on. The third one, which you know, initially wasn't sort of super obvious was AI and machine learning. Now it's super obvious, everybody's talking about it. But when we started, it was kind of called artificial intelligence referred to robotics, and machine learning wasn't a term that people really knew about. Today, it's sort of, everybody's doing machine learning and AI. So betting on those future trends, those secular trends as we call them super critical. >> And one of the things that I want to get your thoughts on is this idea of re-platforming versus refactoring. You see a lot being talked about in some of these, what does that even mean? It's people trying to figure that out. Re-platforming I get the cloud scale. But as you look at the cloud benefits, what do you say to customers out there and enterprises that are trying to use the benefits of the cloud? Say data for instance, in the middle of how could they be thinking about refactoring? And how can they make a better selection on suppliers? I mean, how do you know it used to be RFP, you deliver these speeds and feeds and you get selected. Now I think there's a little bit different science and methodology behind it. What's your thoughts on this refactoring as a buyer? What do I got to do? >> Well, I mean let's start with you said RFP and so on. Times have changed. Back in the day, you had to kind of sign up for something and then much later you're going to get it. So then you have to go through this arduous process. In the cloud, would pay us to go model elasticity and so on. You can kind of try your way to it. You can try before you buy. And you can use more and more. You can gradually, you don't need to go in all in and you know, say we commit to 50,000,000 and six months later to find out that wow, this stuff has got shelf where it doesn't work. So that's one thing that has changed it's beneficial. But the second thing is, don't just mimic what you had on prem in the cloud. So that's what this refactoring is about. If you had, you know, Hadoop data lake, now you're just going to have an S3 data lake. If you had an on-prem data warehouse now you just going to have a cloud data warehouse. You're just repeating what you did on prem in the cloud, architected for the future. And you know, for us, the most important thing that we say is that this lake house paradigm is a cloud native way of organizing your data. That's different from how you would do things on premises. So think through what's the right way of doing it in the cloud. Don't just try to copy paste what you had on premises in the cloud. >> It's interesting one of the things that we're observing and I'd love to get your reaction to this. Dave a lot** and I have been reporting on it is, two personas in the enterprise are changing their organization. One is I call IT ops or there's an SRE role developing. And the data teams are being dismantled and being kind of sprinkled through into other teams is this notion of data, pipelining being part of workflows, not just the department. Are you seeing organizational shifts in how people are organizing their resources, their human resources to take advantage of say that the data problems that are need to being solved with machine learning and whatnot and cloud-scale? >> Yeah, absolutely. So you're right. SRE became a thing, lots of DevOps people. It was because when the cloud vendors launched their infrastructure as a service to stitch all these things together and get it all working you needed a lot of devOps people. But now things are maturing. So, you know, with vendors like Data bricks and other multi-cloud vendors, you can actually get much higher level services where you don't need to necessarily have lots of lots of DevOps people that are themselves trying to stitch together lots of services to make this work. So that's one trend. But secondly, you're seeing more data teams being sort of completely ubiquitous in these organizations. Before it used to be you have one data team and then we'll have data and AI and we'll be done. ' It's a one and done. But that's not how it works. That's not how Google, Facebook, Twitter did it, they had data throughout the organization. Every BU was empowered. It's sales, it's marketing, it's finance, it's engineering. So how do you embed all those data teams and make them actually run fast? And you know, there's this concept of a data mesh which is super important where you can actually decentralize and enable all these teams to focus on their domains and run super fast. And that's really enabled by this Lake house paradigm in the cloud that we're talking about. Where you're open, you're basing it on open standards. You have flexibility in the data types and how they're going to store their data. So you kind of provide a lot of that flexibility, but at the same time, you have sort of centralized governance for it. So absolutely things are changing in the market. >> Well, you're just the professor, the masterclass right here is amazing. Thanks for sharing that insight. You're always got to go out of date and that's why we have you on here. You're amazing, great resource for the community. Ransomware is a huge problem, it's now the government's focus. We're being attacked and we don't know where it's coming from. This business models around cyber that's expanding rapidly. There's real revenue behind it. There's a data problem. It's not just a security problem. So one of the themes in all of these startup showcases is data is ubiquitous in the value propositions. One of them is ransomware. What's your thoughts on ransomware? Is it a data problem? Does cloud help? Some are saying that cloud's got better security with ransomware, then say on premise. What's your vision of how you see this ransomware problem being addressed besides the government taking over? >> Yeah, that's a great question. Let me start by saying, you know, we're a data company, right? And if you say you're a data company, you might as well just said, we're a privacy company, right? It's like some people say, well, what do you think about privacy? Do you guys even do privacy? We're a data company. So yeah, we're a privacy company as well. Like you can't talk about data without talking about privacy. With every customer, with every enterprise. So that's obviously top of mind for us. I do think that in the cloud, security is much better because, you know, vendors like us, we're investing so much resources into security and making sure that we harden the infrastructure and, you know, by actually having all of this infrastructure, we can monitor it, detect if something is, you know, an attack is happening, and we can immediately sort of stop it. So that's different from when it's on prem, you have kind of like the separated duties where the software vendor, which would have been us, doesn't really see what's happening in the data center. So, you know, there's an IT team that didn't develop the software is responsible for the security. So I think things are much better now. I think we're much better set up, but of course, things like cryptocurrencies and so on are making it easier for people to sort of hide. There decentralized networks. So, you know, the attackers are getting more and more sophisticated as well. So that's definitely something that's super important. It's super top of mind. We're all investing heavily into security and privacy because, you know, that's going to be super critical going forward. >> Yeah, we got to move that red line, and figure that out and get more intelligence. Decentralized trends not going away it's going to be more of that, less of the centralized. But centralized does come into play with data. It's a mix, it's not mutually exclusive. And I'll get your thoughts on this. Architectural question with, you know, 5G and the edge coming. Amazon's got that outpost stringent, the wavelength, you're seeing mobile world Congress coming up in this month. The focus on processing data at the edge is a huge issue. And enterprises are now going to be commercial part of that. So architecture decisions are being made in enterprises right now. And this is a big issue. So you mentioned multi-cloud, so tools versus platforms. Now I'm an enterprise buyer and there's no more RFPs. I got all this new choices for startups and growing companies to choose from that are cloud native. I got all kinds of new challenges and opportunities. How do I build my architecture so I don't foreclose a future opportunity. >> Yeah, as I said, look, you're actually right. Cloud is becoming even more and more something that everybody's adopting, but at the same time, there is this thing that the edge is also more and more important. And the connectivity between those two and making sure that you can really do that efficiently. My ask from enterprises, and I think this is top of mind for all the enterprise architects is, choose open because that way you can avoid locking yourself in. So that's one thing that's really, really important. In the past, you know, all these vendors that locked you in, and then you try to move off of them, they were highly innovative back in the day. In the 80's and the 90's, there were the best companies. You gave them all your data and it was fantastic. But then because you were locked in, they didn't need to innovate anymore. And you know, they focused on margins instead. And then over time, the innovation stopped and now you were kind of locked in. So I think openness is really important. I think preserving optionality with multi-cloud because we see the different clouds have different strengths and weaknesses and it changes over time. All right. Early on AWS was the only game that either showed up with much better security, active directory, and so on. Now Google with AI capabilities, which one's going to win, which one's going to be better. Actually, probably all three are going to be around. So having that optionality that you can pick between the three and then artificial intelligence. I think that's going to be the key to the future. You know, you asked about security earlier. That's how people detect zero day attacks, right? You ask about the edge, same thing there, that's where the predictions are going to happen. So make sure that you invest in AI and artificial intelligence very early on because it's not something you can just bolt on later on and have a little data team somewhere that then now you have AI and it's one and done. >> All right. Great insight. I've got to ask you, the folks may or may not know, but you're a professor at Berkeley as well, done a lot of great work. That's where you kind of came out of when Data bricks was formed. And the Berkeley basically was it invented distributed computing back in the 80's. I remember I was breaking in when Unix was proprietary, when software wasn't open you actually had the deal that under the table to get code. Now it's all open. Isn't the internet now with distributed computing and how interconnects are happening. I mean, the internet didn't break during the pandemic, which proves the benefit of the internet. And that's a positive. But as you start seeing edge, it's essentially distributed computing. So I got to ask you from a computer science standpoint. What do you see as the key learnings or connect the dots for how this distributed model will work? I see hybrids clearly, hybrid cloud is clearly the operating model but if you take it to the next level of distributed computing, what are some of the key things that you look for in the next five years as this starts to be completely interoperable, obviously software is going to drive a lot of it. What's your vision on that? >> Yeah, I mean, you know, so Berkeley, you're right for the gigs, you know, there was a now project 20, 30 years ago that basically is how we do things. There was a project on how you search in the very early on with Inktomi that became how Google and everybody else to search today. So workday was super, super early, sometimes way too early. And that was actually the mistake. Was that they were so early that people said that that stuff doesn't work. And then 20 years later you were invented. So I think 2009, Berkeley published just above the clouds saying the cloud is the future. At that time, most industry leaders said, that's just, you know, that doesn't work. Today, recently they published a research paper called, Sky Computing. So sky computing is what you get above the clouds, right? So we have the cloud as the future, the next level after that is the sky. That's one on top of them. That's what multi-cloud is. So that's a lot of the research at Berkeley, you know, into distributed systems labs is about this. And we're excited about that. Then we're one of the sky computing vendors out there. So I think you're going to see much more innovation happening at the sky level than at the compute level where you needed all those DevOps and SRE people to like, you know, build everything manually themselves. I can just see the memes now coming Ali, sky net, star track. You've got space too, by the way, space is another frontier that is seeing a lot of action going on because now the surface area of data with satellites is huge. So again, I know you guys are doing a lot of business with folks in that vertical where you starting to see real time data acquisition coming from these satellites. What's your take on the whole space as the, not the final frontier, but certainly as a new congested and contested space for, for data? >> Well, I mean, as a data vendor, we see a lot of, you know, alternative data sources coming in and people aren't using machine learning< AI to eat out signal out of the, you know, massive amounts of imagery that's coming out of these satellites. So that's actually a pretty common in FinTech, which is a vertical for us. And also sort of in the public sector, lots of, lots of, lots of satellites, imagery data that's coming. And these are massive volumes. I mean, it's like huge data sets and it's a super, super exciting what they can do. Like, you know, extracting signal from the satellite imagery is, and you know, being able to handle that amount of data, it's a challenge for all the companies that we work with. So we're excited about that too. I mean, definitely that's a trend that's going to continue. >> All right. I'm super excited for you. And thanks for coming on The Cube here for our keynote. I got to ask you a final question. As you think about the future, I see your company has achieved great success in a very short time, and again, you guys done the work, I've been following your company as you know. We've been been breaking that Data bricks story for a long time. I've been excited by it, but now what's changed. You got to start thinking about the next 20 miles stair when you look at, you know, the sky computing, you're thinking about these new architectures. As the CEO, your job is to one, not run out of money which you don't have to worry about that anymore, so hiring. And then, you got to figure out that next 20 miles stair as a company. What's that going on in your mind? Take us through your mindset of what's next. And what do you see out in that landscape? >> Yeah, so what I mentioned around Sky company optionality around multi-cloud, you're going to see a lot of capabilities around that. Like how do you get multi-cloud disaster recovery? How do you leverage the best of all the clouds while at the same time not having to just pick one? So there's a lot of innovation there that, you know, we haven't announced yet, but you're going to see a lot of it over the next many years. Things that you can do when you have the optionality across the different parts. And the second thing that's really exciting for us is bringing AI to the masses. Democratizing data and AI. So how can you actually apply machine learning to machine learning? How can you automate machine learning? Today machine learning is still quite complicated and it's pretty advanced. It's not going to be that way 10 years from now. It's going to be very simple. Everybody's going to have it at their fingertips. So how do we apply machine learning to machine learning? It's called auto ML, automatic, you know, machine learning. So that's an area, and that's not something that can be done with, right? But the goal is to eventually be able to automate a way the whole machine learning engineer and the machine learning data scientist altogether. >> You know it's really fun and talking with you is that, you know, for years we've been talking about this inside the ropes, inside the industry, around the future. Now people starting to get some visibility, the pandemics forced that. You seeing the bad projects being exposed. It's like the tide pulled out and you see all the scabs and bad projects that were justified old guard technologies. If you get it right you're on a good wave. And this is clearly what we're seeing. And you guys example of that. So as enterprises realize this, that they're going to have to look double down on the right projects and probably trash the bad projects, new criteria, how should people be thinking about buying? Because again, we talked about the RFP before. I want to kind of circle back because this is something that people are trying to figure out. You seeing, you know, organic, you come in freemium models as cloud scale becomes the advantage in the lock-in frankly seems to be the value proposition. The more value you provide, the more lock-in you get. Which sounds like that's the way it should be versus proprietary, you know, protocols. The protocol is value. How should enterprises organize their teams? Is it end to end workflows? Is it, and how should they evaluate the criteria for these technologies that they want to buy? >> Yeah, that's a great question. So I, you know, it's very simple, try to future proof your decision-making. Make sure that whatever you're doing is not blocking your in. So whatever decision you're making, what if the world changes in five years, make sure that if you making a mistake now, that's not going to bite you in about five years later. So how do you do that? Well, open source is great. If you're leveraging open-source, you can try it out already. You don't even need to talk to any vendor. Your teams can already download it and try it out and get some value out of it. If you're in the cloud, this pay as you go models, you don't have to do a big RFP and commit big. You can try it, pay the vendor, pay as you go, $10, $15. It doesn't need to be a million dollar contract and slowly grow as you're providing value. And then make sure that you're not just locking yourself in to one cloud or, you know, one particular vendor. As much as possible preserve your optionality because then that's not a one-way door. If it turns out later you want to do something else, you can, you know, pick other things as well. You're not locked in. So that's what I would say. Keep that top of mind that you're not locking yourself into a particular decision that you made today, that you might regret in five years. >> I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your with our community and The Cube. And as always great to see you. I really enjoy your clubhouse talks, and I really appreciate how you give back to the community. And I want to thank you for coming on and taking the time with us today. >> Thanks John, always appreciate talking to you. >> Okay Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Data bricks, a success story that proves the validation of cloud scale, open and create value, values the new lock-in. So Natalie, back to you for continuing coverage. >> That was a terrific interview John, but I'd love to get Dave's insights first. What were your takeaways, Dave? >> Well, if we have more time I'll tell you how Data bricks got to where they are today, but I'll say this, the most important thing to me that Allie said was he conveyed a very clear understanding of what data companies are outright and are getting ready. Talked about four things. There's not one data team, there's many data teams. And he talked about data is decentralized, and data has to have context and that context lives in the business. He said, look, think about it. The way that the data companies would get it right, they get data in teams and sales and marketing and finance and engineering. They all have their own data and data teams. And he referred to that as a data mesh. That's a term that is your mock, the Gany coined and the warehouse of the data lake it's merely a node in that global message. It meshes discoverable, he talked about federated governance, and Data bricks, they're breaking the model of shoving everything into a single repository and trying to make that the so-called single version of the truth. Rather what they're doing, which is right on is putting data in the hands of the business owners. And that's how true data companies do. And the last thing you talked about with sky computing, which I loved, it's that future layer, we talked about multi-cloud a lot that abstracts the underlying complexity of the technical details of the cloud and creates additional value on top. I always say that the cloud players like Amazon have given the gift to the world of 100 billion dollars a year they spend in CapEx. Thank you. Now we're going to innovate on top of it. Yeah. And I think the refactoring... >> Hope by John. >> That was great insight and I totally agree. The refactoring piece too was key, he brought that home. But to me, I think Data bricks that Ali shared there and why he's been open and sharing a lot of his insights and the community. But what he's not saying, cause he's humble and polite is they cracked the code on the enterprise, Dave. And to Dave's points exactly reason why they did it, they saw an opportunity to make it easier, at that time had dupe was the rage, and they just made it easier. They was smart, they made good bets, they had a good formula and they cracked the code with the enterprise. They brought it in and they brought value. And see that's the key to the cloud as Dave pointed out. You get replatform with the cloud, then you refactor. And I think he pointed out the multi-cloud and that really kind of teases out the whole future and landscape, which is essentially distributed computing. And I think, you know, companies are starting to figure that out with hybrid and this on premises and now super edge I call it, with 5G coming. So it's just pretty incredible. >> Yeah. Data bricks, IPO is coming and people should know. I mean, what everybody, they created spark as you know John and everybody thought they were going to do is mimic red hat and sell subscriptions and support. They didn't, they developed a managed service and they embedded AI tools to simplify data science. So to your point, enterprises could buy instead of build, we know this. Enterprises will spend money to make things simpler. They don't have the resources, and so this was what they got right was really embedding that, making a building a managed service, not mimicking the kind of the red hat model, but actually creating a new value layer there. And that's big part of their success. >> If I could just add one thing Natalie to that Dave saying is really right on. And as an enterprise buyer, if we go the other side of the equation, it used to be that you had to be a known company, get PR, you fill out RFPs, you had to meet all the speeds. It's like going to the airport and get a swab test, and get a COVID test and all kinds of mechanisms to like block you and filter you. Most of the biggest success stories that have created the most value for enterprises have been the companies that nobody's understood. And Andy Jazz's famous quote of, you know, being misunderstood is actually a good thing. Data bricks was very misunderstood at the beginning and no one kind of knew who they were but they did it right. And so the enterprise buyers out there, don't be afraid to test the startups because you know the next Data bricks is out there. And I think that's where I see the psychology changing from the old IT buyers, Dave. It's like, okay, let's let's test this company. And there's plenty of ways to do that. He illuminated those premium, small pilots, you don't need to go on these big things. So I think that is going to be a shift in how companies going to evaluate startups. >> Yeah. Think about it this way. Why should the large banks and insurance companies and big manufacturers and pharma companies, governments, why should they burn resources managing containers and figuring out data science tools if they can just tap into solutions like Data bricks which is an AI platform in the cloud and let the experts manage all that stuff. Think about how much money in time that saves enterprises. >> Yeah, I mean, we've got 15 companies here we're showcasing this batch and this season if you call it. That episode we are going to call it? They're awesome. Right? And the next 15 will be the same. And these companies could be the next billion dollar revenue generator because the cloud enables that day. I think that's the exciting part. >> Well thank you both so much for these insights. Really appreciate it. AWS startup showcase highlights the innovation that helps startups succeed. And no one knows that better than our very next guest, Jeff Barr. Welcome to the show and I will send this interview now to Dave and John and see you just in the bit. >> Okay, hey Jeff, great to see you. Thanks for coming on again. >> Great to be back. >> So this is a regular community segment with Jeff Barr who's a legend in the industry. Everyone knows your name. Everyone knows that. Congratulations on your recent blog posts we have reading. Tons of news, I want to get your update because 5G has been all over the news, mobile world congress is right around the corner. I know Bill Vass was a keynote out there, virtual keynote. There's a lot of Amazon discussion around the edge with wavelength. Specifically, this is the outpost piece. And I know there is news I want to get to, but the top of mind is there's massive Amazon expansion and the cloud is going to the edge, it's here. What's up with wavelength. Take us through the, I call it the power edge, the super edge. >> Well, I'm really excited about this mostly because it gives a lot more choice and flexibility and options to our customers. This idea that with wavelength we announced quite some time ago, at least quite some time ago if we think in cloud years. We announced that we would be working with 5G providers all over the world to basically put AWS in the telecom providers data centers or telecom centers, so that as their customers build apps, that those apps would take advantage of the low latency, the high bandwidth, the reliability of 5G, be able to get to some compute and storage services that are incredibly close geographically and latency wise to the compute and storage that is just going to give customers this new power and say, well, what are the cool things we can build? >> Do you see any correlation between wavelength and some of the early Amazon services? Because to me, my gut feels like there's so much headroom there. I mean, I was just riffing on the notion of low latency packets. I mean, just think about the applications, gaming and VR, and metaverse kind of cool stuff like that where having the edge be that how much power there. It just feels like a new, it feels like a new AWS. I mean, what's your take? You've seen the evolutions and the growth of a lot of the key services. Like EC2 and SA3. >> So welcome to my life. And so to me, the way I always think about this is it's like when I go to a home improvement store and I wander through the aisles and I often wonder through with no particular thing that I actually need, but I just go there and say, wow, they've got this and they've got this, they've got this other interesting thing. And I just let my creativity run wild. And instead of trying to solve a problem, I'm saying, well, if I had these different parts, well, what could I actually build with them? And I really think that this breadth of different services and locations and options and communication technologies. I suspect a lot of our customers and customers to be and are in this the same mode where they're saying, I've got all this awesomeness at my fingertips, what might I be able to do with it? >> He reminds me when Fry's was around in Palo Alto, that store is no longer here but it used to be back in the day when it was good. It was you go in and just kind of spend hours and then next thing you know, you built a compute. Like what, I didn't come in here, whether it gets some cables. Now I got a motherboard. >> I clearly remember Fry's and before that there was the weird stuff warehouse was another really cool place to hang out if you remember that. >> Yeah I do. >> I wonder if I could jump in and you guys talking about the edge and Jeff I wanted to ask you about something that is, I think people are starting to really understand and appreciate what you did with the entrepreneur acquisition, what you do with nitro and graviton, and really driving costs down, driving performance up. I mean, there's like a compute Renaissance. And I wonder if you could talk about the importance of that at the edge, because it's got to be low power, it has to be low cost. You got to be doing processing at the edge. What's your take on how that's evolving? >> Certainly so you're totally right that we started working with and then ultimately acquired Annapurna labs in Israel a couple of years ago. I've worked directly with those folks and it's really awesome to see what they've been able to do. Just really saying, let's look at all of these different aspects of building the cloud that were once effectively kind of somewhat software intensive and say, where does it make sense to actually design build fabricate, deploy custom Silicon? So from putting up the system to doing all kinds of additional kinds of security checks, to running local IO devices, running the NBME as fast as possible to support the EBS. Each of those things has been a contributing factor to not just the power of the hardware itself, but what I'm seeing and have seen for the last probably two or three years at this point is the pace of innovation on instance types just continues to get faster and faster. And it's not just cranking out new instance types because we can, it's because our awesomely diverse base of customers keeps coming to us and saying, well, we're happy with what we have so far, but here's this really interesting new use case. And we needed a different ratio of memory to CPU, or we need more cores based on the amount of memory, or we needed a lot of IO bandwidth. And having that nitro as the base lets us really, I don't want to say plug and play, cause I haven't actually built this myself, but it seems like they can actually put the different elements together, very very quickly and then come up with new instance types that just our customers say, yeah, that's exactly what I asked for and be able to just do this entire range of from like micro and nano sized all the way up to incredibly large with incredible just to me like, when we talk about terabytes of memory that are just like actually just RAM memory. It's like, that's just an inconceivably large number by the standards of where I started out in my career. So it's all putting this power in customer hands. >> You used the term plug and play, but it does give you that nitro gives you that optionality. And then other thing that to me is really exciting is the way in which ISVs are writing to whatever's underneath. So you're making that, you know, transparent to the users so I can choose as a customer, the best price performance for my workload and that that's just going to grow that ISV portfolio. >> I think it's really important to be accurate and detailed and as thorough as possible as we launch each one of these new instance types with like what kind of processor is in there and what clock speed does it run at? What kind of, you know, how much memory do we have? What are the, just the ins and outs, and is it Intel or arm or AMD based? It's such an interesting to me contrast. I can still remember back in the very very early days of back, you know, going back almost 15 years at this point and effectively everybody said, well, not everybody. A few people looked and said, yeah, we kind of get the value here. Some people said, this just sounds like a bunch of generic hardware, just kind of generic hardware in Iraq. And even back then it was something that we were very careful with to design and optimize for use cases. But this idea that is generic is so, so, so incredibly inaccurate that I think people are now getting this. And it's okay. It's fine too, not just for the cloud, but for very specific kinds of workloads and use cases. >> And you guys have announced obviously the performance improvements on a lamb** does getting faster, you got the per billing, second billings on windows and SQL server on ECE too**. So I mean, obviously everyone kind of gets that, that's been your DNA, keep making it faster, cheaper, better, easier to use. But the other area I want to get your thoughts on because this is also more on the footprint side, is that the regions and local regions. So you've got more region news, take us through the update on the expansion on the footprint of AWS because you know, a startup can come in and these 15 companies that are here, they're global with AWS, right? So this is a major benefit for customers around the world. And you know, Ali from Data bricks mentioned privacy. Everyone's a privacy company now. So the huge issue, take us through the news on the region. >> Sure, so the two most recent regions that we announced are in the UAE and in Israel. And we generally like to pre-announce these anywhere from six months to two years at a time because we do know that the customers want to start making longer term plans to where they can start thinking about where they can do their computing, where they can store their data. I think at this point we now have seven regions under construction. And, again it's all about customer trice. Sometimes it's because they have very specific reasons where for based on local laws, based on national laws, that they must compute and restore within a particular geographic area. Other times I say, well, a lot of our customers are in this part of the world. Why don't we pick a region that is as close to that part of the world as possible. And one really important thing that I always like to remind our customers of in my audience is, anything that you choose to put in a region, stays in that region unless you very explicitly take an action that says I'd like to replicate it somewhere else. So if someone says, I want to store data in the US, or I want to store it in Frankfurt, or I want to store it in Sao Paulo, or I want to store it in Tokyo or Osaka. They get to make that very specific choice. We give them a lot of tools to help copy and replicate and do cross region operations of various sorts. But at the heart, the customer gets to choose those locations. And that in the early days I think there was this weird sense that you would, you'd put things in the cloud that would just mysteriously just kind of propagate all over the world. That's never been true, and we're very very clear on that. And I just always like to reinforce that point. >> That's great stuff, Jeff. Great to have you on again as a regular update here, just for the folks watching and don't know Jeff he'd been blogging and sharing. He'd been the one man media band for Amazon it's early days. Now he's got departments, he's got peoples on doing videos. It's an immediate franchise in and of itself, but without your rough days we wouldn't have gotten all the great news we subscribe to. We watch all the blog posts. It's essentially the flow coming out of AWS which is just a tsunami of a new announcements. Always great to read, must read. Jeff, thanks for coming on, really appreciate it. That's great. >> Thank you John, great to catch up as always. >> Jeff Barr with AWS again, and follow his stuff. He's got a great audience and community. They talk back, they collaborate and they're highly engaged. So check out Jeff's blog and his social presence. All right, Natalie, back to you for more coverage. >> Terrific. Well, did you guys know that Jeff took a three week AWS road trip across 15 cities in America to meet with cloud computing enthusiasts? 5,500 miles he drove, really incredible I didn't realize that. Let's unpack that interview though. What stood out to you John? >> I think Jeff, Barr's an example of what I call direct to audience a business model. He's been doing it from the beginning and I've been following his career. I remember back in the day when Amazon was started, he was always building stuff. He's a builder, he's classic. And he's been there from the beginning. At the beginning he was just the blog and it became a huge audience. It's now morphed into, he was power blogging so hard. He has now support and he still does it now. It's basically the conduit for information coming out of Amazon. I think Jeff has single-handedly made Amazon so successful at the community developer level, and that's the startup action happened and that got them going. And I think he deserves a lot of the success for AWS. >> And Dave, how about you? What is your reaction? >> Well I think you know, and everybody knows about the cloud and back stop X** and agility, and you know, eliminating the undifferentiated, heavy lifting and all that stuff. And one of the things that's often overlooked which is why I'm excited to be part of this program is the innovation. And the innovation comes from startups, and startups start in the cloud. And so I think that that's part of the flywheel effect. You just don't see a lot of startups these days saying, okay, I'm going to do something that's outside of the cloud. There are some, but for the most part, you know, if you saw in software, you're starting in the cloud, it's so capital efficient. I think that's one thing, I've throughout my career. I've been obsessed with every part of the stack from whether it's, you know, close to the business process with the applications. And right now I'm really obsessed with the plumbing, which is why I was excited to talk about, you know, the Annapurna acquisition. Amazon bought and a part of the $350 million, it's reported, you know, maybe a little bit more, but that isn't an amazing acquisition. And the reason why that's so important is because Amazon is continuing to drive costs down, drive performance up. And in my opinion, leaving a lot of the traditional players in their dust, especially when it comes to the power and cooling. You have often overlooked things. And the other piece of the interview was that Amazon is actually getting ISVs to write to these new platforms so that you don't have to worry about there's the software run on this chip or that chip, or x86 or arm or whatever it is. It runs. And so I can choose the best price performance. And that's where people don't, they misunderstand, you always say it John, just said that people are misunderstood. I think they misunderstand, they confused, you know, the price of the cloud with the cost of the cloud. They ignore all the labor costs that are associated with that. And so, you know, there's a lot of discussion now about the cloud tax. I just think the pace is accelerating. The gap is not closing, it's widening. >> If you look at the one question I asked them about wavelength and I had a follow up there when I said, you know, we riff on it and you see, he lit up like he beam was beaming because he said something interesting. It's not that there's a problem to solve at this opportunity. And he conveyed it to like I said, walking through Fry's. But like, you go into a store and he's a builder. So he sees opportunity. And this comes back down to the Martine Casada paradox posts he wrote about do you optimize for CapEx or future revenue? And I think the tell sign is at the wavelength edge piece is going to be so creative and that's going to open up massive opportunities. I think that's the place to watch. That's the place I'm watching. And I think startups going to come out of the woodwork because that's where the action will be. And that's just Amazon at the edge, I mean, that's just cloud at the edge. I think that is going to be very effective. And his that's a little TeleSign, he kind of revealed a little bit there, a lot there with that comment. >> Well that's a to be continued conversation. >> Indeed, I would love to introduce our next guest. We actually have Soma on the line. He's the managing director at Madrona venture group. Thank you Soma very much for coming for our keynote program. >> Thank you Natalie and I'm great to be here and will have the opportunity to spend some time with you all. >> Well, you have a long to nerd history in the enterprise. How would you define the modern enterprise also known as cloud scale? >> Yeah, so I would say I have, first of all, like, you know, we've all heard this now for the last, you know, say 10 years or so. Like, software is eating the world. Okay. Put it another way, we think about like, hey, every enterprise is a software company first and foremost. Okay. And companies that truly internalize that, that truly think about that, and truly act that way are going to start up, continue running well and things that don't internalize that, and don't do that are going to be left behind sooner than later. Right. And the last few years you start off thing and not take it to the next level and talk about like, not every enterprise is not going through a digital transformation. Okay. So when you sort of think about the world from that lens. Okay. Modern enterprise has to think about like, and I am first and foremost, a technology company. I may be in the business of making a car art, you know, manufacturing paper, or like you know, manufacturing some healthcare products or what have you got out there. But technology and software is what is going to give me a unique, differentiated advantage that's going to let me do what I need to do for my customers in the best possible way [Indistinct]. So that sort of level of focus, level of execution, has to be there in a modern enterprise. The other thing is like not every modern enterprise needs to think about regular. I'm competing for talent, not anymore with my peers in my industry. I'm competing for technology talent and software talent with the top five technology companies in the world. Whether it is Amazon or Facebook or Microsoft or Google, or what have you cannot think, right? So you really have to have that mindset, and then everything flows from that. >> So I got to ask you on the enterprise side again, you've seen many ways of innovation. You've got, you know, been in the industry for many, many years. The old way was enterprises want the best proven product and the startups want that lucrative contract. Right? Yeah. And get that beach in. And it used to be, and we addressed this in our earlier keynote with Ali and how it's changing, the buyers are changing because the cloud has enabled this new kind of execution. I call it agile, call it what you want. Developers are driving modern applications, so enterprises are still, there's no, the playbooks evolving. Right? So we see that with the pandemic, people had needs, urgent needs, and they tried new stuff and it worked. The parachute opened as they say. So how do you look at this as you look at stars, you're investing in and you're coaching them. What's the playbook? What's the secret sauce of how to crack the enterprise code today. And if you're an enterprise buyer, what do I need to do? I want to be more agile. Is there a clear path? Is there's a TSA to let stuff go through faster? I mean, what is the modern playbook for buying and being a supplier? >> That's a fantastic question, John, because I think that sort of playbook is changing, even as we speak here currently. A couple of key things to understand first of all is like, you know, decision-making inside an enterprise is getting more and more de-centralized. Particularly decisions around what technology to use and what solutions to use to be able to do what people need to do. That decision making is no longer sort of, you know, all done like the CEO's office or the CTO's office kind of thing. Developers are more and more like you rightly said, like sort of the central of the workflow and the decision making process. So it'll be who both the enterprises, as well as the startups to really understand that. So what does it mean now from a startup perspective, from a startup perspective, it means like, right. In addition to thinking about like hey, not do I go create an enterprise sales post, do I sell to the enterprise like what I might have done in the past? Is that the best way of moving forward, or should I be thinking about a product led growth go to market initiative? You know, build a product that is easy to use, that made self serve really works, you know, get the developers to start using to see the value to fall in love with the product and then you think about like hey, how do I go translate that into a contract with enterprise. Right? And more and more what I call particularly, you know, startups and technology companies that are focused on the developer audience are thinking about like, you know, how do I have a bottom up go to market motion? And sometime I may sort of, you know, overlap that with the top down enterprise sales motion that we know that has been going on for many, many years or decades kind of thing. But really this product led growth bottom up a go to market motion is something that we are seeing on the rise. I would say they're going to have more than half the startup that we come across today, have that in some way shape or form. And so the enterprise also needs to understand this, the CIO or the CTO needs to know that like hey, I'm not decision-making is getting de-centralized. I need to empower my engineers and my engineering managers and my engineering leaders to be able to make the right decision and trust them. I'm going to give them some guard rails so that I don't find myself in a soup, you know, sometime down the road. But once I give them the guard rails, I'm going to enable people to make the decisions. People who are closer to the problem, to make the right decision. >> Well Soma, what are some of the ways that startups can accelerate their enterprise penetration? >> I think that's another good question. First of all, you need to think about like, Hey, what are enterprises wanting to rec? Okay. If you start off take like two steps back and think about what the enterprise is really think about it going. I'm a software company, but I'm really manufacturing paper. What do I do? Right? The core thing that most enterprises care about is like, hey, how do I better engage with my customers? How do I better serve my customers? And how do I do it in the most optimal way? At the end of the day that's what like most enterprises really care about. So startups need to understand, what are the problems that the enterprise is trying to solve? What kind of tools and platform technologies and infrastructure support, and, you know, everything else that they need to be able to do what they need to do and what only they can do in the most optimal way. Right? So to the extent you are providing either a tool or platform or some technology that is going to enable your enterprise to make progress on what they want to do, you're going to get more traction within the enterprise. In other words, stop thinking about technology, and start thinking about the customer problem that they want to solve. And the more you anchor your company, and more you anchor your conversation with the customer around that, the more the enterprise is going to get excited about wanting to work with you. >> So I got to ask you on the enterprise and developer equation because CSOs and CXOs, depending who you talk to have that same answer. Oh yeah. In the 90's and 2000's, we kind of didn't, we throttled down, we were using the legacy developer tools and cloud came and then we had to rebuild and we didn't really know what to do. So you seeing a shift, and this is kind of been going on for at least the past five to eight years, a lot more developers being hired yet. I mean, at FinTech is clearly a vertical, they always had developers and everyone had developers, but there's a fast ramp up of developers now and the role of open source has changed. Just looking at the participation. They're not just consuming open source, open source is part of the business model for mainstream enterprises. How is this, first of all, do you agree? And if so, how has this changed the course of an enterprise human resource selection? How they're organized? What's your vision on that? >> Yeah. So as I mentioned earlier, John, in my mind the first thing is, and this sort of, you know, like you said financial services has always been sort of hiring people [Indistinct]. And this is like five-year old story. So bear with me I'll tell you the firewall story and then come to I was trying to, the cloud CIO or the Goldman Sachs. Okay. And this is five years ago when people were still like, hey, is this cloud thing real and now is cloud going to take over the world? You know, am I really ready to put my data in the cloud? So there are a lot of questions and conversations can affect. The CIO of Goldman Sachs told me two things that I remember to this day. One is, hey, we've got a internal edict. That we made a decision that in the next five years, everything in Goldman Sachs is going to be on the public law. And I literally jumped out of the chair and I said like now are you going to get there? And then he laughed and said like now it really doesn't matter whether we get there or not. We want to set the tone, set the direction for the organization that hey, public cloud is here. Public cloud is there. And we need to like, you know, move as fast as we realistically can and think about all the financial regulations and security and privacy. And all these things that we care about deeply. But given all of that, the world is going towards public load and we better be on the leading edge as opposed to the lagging edge. And the second thing he said, like we're talking about like hey, how are you hiring, you know, engineers at Goldman Sachs Canada? And he said like in hey, I sort of, my team goes out to the top 20 schools in the US. And the people we really compete with are, and he was saying this, Hey, we don't compete with JP Morgan or Morgan Stanley, or pick any of your favorite financial institutions. We really think about like, hey, we want to get the best talent into Goldman Sachs out of these schools. And we really compete head to head with Google. We compete head to head with Microsoft. We compete head to head with Facebook. And we know that the caliber of people that we want to get is no different than what these companies want. If you want to continue being a successful, leading it, you know, financial services player. That sort of tells you what's going on. You also talked a little bit about like hey, open source is here to stay. What does that really mean kind of thing. In my mind like now, you can tell me that I can have from given my pedigree at Microsoft, I can tell you that we were the first embraces of open source in this world. So I'll say that right off the bat. But having said that we did in our turn around and said like, hey, this open source is real, this open source is going to be great. How can we embrace and how can we participate? And you fast forward to today, like in a Microsoft is probably as good as open source as probably any other large company I would say. Right? Including like the work that the company has done in terms of acquiring GitHub and letting it stay true to its original promise of open source and community can I think, right? I think Microsoft has come a long way kind of thing. But the thing that like in all these enterprises need to think about is you want your developers to have access to the latest and greatest tools. To the latest and greatest that the software can provide. And you really don't want your engineers to be reinventing the wheel all the time. So there is something available in the open source world. Go ahead, please set up, think about whether that makes sense for you to use it. And likewise, if you think that is something you can contribute to the open source work, go ahead and do that. So it's really a two way somebody Arctic relationship that enterprises need to have, and they need to enable their developers to want to have that symbiotic relationship. >> Soma, fantastic insights. Thank you so much for joining our keynote program. >> Thank you Natalie and thank you John. It was always fun to chat with you guys. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> John we would love to get your quick insight on that. >> Well I think first of all, he's a prolific investor the great from Madrona venture partners, which is well known in the tech circles. They're in Seattle, which is in the hub of I call cloud city. You've got Amazon and Microsoft there. He'd been at Microsoft and he knows the developer ecosystem. And reason why I like his perspective is that he understands the value of having developers as a core competency in Microsoft. That's their DNA. You look at Microsoft, their number one thing from day one besides software was developers. That was their army, the thousand centurions that one won everything for them. That has shifted. And he brought up open source, and .net and how they've embraced Linux, but something that tele before he became CEO, we interviewed him in the cube at an Xcel partners event at Stanford. He was open before he was CEO. He was talking about opening up. They opened up a lot of their open source infrastructure projects to the open compute foundation early. So they had already had that going and at that price, since that time, the stock price of Microsoft has skyrocketed because as Ali said, open always wins. And I think that is what you see here, and as an investor now he's picking in startups and investing in them. He's got to read the tea leaves. He's got to be in the right side of history. So he brings a great perspective because he sees the old way and he understands the new way. That is the key for success we've seen in the enterprise and with the startups. The people who get the future, and can create the value are going to win. >> Yeah, really excellent point. And just really quickly. What do you think were some of our greatest hits on this hour of programming? >> Well first of all I'm really impressed that Ali took the time to come join us because I know he's super busy. I think they're at a $28 billion valuation now they're pushing a billion dollars in revenue, gap revenue. And again, just a few short years ago, they had zero software revenue. So of these 15 companies we're showcasing today, you know, there's a next Data bricks in there. They're all going to be successful. They already are successful. And they're all on this rocket ship trajectory. Ali is smart, he's also got the advantage of being part of that Berkeley community which they're early on a lot of things now. Being early means you're wrong a lot, but you're also right, and you're right big. So Berkeley and Stanford obviously big areas here in the bay area as research. He is smart, He's got a great team and he's really open. So having him share his best practices, I thought that was a great highlight. Of course, Jeff Barr highlighting some of the insights that he brings and honestly having a perspective of a VC. And we're going to have Peter Wagner from wing VC who's a classic enterprise investors, super smart. So he'll add some insight. Of course, one of the community session, whenever our influencers coming on, it's our beat coming on at the end, as well as Katie Drucker. Another Madrona person is going to talk about growth hacking, growth strategies, but yeah, sights Raleigh coming on. >> Terrific, well thank you so much for those insights and thank you to everyone who is watching the first hour of our live coverage of the AWS startup showcase for myself, Natalie Ehrlich, John, for your and Dave Vellante we want to thank you very much for watching and do stay tuned for more amazing content, as well as a special live segment that John Furrier is going to be hosting. It takes place at 12:30 PM Pacific time, and it's called cracking the code, lessons learned on how enterprise buyers evaluate new startups. Don't go anywhere.

>>from around the >>globe. >>It's the cube with digital coverage of IBM. Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >>Hello buddy. Welcome back to I didn't think 28 21 this is the cubes ongoing coverage. We go out to the events of course, in this case we do so virtually to extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Volonte and now we're gonna talk about the intersection of business success and sustainability. It's hot topic. We have a great panel for you with me, our ali Carr molly, sustainability and climate practice lead at IBM Canada lucy Bonet is a senior consultant and customer experience and sustainability strategy. Also from IBM Canada and Carrick Morris. Executive Partner, Enterprise Strategy. Global Energy and sustainability lead. IBM UK folks welcome to the panel. Welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. Thank you. Maybe lucy, you could kick it off to talk about what is sustainability and how has it all of a sudden becomes such a hot topic amongst leadership? >>Yeah. Sure. Um So first off it's actually my pleasure that sustainability has finally become a trendy topic and is now a key imperative in the business world. Um The pandemic really played a role in it as it made people realize uh that there's an intricate link between global scale events like the climate crisis leading to the acceleration of viruses spread and their own personal health or of their business. So sustainability really means that you're addressing the needs of the present without compromising the needs of future generations to do so. Companies use different frameworks uh and and standards including E. S. G. Standing for environmental social and governance criteria to really assess their progress on their journey to sustainability. It comes with many metrics that they track or should track and choose to disclose for the greater benefit of all. Um One prerequisite I'd say to really building a successful sustainable company is really the need for a new form of leadership style, one that is the purpose driven that really focuses on doing well while doing the right thing. And I mean, you you might need uh examples here to illustrate what I'm saying. Um you can take uh union lever and the really radical transformation of the palm oil industry they're leading. Um if Unilever did nothing serious risk would really be posed in a few years on the whole business. So the company has started working with all actors across its value chain, from training farmers to building alliances with competitors and stakeholders. And you know what union lever is doing for the polymetal industry is actually cementing its reputation as an innovator and they're already reaping the benefits of having been first movers >>Carrick, uh lucy talked about an imperative, so take away there is not a checkbox, it's something that's sort of designed in. I wonder if you could, you could talk to that. >>Yeah, I mean sustainability at the end of the day now is built into every decision, every process, every system. Um and you know and leadership role in that space is about some kind of developing new corporate strategies, new cultures, new approaches which are around, you know, actually, how do I do this? It's a real paradigm shift, it's not it's not something you add to your business, it's something that needs to be called to your business and then you know, that's requiring us to kind of re imagining, you know, how we sort of go work, how we could help you do business? The process is developing new products, leveraging new technologies, it's putting all of those pieces in and sort of making them work and, you know, and the key part of it is how do you do this in a way where we're not forcing people to make a choice between sustainability and profitability, sustainability and you know, and in a way of quality of life. So that's how you kind of build that into kind of the core products and services and again use that ingenuity to kind of develop those and sort of developed, you know, the components that you need to as part of that process. And the other part of this is then getting into, well, actually from a leadership perspective, how do I then change and the way that I work with partners with suppliers, with competitors. So it's it's really fundamentally changing the way the business itself works as well. >>Thank you. Uh you know, ali when I talk about DSG I sometimes tongue in cheek say, Milton Friedman's probably rolling over in his grave because he's the the economist who said that the only job of a company is to make profits and drive shareholder value. And so that's, I mean that's a that's a that's a historical challenge. Uh But there's there's actually a business case for this. Uh It's actually good business and we'll talk about that. But maybe you could address some of the challenges that organizations are facing to really lean in and address. E. S. G. >>Yeah, that's right. You know, there are a lot of components to go into this and as lucy mentioned and Carrick mentioned the complexities that come with that are a lot of their significant. And so I'd say that the first challenge that I see is in regards to the alignment and integration of sustainability strategy within the organization's business model. So if we take a look at the typical life cycle which includes sourcing, production operations, distribution, and then end of life and recycling. Each of these components must consider the conduits for driving positive social impact and environmental stewardship, but that also as you said, drives opportunity and economic benefits for the organization. Um so these are components that could fall into three categories. The first one is what is the journey to net zero look like for you? How will I transform my operations, my strategy, my business models to achieve a net zero emission? What is circularity in the context of my business? How do I orchestrate for zero waste, include reuse regenerative processes, restorative processes, and then how do I build in principles of sustainability into the design, so that I integrate those components into the ways of working within this new world of sustainability that we're seeing. It's also the what and how coming together to enable long term value creation for the company. The second challenge that I see is around the performance monitoring and management and as they say, you can't manage what you can't measure and so many organizations might not have the complexity roadmap laid out for the systems and data that's required in order to enable transparent and quality reporting. We think about data knowing what you have versus what you don't um data management capturing and transform that data, integrating that data in a way that has a simple but effective use of methodologies as well as benchmarking and then having a reporting system that allows you to see everything almost a control tower of your E your S and your G. And then finally we see sustainability has become a board level priority. It is a hot topic but it's not always properly understood below the board level, so senior executives sometimes approach uh uh the the informants to change in the way that we normally approach things like regulation, but I think in this case it's quite it's quite different because it is a bit of a shift to the person with purpose as the center leaders must lead, they must hire, they must think design and share, they must meet the count paradigms for diversity inclusion. Um And I think at the same time encourage diversity, but also divergence where it needs to be, they have to have the headspace to accept the truth in the collaboration with all stakeholders. Um So I think there are ways for companies to do this and and and for them to be successful and I think I am is one of them >>uh for sure, and I think Carrick, that sort of leads me from what allie was saying about, you know, IBM big company has a big ecosystem. There are other large leaders within industry that can leverage ecosystems and it may be set the tone and show the point the way for the long tail of smaller companies. But maybe you could talk about that ecosystem flywheel. What >>we are saying is is actually sort of quite a lot of differences between the way organizations are addressing this and you are seeing some leaders in this space and you are seeing people who are taking a stand around around >>these components and actually trying to shape >>just not only what they do, but also what organizations do around them. Um I mean, you know if you kind of look at this, there's there's almost kind of three categories so that there are organizations that are sort of seeing this as an existential change. You know, if I'm looking at some mining and looking at oil and gas, I'm making your travel and transport, you know what you're still seeing, there is a fundamental shift in their business, requiring them to rethink how they do things in a very structured, um and actually quite an extended way. You know, if I'm looking at other organizations like retailers, it's actually a little less of uh an existential changes, that's more of an incremental one. But even so, they still have to change all that. They do that. They can do it in a probably a more staged approach and then you've got influences around that as well. So governments and financial services players, etcetera, who are sort of shaping the agenda and who need help and support around thinking through how they kind of measure the change, how they sort of make sure the financing the right things, and they make how they make sure they're actually getting returns they expect. And actually, the sustainability components are actually being driven by that. And I think that's that's kind of sort of where an organization like IBM comes in there, there's a lot of technical change in here, there's a lot of data change in here. And actually these are the sorts of things that, you know, from students sustainability perspective are going to help to to drive this in a more seamless and achievable way if you will. Um and so there's an awful lot that we're looking to try to do, to enable that quickly, to kind of take things off the shelf to rapidly test and to actually show people both what can be done and the value then can create by going down the sustainability journey. >>Okay. Got it. Thank you. And lucy you touched on some examples at a high level in your opening remarks. Uh and I'm interested in in kind of the starting point that you see cos you know taking uh and what's the right regime, I mean you've got to put somebody somebody's gonna be accountable for the measurements and the and the cultural changes. But but where do we start? >>Right. So one starting point is definitely uh to be looking at your data right? And uh you know it's it's really tempting to forget when you're building products or you're creating experiences. It's attempting to forget thinking about their repetitions on the environment, on communities and on society. Um Their impact is made invisible for the sake of immediate user satisfaction and short term business value. And you know although 60% of executives consider sustainability to be an essential competitive advantage, 80 actually of the products ecological impacts are locked in at the design phase. So, um that's why, you know, with with a team of four IBM superstars, um we've created the sustainable design thinking toolkit uh that was just launched and is in the process of being integrated into the official IBM design thinking uh site. And and that's really a great start because it's meant to help design thinking practitioners take responsibility on making that impact visible from the very start of the process. And we've used it with multiple clients and for internal projects. And, you know, it's really helped infuse a sustainable mindset throughout the workflows and and actually from the very, very start of it. Um one recent example was in the CPG industry where we've applied renew a sustainable design thinking activities to the problem at hand uh to get consumers to recycle more by enhancing their recycling experience. And what it allowed us to do is really to make sure that, you know, the prioritization process of the first ideas that emerged included sustainable value into the mix, so that the impact on the planet and communities wasn't a blind spot anymore. >>So, thank you for that. Uh Carrick, I wonder, you know, lucy was talking about you start with the data and that that's that's cool. I sometimes I get worried though there's going to be analysis by paralysis and overthinking the strategy. Are there ways to are there ways to get in and and and take smaller bites and iterate what what are your thoughts on that? >>Yeah, I mean, I think they're absolutely, and you know, with with lots of organizations, they really have to kind of feel their way into this, this, this new approach. You know, you actually kind of have to learn both what sustainability means, but also sort of what it can deliver. So, you know, usually what we're sort of seeing is these organizations will start to start off with things which are under their control, so how can I change my manufacturing processes? How can I change some of the internal components of what it is that we do to make them more sustainable to reduce waste, to reduce sort of kind of the energy usage components which are associated with. And that's that's quite a nice controlled starting point using leveraging things like manufacturing, 4.0, intelligent processes, massive, maximum maximum asset management type approaches. Um The second step we're sort of seeing with lots of organizations is that they then moving into kind of their own ecosystem if you will. So actually, how do I manage my supply chain more effectively? How do I drive transparency? How do I sort of also drive efficiency and and kind of carbon management from that sort of perspective. But also how do I sort of highlight the sustainable gains I'm making on my products and and get those messages to customers and highlights of what we're doing with both new products and services, but also with the existing products and services and then sort of your, your kind of your final piece. And actually this depends what kind of goes back to what I was saying before about what industry you're in. But, you know, a lot of industries are also having to kind of face the challenge of any to change fundamentally. You know, the business I'm in is not not going to work the way it works in a sustainable world. So, so actually, how do I kind of build an ecosystem based approach? How do I kind of work with other partners? How do I kind of work with suppliers? How do women competitors actually, how do I build something at scale around the platform in order to be able to deliver these types of things? And IBM, we've been kind of creating some of those, those platforms and then scaling them quite rapidly across a variety of different sectors >>and that's where you're gonna see the measurable impact. Ali do you have a framework for what was a successful outcome looks like? Are there are there companies that are sort of models of success? I mean, I think IBM is one of them, but maybe you could talk to that. >>Yeah, there are definitely companies to emulate, and companies have really started to think about the connection point between the value that's driven by their business model, as well as the effort and the impact that's being driven by there S g uh there? S you focus and so while there might be components of success, I think getting, getting it all together and all right is going to take time and it's going to be a bit of a sequence. Um but a bit of a thought experiment, if you could sit into a boardroom or at a senior level executive discussion when you think about success, would you hear things or discussions around how the company is building the environmental and social inputs to its products and services and what does that sound like? Are they tangible? Are they realistic? And what are the methods and the tools that they're using? Um Would you hear conversations about how the company is evaluating or infusing sustainability across the value chain from procurement all the way to end of life, or how about the participation of the company into other ecosystems that's driving value into other industries. And we see the force multiplier effect that comes with that when companies partner together because we are either vendors or providers or consumers of every other product or service. And then I think lastly, would organizations start to think about how to generate value closer to home and how that value can be driven into communities into where their employees are based and those elements really really improve the social elements. So let's say last is there are elements of what good and success looks like when it comes sustainability. Um but I think organizations can set their targets uh meat industry benchmarks and frameworks which already exist and are really well established um but continuously increase their own targets to set better and more ambitious goals for themselves to move beyond, to leverage technology and be innovative and and apply uh these these tools and best practices in order to get there. Uh And I think um and I think I think we'll get there over time, so I'm really encouraged by the progress that we're seeing. Uh and we hope that IBM to help accelerate that journey. >>Thank you and then lucy one of these, I'm excited about the tech because this is where I think, you know, business does meet sustainability mean green tech E. V. I mean, if if I'm a nation, I want to be on top of that. If I'm a company, I think there's opportunities for invention and innovation. Can you talk about some of those innovative texts that we're likely to see >>right? Um Well, yeah, but to pick you back on on what Allah is just saying and, you know, I think success can can come in very different ways and forms. Um you know, be it creating entirely new business models like, you know, some clients we help in the colon gas industry Taking really bold commitments to shift to energy, electric energy. Um or you know, significantly cutting costs such as, you know, those brands and the CPG industry that are doing amazing things to optimize their supply chains and make them more efficient, more transparent, more secure. Um or you know, also protecting brand reputation and mitigating risks or gaining market share by creating differentiating value. You might have heard about Loreal taking really bold moves and switching all their products to 95 renewable plant sources and circular processes. Um you know, it it can also be about capturing value by charging a premium for sustainable products. Think about Tesla or whole foods for example. I mean there's so many great examples out there already. >>Excellent. So we gotta wrap it. So, my last question and I'll start with ali and then we'll go to Carrick and lucy you can bring us home talk about why you were talking about STD reporting and transparency and how it's great for the future and in the economy and so forth. Why is this not gonna be a fad? Why is it going to be sustainable sustainability? The sustainability of sustainable uh please kick it off and then we'll go to karaoke and then lucy >>you're right. You know, this is a big change for organizations and I think naturally their uh their corporate social responsibility. Um and sustainability reports have really been externally focused and I think that has been a great step in the right direction. Um but I think what's happening now is is this convergence of sustainable material and transparent reporting that is equivalent to material financial reporting that we're seeing. And eventually I think the end goal would be to be able to read a sustainable report and understand and quantify as well as qualify how much impact is an organization making year to year. And what are some of the initiatives that's driving? What we have begun to see is a sustainable business strategy. That is also a competitive advantage for organizations. So I think the benefit in the long term is going to create a lot of value for not just the shareholder, but for the stakeholders like employees, like the communities in which these companies operate, like regulatory agencies as well as municipal, federal governments and state government. So I think this is a step in the right direction for providing a very clear direction on their sustainable initiatives. >>Thank you. Thank you. Ali Carrick, can you weigh in here, please? >>Yeah, I mean, I I agree with all that he said there and I think with the stakeholders and the end of the day this this is a collective responsibility. You know, we have one planet one rock we all live on and we all need to be part of the process of actually making it, making it change. And you can't you can't sort of change what you can't measure. So kind of holding people to account, being able to share some of the data that we've got, making sure everybody understands what the position is, how we're contributing um and and the role that we're actually still playing is going to be an incredibly important part of collectively coming together and making this change happen, and making this change happen quickly, which is what it needs to do >>and lucy your passion shines through here so it's appropriate that you close it out. >>Mhm. Yeah, well it all comes down to you know, do you want your business to still exist in 100 years from now and you know it does require courage and determination but we all have it in ourselves. Um you know, trying to find the ways that we can change things for the greater good, find the energy in yourself to inspire others to act. That's why you know, leaders with purpose and ingenuity are so so important today. Thank you >>folks. Thanks so much for the perspectives guys doing a great work, really appreciate your time on the cube today. >>Thank you. Thanks for having us >>All right, it's been our pleasure and thank you for watching. This is the cubes coverage of IBM think 2021, the virtual edition will be right back.

>> So as folks make their way over from Javits I'm going to give you the least interesting part of the evening and that's my segment in which I welcome you here, introduce myself, lay out what what we're going to do for the next couple of hours. So first off, thank you very much for coming. As all of you know Wikibon is a part of SiliconANGLE which also includes theCUBE, so if you look around, this is what we have been doing for the past couple of days here in the TheCUBE. We've been inviting some significant thought leaders from over on the show and in incredibly expensive limousines driven them up the street to come on to TheCUBE and spend time with us and talk about some of the things that are happening in the industry today that are especially important. We tore it down, and we're having this party tonight. So we want to thank you very much for coming and look forward to having more conversations with all of you. Now what are we going to talk about? Well Wikibon is the research arm of SiliconANGLE. So we take data that comes out of TheCUBE and other places and we incorporated it into our research. And work very closely with large end users and large technology companies regarding how to make better decisions in this incredibly complex, incredibly important transformative world of digital business. What we're going to talk about tonight, and I've got a couple of my analysts assembled, and we're also going to have a panel, is this notion of software is eating the Edge. Now most of you have probably heard Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and developer, original developer of Netscape many years ago, talk about how software's eating the world. Well, if software is truly going to eat the world, it's going to eat at, it's going to take the big chunks, big bites at the Edge. That's where the actual action's going to be. And what we want to talk about specifically is the entangling of the internet or the industrial internet of things and IoT with analytics. So that's what we're going to talk about over the course of the next couple of hours. To do that we're going to, I've already blown the schedule, that's on me. But to do that I'm going to spend a couple minutes talking about what we regard as the essential digital business capabilities which includes analytics and Big Data, and includes IIoT and we'll explain at least in our position why those two things come together the way that they do. But I'm going to ask the august and revered Neil Raden, Wikibon analyst to come on up and talk about harvesting value at the Edge. 'Cause there are some, not now Neil, when we're done, when I'm done. So I'm going to ask Neil to come on up and we'll talk, he's going to talk about harvesting value at the Edge. And then Jim Kobielus will follow up with him, another Wikibon analyst, he'll talk specifically about how we're going to take that combination of analytics and Edge and turn it into the new types of systems and software that are going to sustain this significant transformation that's going on. And then after that, I'm going to ask Neil and Jim to come, going to invite some other folks up and we're going to run a panel to talk about some of these issues and do a real question and answer. So the goal here is before we break for drinks is to create a community feeling within the room. That includes smart people here, smart people in the audience having a conversation ultimately about some of these significant changes so please participate and we look forward to talking about the rest of it. All right, let's get going! What is digital business? One of the nice things about being an analyst is that you can reach back on people who were significantly smarter than you and build your points of view on the shoulders of those giants including Peter Drucker. Many years ago Peter Drucker made the observation that the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer. Not better shareholder value, not anything else. It is about creating and keeping your customer. Now you can argue with that, at the end of the day, if you don't have customers, you don't have a business. Now the observation that we've made, what we've added to that is that we've made the observation that the difference between business and digital business essentially is one thing. That's data. A digital business uses data to differentially create and keep customers. That's the only difference. If you think about the difference between taxi cab companies here in New York City, every cab that I've been in in the last three days has bothered me about Uber. The reason, the difference between Uber and a taxi cab company is data. That's the primary difference. Uber uses data as an asset. And we think this is the fundamental feature of digital business that everybody has to pay attention to. How is a business going to use data as an asset? Is the business using data as an asset? Is a business driving its engagement with customers, the role of its product et cetera using data? And if they are, they are becoming a more digital business. Now when you think about that, what we're really talking about is how are they going to put data to work? How are they going to take their customer data and their operational data and their financial data and any other kind of data and ultimately turn that into superior engagement or improved customer experience or more agile operations or increased automation? Those are the kinds of outcomes that we're talking about. But it is about putting data to work. That's fundamentally what we're trying to do within a digital business. Now that leads to an observation about the crucial strategic business capabilities that every business that aspires to be more digital or to be digital has to put in place. And I want to be clear. When I say strategic capabilities I mean something specific. When you talk about, for example technology architecture or information architecture there is this notion of what capabilities does your business need? Your business needs capabilities to pursue and achieve its mission. And in the digital business these are the capabilities that are now additive to this core question, ultimately of whether or not the company is a digital business. What are the three capabilities? One, you have to capture data. Not just do a good job of it, but better than your competition. You have to capture data better than your competition. In a way that is ultimately less intrusive on your markets and on your customers. That's in many respects, one of the first priorities of the internet of things and people. The idea of using sensors and related technologies to capture more data. Once you capture that data you have to turn it into value. You have to do something with it that creates business value so you can do a better job of engaging your markets and serving your customers. And that essentially is what we regard as the basis of Big Data. Including operations, including financial performance and everything else, but ultimately it's taking the data that's being captured and turning it into value within the business. The last point here is that once you have generated a model, or an insight or some other resource that you can act upon, you then have to act upon it in the real world. We call that systems of agency, the ability to enact based on data. Now I want to spend just a second talking about systems of agency 'cause we think it's an interesting concept and it's something Jim Kobielus is going to talk about a little bit later. When we say systems of agency, what we're saying is increasingly machines are acting on behalf of a brand. Or systems, combinations of machines and people are acting on behalf of the brand. And this whole notion of agency is the idea that ultimately these systems are now acting as the business's agent. They are at the front line of engaging customers. It's an extremely rich proposition that has subtle but crucial implications. For example I was talking to a senior decision maker at a business today and they made a quick observation, they talked about they, on their way here to New York City they had followed a woman who was going through security, opened up her suitcase and took out a bird. And then went through security with the bird. And the reason why I bring this up now is as TSA was trying to figure out how exactly to deal with this, the bird started talking and repeating things that the woman had said and many of those things, in fact, might have put her in jail. Now in this case the bird is not an agent of that woman. You can't put the woman in jail because of what the bird said. But increasingly we have to ask ourselves as we ask machines to do more on our behalf, digital instrumentation and elements to do more on our behalf, it's going to have blow back and an impact on our brand if we don't do it well. I want to draw that forward a little bit because I suggest there's going to be a new lifecycle for data. And the way that we think about it is we have the internet or the Edge which is comprised of things and crucially people, using sensors, whether they be smaller processors in control towers or whether they be phones that are tracking where we go, and this crucial element here is something that we call information transducers. Now a transducer in a traditional sense is something that takes energy from one form to another so that it can perform new types of work. By information transducer I essentially mean it takes information from one form to another so it can perform another type of work. This is a crucial feature of data. One of the beauties of data is that it can be used in multiple places at multiple times and not engender significant net new costs. It's one of the few assets that you can say about that. So the concept of an information transducer's really important because it's the basis for a lot of transformations of data as data flies through organizations. So we end up with the transducers storing data in the form of analytics, machine learning, business operations, other types of things, and then it goes back and it's transduced, back into to the real world as we program the real world and turning into these systems of agency. So that's the new lifecycle. And increasingly, that's how we have to think about data flows. Capturing it, turning it into value and having it act on our behalf in front of markets. That could have enormous implications for how ultimately money is spent over the next few years. So Wikibon does a significant amount of market research in addition to advising our large user customers. And that includes doing studies on cloud, public cloud, but also studies on what's happening within the analytics world. And if you take a look at it, what we basically see happening over the course of the next few years is significant investments in software and also services to get the word out. But we also expect there's going to be a lot of hardware. A significant amount of hardware that's ultimately sold within this space. And that's because of something that we call true private cloud. This concept of ultimately a business increasingly being designed and architected around the idea of data assets means that the reality, the physical realities of how data operates, how much it costs to store it or move it, the issues of latency, the issues of intellectual property protection as well as things like the regulatory regimes that are being put in place to govern how data gets used in between locations. All of those factors are going to drive increased utilization of what we call true private cloud. On premise technologies that provide the cloud experience but act where the data naturally needs to be processed. I'll come a little bit more to that in a second. So we think that it's going to be a relatively balanced market, a lot of stuff is going to end up in the cloud, but as Neil and Jim will talk about, there's going to be an enormous amount of analytics that pulls an enormous amount of data out to the Edge 'cause that's where the action's going to be. Now one of the things I want to also reveal to you is we've done a fair amount of data, we've done a fair amount of research around this question of where or how will data guide decisions about infrastructure? And in particular the Edge is driving these conversations. So here is a piece of research that one of our cohorts at Wikibon did, David Floyer. Taking a look at IoT Edge cost comparisons over a three year period. And it showed on the left hand side, an example where the sensor towers and other types of devices were streaming data back into a central location in a wind farm, stylized wind farm example. Very very expensive. Significant amounts of money end up being consumed, significant resources end up being consumed by the cost of moving the data from one place to another. Now this is even assuming that latency does not become a problem. The second example that we looked at is if we kept more of that data at the Edge and processed at the Edge. And literally it is a 85 plus percent cost reduction to keep more of the data at the Edge. Now that has enormous implications, how we think about big data, how we think about next generation architectures, et cetera. But it's these costs that are going to be so crucial to shaping the decisions that we make over the next two years about where we put hardware, where we put resources, what type of automation is possible, and what types of technology management has to be put in place. Ultimately we think it's going to lead to a structure, an architecture in the infrastructure as well as applications that is informed more by moving cloud to the data than moving the data to the cloud. That's kind of our fundamental proposition is that the norm in the industry has been to think about moving all data up to the cloud because who wants to do IT? It's so much cheaper, look what Amazon can do. Or what AWS can do. All true statements. Very very important in many respects. But most businesses today are starting to rethink that simple proposition and asking themselves do we have to move our business to the cloud, or can we move the cloud to the business? And increasingly what we see happening as we talk to our large customers about this, is that the cloud is being extended out to the Edge, we're moving the cloud and cloud services out to the business. Because of economic reasons, intellectual property control reasons, regulatory reasons, security reasons, any number of other reasons. It's just a more natural way to deal with it. And of course, the most important reason is latency. So with that as a quick backdrop, if I may quickly summarize, we believe fundamentally that the difference today is that businesses are trying to understand how to use data as an asset. And that requires an investment in new sets of technology capabilities that are not cheap, not simple and require significant thought, a lot of planning, lot of change within an IT and business organizations. How we capture data, how we turn it into value, and how we translate that into real world action through software. That's going to lead to a rethinking, ultimately, based on cost and other factors about how we deploy infrastructure. How we use the cloud so that the data guides the activity and not the choice of cloud supplier determines or limits what we can do with our data. And that's going to lead to this notion of true private cloud and elevate the role the Edge plays in analytics and all other architectures. So I hope that was perfectly clear. And now what I want to do is I want to bring up Neil Raden. Yes, now's the time Neil! So let me invite Neil up to spend some time talking about harvesting value at the Edge. Can you see his, all right. Got it. >> Oh boy. Hi everybody. Yeah, this is a really, this is a really big and complicated topic so I decided to just concentrate on something fairly simple, but I know that Peter mentioned customers. And he also had a picture of Peter Drucker. I had the pleasure in 1998 of interviewing Peter and photographing him. Peter Drucker, not this Peter. Because I'd started a magazine called Hired Brains. It was for consultants. And Peter said, Peter said a number of really interesting things to me, but one of them was his definition of a customer was someone who wrote you a check that didn't bounce. He was kind of a wag. He was! So anyway, he had to leave to do a video conference with Jack Welch and so I said to him, how do you charge Jack Welch to spend an hour on a video conference? And he said, you know I have this theory that you should always charge your client enough that it hurts a little bit or they don't take you seriously. Well, I had the chance to talk to Jack's wife, Suzie Welch recently and I told her that story and she said, "Oh he's full of it, Jack never paid "a dime for those conferences!" (laughs) So anyway, all right, so let's talk about this. To me, things about, engineered things like the hardware and network and all these other standards and so forth, we haven't fully developed those yet, but they're coming. As far as I'm concerned, they're not the most interesting thing. The most interesting thing to me in Edge Analytics is what you're going to get out of it, what the result is going to be. Making sense of this data that's coming. And while we're on data, something I've been thinking a lot lately because everybody I've talked to for the last three days just keeps talking to me about data. I have this feeling that data isn't actually quite real. That any data that we deal with is the result of some process that's captured it from something else that's actually real. In other words it's proxy. So it's not exactly perfect. And that's why we've always had these problems about customer A, customer A, customer A, what's their definition? What's the definition of this, that and the other thing? And with sensor data, I really have the feeling, when companies get, not you know, not companies, organizations get instrumented and start dealing with this kind of data what they're going to find is that this is the first time, and I've been involved in analytics, I don't want to date myself, 'cause I know I look young, but the first, I've been dealing with analytics since 1975. And everything we've ever done in analytics has involved pulling data from some other system that was not designed for analytics. But if you think about sensor data, this is data that we're actually going to catch the first time. It's going to be ours! We're not going to get it from some other source. It's going to be the real deal, to the extent that it's the real deal. Now you may say, ya know Neil, a sensor that's sending us information about oil pressure or temperature or something like that, how can you quarrel with that? Well, I can quarrel with it because I don't know if the sensor's doing it right. So we still don't know, even with that data, if it's right, but that's what we have to work with. Now, what does that really mean? Is that we have to be really careful with this data. It's ours, we have to take care of it. We don't get to reload it from source some other day. If we munge it up it's gone forever. So that has, that has very serious implications, but let me, let me roll you back a little bit. The way I look at analytics is it's come in three different eras. And we're entering into the third now. The first era was business intelligence. It was basically built and governed by IT, it was system of record kind of reporting. And as far as I can recall, it probably started around 1988 or at least that's the year that Howard Dresner claims to have invented the term. I'm not sure it's true. And things happened before 1988 that was sort of like BI, but 88 was when they really started coming out, that's when we saw BusinessObjects and Cognos and MicroStrategy and those kinds of things. The second generation just popped out on everybody else. We're all looking around at BI and we were saying why isn't this working? Why are only five people in the organization using this? Why are we not getting value out of this massive license we bought? And along comes companies like Tableau doing data discovery, visualization, data prep and Line of Business people are using this now. But it's still the same kind of data sources. It's moved out a little bit, but it still hasn't really hit the Big Data thing. Now we're in third generation, so we not only had Big Data, which has come and hit us like a tsunami, but we're looking at smart discovery, we're looking at machine learning. We're looking at AI induced analytics workflows. And then all the natural language cousins. You know, natural language processing, natural language, what's? Oh Q, natural language query. Natural language generation. Anybody here know what natural language generation is? Yeah, so what you see now is you do some sort of analysis and that tool comes up and says this chart is about the following and it used the following data, and it's blah blah blah blah blah. I think it's kind of wordy and it's going to refined some, but it's an interesting, it's an interesting thing to do. Now, the problem I see with Edge Analytics and IoT in general is that most of the canonical examples we talk about are pretty thin. I know we talk about autonomous cars, I hope to God we never have them, 'cause I'm a car guy. Fleet Management, I think Qualcomm started Fleet Management in 1988, that is not a new application. Industrial controls. I seem to remember, I seem to remember Honeywell doing industrial controls at least in the 70s and before that I wasn't, I don't want to talk about what I was doing, but I definitely wasn't in this industry. So my feeling is we all need to sit down and think about this and get creative. Because the real value in Edge Analytics or IoT, whatever you want to call it, the real value is going to be figuring out something that's new or different. Creating a brand new business. Changing the way an operation happens in a company, right? And I think there's a lot of smart people out there and I think there's a million apps that we haven't even talked about so, if you as a vendor come to me and tell me how great your product is, please don't talk to me about autonomous cars or Fleet Managing, 'cause I've heard about that, okay? Now, hardware and architecture are really not the most interesting thing. We fell into that trap with data warehousing. We've fallen into that trap with Big Data. We talk about speeds and feeds. Somebody said to me the other day, what's the narrative of this company? This is a technology provider. And I said as far as I can tell, they don't have a narrative they have some products and they compete in a space. And when they go to clients and the clients say, what's the value of your product? They don't have an answer for that. So we don't want to fall into this trap, okay? Because IoT is going to inform you in ways you've never even dreamed about. Unfortunately some of them are going to be really stinky, you know, they're going to be really bad. You're going to lose more of your privacy, it's going to get harder to get, I dunno, mortgage for example, I dunno, maybe it'll be easier, but in any case, it's not going to all be good. So let's really think about what you want to do with this technology to do something that's really valuable. Cost takeout is not the place to justify an IoT project. Because number one, it's very expensive, and number two, it's a waste of the technology because you should be looking at, you know the old numerator denominator thing? You should be looking at the numerators and forget about the denominators because that's not what you do with IoT. And the other thing is you don't want to get over confident. Actually this is good advice about anything, right? But in this case, I love this quote by Derek Sivers He's a pretty funny guy. He said, "If more information was the answer, "then we'd all be billionaires with perfect abs." I'm not sure what's on his wishlist, but you know, I would, those aren't necessarily the two things I would think of, okay. Now, what I said about the data, I want to explain some more. Big Data Analytics, if you look at this graphic, it depicts it perfectly. It's a bunch of different stuff falling into the funnel. All right? It comes from other places, it's not original material. And when it comes in, it's always used as second hand data. Now what does that mean? That means that you have to figure out the semantics of this information and you have to find a way to put it together in a way that's useful to you, okay. That's Big Data. That's where we are. How is that different from IoT data? It's like I said, IoT is original. You can put it together any way you want because no one else has ever done that before. It's yours to construct, okay. You don't even have to transform it into a schema because you're creating the new application. But the most important thing is you have to take care of it 'cause if you lose it, it's gone. It's the original data. It's the same way, in operational systems for a long long time we've always been concerned about backup and security and everything else. You better believe this is a problem. I know a lot of people think about streaming data, that we're going to look at it for a minute, and we're going to throw most of it away. Personally I don't think that's going to happen. I think it's all going to be saved, at least for a while. Now, the governance and security, oh, by the way, I don't know where you're going to find a presentation where somebody uses a newspaper clipping about Vladimir Lenin, but here it is, enjoy yourselves. I believe that when people think about governance and security today they're still thinking along the same grids that we thought about it all along. But this is very very different and again, I'm sorry I keep thrashing this around, but this is treasured data that has to be carefully taken care of. Now when I say governance, my experience has been over the years that governance is something that IT does to make everybody's lives miserable. But that's not what I mean by governance today. It means a comprehensive program to really secure the value of the data as an asset. And you need to think about this differently. Now the other thing is you may not get to think about it differently, because some of the stuff may end up being subject to regulation. And if the regulators start regulating some of this, then that'll take some of the degrees of freedom away from you in how you put this together, but you know, that's the way it works. Now, machine learning, I think I told somebody the other day that claims about machine learning in software products are as common as twisters in trail parks. And a lot of it is not really what I'd call machine learning. But there's a lot of it around. And I think all of the open source machine learning and artificial intelligence that's popped up, it's great because all those math PhDs who work at Home Depot now have something to do when they go home at night and they construct this stuff. But if you're going to have machine learning at the Edge, here's the question, what kind of machine learning would you have at the Edge? As opposed to developing your models back at say, the cloud, when you transmit the data there. The devices at the Edge are not very powerful. And they don't have a lot of memory. So you're only going to be able to do things that have been modeled or constructed somewhere else. But that's okay. Because machine learning algorithm development is actually slow and painful. So you really want the people who know how to do this working with gobs of data creating models and testing them offline. And when you have something that works, you can put it there. Now there's one thing I want to talk about before I finish, and I think I'm almost finished. I wrote a book about 10 years ago about automated decision making and the conclusion that I came up with was that little decisions add up, and that's good. But it also means you don't have to get them all right. But you don't want computers or software making decisions unattended if it involves human life, or frankly any life. Or the environment. So when you think about the applications that you can build using this architecture and this technology, think about the fact that you're not going to be doing air traffic control, you're not going to be monitoring crossing guards at the elementary school. You're going to be doing things that may seem fairly mundane. Managing machinery on the factory floor, I mean that may sound great, but really isn't that interesting. Managing well heads, drilling for oil, well I mean, it's great to the extent that it doesn't cause wells to explode, but they don't usually explode. What it's usually used for is to drive the cost out of preventative maintenance. Not very interesting. So use your heads. Come up with really cool stuff. And any of you who are involved in Edge Analytics, the next time I talk to you I don't want to hear about the same five applications that everybody talks about. Let's hear about some new ones. So, in conclusion, I don't really have anything in conclusion except that Peter mentioned something about limousines bringing people up here. On Monday I was slogging up and down Park Avenue and Madison Avenue with my client and we were visiting all the hedge funds there because we were doing a project with them. And in the miserable weather I looked at him and I said, for godsake Paul, where's the black car? And he said, that was the 90s. (laughs) Thank you. So, Jim, up to you. (audience applauding) This is terrible, go that way, this was terrible coming that way. >> Woo, don't want to trip! And let's move to, there we go. Hi everybody, how ya doing? Thanks Neil, thanks Peter, those were great discussions. So I'm the third leg in this relay race here, talking about of course how software is eating the world. And focusing on the value of Edge Analytics in a lot of real world scenarios. Programming the real world for, to make the world a better place. So I will talk, I'll break it out analytically in terms of the research that Wikibon is doing in the area of the IoT, but specifically how AI intelligence is being embedded really to all material reality potentially at the Edge. But mobile applications and industrial IoT and the smart appliances and self driving vehicles. I will break it out in terms of a reference architecture for understanding what functions are being pushed to the Edge to hardware, to our phones and so forth to drive various scenarios in terms of real world results. So I'll move a pace here. So basically AI software or AI microservices are being infused into Edge hardware as we speak. What we see is more vendors of smart phones and other, real world appliances and things like smart driving, self driving vehicles. What they're doing is they're instrumenting their products with computer vision and natural language processing, environmental awareness based on sensing and actuation and those capabilities and inferences that these devices just do to both provide human support for human users of these devices as well as to enable varying degrees of autonomous operation. So what I'll be talking about is how AI is a foundation for data driven systems of agency of the sort that Peter is talking about. Infusing data driven intelligence into everything or potentially so. As more of this capability, all these algorithms for things like, ya know for doing real time predictions and classifications, anomaly detection and so forth, as this functionality gets diffused widely and becomes more commoditized, you'll see it burned into an ever-wider variety of hardware architecture, neuro synaptic chips, GPUs and so forth. So what I've got here in front of you is a sort of a high level reference architecture that we're building up in our research at Wikibon. So AI, artificial intelligence is a big term, a big paradigm, I'm not going to unpack it completely. Of course we don't have oodles of time so I'm going to take you fairly quickly through the high points. It's a driver for systems of agency. Programming the real world. Transducing digital inputs, the data, to analog real world results. Through the embedding of this capability in the IoT, but pushing more and more of it out to the Edge with points of decision and action in real time. And there are four capabilities that we're seeing in terms of AI enabled, enabling capabilities that are absolutely critical to software being pushed to the Edge are sensing, actuation, inference and Learning. Sensing and actuation like Peter was describing, it's about capturing data from the environment within which a device or users is operating or moving. And then actuation is the fancy term for doing stuff, ya know like industrial IoT, it's obviously machine controlled, but clearly, you know self driving vehicles is steering a vehicle and avoiding crashing and so forth. Inference is the meat and potatoes as it were of AI. Analytics does inferences. It infers from the data, the logic of the application. Predictive logic, correlations, classification, abstractions, differentiation, anomaly detection, recognizing faces and voices. We see that now with Apple and the latest version of the iPhone is embedding face recognition as a core, as the core multifactor authentication technique. Clearly that's a harbinger of what's going to be universal fairly soon which is that depends on AI. That depends on convolutional neural networks, that is some heavy hitting processing power that's necessary and it's processing the data that's coming from your face. So that's critically important. So what we're looking at then is the AI software is taking root in hardware to power continuous agency. Getting stuff done. Powered decision support by human beings who have to take varying degrees of action in various environments. We don't necessarily want to let the car steer itself in all scenarios, we want some degree of override, for lots of good reasons. They want to protect life and limb including their own. And just more data driven automation across the internet of things in the broadest sense. So unpacking this reference framework, what's happening is that AI driven intelligence is powering real time decisioning at the Edge. Real time local sensing from the data that it's capturing there, it's ingesting the data. Some, not all of that data, may be persistent at the Edge. Some, perhaps most of it, will be pushed into the cloud for other processing. When you have these highly complex algorithms that are doing AI deep learning, multilayer, to do a variety of anti-fraud and higher level like narrative, auto-narrative roll-ups from various scenes that are unfolding. A lot of this processing is going to begin to happen in the cloud, but a fair amount of the more narrowly scoped inferences that drive real time decision support at the point of action will be done on the device itself. Contextual actuation, so it's the sensor data that's captured by the device along with other data that may be coming down in real time streams through the cloud will provide the broader contextual envelope of data needed to drive actuation, to drive various models and rules and so forth that are making stuff happen at the point of action, at the Edge. Continuous inference. What it all comes down to is that inference is what's going on inside the chips at the Edge device. And what we're seeing is a growing range of hardware architectures, GPUs, CPUs, FPGAs, ASIC, Neuro synaptic chips of all sorts playing in various combinations that are automating more and more very complex inference scenarios at the Edge. And not just individual devices, swarms of devices, like drones and so forth are essentially an Edge unto themselves. You'll see these tiered hierarchies of Edge swarms that are playing and doing inferences of ever more complex dynamic nature. And much of this will be, this capability, the fundamental capabilities that is powering them all will be burned into the hardware that powers them. And then adaptive learning. Now I use the term learning rather than training here, training is at the core of it. Training means everything in terms of the predictive fitness or the fitness of your AI services for whatever task, predictions, classifications, face recognition that you, you've built them for. But I use the term learning in a broader sense. It's what's make your inferences get better and better, more accurate over time is that you're training them with fresh data in a supervised learning environment. But you can have reinforcement learning if you're doing like say robotics and you don't have ground truth against which to train the data set. You know there's maximize a reward function versus minimize a loss function, you know, the standard approach, the latter for supervised learning. There's also, of course, the issue, or not the issue, the approach of unsupervised learning with cluster analysis critically important in a lot of real world scenarios. So Edge AI Algorithms, clearly, deep learning which is multilayered machine learning models that can do abstractions at higher and higher levels. Face recognition is a high level abstraction. Faces in a social environment is an even higher level of abstraction in terms of groups. Faces over time and bodies and gestures, doing various things in various environments is an even higher level abstraction in terms of narratives that can be rolled up, are being rolled up by deep learning capabilities of great sophistication. Convolutional neural networks for processing images, recurrent neural networks for processing time series. Generative adversarial networks for doing essentially what's called generative applications of all sort, composing music, and a lot of it's being used for auto programming. These are all deep learning. There's a variety of other algorithm approaches I'm not going to bore you with here. Deep learning is essentially the enabler of the five senses of the IoT. Your phone's going to have, has a camera, it has a microphone, it has the ability to of course, has geolocation and navigation capabilities. It's environmentally aware, it's got an accelerometer and so forth embedded therein. The reason that your phone and all of the devices are getting scary sentient is that they have the sensory modalities and the AI, the deep learning that enables them to make environmentally correct decisions in the wider range of scenarios. So machine learning is the foundation of all of this, but there are other, I mean of deep learning, artificial neural networks is the foundation of that. But there are other approaches for machine learning I want to make you aware of because support vector machines and these other established approaches for machine learning are not going away but really what's driving the show now is deep learning, because it's scary effective. And so that's where most of the investment in AI is going into these days for deep learning. AI Edge platforms, tools and frameworks are just coming along like gangbusters. Much development of AI, of deep learning happens in the context of your data lake. This is where you're storing your training data. This is the data that you use to build and test to validate in your models. So we're seeing a deepening stack of Hadoop and there's Kafka, and Spark and so forth that are driving the training (coughs) excuse me, of AI models that are power all these Edge Analytic applications so that that lake will continue to broaden in terms, and deepen in terms of a scope and the range of data sets and the range of modeling, AI modeling supports. Data science is critically important in this scenario because the data scientist, the data science teams, the tools and techniques and flows of data science are the fundamental development paradigm or discipline or capability that's being leveraged to build and to train and to deploy and iterate all this AI that's being pushed to the Edge. So clearly data science is at the center, data scientists of an increasingly specialized nature are necessary to the realization to this value at the Edge. AI frameworks are coming along like you know, a mile a minute. TensorFlow has achieved a, is an open source, most of these are open source, has achieved sort of almost like a defacto standard, status, I'm using the word defacto in air quotes. There's Theano and Keras and xNet and CNTK and a variety of other ones. We're seeing range of AI frameworks come to market, most open source. Most are supported by most of the major tool vendors as well. So at Wikibon we're definitely tracking that, we plan to go deeper in our coverage of that space. And then next best action, powers recommendation engines. I mean next best action decision automation of the sort of thing Neil's covered in a variety of contexts in his career is fundamentally important to Edge Analytics to systems of agency 'cause it's driving the process automation, decision automation, sort of the targeted recommendations that are made at the Edge to individual users as well as to process that automation. That's absolutely necessary for self driving vehicles to do their jobs and industrial IoT. So what we're seeing is more and more recommendation engine or recommender capabilities powered by ML and DL are going to the Edge, are already at the Edge for a variety of applications. Edge AI capabilities, like I said, there's sensing. And sensing at the Edge is becoming ever more rich, mixed reality Edge modalities of all sort are for augmented reality and so forth. We're just seeing a growth in certain, the range of sensory modalities that are enabled or filtered and analyzed through AI that are being pushed to the Edge, into the chip sets. Actuation, that's where robotics comes in. Robotics is coming into all aspects of our lives. And you know, it's brainless without AI, without deep learning and these capabilities. Inference, autonomous edge decisioning. Like I said, it's, a growing range of inferences that are being done at the Edge. And that's where it has to happen 'cause that's the point of decision. Learning, training, much training, most training will continue to be done in the cloud because it's very data intensive. It's a grind to train and optimize an AI algorithm to do its job. It's not something that you necessarily want to do or can do at the Edge at Edge devices so, the models that are built and trained in the cloud are pushed down through a dev ops process down to the Edge and that's the way it will work pretty much in most AI environments, Edge analytics environments. You centralize the modeling, you decentralize the execution of the inference models. The training engines will be in the cloud. Edge AI applications. I'll just run you through sort of a core list of the ones that are coming into, already come into the mainstream at the Edge. Multifactor authentication, clearly the Apple announcement of face recognition is just a harbinger of the fact that that's coming to every device. Computer vision speech recognition, NLP, digital assistance and chat bots powered by natural language processing and understanding, it's all AI powered. And it's becoming very mainstream. Emotion detection, face recognition, you know I could go on and on but these are like the core things that everybody has access to or will by 2020 and they're core devices, mass market devices. Developers, designers and hardware engineers are coming together to pool their expertise to build and train not just the AI, but also the entire package of hardware in UX and the orchestration of real world business scenarios or life scenarios that all this intelligence, the submitted intelligence enables and most, much of what they build in terms of AI will be containerized as micro services through Docker and orchestrated through Kubernetes as full cloud services in an increasingly distributed fabric. That's coming along very rapidly. We can see a fair amount of that already on display at Strata in terms of what the vendors are doing or announcing or who they're working with. The hardware itself, the Edge, you know at the Edge, some data will be persistent, needs to be persistent to drive inference. That's, and you know to drive a variety of different application scenarios that need some degree of historical data related to what that device in question happens to be sensing or has sensed in the immediate past or you know, whatever. The hardware itself is geared towards both sensing and increasingly persistence and Edge driven actuation of real world results. The whole notion of drones and robotics being embedded into everything that we do. That's where that comes in. That has to be powered by low cost, low power commodity chip sets of various sorts. What we see right now in terms of chip sets is it's a GPUs, Nvidia has gone real far and GPUs have come along very fast in terms of power inference engines, you know like the Tesla cars and so forth. But GPUs are in many ways the core hardware sub straight for in inference engines in DL so far. But to become a mass market phenomenon, it's got to get cheaper and lower powered and more commoditized, and so we see a fair number of CPUs being used as the hardware for Edge Analytic applications. Some vendors are fairly big on FPGAs, I believe Microsoft has gone fairly far with FPGAs inside DL strategy. ASIC, I mean, there's neuro synaptic chips like IBM's got one. There's at least a few dozen vendors of neuro synaptic chips on the market so at Wikibon we're going to track that market as it develops. And what we're seeing is a fair number of scenarios where it's a mixed environment where you use one chip set architecture at the inference side of the Edge, and other chip set architectures that are driving the DL as processed in the cloud, playing together within a common architecture. And we see some, a fair number of DL environments where the actual training is done in the cloud on Spark using CPUs and parallelized in memory, but pushing Tensorflow models that might be trained through Spark down to the Edge where the inferences are done in FPGAs and GPUs. Those kinds of mixed hardware scenarios are very, very, likely to be standard going forward in lots of areas. So analytics at the Edge power continuous results is what it's all about. The whole point is really not moving the data, it's putting the inference at the Edge and working from the data that's already captured and persistent there for the duration of whatever action or decision or result needs to be powered from the Edge. Like Neil said cost takeout alone is not worth doing. Cost takeout alone is not the rationale for putting AI at the Edge. It's getting new stuff done, new kinds of things done in an automated consistent, intelligent, contextualized way to make our lives better and more productive. Security and governance are becoming more important. Governance of the models, governance of the data, governance in a dev ops context in terms of version controls over all those DL models that are built, that are trained, that are containerized and deployed. Continuous iteration and improvement of those to help them learn to do, make our lives better and easier. With that said, I'm going to hand it over now. It's five minutes after the hour. We're going to get going with the Influencer Panel so what we'd like to do is I call Peter, and Peter's going to call our influencers. >> All right, am I live yet? Can you hear me? All right so, we've got, let me jump back in control here. We've got, again, the objective here is to have community take on some things. And so what we want to do is I want to invite five other people up, Neil why don't you come on up as well. Start with Neil. You can sit here. On the far right hand side, Judith, Judith Hurwitz. >> Neil: I'm glad I'm on the left side. >> From the Hurwitz Group. >> From the Hurwitz Group. Jennifer Shin who's affiliated with UC Berkeley. Jennifer are you here? >> She's here, Jennifer where are you? >> She was here a second ago. >> Neil: I saw her walk out she may have, >> Peter: All right, she'll be back in a second. >> Here's Jennifer! >> Here's Jennifer! >> Neil: With 8 Path Solutions, right? >> Yep. >> Yeah 8 Path Solutions. >> Just get my mic. >> Take your time Jen. >> Peter: All right, Stephanie McReynolds. Far left. And finally Joe Caserta, Joe come on up. >> Stephie's with Elysian >> And to the left. So what I want to do is I want to start by having everybody just go around introduce yourself quickly. Judith, why don't we start there. >> I'm Judith Hurwitz, I'm president of Hurwitz and Associates. We're an analyst research and fault leadership firm. I'm the co-author of eight books. Most recent is Cognitive Computing and Big Data Analytics. I've been in the market for a couple years now. >> Jennifer. >> Hi, my name's Jennifer Shin. I'm the founder and Chief Data Scientist 8 Path Solutions LLC. We do data science analytics and technology. We're actually about to do a big launch next month, with Box actually. >> We're apparent, are we having a, sorry Jennifer, are we having a problem with Jennifer's microphone? >> Man: Just turn it back on? >> Oh you have to turn it back on. >> It was on, oh sorry, can you hear me now? >> Yes! We can hear you now. >> Okay, I don't know how that turned back off, but okay. >> So you got to redo all that Jen. >> Okay, so my name's Jennifer Shin, I'm founder of 8 Path Solutions LLC, it's a data science analytics and technology company. I founded it about six years ago. So we've been developing some really cool technology that we're going to be launching with Box next month. It's really exciting. And I have, I've been developing a lot of patents and some technology as well as teaching at UC Berkeley as a lecturer in data science. >> You know Jim, you know Neil, Joe, you ready to go? >> Joe: Just broke my microphone. >> Joe's microphone is broken. >> Joe: Now it should be all right. >> Jim: Speak into Neil's. >> Joe: Hello, hello? >> I just feel not worthy in the presence of Joe Caserta. (several laughing) >> That's right, master of mics. If you can hear me, Joe Caserta, so yeah, I've been doing data technology solutions since 1986, almost as old as Neil here, but been doing specifically like BI, data warehousing, business intelligence type of work since 1996. And been doing, wholly dedicated to Big Data solutions and modern data engineering since 2009. Where should I be looking? >> Yeah I don't know where is the camera? >> Yeah, and that's basically it. So my company was formed in 2001, it's called Caserta Concepts. We recently rebranded to only Caserta 'cause what we do is way more than just concepts. So we conceptualize the stuff, we envision what the future brings and we actually build it. And we help clients large and small who are just, want to be leaders in innovation using data specifically to advance their business. >> Peter: And finally Stephanie McReynolds. >> I'm Stephanie McReynolds, I had product marketing as well as corporate marketing for a company called Elysian. And we are a data catalog so we help bring together not only a technical understanding of your data, but we curate that data with human knowledge and use automated intelligence internally within the system to make recommendations about what data to use for decision making. And some of our customers like City of San Diego, a large automotive manufacturer working on self driving cars and General Electric use Elysian to help power their solutions for IoT at the Edge. >> All right so let's jump right into it. And again if you have a question, raise your hand, and we'll do our best to get it to the floor. But what I want to do is I want to get seven questions in front of this group and have you guys discuss, slog, disagree, agree. Let's start here. What is the relationship between Big Data AI and IoT? Now Wikibon's put forward its observation that data's being generated at the Edge, that action is being taken at the Edge and then increasingly the software and other infrastructure architectures need to accommodate the realities of how data is going to work in these very complex systems. That's our perspective. Anybody, Judith, you want to start? >> Yeah, so I think that if you look at AI machine learning, all these different areas, you have to be able to have the data learned. Now when it comes to IoT, I think one of the issues we have to be careful about is not all data will be at the Edge. Not all data needs to be analyzed at the Edge. For example if the light is green and that's good and it's supposed to be green, do you really have to constantly analyze the fact that the light is green? You actually only really want to be able to analyze and take action when there's an anomaly. Well if it goes purple, that's actually a sign that something might explode, so that's where you want to make sure that you have the analytics at the edge. Not for everything, but for the things where there is an anomaly and a change. >> Joe, how about from your perspective? >> For me I think the evolution of data is really becoming, eventually oxygen is just, I mean data's going to be the oxygen we breathe. It used to be very very reactive and there used to be like a latency. You do something, there's a behavior, there's an event, there's a transaction, and then you go record it and then you collect it, and then you can analyze it. And it was very very waterfallish, right? And then eventually we figured out to put it back into the system. Or at least human beings interpret it to try to make the system better and that is really completely turned on it's head, we don't do that anymore. Right now it's very very, it's synchronous, where as we're actually making these transactions, the machines, we don't really need, I mean human beings are involved a bit, but less and less and less. And it's just a reality, it may not be politically correct to say but it's a reality that my phone in my pocket is following my behavior, and it knows without telling a human being what I'm doing. And it can actually help me do things like get to where I want to go faster depending on my preference if I want to save money or save time or visit things along the way. And I think that's all integration of big data, streaming data, artificial intelligence and I think the next thing that we're going to start seeing is the culmination of all of that. I actually, hopefully it'll be published soon, I just wrote an article for Forbes with the term of ARBI and ARBI is the integration of Augmented Reality and Business Intelligence. Where I think essentially we're going to see, you know, hold your phone up to Jim's face and it's going to recognize-- >> Peter: It's going to break. >> And it's going to say exactly you know, what are the key metrics that we want to know about Jim. If he works on my sales force, what's his attainment of goal, what is-- >> Jim: Can it read my mind? >> Potentially based on behavior patterns. >> Now I'm scared. >> I don't think Jim's buying it. >> It will, without a doubt be able to predict what you've done in the past, you may, with some certain level of confidence you may do again in the future, right? And is that mind reading? It's pretty close, right? >> Well, sometimes, I mean, mind reading is in the eye of the individual who wants to know. And if the machine appears to approximate what's going on in the person's head, sometimes you can't tell. So I guess, I guess we could call that the Turing machine test of the paranormal. >> Well, face recognition, micro gesture recognition, I mean facial gestures, people can do it. Maybe not better than a coin toss, but if it can be seen visually and captured and analyzed, conceivably some degree of mind reading can be built in. I can see when somebody's angry looking at me so, that's a possibility. That's kind of a scary possibility in a surveillance society, potentially. >> Neil: Right, absolutely. >> Peter: Stephanie, what do you think? >> Well, I hear a world of it's the bots versus the humans being painted here and I think that, you know at Elysian we have a very strong perspective on this and that is that the greatest impact, or the greatest results is going to be when humans figure out how to collaborate with the machines. And so yes, you want to get to the location more quickly, but the machine as in the bot isn't able to tell you exactly what to do and you're just going to blindly follow it. You need to train that machine, you need to have a partnership with that machine. So, a lot of the power, and I think this goes back to Judith's story is then what is the human decision making that can be augmented with data from the machine, but then the humans are actually training the training side and driving machines in the right direction. I think that's when we get true power out of some of these solutions so it's not just all about the technology. It's not all about the data or the AI, or the IoT, it's about how that empowers human systems to become smarter and more effective and more efficient. And I think we're playing that out in our technology in a certain way and I think organizations that are thinking along those lines with IoT are seeing more benefits immediately from those projects. >> So I think we have a general agreement of what kind of some of the things you talked about, IoT, crucial capturing information, and then having action being taken, AI being crucial to defining and refining the nature of the actions that are being taken Big Data ultimately powering how a lot of that changes. Let's go to the next one. >> So actually I have something to add to that. So I think it makes sense, right, with IoT, why we have Big Data associated with it. If you think about what data is collected by IoT. We're talking about a serial information, right? It's over time, it's going to grow exponentially just by definition, right, so every minute you collect a piece of information that means over time, it's going to keep growing, growing, growing as it accumulates. So that's one of the reasons why the IoT is so strongly associated with Big Data. And also why you need AI to be able to differentiate between one minute versus next minute, right? Trying to find a better way rather than looking at all that information and manually picking out patterns. To have some automated process for being able to filter through that much data that's being collected. >> I want to point out though based on what you just said Jennifer, I want to bring Neil in at this point, that this question of IoT now generating unprecedented levels of data does introduce this idea of the primary source. Historically what we've done within technology, or within IT certainly is we've taken stylized data. There is no such thing as a real world accounting thing. It is a human contrivance. And we stylize data and therefore it's relatively easy to be very precise on it. But when we start, as you noted, when we start measuring things with a tolerance down to thousandths of a millimeter, whatever that is, metric system, now we're still sometimes dealing with errors that we have to attend to. So, the reality is we're not just dealing with stylized data, we're dealing with real data, and it's more, more frequent, but it also has special cases that we have to attend to as in terms of how we use it. What do you think Neil? >> Well, I mean, I agree with that, I think I already said that, right. >> Yes you did, okay let's move on to the next one. >> Well it's a doppelganger, the digital twin doppelganger that's automatically created by your very fact that you're living and interacting and so forth and so on. It's going to accumulate regardless. Now that doppelganger may not be your agent, or might not be the foundation for your agent unless there's some other piece of logic like an interest graph that you build, a human being saying this is my broad set of interests, and so all of my agents out there in the IoT, you all need to be aware that when you make a decision on my behalf as my agent, this is what Jim would do. You know I mean there needs to be that kind of logic somewhere in this fabric to enable true agency. >> All right, so I'm going to start with you. Oh go ahead. >> I have a real short answer to this though. I think that Big Data provides the data and compute platform to make AI possible. For those of us who dipped our toes in the water in the 80s, we got clobbered because we didn't have the, we didn't have the facilities, we didn't have the resources to really do AI, we just kind of played around with it. And I think that the other thing about it is if you combine Big Data and AI and IoT, what you're going to see is people, a lot of the applications we develop now are very inward looking, we look at our organization, we look at our customers. We try to figure out how to sell more shoes to fashionable ladies, right? But with this technology, I think people can really expand what they're thinking about and what they model and come up with applications that are much more external. >> Actually what I would add to that is also it actually introduces being able to use engineering, right? Having engineers interested in the data. Because it's actually technical data that's collected not just say preferences or information about people, but actual measurements that are being collected with IoT. So it's really interesting in the engineering space because it opens up a whole new world for the engineers to actually look at data and to actually combine both that hardware side as well as the data that's being collected from it. >> Well, Neil, you and I have talked about something, 'cause it's not just engineers. We have in the healthcare industry for example, which you know a fair amount about, there's this notion of empirical based management. And the idea that increasingly we have to be driven by data as a way of improving the way that managers do things, the way the managers collect or collaborate and ultimately collectively how they take action. So it's not just engineers, it's supposed to also inform business, what's actually happening in the healthcare world when we start thinking about some of this empirical based management, is it working? What are some of the barriers? >> It's not a function of technology. What happens in medicine and healthcare research is, I guess you can say it borders on fraud. (people chuckling) No, I'm not kidding. I know the New England Journal of Medicine a couple of years ago released a study and said that at least half their articles that they published turned out to be written, ghost written by pharmaceutical companies. (man chuckling) Right, so I think the problem is that when you do a clinical study, the one that really killed me about 10 years ago was the women's health initiative. They spent $700 million gathering this data over 20 years. And when they released it they looked at all the wrong things deliberately, right? So I think that's a systemic-- >> I think you're bringing up a really important point that we haven't brought up yet, and that is is can you use Big Data and machine learning to begin to take the biases out? So if you let the, if you divorce your preconceived notions and your biases from the data and let the data lead you to the logic, you start to, I think get better over time, but it's going to take a while to get there because we do tend to gravitate towards our biases. >> I will share an anecdote. So I had some arm pain, and I had numbness in my thumb and pointer finger and I went to, excruciating pain, went to the hospital. So the doctor examined me, and he said you probably have a pinched nerve, he said, but I'm not exactly sure which nerve it would be, I'll be right back. And I kid you not, he went to a computer and he Googled it. (Neil laughs) And he came back because this little bit of information was something that could easily be looked up, right? Every nerve in your spine is connected to your different fingers so the pointer and the thumb just happens to be your C6, so he came back and said, it's your C6. (Neil mumbles) >> You know an interesting, I mean that's a good example. One of the issues with healthcare data is that the data set is not always shared across the entire research community, so by making Big Data accessible to everyone, you actually start a more rational conversation or debate on well what are the true insights-- >> If that conversation includes what Judith talked about, the actual model that you use to set priorities and make decisions about what's actually important. So it's not just about improving, this is the test. It's not just about improving your understanding of the wrong thing, it's also testing whether it's the right or wrong thing as well. >> That's right, to be able to test that you need to have humans in dialog with one another bringing different biases to the table to work through okay is there truth in this data? >> It's context and it's correlation and you can have a great correlation that's garbage. You know if you don't have the right context. >> Peter: So I want to, hold on Jim, I want to, >> It's exploratory. >> Hold on Jim, I want to take it to the next question 'cause I want to build off of what you talked about Stephanie and that is that this says something about what is the Edge. And our perspective is that the Edge is not just devices. That when we talk about the Edge, we're talking about human beings and the role that human beings are going to play both as sensors or carrying things with them, but also as actuators, actually taking action which is not a simple thing. So what do you guys think? What does the Edge mean to you? Joe, why don't you start? >> Well, I think it could be a combination of the two. And specifically when we talk about healthcare. So I believe in 2017 when we eat we don't know why we're eating, like I think we should absolutely by now be able to know exactly what is my protein level, what is my calcium level, what is my potassium level? And then find the foods to meet that. What have I depleted versus what I should have, and eat very very purposely and not by taste-- >> And it's amazing that red wine is always the answer. >> It is. (people laughing) And tequila, that helps too. >> Jim: You're a precision foodie is what you are. (several chuckle) >> There's no reason why we should not be able to know that right now, right? And when it comes to healthcare is, the biggest problem or challenge with healthcare is no matter how great of a technology you have, you can't, you can't, you can't manage what you can't measure. And you're really not allowed to use a lot of this data so you can't measure it, right? You can't do things very very scientifically right, in the healthcare world and I think regulation in the healthcare world is really burdening advancement in science. >> Peter: Any thoughts Jennifer? >> Yes, I teach statistics for data scientists, right, so you know we talk about a lot of these concepts. I think what makes these questions so difficult is you have to find a balance, right, a middle ground. For instance, in the case of are you being too biased through data, well you could say like we want to look at data only objectively, but then there are certain relationships that your data models might show that aren't actually a causal relationship. For instance, if there's an alien that came from space and saw earth, saw the people, everyone's carrying umbrellas right, and then it started to rain. That alien might think well, it's because they're carrying umbrellas that it's raining. Now we know from real world that that's actually not the way these things work. So if you look only at the data, that's the potential risk. That you'll start making associations or saying something's causal when it's actually not, right? So that's one of the, one of the I think big challenges. I think when it comes to looking also at things like healthcare data, right? Do you collect data about anything and everything? Does it mean that A, we need to collect all that data for the question we're looking at? Or that it's actually the best, more optimal way to be able to get to the answer? Meaning sometimes you can take some shortcuts in terms of what data you collect and still get the right answer and not have maybe that level of specificity that's going to cost you millions extra to be able to get. >> So Jennifer as a data scientist, I want to build upon what you just said. And that is, are we going to start to see methods and models emerge for how we actually solve some of these problems? So for example, we know how to build a system for stylized process like accounting or some elements of accounting. We have methods and models that lead to technology and actions and whatnot all the way down to that that system can be generated. We don't have the same notion to the same degree when we start talking about AI and some of these Big Datas. We have algorithms, we have technology. But are we going to start seeing, as a data scientist, repeatability and learning and how to think the problems through that's going to lead us to a more likely best or at least good result? >> So I think that's a bit of a tough question, right? Because part of it is, it's going to depend on how many of these researchers actually get exposed to real world scenarios, right? Research looks into all these papers, and you come up with all these models, but if it's never tested in a real world scenario, well, I mean we really can't validate that it works, right? So I think it is dependent on how much of this integration there's going to be between the research community and industry and how much investment there is. Funding is going to matter in this case. If there's no funding in the research side, then you'll see a lot of industry folk who feel very confident about their models that, but again on the other side of course, if researchers don't validate those models then you really can't say for sure that it's actually more accurate, or it's more efficient. >> It's the issue of real world testing and experimentation, A B testing, that's standard practice in many operationalized ML and AI implementations in the business world, but real world experimentation in the Edge analytics, what you're actually transducing are touching people's actual lives. Problem there is, like in healthcare and so forth, when you're experimenting with people's lives, somebody's going to die. I mean, in other words, that's a critical, in terms of causal analysis, you've got to tread lightly on doing operationalizing that kind of testing in the IoT when people's lives and health are at stake. >> We still give 'em placebos. So we still test 'em. All right so let's go to the next question. What are the hottest innovations in AI? Stephanie I want to start with you as a company, someone at a company that's got kind of an interesting little thing happening. We start thinking about how do we better catalog data and represent it to a large number of people. What are some of the hottest innovations in AI as you see it? >> I think it's a little counter intuitive about what the hottest innovations are in AI, because we're at a spot in the industry where the most successful companies that are working with AI are actually incorporating them into solutions. So the best AI solutions are actually the products that you don't know there's AI operating underneath. But they're having a significant impact on business decision making or bringing a different type of application to the market and you know, I think there's a lot of investment that's going into AI tooling and tool sets for data scientists or researchers, but the more innovative companies are thinking through how do we really take AI and make it have an impact on business decision making and that means kind of hiding the AI to the business user. Because if you think a bot is making a decision instead of you, you're not going to partner with that bot very easily or very readily. I worked at, way at the start of my career, I worked in CRM when recommendation engines were all the rage online and also in call centers. And the hardest thing was to get a call center agent to actually read the script that the algorithm was presenting to them, that algorithm was 99% correct most of the time, but there was this human resistance to letting a computer tell you what to tell that customer on the other side even if it was more successful in the end. And so I think that the innovation in AI that's really going to push us forward is when humans feel like they can partner with these bots and they don't think of it as a bot, but they think about as assisting their work and getting to a better result-- >> Hence the augmentation point you made earlier. >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> Joe how 'about you? What do you look at? What are you excited about? >> I think the coolest thing at the moment right now is chat bots. Like to be able, like to have voice be able to speak with you in natural language, to do that, I think that's pretty innovative, right? And I do think that eventually, for the average user, not for techies like me, but for the average user, I think keyboards are going to be a thing of the past. I think we're going to communicate with computers through voice and I think this is the very very beginning of that and it's an incredible innovation. >> Neil? >> Well, I think we all have myopia here. We're all thinking about commercial applications. Big, big things are happening with AI in the intelligence community, in military, the defense industry, in all sorts of things. Meteorology. And that's where, well, hopefully not on an every day basis with military, you really see the effect of this. But I was involved in a project a couple of years ago where we were developing AI software to detect artillery pieces in terrain from satellite imagery. I don't have to tell you what country that was. I think you can probably figure that one out right? But there are legions of people in many many companies that are involved in that industry. So if you're talking about the dollars spent on AI, I think the stuff that we do in our industries is probably fairly small. >> Well it reminds me of an application I actually thought was interesting about AI related to that, AI being applied to removing mines from war zones. >> Why not? >> Which is not a bad thing for a whole lot of people. Judith what do you look at? >> So I'm looking at things like being able to have pre-trained data sets in specific solution areas. I think that that's something that's coming. Also the ability to, to really be able to have a machine assist you in selecting the right algorithms based on what your data looks like and the problems you're trying to solve. Some of the things that data scientists still spend a lot of their time on, but can be augmented with some, basically we have to move to levels of abstraction before this becomes truly ubiquitous across many different areas. >> Peter: Jennifer? >> So I'm going to say computer vision. >> Computer vision? >> Computer vision. So computer vision ranges from image recognition to be able to say what content is in the image. Is it a dog, is it a cat, is it a blueberry muffin? Like a sort of popular post out there where it's like a blueberry muffin versus like I think a chihuahua and then it compares the two. And can the AI really actually detect difference, right? So I think that's really where a lot of people who are in this space of being in both the AI space as well as data science are looking to for the new innovations. I think, for instance, cloud vision I think that's what Google still calls it. The vision API we've they've released on beta allows you to actually use an API to send your image and then have it be recognized right, by their API. There's another startup in New York called Clarify that also does a similar thing as well as you know Amazon has their recognition platform as well. So I think in a, from images being able to detect what's in the content as well as from videos, being able to say things like how many people are entering a frame? How many people enter the store? Not having to actually go look at it and count it, but having a computer actually tally that information for you, right? >> There's actually an extra piece to that. So if I have a picture of a stop sign, and I'm an automated car, and is it a picture on the back of a bus of a stop sign, or is it a real stop sign? So that's going to be one of the complications. >> Doesn't matter to a New York City cab driver. How 'about you Jim? >> Probably not. (laughs) >> Hottest thing in AI is General Adversarial Networks, GANT, what's hot about that, well, I'll be very quick, most AI, most deep learning, machine learning is analytical, it's distilling or inferring insights from the data. Generative takes that same algorithmic basis but to build stuff. In other words, to create realistic looking photographs, to compose music, to build CAD CAM models essentially that can be constructed on 3D printers. So GANT, it's a huge research focus all around the world are used for, often increasingly used for natural language generation. In other words it's institutionalizing or having a foundation for nailing the Turing test every single time, building something with machines that looks like it was constructed by a human and doing it over and over again to fool humans. I mean you can imagine the fraud potential. But you can also imagine just the sheer, like it's going to shape the world, GANT. >> All right so I'm going to say one thing, and then we're going to ask if anybody in the audience has an idea. So the thing that I find interesting is traditional programs, or when you tell a machine to do something you don't need incentives. When you tell a human being something, you have to provide incentives. Like how do you get someone to actually read the text. And this whole question of elements within AI that incorporate incentives as a way of trying to guide human behavior is absolutely fascinating to me. Whether it's gamification, or even some things we're thinking about with block chain and bitcoins and related types of stuff. To my mind that's going to have an enormous impact, some good, some bad. Anybody in the audience? I don't want to lose everybody here. What do you think sir? And I'll try to do my best to repeat it. Oh we have a mic. >> So my question's about, Okay, so the question's pretty much about what Stephanie's talking about which is human and loop training right? I come from a computer vision background. That's the problem, we need millions of images trained, we need humans to do that. And that's like you know, the workforce is essentially people that aren't necessarily part of the AI community, they're people that are just able to use that data and analyze the data and label that data. That's something that I think is a big problem everyone in the computer vision industry at least faces. I was wondering-- >> So again, but the problem is that is the difficulty of methodologically bringing together people who understand it and people who, people who have domain expertise people who have algorithm expertise and working together? >> I think the expertise issue comes in healthcare, right? In healthcare you need experts to be labeling your images. With contextual information where essentially augmented reality applications coming in, you have the AR kit and everything coming out, but there is a lack of context based intelligence. And all of that comes through training images, and all of that requires people to do it. And that's kind of like the foundational basis of AI coming forward is not necessarily an algorithm, right? It's how well are datas labeled? Who's doing the labeling and how do we ensure that it happens? >> Great question. So for the panel. So if you think about it, a consultant talks about being on the bench. How much time are they going to have to spend on trying to develop additional business? How much time should we set aside for executives to help train some of the assistants? >> I think that the key is not, to think of the problem a different way is that you would have people manually label data and that's one way to solve the problem. But you can also look at what is the natural workflow of that executive, or that individual? And is there a way to gather that context automatically using AI, right? And if you can do that, it's similar to what we do in our product, we observe how someone is analyzing the data and from those observations we can actually create the metadata that then trains the system in a particular direction. But you have to think about solving the problem differently of finding the workflow that then you can feed into to make this labeling easy without the human really realizing that they're labeling the data. >> Peter: Anybody else? >> I'll just add to what Stephanie said, so in the IoT applications, all those sensory modalities, the computer vision, the speech recognition, all that, that's all potential training data. So it cross checks against all the other models that are processing all the other data coming from that device. So that the natural language process of understanding can be reality checked against the images that the person happens to be commenting upon, or the scene in which they're embedded, so yeah, the data's embedded-- >> I don't think we're, we're not at the stage yet where this is easy. It's going to take time before we do start doing the pre-training of some of these details so that it goes faster, but right now, there're not that many shortcuts. >> Go ahead Joe. >> Sorry so a couple things. So one is like, I was just caught up on your incentivizing programs to be more efficient like humans. You know in Ethereum that has this notion, which is bot chain, has this theory, this concept of gas. Where like as the process becomes more efficient it costs less to actually run, right? It costs less ether, right? So it actually is kind of, the machine is actually incentivized and you don't really know what it's going to cost until the machine processes it, right? So there is like some notion of that there. But as far as like vision, like training the machine for computer vision, I think it's through adoption and crowdsourcing, so as people start using it more they're going to be adding more pictures. Very very organically. And then the machines will be trained and right now is a very small handful doing it, and it's very proactive by the Googles and the Facebooks and all of that. But as we start using it, as they start looking at my images and Jim's and Jen's images, it's going to keep getting smarter and smarter through adoption and through very organic process. >> So Neil, let me ask you a question. Who owns the value that's generated as a consequence of all these people ultimately contributing their insight and intelligence into these systems? >> Well, to a certain extent the people who are contributing the insight own nothing because the systems collect their actions and the things they do and then that data doesn't belong to them, it belongs to whoever collected it or whoever's going to do something with it. But the other thing, getting back to the medical stuff. It's not enough to say that the systems, people will do the right thing, because a lot of them are not motivated to do the right thing. The whole grant thing, the whole oh my god I'm not going to go against the senior professor. A lot of these, I knew a guy who was a doctor at University of Pittsburgh and they were doing a clinical study on the tubes that they put in little kids' ears who have ear infections, right? And-- >> Google it! Who helps out? >> Anyway, I forget the exact thing, but he came out and said that the principle investigator lied when he made the presentation, that it should be this, I forget which way it went. He was fired from his position at Pittsburgh and he has never worked as a doctor again. 'Cause he went against the senior line of authority. He was-- >> Another question back here? >> Man: Yes, Mark Turner has a question. >> Not a question, just want to piggyback what you're saying about the transfixation of maybe in healthcare of black and white images and color images in the case of sonograms and ultrasound and mammograms, you see that happening using AI? You see that being, I mean it's already happening, do you see it moving forward in that kind of way? I mean, talk more about that, about you know, AI and black and white images being used and they can be transfixed, they can be made to color images so you can see things better, doctors can perform better operations. >> So I'm sorry, but could you summarize down? What's the question? Summarize it just, >> I had a lot of students, they're interested in the cross pollenization between AI and say the medical community as far as things like ultrasound and sonograms and mammograms and how you can literally take a black and white image and it can, using algorithms and stuff be made to color images that can help doctors better do the work that they've already been doing, just do it better. You touched on it like 30 seconds. >> So how AI can be used to actually add information in a way that's not necessarily invasive but is ultimately improves how someone might respond to it or use it, yes? Related? I've also got something say about medical images in a second, any of you guys want to, go ahead Jennifer. >> Yeah, so for one thing, you know and it kind of goes back to what we were talking about before. When we look at for instance scans, like at some point I was looking at CT scans, right, for lung cancer nodules. In order for me, who I don't have a medical background, to identify where the nodule is, of course, a doctor actually had to go in and specify which slice of the scan had the nodule and where exactly it is, so it's on both the slice level as well as, within that 2D image, where it's located and the size of it. So the beauty of things like AI is that ultimately right now a radiologist has to look at every slice and actually identify this manually, right? The goal of course would be that one day we wouldn't have to have someone look at every slice to like 300 usually slices and be able to identify it much more automated. And I think the reality is we're not going to get something where it's going to be 100%. And with anything we do in the real world it's always like a 95% chance of it being accurate. So I think it's finding that in between of where, what's the threshold that we want to use to be able to say that this is, definitively say a lung cancer nodule or not. I think the other thing to think about is in terms of how their using other information, what they might use is a for instance, to say like you know, based on other characteristics of the person's health, they might use that as sort of a grading right? So you know, how dark or how light something is, identify maybe in that region, the prevalence of that specific variable. So that's usually how they integrate that information into something that's already existing in the computer vision sense. I think that's, the difficulty with this of course, is being able to identify which variables were introduced into data that does exist. >> So I'll make two quick observations on this then I'll go to the next question. One is radiologists have historically been some of the highest paid physicians within the medical community partly because they don't have to be particularly clinical. They don't have to spend a lot of time with patients. They tend to spend time with doctors which means they can do a lot of work in a little bit of time, and charge a fair amount of money. As we start to introduce some of these technologies that allow us to from a machine standpoint actually make diagnoses based on those images, I find it fascinating that you now see television ads promoting the role that the radiologist plays in clinical medicine. It's kind of an interesting response. >> It's also disruptive as I'm seeing more and more studies showing that deep learning models processing images, ultrasounds and so forth are getting as accurate as many of the best radiologists. >> That's the point! >> Detecting cancer >> Now radiologists are saying oh look, we do this great thing in terms of interacting with the patients, never have because they're being dis-intermediated. The second thing that I'll note is one of my favorite examples of that if I got it right, is looking at the images, the deep space images that come out of Hubble. Where they're taking data from thousands, maybe even millions of images and combining it together in interesting ways you can actually see depth. You can actually move through to a very very small scale a system that's 150, well maybe that, can't be that much, maybe six billion light years away. Fascinating stuff. All right so let me go to the last question here, and then I'm going to close it down, then we can have something to drink. What are the hottest, oh I'm sorry, question? >> Yes, hi, my name's George, I'm with Blue Talon. You asked earlier there the question what's the hottest thing in the Edge and AI, I would say that it's security. It seems to me that before you can empower agency you need to be able to authorize what they can act on, how they can act on, who they can act on. So it seems if you're going to move from very distributed data at the Edge and analytics at the Edge, there has to be security similarly done at the Edge. And I saw (speaking faintly) slides that called out security as a key prerequisite and maybe Judith can comment, but I'm curious how security's going to evolve to meet this analytics at the Edge. >> Well, let me do that and I'll ask Jen to comment. The notion of agency is crucially important, slightly different from security, just so we're clear. And the basic idea here is historically folks have thought about moving data or they thought about moving application function, now we are thinking about moving authority. So as you said. That's not necessarily, that's not really a security question, but this has been a problem that's been in, of concern in a number of different domains. How do we move authority with the resources? And that's really what informs the whole agency process. But with that said, Jim. >> Yeah actually I'll, yeah, thank you for bringing up security so identity is the foundation of security. Strong identity, multifactor, face recognition, biometrics and so forth. Clearly AI, machine learning, deep learning are powering a new era of biometrics and you know it's behavioral metrics and so forth that's organic to people's use of devices and so forth. You know getting to the point that Peter was raising is important, agency! Systems of agency. Your agent, you have to, you as a human being should be vouching in a secure, tamper proof way, your identity should be vouching for the identity of some agent, physical or virtual that does stuff on your behalf. How can that, how should that be managed within this increasingly distributed IoT fabric? Well a lot of that's been worked. It all ran through webs of trust, public key infrastructure, formats and you know SAML for single sign and so forth. It's all about assertion, strong assertions and vouching. I mean there's the whole workflows of things. Back in the ancient days when I was actually a PKI analyst three analyst firms ago, I got deep into all the guts of all those federation agreements, something like that has to be IoT scalable to enable systems agency to be truly fluid. So we can vouch for our agents wherever they happen to be. We're going to keep on having as human beings agents all over creation, we're not even going to be aware of everywhere that our agents are, but our identity-- >> It's not just-- >> Our identity has to follow. >> But it's not just identity, it's also authorization and context. >> Permissioning, of course. >> So I may be the right person to do something yesterday, but I'm not authorized to do it in another context in another application. >> Role based permissioning, yeah. Or persona based. >> That's right. >> I agree. >> And obviously it's going to be interesting to see the role that block chain or its follow on to the technology is going to play here. Okay so let me throw one more questions out. What are the hottest applications of AI at the Edge? We've talked about a number of them, does anybody want to add something that hasn't been talked about? Or do you want to get a beer? (people laughing) Stephanie, you raised your hand first. >> I was going to go, I bring something mundane to the table actually because I think one of the most exciting innovations with IoT and AI are actually simple things like City of San Diego is rolling out 3200 automated street lights that will actually help you find a parking space, reduce the amount of emissions into the atmosphere, so has some environmental change, positive environmental change impact. I mean, it's street lights, it's not like a, it's not medical industry, it doesn't look like a life changing innovation, and yet if we automate streetlights and we manage our energy better, and maybe they can flicker on and off if there's a parking space there for you, that's a significant impact on everyone's life. >> And dramatically suppress the impact of backseat driving! >> (laughs) Exactly. >> Joe what were you saying? >> I was just going to say you know there's already the technology out there where you can put a camera on a drone with machine learning within an artificial intelligence within it, and it can look at buildings and determine whether there's rusty pipes and cracks in cement and leaky roofs and all of those things. And that's all based on artificial intelligence. And I think if you can do that, to be able to look at an x-ray and determine if there's a tumor there is not out of the realm of possibility, right? >> Neil? >> I agree with both of them, that's what I meant about external kind of applications. Instead of figuring out what to sell our customers. Which is most what we hear. I just, I think all of those things are imminently doable. And boy street lights that help you find a parking place, that's brilliant, right? >> Simple! >> It improves your life more than, I dunno. Something I use on the internet recently, but I think it's great! That's, I'd like to see a thousand things like that. >> Peter: Jim? >> Yeah, building on what Stephanie and Neil were saying, it's ambient intelligence built into everything to enable fine grain microclimate awareness of all of us as human beings moving through the world. And enable reading of every microclimate in buildings. In other words, you know you have sensors on your body that are always detecting the heat, the humidity, the level of pollution or whatever in every environment that you're in or that you might be likely to move into fairly soon and either A can help give you guidance in real time about where to avoid, or give that environment guidance about how to adjust itself to your, like the lighting or whatever it might be to your specific requirements. And you know when you have a room like this, full of other human beings, there has to be some negotiated settlement. Some will find it too hot, some will find it too cold or whatever but I think that is fundamental in terms of reshaping the sheer quality of experience of most of our lived habitats on the planet potentially. That's really the Edge analytics application that depends on everybody having, being fully equipped with a personal area network of sensors that's communicating into the cloud. >> Jennifer? >> So I think, what's really interesting about it is being able to utilize the technology we do have, it's a lot cheaper now to have a lot of these ways of measuring that we didn't have before. And whether or not engineers can then leverage what we have as ways to measure things and then of course then you need people like data scientists to build the right model. So you can collect all this data, if you don't build the right model that identifies these patterns then all that data's just collected and it's just made a repository. So without having the models that supports patterns that are actually in the data, you're not going to find a better way of being able to find insights in the data itself. So I think what will be really interesting is to see how existing technology is leveraged, to collect data and then how that's actually modeled as well as to be able to see how technology's going to now develop from where it is now, to being able to either collect things more sensitively or in the case of say for instance if you're dealing with like how people move, whether we can build things that we can then use to measure how we move, right? Like how we move every day and then being able to model that in a way that is actually going to give us better insights in things like healthcare and just maybe even just our behaviors. >> Peter: Judith? >> So, I think we also have to look at it from a peer to peer perspective. So I may be able to get some data from one thing at the Edge, but then all those Edge devices, sensors or whatever, they all have to interact with each other because we don't live, we may, in our business lives, act in silos, but in the real world when you look at things like sensors and devices it's how they react with each other on a peer to peer basis. >> All right, before I invite John up, I want to say, I'll say what my thing is, and it's not the hottest. It's the one I hate the most. I hate AI generated music. (people laughing) Hate it. All right, I want to thank all the panelists, every single person, some great commentary, great observations. I want to thank you very much. I want to thank everybody that joined. John in a second you'll kind of announce who's the big winner. But the one thing I want to do is, is I was listening, I learned a lot from everybody, but I want to call out the one comment that I think we all need to remember, and I'm going to give you the award Stephanie. And that is increasing we have to remember that the best AI is probably AI that we don't even know is working on our behalf. The same flip side of that is all of us have to be very cognizant of the idea that AI is acting on our behalf and we may not know it. So, John why don't you come on up. Who won the, whatever it's called, the raffle? >> You won. >> Thank you! >> How 'about a round of applause for the great panel. (audience applauding) Okay we have a put the business cards in the basket, we're going to have that brought up. We're going to have two raffle gifts, some nice Bose headsets and speaker, Bluetooth speaker. Got to wait for that. I just want to say thank you for coming and for the folks watching, this is our fifth year doing our own event called Big Data NYC which is really an extension of the landscape beyond the Big Data world that's Cloud and AI and IoT and other great things happen and great experts and influencers and analysts here. Thanks for sharing your opinion. Really appreciate you taking the time to come out and share your data and your knowledge, appreciate it. Thank you. Where's the? >> Sam's right in front of you. >> There's the thing, okay. Got to be present to win. We saw some people sneaking out the back door to go to a dinner. >> First prize first. >> Okay first prize is the Bose headset. >> Bluetooth and noise canceling. >> I won't look, Sam you got to hold it down, I can see the cards. >> All right. >> Stephanie you won! (Stephanie laughing) Okay, Sawny Cox, Sawny Allie Cox? (audience applauding) Yay look at that! He's here! The bar's open so help yourself, but we got one more. >> Congratulations. Picture right here. >> Hold that I saw you. Wake up a little bit. Okay, all right. Next one is, my kids love this. This is great, great for the beach, great for everything portable speaker, great gift. >> What is it? >> Portable speaker. >> It is a portable speaker, it's pretty awesome. >> Oh you grabbed mine. >> Oh that's one of our guys. >> (lauging) But who was it? >> Can't be related! Ava, Ava, Ava. Okay Gene Penesko (audience applauding) Hey! He came in! All right look at that, the timing's great. >> Another one? (people laughing) >> Hey thanks everybody, enjoy the night, thank Peter Burris, head of research for SiliconANGLE, Wikibon and he great guests and influencers and friends. And you guys for coming in the community. Thanks for watching and thanks for coming. Enjoy the party and some drinks and that's out, that's it for the influencer panel and analyst discussion. Thank you. (logo music)