>>Hi, this is Dave Volonte. We're winding down Day two of the Cubes coverage of Vim on 2022. We're here at the area in Las Vegas. Myself and Dave Nicholson had been going for two days. Everybody's excited about the VM on party tonight. It's It's always epic, and, uh, it's a great show in terms of its energy. Danny Allen is here. He's cto of in his back. He gave the keynote this morning. I say, Danny, you know, you look pretty good up there with two hours of sleep. I >>had three. >>Look, don't look that good, but your energy was very high. And I got to tell you the story you told was amazing. It was one of the best keynotes I've ever seen. Even even the technology pieces were outstanding. But you weaving in that story was incredible. I'm hoping that people will go back and and watch it. We probably don't have time to go into it, but wow. Um, can you give us the the one minute version of that >>long story? >>Sure. Yeah. I read a book back in 2013 about a ship that sank off Portsmouth, Maine, and I >>thought, I'm gonna go find that >>ship. And so it's a long, >>complicated process. Five >>years in the making. But we used data, and the data that found the ship was actually from 15 years earlier. >>And in 20 >>18, we found the bow of the ship. We found the stern of the ship, but what we were really trying to answer was torpedoed. Or did the boilers explode? Because >>the navy said the boilers exploded >>and two survivors said, No, it was torpedoed or there was a German U boat there. >>And so >>our goal was fine. The ship find the boiler. >>So in 20 >>19, Sorry, Uh, it was 2018. We found the bow and the stern. And then in 2019, we found both boilers perfectly intact. And in fact, the rear end of that torpedo wasn't much left >>of it, of course, but >>data found that wreck. And so it, um, it exonerated essentially any implication that somebody screwed >>up in >>the boiler system and the survivors or the Children of the survivors obviously appreciated >>that. I'm sure. Yes, Several >>outcomes to it. So the >>chief engineer was one >>of the 13 survivors, >>and he lived with the weight of this for 75 years. 49 sailors dead because of myself. But I had the opportunity of meeting some of the Children of the victims and also attending ceremonies. The families of those victims received purple hearts because they were killed due to enemy action. And then you actually knew how to do this. I wasn't aware you had experience finding Rex. You've >>discovered several of >>them prior to this one. But >>the interesting connection >>the reason why this keynote was so powerful as we're a >>team, it's a data conference. >>You connected that to data because you you went out and bought a How do you say this? Magnanimous magnetometer. Magnetometer, Magnetometer. I don't know what that >>is. And a side >>scan Sonar, Right? I got that right. That was >>easy. But >>then you know what this stuff is. And then you >>built the model >>tensorflow. You took all the data and you found anomalies. And then you went right to that spot. Found the >>wreck with 12 >>£1000 of dynamite, >>which made your heart >>beat. But >>then you found >>the boilers. That's incredible. And >>but the point was, >>this is data >>uh, let's see, >>a lot of years after, >>right? >>Yeah. Two sets of data were used. One was the original set of side scan sonar >>data by the historian >>who discovered there was a U boat in the area that was 15 years old. >>And then we used, of >>course, the wind and weather and wave pattern data that was 75 years old to figure out where the boiler should be because they knew that the ship had continued to float for eight minutes. And so you had to go back and determine the models of where should the boilers >>be if it exploded and the boilers >>dropped out and it floated along >>for eight minutes and then sank? Where was >>that data? >>It was was a scanned was an electronic was a paper. How did you get that data? So the original side scan sonar data was just hard >>drive >>data by the historian. >>I wish I could say he used them to >>back it up. But I don't know that I can say that. But he still had >>the data. 15 years later, the >>weather and >>wind and wave data, That was all public information, and we actually used that extensively. We find other wrecks. A lot of wrecks off Boston Sunken World War Two. So we were We were used to that model of tracking what happened. Wow. So, yes, imagine if that data weren't available >>and it >>probably shouldn't have been right by all rights. So now fast forward to 2022. We've got Let's talk about just a cloud >>data. I think you said a >>couple of 100 >>petabytes in the >>cloud 2019. 500 in, Uh, >>no. Yeah. In >>20 2200 and 42. Petabytes in 20 2500 Petabytes last year. And we've already done the same as 2020. So >>240 petabytes >>in Q one. I expect >>this year to move an exhibit of >>data into the public cloud. >>Okay, so you got all that data. Who knows what's in there, right? And if it's not protected, who's going to know in 50 60 7100 years? Right. So that was your tie in? Yes. To the to the importance of data protection, which was just really, really well done. Congratulations. Honestly, one of the best keynotes I've ever seen keynotes often really boring, But you did a great job again on two hours. Sleep. So much to unpack here. The other thing that really is. I mean, we can talk about the demos. We can talk about the announcements. Um, so? Well, yeah, Let's see. Salesforce. Uh, data protection is now public. I almost spilled the beans yesterday in the cube. Caught myself the version 12. Obviously, you guys gave a great demo showing the island >>cloud with I think it >>was just four minutes. It was super fast. Recovery in four minutes of data loss was so glad you didn't say zero minutes because that would have been a live demos which, Okay, which I appreciate and also think is crazy. So some really cool demos, Um, and some really cool features. So I have so much impact, but the the insights that you can provide through them it's VM one, uh, was actually something that I hadn't heard you talk about extensively in the past. That maybe I just missed it. But I wonder if you could talk about that layer and why it's critical differentiator for Wien. It's >>the hidden gem >>within the Wien portfolio because it knows about absolutely >>everything. >>And what determines the actions >>that we take is the >>context in which >>data is surviving. So in the context of security, which we are showing, we look for CPU utilisation, memory utilisation, data change rate. If you encrypt all of the data in a file server, it's going to blow up overnight. And so we're leveraging heuristics in their reporting. But even more than that, one of the things in Wien one people don't realise we have this concept of the intelligent diagnostics. It's machine learning, which we drive on our end and we push out as packages intervene one. There's up to 200 signatures, but it helps our customers find issues before they become issues. Okay, so I want to get into because I often time times, don't geek out with you. And don't take advantage of your your technical knowledge. And you've you've triggered a couple of things, >>especially when the >>analysts call you said it again today that >>modern >>data protection has meaning to you. We talked a little bit about this yesterday, but back in >>the days of >>virtualisation, you shunned agents >>and took a different >>approach because you were going for what was then >>modern. Then you >>went to bare metal cloud hybrid >>cloud containers. Super Cloud. Using the analyst meeting. You didn't use the table. Come on, say Super Cloud and then we'll talk about the edge. So I would like to know specifically if we can go back to Virtualised >>because I didn't know >>this exactly how you guys >>defined modern >>back then >>and then. Let's take that to modern today. >>So what do you >>do back then? And then we'll get into cloud and sure, So if you go back to and being started, everyone who's using agents, you'd instal something in the operating system. It would take 10% 15% of your CPU because it was collecting all the data and sending it outside of the machine when we went through a virtual environment. If you put an agent inside that machine, what happens is you would have 100 operating systems all on the same >>server, consuming >>resources from that hyper visor. And so he said, there's a better way of capturing the data instead of capturing the data inside the operating system. And by the way, managing thousands of agents is no fun. So What we did is we captured a snapshot of the image at the hyper visor level. And then over time, we just leverage changed block >>tracking from the hyper >>visor to determine what >>had changed. And so that was modern. Because no more >>managing agents >>there was no impact >>on the operating system, >>and it was a far more >>efficient way to store >>data. You leverage CBT through the A P. Is that correct? Yeah. We used the VCR API >>for data protection. >>Okay, so I said this to Michael earlier. Fast forward to today. Your your your data protection competitors aren't as fat, dumb and happy as they used to be, so they can do things in containers, containers. And we talked about that. So now let's talk about Cloud. What's different about cloud data protection? What defines modern data protection? And where are the innovations that you're providing? >>Let me do one step in >>between those because one of the things that happened between hypervisors and Cloud was >>offline. The capture of the data >>to the storage system because >>even better than doing it >>at the hyper visor clusters >>do it on the storage >>array because that can capture the >>data instantly. Right? So as we go to the cloud, we want to do the same thing. Except we don't have access to either the hyper visor or the storage system. But what they do provide is an API. So we can use the API to capture all of the blocks, all of the data, all of the changes on that particular operating system. Now, here's where we've kind of gone full circle on a hyper >>visor. You can use the V >>sphere agent to reach into the operating system to do >>things like application consistency. What we've done modern data protection is create specific cloud agents that say Forget >>about the block changes. Make sure that I have application consistency inside that cloud operating >>system. Even though you don't have access to the hyper visor of the storage, >>you're still getting the >>operating system consistency >>while getting the really >>fast capture of data. So that gets into you talking on stage about how synapse don't equal data protection. I think you just explained it, but explain why, but let me highlight something that VM does that is important. We manage both snapshots and back up because if you can recover from your storage array >>snapshot. That is the best >>possible thing to recover from right, But we don't. So we manage both the snapshots and we converted >>into the VM portable >>data format. And here's where the super cloud comes into play because if I can convert it into the VM portable data format, I can move >>that OS >>anywhere. I can move it from >>physical to virtual to cloud >>to another cloud back to virtual. I can put it back on physical if I want to. It actually abstracts >>the cloud >>layer. There are things >>that we do when we go >>between clouds. Some use bio, >>some use, um, fee. >>But we have the data in backup format, not snapshot format. That's theirs. But we have been in backup format that we can move >>around and abstract >>workloads across. All of the infrastructure in your >>catalogue is control >>of that. Is that Is >>that right? That is about >>that 100%. And you know what's interesting about our catalogue? Dave. The catalogue is inside the backup, and so historically, one of the problems with backup is that you had a separate catalogue and if it ever got corrupted. All of your >>data is meaningless >>because the catalogue is inside >>the backup >>for that unique VM or that unique instance, you can move it anywhere and power it on. That's why people said were >>so reliable. As long >>as you have the backup file, you can delete our >>software. You can >>still get the data back, so I love this fast paced so that >>enables >>what I call Super Cloud we now call Super Cloud >>because now >>take that to the edge. >>If I want to go to the edge, I presume you can extend that. And I also presume the containers play a role there. Yes, so here's what's interesting about the edge to things on the edge. You don't want to have any state if you can help it, >>and so >>containers help with that. You can have stateless environment, some >>persistent data storage, >>but we not only >>provide the portability >>in operating systems. We also do this for containers, >>and that's >>true if you go to the cloud and you're using SE CKs >>with relational >>database service is already >>asked for the persistent data. >>Later, we can pick that up and move it to G K E or move it to open shift >>on premises. And >>so that's why I call this the super cloud. We have all of this data. Actually, I think you termed the term super thank you for I'm looking for confirmation from a technologist that it's technically feasible. It >>is technically feasible, >>and you can do it today and that's a I think it's a winning strategy. Personally, Will there be >>such a thing as edge Native? You know, there's cloud native. Will there be edge native new architectures, new ways of doing things, new workloads use cases? We talk about hardware, new hardware, architectures, arm based stuff that are going to change everything to edge Native Yes and no. There's going to be small tweaks that make it better for the edge. You're gonna see a lot of iron at the edge, obviously for power consumption purposes, and you're also going to see different constructs for networking. We're not going to use the traditional networking, probably a lot more software to find stuff. Same thing on the storage. They're going to try and >>minimise the persistent >>storage to the smallest footprint possible. But ultimately I think we're gonna see containers >>will lead >>the edge. We're seeing this now. We have a I probably can't name them, but we have a large retail organisation that is running containers in every single store with a small, persistent footprint of the point of sale and local data, but that what >>is running the actual >>system is containers, and it's completely ephemeral. So we were >>at Red Hat, I was saying >>earlier last week, and I'd say half 40 50% of the conversation was edge open shift, obviously >>playing a big role there. I >>know doing work with Rancher and Town Zoo. And so there's a lot of options there. >>But obviously, open shift has >>strong momentum in the >>marketplace. >>I've been dominating. You want to chime in? No, I'm just No, >>I yeah, I know. Sometimes >>I'll sit here like a sponge, which isn't my job absorbing stuff. I'm just fascinated by the whole concept of of a >>of a portable format for data that encapsulates virtual machines and or instances that can live in the containerised world. And once you once you create that common denominator, that's really that's >>That's the secret sauce >>for what you're talking about is a super club and what's been fascinating to watch because I've been paying attention since the beginning. You go from simply V. M. F s and here it is. And by the way, the pitch to E. M. C. About buying VM ware. It was all about reducing servers to files that can be stored on storage arrays. All of a sudden, the light bulbs went off. We can store those things, and it just began. It became it became a marriage afterwards. But to watch that progression that you guys have gone from from that fundamental to all of the other areas where now you've created this common denominator layer has has been amazing. So my question is, What's the singer? What doesn't work? Where the holes. You don't want to look at it from a from a glass half empty perspective. What's the next opportunity? We've talked about edge, but what are the things that you need to fill in to make this truly ubiquitous? Well, there's a lot of services out there that we're not protecting. To be fair, right, we do. Microsoft 3 65. We announced sales for us, but there's a dozen other paths services that >>people are moving data >>into. And until >>we had data protection >>for the assassin path services, you know >>you have to figure out how >>to protect them. Now here's the kicker about >>those services. >>Most of them have the >>ability to dump date >>out. The trick is, do they have the A >>P? I is needed to put data >>back into it right, >>which is which is a >>gap. As an industry, we need to address this. I actually think we need a common >>framework for >>how to manage the >>export of data, but also the import of data not at a at a system level, but at an atomic level of the elements within those applications. >>So there are gaps >>there at the industry, but we'll fill them >>if you look on the >>infrastructure side. We've done a lot with containers and kubernetes. I think there's a next wave around server list. There's still servers and these micro services, but we're making things smaller and smaller and smaller, and there's going to be an essential need to protect those services as well. So modern data protection is something that's going to we're gonna need modern data protection five years from now, the modern will just be different. Do you ever see the day, Danny, where governance becomes an >>adjacency opportunity for >>you guys? It's clearly an opportunity even now if you look, we spent a lot of time talking about security and what you find is when organisations go, for example, of ransomware insurance or for compliance, they need to be able to prove that they have certifications or they have security or they have governance. We just saw transatlantic privacy >>packed only >>to be able to prove what type of data they're collecting. Where are they storing it? Where are they allowed to recovered? And yes, those are very much adjacency is for our customers. They're trying to manage that data. >>So given that I mean, >>am I correct that architecturally you are, are you location agnostic? Right. We are a location agnostic, and you can actually tag data to allowable location. So the big trend that I think is happening is going to happen in in this >>this this decade. >>I think we're >>scratching the surface. Is this idea >>that, you know, leave data where it is, >>whether it's an S three >>bucket, it could be in an Oracle >>database. It could be in a snowflake database. It can be a data lake that's, you know, data, >>bricks or whatever, >>and it stays where >>it is. And it's just a note on the on the call of the data >>mesh. Not my term. Jim >>Octagon coined that term. The >>problem with that, and it puts data in the hands of closer to the domain experts. The problem with that >>scenario >>is you need self service infrastructure, which really doesn't exist today anyway. But it's coming, and the big problem is Federated >>computational >>governance. How do I automate that governance so that the people who should have access to that it can have access to that data? That, to me, seems to be an adjacency. It doesn't exist except in >>a proprietary >>platform. Today. There needs to be a horizontal >>layer >>that is more open than anybody >>can use. And I >>would think that's a perfect opportunity for you guys. Just strategically it is. There's no question, and I would argue, Dave, that it's actually >>valuable to take snapshots and to keep the data out at the edge wherever it happens to be collected. But then Federated centrally. It's why I get so excited by an exhibit of data this year going into the cloud, because then you're centralising the aggregation, and that's where you're really going to drive the insights. You're not gonna be writing tensorflow and machine learning and things on premises unless you have a lot of money and a lot of GPS and a lot of capacity. That's the type of thing that is actually better suited for the cloud. And, I would argue, better suited for not your organisation. You're gonna want to delegate that to a third party who has expertise in privacy, data analysis or security forensics or whatever it is that you're trying to do with the data. But you're gonna today when you think about AI. We talked about A. I haven't had a tonne of talk about AI some >>appropriate >>amount. Most of the >>AI today correct me if you think >>this is not true is modelling that's done in the cloud. It's dominant. >>Don't >>you think that's gonna flip when edge >>really starts to take >>off where it's it's more real time >>influencing >>at the edge in new use cases at the edge now how much of that data >>is going to be >>persisted is a >>point of discussion. But what >>are your thoughts on that? I completely agree. So my expectation of the way >>that this will work is that >>the true machine learning will happen in the centralised location, and what it will do is similar to someone will push out to the edge the signatures that drive the inferences. So my example of this is always the Tesla driving down the road. >>There's no way that that >>car should be figuring it sending up to the cloud. Is that a stop sign? Is it not? It can't. It has to be able to figure out what the stop sign is before it gets to it, so we'll do the influencing at the edge. But when it doesn't know what to do with the data, then it should send it to the court to determine, to learn about it and send signatures back out, not just to that edge location, but all the edge locations within the within the ecosystem. So I get what you're saying. They might >>send data back >>when there's an anomaly, >>or I always use the example of a deer running in front of the car. David Floyd gave me that one. That's when I want to. I do want to send the data back to the cloud because Tesla doesn't persist. A tonne of data, I presume, right, right less than 5% of it. You know, I want to. Usually I'm here to dive into the weeds. I want kind of uplevel this >>to sort of the >>larger picture. From an I T perspective. >>There's been a lot of consolidation going on if you divide the >>world into vendors >>and customers. On the customer side, there are only if there's a finite number of seats at the table for truly strategic partners. Those get gobbled up often by hyper >>scale cloud >>providers. The challenge there, and I'm part of a CEO accreditation programme. So this >>is aimed at my students who >>are CEOs and CIOs. The challenge is that a lot of CEOs and CIOs on the customer side don't exhaustively drag out of their vendor partners like a theme everything that Saveem >>can do for >>them. Maybe they're leveraging a point >>solution, >>but I guarantee you they don't all know that you've got cast in in the portfolio. Not every one of them does yet, let alone this idea of a super >>cloud and and and >>how much of a strategic role you can play. So I don't know if it's a blanket admonition to folks out there, but you have got to leverage the people who are building the solutions that are going to help you solve problems in the business. And I guess, as in the form of >>a question, >>uh, do you Do you see that as a challenge? Now those the limited number of seats at >>the Table for >>Strategic Partners >>Challenge and >>Opportunity. If you look at the types of partners that we've partnered with storage partners because they own the storage of the data, at the end of the day, we actually just manage it. We don't actually store it the cloud partners. So I see that as the opportunity and my belief is I thought that the storage doesn't matter, >>but I think the >>organisation that can centralise and manage that data is the one that can rule the world, and so >>clearly I'm a team. I think we can do amazing things, but we do have key >>strategic partners hp >>E Amazon. You heard >>them on stage yesterday. >>18 different >>integrations with AWS. So we have very strategic partners. Azure. I go out there all the time. >>So there >>you don't need to be >>in the room at the table because your partners are >>and they have a relationship with the customer as well. Fair enough. But the key to this it's not just technology. It is these relationships and what is possible between our organisations. So I'm sorry to be >>so dense on this, but when you talk about >>centralising that data you're talking about physically centralising it or can actually live across clouds, >>for instance. But you've got >>visibility and your catalogues >>have visibility on >>all that. Is that what you mean by centralised obliterated? We have understanding of all the places that lives, and we can do things with >>it. We can move it from one >>cloud to another. We can take, you know, everyone talks about data warehouses. >>They're actually pretty expensive. >>You got to take data and stream it into this thing, and there's a massive computing power. On the other hand, we're >>not like that. You've storage on there. We can ephemeral e. Spin up a database when you need it for five minutes and then destroy it. We can spin up an image when you need it and then destroy it. And so on your perspective of locations. So irrespective of >>location, it doesn't >>have to be in a central place, and that's been a challenge. You extract, >>transform and load, >>and moving the data to the central >>location has been a problem. We >>have awareness of >>all the data everywhere, >>and then we can make >>decisions as to what you >>do based >>on where it is and >>what it is. And that's a metadata >>innovation. I guess that >>comes back to the catalogue, >>right? Is that correct? >>You have data >>about the data that informs you as to where it is and how to get to it. And yes, so metadata within the data that allows you to recover it and then data across the federation of all that to determine where it is. And machine intelligence plays a role in all that, not yet not yet in that space. Now. I do think there's opportunity in the future to be able to distribute storage across many different locations and that's a whole conversation in itself. But but our machine learning is more just on helping our customers address the problems in their infrastructures rather than determining right now where that data should be. >>These guys they want me to break, But I'm >>refusing. So your >>Hadoop back >>in their rooms via, um that's >>well, >>that scale. A lot of customers. I talked to Renee Dupuis. Hey, we we got there >>was heavy lift. You >>know, we're looking at new >>ways. New >>approaches, uh, going. And of course, it's all in the cloud >>anyway. But what's >>that look like? That future look like we haven't reached bottle and X ray yet on our on our Hadoop clusters, and we do continuously examine >>them for anomalies that might happen. >>Not saying we won't run into a >>bottle like we always do at some >>point, But we haven't yet >>awesome. We've covered a lot of We've certainly covered extensively the research that you did on cyber >>security and ransomware. Um, you're kind of your vision for modern >>data protection. I think we hit on that pretty well casting, you know, we talked to Michael about that, and then, you know, the future product releases the Salesforce data protection. You guys, I think you're the first there. I think you were threatened at first from Microsoft. 3 65. No, there are other vendors in the in the salesforce space. But what I tell people we weren't the first to do data capture at the hyper >>visor level. There's two other >>vendors I won't tell you they were No one remembers them. Microsoft 3 65. We weren't the first one to for that, but we're now >>the largest. So >>there are other vendors in the salesforce space. But we're looking at We're going to be aggressive. Danielle, Thanks >>so much for coming to Cuba and letting us pick your brain like that Really great job today. And congratulations on >>being back >>in semi normal. Thank you for having me. I love being on all right. And thank you for watching. Keep it right there. More coverage. Day volonte for Dave >>Nicholson, By >>the way, check out silicon angle dot com for all the written coverage. All the news >>The cube dot >>net is where all these videos We'll we'll live. Check out wiki bond dot com I published every week. I think I'm gonna dig into the cybersecurity >>research that you guys did this week. If I can >>get a hands my hands on those charts which Dave Russell promised >>me, we'll be right back >>right after this short break. Mm.

>>The cube presents, Dell technologies world brought to you by Dell. >>Welcome back to Dell technologies, world 2022. We're live in Vegas. Very happy to be here. Uh, this is the cubes multi-year coverage. This is year 13 for covering either, you know, EMC world or, uh, Dell world. And now of course, Dell tech world. My name is Dave Volante and I'm here with longtime Cub alum cube guest, Steve Kenon, the storage Alchemist, who's, uh, Beckett, Dell, uh, and his data protection role. And Tony Bryson is the chief information security officer of the town of Gilbert town in Arizona. Most, most towns don't have a CISO, but Tony, we're a thrilled, you're here to tell us that story. How did you become a CISO and how does the town of Gilbert have a CISO? >>Well, thank you for having me here. Uh, believe it or not. The town of Gilbert is actually the fourth largest municipality in Arizona. We serve as 281,000 citizens. So it's a fairly large enterprise. We're a billion dollar enterprise. And it got to the point where the, uh, cybersecurity concerns were at such a point that they elected to bring in their first chief information security officer. And I managed to, uh, be the lucky gentleman that got that particular position. >>That's awesome. And there's a, is there a CIO as well? Are you guys peers? Do you, how what's the reporting structure look like? >>We have a chief technology officer. Okay. I report through his office mm-hmm <affirmative> and then he reports, uh, directly to the town executive. >>So you guys talk a lot, you I'm sure you present a lot to the, to the board or wherever the governance structure is. Yeah, >>We do. I, I do quarterly report outs to the, I report through to the town council. Uh, let them know exactly what our cyber security posture is like, the type of threats that we're facing. As a matter of fact, I have to do one when I return to, uh, Gilbert from this particular conference. So really looking forward to that one, cuz this is an interesting time to be in cyber security. >>So obviously a sea. So Steve is gonna say, cyber's the number one priority, but I would say the CTO is gonna say the, say the same thing I would say the board is gonna say the same thing. I would also say Steve, that, uh, cyber and cyber resilience is probably the number one topic here at the show. When you walk around and you see the cyber demonstrations, the security demonstrations, they're packed, it's kind of your focus. Um, it's a good call. >>Yeah. <laugh> I'm the luckiest guy in storage, right? <laugh> um, yeah, there hasn't I in the last 24 months, I don't think that there's been a, a meeting that I've been to with a customer, no matter who's in the room where, uh, cyber resiliency, cybersecurity hasn't come up. I mean, it is, it is one of the hot topics in last night. I mean, Michael was just here. Uh, Michael Dell was just here last night. He came into the showroom floor, he came back, he took a look at what we were offering for cyber capabilities and was impressed. And, and so, so that's really good. >>Yeah. So I noticed, you know, when I talked to a lot of CIOs in particular, they would tell me that the pre pandemic, their cyber resiliency was very Dr. Focused, right. They really, it really wasn't an organizational resilience. It was a, if there's an oh crap moment, they could get it back in theory. And they sort of rethought that. Do you see you that amongst your peers, Tony? >>I think so. I think that people are quickly starting to understand that you just can't focus on, in, on protecting yourself from something that you think may never happen. The reality is that you're likely to see some type of cyber event, so you better be prepared for it. And you protect yourself against that. So plan for resiliency plan with making sure that you have the right people in place that can take that challenge on, because it's not a matter of if it's a matter of when >>I would imagine. Well, Steve, you and I have talked about this, that, you know, the data protection business used to be, we used to call it backup in recovery and security, which is a whole different animal, but they're really starting to come together. It's kind of an Adjay. I, I know you've got this, uh, Maverick report that, that you want to talk about. What, what is that as a new Gartner research? I, I'm not familiar with it. >>Yeah. So it's some very interesting Gartner research and what I think, and I'd be curious to, Tony's take on, especially after that last question is, you know, a lot of people are, are spending a lot of money to keep the bad actors out. Right. And Gardner's philosophy on this whole, um, it's, it's, you're going to get hacked. So embrace the breach, that's their report. Right. So what they're suggesting is you're spending a lot of money, but, but we're witnessing a lot of attacks still coming in. Are you prepared to recover that when it happens? Right. And so their philosophy is it's time to start thinking about the recovery aspects of, you know, if, if they're gonna get through, how do you handle that? Right. >>Well, so you got announcements this week, big one of the big four, I guess, or big five cyber recovery vault. It's been, you're enhancing that you guys are talking things like, you know, air gaps and so forth. Give us the overview of the news there. >>Yeah. So there's, uh, cyber recovery vault for AWS for the cloud. There is, uh, a lot of stuff we're doing with, uh, cyber recovery vault for, uh, Aw, uh, Azure also, right along with the cyber sense technology, which is the technology that scans the data. Once it comes in from the backup to ensure that it clean and can be recovered and you can feel confident that your recoveries look good, right? So now, now you can do that OnPrem, or you can do it through a colo. You can do it with in the cloud, or you can, uh, ask Dell technologies with our apex business services to help provide cyber recovery services wherever for you at your co at yet OnPrem or for you from the cloud. So it's kind of giving the customer, allowing them to keep that freedom of choice of how they want to operate, but provide them those same recovery capabilities. >>So Tony, give us paint us a picture without giving away too much for the bad guys. How, how you approach this, maybe are you using some of these products? What's your sort of infrastructure look like? >>Yeah. Without giving away the state secrets, um, we are heavily invested in the cyber recovery vault and cyber sense. Uh, it plays heavily in our strategy. We wanna make sure we have a safe Harbor for our data. And that's something that, that the Dell power protect cyber recovery vault provides to us. Uh, we're exceptionally excited about the, the development that's going on, especially with apex. We're looking at that, and that has really captured our imagination. It could be a game changer for us as a town because we're, we're a small organization transitioning to a midsize organization and what apex provides and what the Dell cyber recovery vault provides to us. Putting those two together gives us the elasticity we need as a small organization to expand quickly and deal with our internal data concerns. >>So cyber recovery as a service is what you're interested in. Let me ask you a question. Are you interested in a managed service or are you interested in managing it yourself? >>That's a great question, personally. I would prefer that we went with managed services. I think that from a manager's perspective, you get a bigger bang for the buck going with managed services. You have people that work with that technology all the time. You don't have to ramp people up and develop that expertise in house. You also then have that peace of mind that you have more people that are doing the services and it acts as a force multiplier for you. So from a dollar and cents perspective, it's the way that you want to go. When I start talking to my internal people, of course, there's that, that sense of fear that comes with the unknown and especially outsourcing that type of critical infrastructure, the there's some concern there, but I think that with education, with exposure, to some of the things that we get from the managed service, it makes sense for everybody to go that >>Route and, and you can, I presume sort of POC it and then expand it and then get more comfortable with it and then say, okay, when it's hardened and ready now, this is the, the Def facto standard across the organization. >>I suspect we'll end up in a hybrid environment to begin with where we'll some assets on site, and then we'll have some assets in the cloud. And that's again, where apex will be that, that big linchpin for us and really make it all work. How >>Important are air gaps? >>Oh, they're incredibly, incredibly, uh, needed right now. You cannot have true data of security without having an air gap. A lot of the ransomware that we see moves laterally through your organization. So if you have, uh, all your data backed up in the same data center that your, your backups and your primary data sources are in odds are they're all gonna get owned at the same time. So having that air gap solution in there is critical to having the peace of mind that allows the CISO to sleep at night. >>I always tell my crypto and NFT readers, this doesn't apply to data centers. You gotta air back air, air gap, your crypto, you know, when you're NFT. So how do you guys Steve deal with, with air gap? Can you explain the solutions? >>So in the, in the cyber recovery vault itself, it is driven through, uh, you've got one, uh, power protect, uh, appliance on one, one side in your data center, and then wherever your, your, your vaulted area is, whether it be a colo, whether it be on pre wherever it might be. Uh, we create a connection between between the two that is one directional, right? So we send the data to that vault. We call it the vault and, you know, we replicate a copy of your backup data. Once it lives over there, we make a copy of that data. And then what we do is with the cyber sense technology that Tony was talking about, we scan that data and we validate it against, with a whole cyber sense is built on IML machine learning. We look at a couple hundred different kind of profiles that come through and compare it to the, to the day before as backup and the day before that and understand kind of what's changing. >>And is it changing the right way? Right? Like there might be some reasons it it's supposed to change that way. Right. But things that look anomalous, we send up a warning when we let the people know that, you know, whoever's monitoring, something's going on. You might want to take a look. And then based on that, if there's whatever's happening in the environment, we have the ability to then recover that data back to the, to the original system. You can use the vault as a, as a clean room area, if you want to send people to it, depending on kind of what's going on in, in, in your main data center. So there's a lot of things we do to protect that. Do >>You recommend, like changing the timing of when you take, you know, snapshots or you do the same time every day, it's gotta create different patterns or >>I'll tell you that's, that's one thing to keep the, keep the hackers on their tow, right? It it's tough to do operationally, right? Because you kind that's processes. But, but the reality is if you really are that, uh, concerned about attacks, that makes a lot of sense, >>Tony, what's the CISOs number one challenge today? >>Uh, I, it has to be resilience. It has to be making sure your organization that if or when they get hit, that you're able to pick the pieces back up and get the operation back up as quickly and efficiently as possible. Making sure that the, the mission critical data is immediately, uh, recoverable and be able to be put back into play. >>And, and what's the biggest challenge or best practice in terms of doing that? Obviously the technology, the people, the process >>Right now, I would probably say it's it's people, uh, we're going through the, the, um, a period of, of uncertainty in the marketplace when it comes to trying to find people. So it is difficult to find the right people to do certain things, which is why managed services is so important to an organization of our size and, and what we're trying to do, where we are, are incorporating such big ideas. We need those manager services because we just can't find the bodies that can do some of this work. >>You got an interesting background, you a PhD in psychology, you're an educator, you're a golf pro and you're a CISO. I I've never met anybody like you, Tony <laugh>. So, thanks for coming on, Steve, give you the last word. >>Well, I think I, I think one of the things that Tony said, and I wanted to parlay this a little bit, uh, from that Gartner report, I even talked about people is so critical when it comes to cyber resiliency and that sort of thing. And one of the things I talked about in that embraced the breach report is as you're looking to hire staff for your environment, right, you wanna, you know, a lot of people might shy away from hiring that CSO that got fired because they had a cyber event. Right, right. Oh, maybe they didn't do their job. But the reality is, is those folks, because this is very new. I mean, of course we've been talking about cyber for a couple of years, but, but getting that experience under your belt and understanding what happens in the event. I mean, there are a lot of companies that run things like cyber ranges, resiliency, ranges to put people through the paces of, Hey, this is what have happens when an event happens and are you prepared to respond? I think there's a big set of learning lessons that happens when you go through one of those events and it helps kind of educate the people about what's needed. >>It's a great point. Failure used to mean fire right in this industry. And, and today it's different. The adversary is very well armed and quite capable and motivated that learning even during, even when you fail, can be applied to succeed in the future or not fail, I guess there's no such thing as success in your business. Guys. Thanks so much for coming on the cube. Really appreciate your time. Thank you. Thanks very >>Much. >>All right. And thank you for watching the cubes coverage of Dell tech world 2022. This is Dave Valenti. We'll be back with John furrier, Lisa Martin and David Nicholson. Two days of wall to wall coverage left. Keep it with us.

>>Hello, and welcome to today's event, dealing government emergency responses beyond the pandemic. This is Bob Wooley, senior fellow for the center for digital government and formerly the chief tech clerk for the state of Utah. I'm excited to serve as moderator for today's event. And just want to say, thank you for joining us. I know we're in for an informative session over the next 60 minutes before we begin a couple of brief housekeeping notes or recording of this presentation will be emailed to all registrants within 48 hours. You can use the recording for your reference or feel free to pass it along to colleagues. This webcast is designed to be interactive and you can participate in Q and a with us by asking questions at any time during the presentation, you should see a Q and a box on the bottom left of the presentation panel. >>Please send in your questions as they come out throughout the presentation, our speakers will address as many of these questions as we can during the Q and a portion of the close of our webinar today, if you would like to download the PDF of the slides for this presentation, you can do so by clicking the webinar resources widget at the bottom of the console. Also during today's webinar, you'll be able to connect with your peers by LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Please use the hashtag gov tech live to connect with your peers across the government technology platform, via Twitter. At the close of the webinar, we encourage you to complete a brief survey about the presentation. We would like to hear what you think if you're unable to see with us for the entire webinar, but we're just like to complete the survey. As much as you're able, please click the survey widget at the bottom of the screen to launch the survey. Otherwise it will pop up once the webinar concludes at this time, we recommend that you disable your pop-up blockers, and if you experiencing any media player issues or have any other problems, please visit our webcast help guide by clicking on the help button at the bottom of the console. >>Joining me today to discuss this very timely topic are Karen revolt and Tim Burch, Kim Berge currently serves as the administrator of human services for Clark County Nevada. He's invested over 20 years in improving health and human service systems of care or working in the private public and nonprofit sectors. 18 of those years have been in local government in Clark County, Las Vegas, where you served in a variety of capacities, including executive leadership roles as the director of department of social services, as well as the director for the department of family services. He has also served as CEO for provider of innovative hosted software solutions, as well as chief strategy officer for a boutique public sector consulting firm. Karen real-world is the social program management offering lead for government health and human services with IBM Watson health. Karen focuses delivering exciting new offerings by focusing on market opportunities, determining unmet needs and identifying innovative solutions. >>Much of her career has been in health and human services focused on snap, TANIF, Medicaid, affordable care act, and child welfare prior to joining IBM. Karen was the senior director of product management for a systems integrator. She naturally fell in love with being a project manager. She can take her user requirements and deliver offerings. Professionals would use to make their job easier and more productive. Karen has also found fulfillment in working in health and human services on challenges that could possibly impact the outcome of people's lives. Now, before we begin our discussion of the presentation, I want to one, we'd like to learn a little more about you as an audience. So I'm going to ask you a polling question. Please take a look at this. Give us an idea of what is your organization size. I won't bother to read all these to you, but there are other a range of sizes zero to 250 up to 50,000. Please select the one that is most appropriate and then submit. >>It looks like the vast majority are zero to two 50. Don't have too many over 250,000. So this is a very, very interesting piece of information. Now, just to set up our discussion today, what I want to do is just spend just a moment and talk about the issue that we're dealing with. So when you look the COVID-19 pandemic, it's put immense pressure on States. I've been a digital state judge and had been judging a lot of the responses from States around the country. It's been very interesting to me because they bifurcate really into two principle kinds of reactions to the stress providing services that COVID environment present. One is we're in a world of hurt. We don't have enough money. I think I'm going to go home and engage as little as I have to. Those are relatively uncommon. Thankfully, most of them have taken the COVID-19 pandemic has immense opportunity for them to really do a lot more with telework, to do more with getting people, employees, and citizens involved with government services. >>And I've done some really, really creative things along the way. I find that to be a really good thing, but in many States systems have been overloaded as individuals and families throughout the country submitted just an unprecedented number of benefit applications for social services. At the same time, government agencies have had to contend with social distance and the need for a wholly different approach to engage with citizens. Um, overall most public agencies, regardless of how well they've done with technology have certainly felt some strain. Now, today we have the opportunity to go into a discussion with our speakers, have some wonderful experience in these areas, and I'm going to be directing questions to them. And again, we encourage you as you hear what they have to say. Be sure and submit questions that we can pick up later at the time. So Tim, let's start with you. Given that Las Vegas is a hub for hospitality. An industry hit severely as a result of this pandemic. How's the County doing right now and how are you prioritizing the growing needs of the County? >>Thanks Bob. Thanks for having me. Let me start off by giving just a little, maybe context for Clark County too, to our audience today. So, uh, Clark County is, you know, 85% of the state of Nevada if we serve not just as a regional County by way of service provision, but also direct municipal services. Well, if, uh, the famous Las Vegas strip is actually in unincorporated Clark County, and if we were incorporated, we would be the largest city in the state. So I say all of that to kind of help folks understand that we provide a mix of services, not just regional services, like health and human services, the direct and, and missable, uh, services as well as we work with our other five jurisdiction partners, uh, throughout the area. Uh, we are very much, um, I think during the last recession we were called the Detroit of the West. >>And, uh, that was because we're very much seen as a one industry town. Uh, so most like when the car plants, the coal plants closed back East and in the communities fuel that very rapidly, the same thing happens to us when tourism, uh, it's cut. Uh, so of course, when we went into complete shutdown and March, uh, we felt it very rapidly, not just on, uh, uh, tax receipts and collectibles, but the way in which we could deliver services. So of course our first priority was to, uh, like I think you mentioned mobilized staff. We, we mobilized hundreds of staff overnight with laptops and phones and cars and the things they needed to do to get mobile and still provide the priority services that we're mandated to provide from a safety standpoint. Um, and then we got busy working for our clients and that's really where our partnership with IBM and Watson, uh, came in and began planning that in July. And we're able to open that portal up in October to, to really speed up the way in which we're giving assistance to, to our residents. Um, re focus has been on making sure that people stay housed. We have, uh, an estimated, uh, 2.5 million residents and over 150,000 of those households are anticipated to be facing eviction, uh, as of January one. So we, we've got a, a big task ahead of us. >>All of this sounds kind of expensive. Uh, one of the common threads as you know, runs throughout government is, ah, I don't really have the money for that. I think I'd be able to afford that a diaper too, as well. So what types of funding has been made available for counties, a result of a pandemic, >>Primarily our funding stream that we're utilizing to get these services out the door has been the federal cares act. Uh, now we had some jurisdictions regionally around us and even locally that prioritize those funds in a different way. Um, our board of County commissioners, uh, took, um, a sum total of about $85 million of our 240 million that said, this will go directly to residents in the form of rental assistance and basic needs support. No one should lose their home or go hungry during this pandemic. Uh, so we've really been again working through our community partners and through our IBM tools to make sure that happens. >>So how does, how does, how does the cares act funding then support Clark County? Cause it seems to me that the needs would be complex, diverse >>Pretty much so. So as you, as folks may know him a call there's several tronches of the cares act, the original cares act funding that has come down to us again, our board, uh, identified basic needs or rental assistance and, and gave that the department of social service to go to the tunicate, uh, through the community. We then have the cares act, uh, uh, coronavirus relief funds that have, uh, impacted our CDBG and our emergency solutions grants. We've taken those. And that's what we was going to keep a lot of the programs and services, uh, like our IBM Watson portal open past January one when the cares act dollars expire. Uh, our initial response was a very manual one, uh, because even though we have a great home grown homeless management information system, it does not do financials. Uh, so we had 14 local nonprofits adjudicating, uh, this rental assistance program. >>And so we could get our social service visitor portal up, uh, to allow us to take applications digitally and run that through our program. Uh, and, uh, so those partners were obviously very quickly overwhelmed and were able to stand up our portal, uh, which for the reason we were driving so hard, even from, uh, beginning of the conversations where after going into lockdown into contracting in July and getting the portal open in October, which was an amazing turnaround. Uh, so the kudos that IBM team, uh, for getting us up and out the door so quickly, uh, was a tie in, uh, to our, uh, Curam IBM, uh, case management system that we utilize to adjudicate benefits on daily basis in Clark County for all our local indigent population, uh, and high needs folks. Uh, and then that ties into our SAP IBM platform, which gets the checks out the door. >>So what, what we've been able to do with these dollars is created in Lucian, uh, that has allowed us in the last 60 days to get as much money out the door, as our nonprofits were able go out the door in the first six months pandemic. So it really has helped us. Uh, so I'm really grateful to our board of County commissioners for recognizing the investment in technology to, to not only get our teams mobile, but to create ease of access for our constituents and our local residents to give them the help they need quickly and the way that they need it. >>Just to follow up question to that, Tim, that I'm curious about having done a lot of work like this in government, sometimes getting procurement through in a timely way is a bit challenging. How were you able to work through those issues and getting this up and provision so quickly? >>Uh, yeah, so we, we put together a, what we call a pandemic playbook, which is kind of lessons learned. And what we've seen is the folks who were essential workers in the first 60 days of the, uh, pandemic. We were able to get a lot done quickly because we were taking full advantage of the emergency. Uh, it may sound a little crass to folks not inside the service world, but it was, uh, you know, don't want you to crisis. It was things we've been planning or trying to do for years. We need them yesterday. We should have had them yesterday, but let's get them tomorrow and get it moving very quickly. Uh, this IBM procurement was something we were able to step through very quickly because of our longstanding relationship. Our countywide, uh, system of record for our financials is SAP. Uh, we've worked with Curam, uh, solution, uh, for years. >>So we've got this long standing relationship and trust in the product and the teams, which helped us build the business case of why we did it, no need to go out for competitive procurement that we didn't have time. And we needed something that would integrate very quickly into our existing systems. Uh, so that part was there. Now when the folks who were non essential came back in June and the reopening, it was whiplash, uh, the speed at which we were moving, went back to the pace of normal business, uh, which feels like hitting a wall, doing a hundred miles an hour when you're used to having that, uh, mode of doing business. Uh, so that's certainly been a struggle, uh, for all of those involved, uh, in trying to continue to get things up. Um, but, uh, once again, the teams have been great because we've probably tripled our licensure on this portal since we opened it, uh, because of working with outside vendors, uh, to, uh, literally triple the size of our staff that are processing these applications by bringing on temporary staff, uh, and short-term professionals. Uh, and so we've been able to get those things through, uh, because we'd already built the purchasing vehicle during the early onset of the crisis. >>That's very helpful. Karen, IBM has played a really pivotal role in all of this. Uh, IBM Watson health works with a number of global government agencies, raging from counties like Clark County to federal governments. What are some of the major challenges you've seen with your clients as a result of the pandemic and how is technology supporting them in a time of need and give us some background Watson health too. So we kind of know a little more about it because this is really a fascinating area. >>Yeah. Thank you, Bob. And thanks Tim for the background on Clark County, because I think Clark County is definitely also an example of what federal governments and global governments are doing worldwide today. So, um, Watson health is our division within IBM where we really focus on health and human services. And our goal is to really focus in on, um, the outcomes that we're providing to individuals and families and looking at how we use data and insights to really make that impact and that change. And within that division, we have our government health and human services area, which is the focus of where we are with our clients around social program. But it also allows us to work with, um, different agencies and really look at how we can really move the ball in terms of, um, effecting change and outcomes for, um, really moving the needle of how we can, uh, make an impact on individuals and families. >>So as we look at the globe globally as well, you know, everything that Tim had mentioned about how the pandemic has really changed the way that government agencies operate and how they do services, I think it's amazing that you have that pandemic playbook because a lot of agencies in the same way also had these set of activities that they always wanted to go and take part on, but there was no impetus to really allow for that to happen. And with the pandemic, it allowed that to kind of open and say, okay, we can try this. And unfortunately I'm in a very partial house way to do that. And, um, what Tim has mentioned about the new program that they set up for the housing, some of those programs could take a number of years to really get a program online and get through and allowing, uh, the agencies to be able to do that in a matter of weeks is amazing. >>And I think that's really gonna set a precedent as we go forward and how you can bring on programs such as the housing and capability in Canada with the economic, uh, social, um, uh, development and, and Canada need that the same thing. They actually had a multi benefit delivery system that was designed to deliver benefits for three programs. And as part of the department of fisheries and oceans Canada, the, um, the state had an emergency and they really need to set up on how they could provide benefits to the fishermen who had been at that impacted, um, from that. And they also did set up a digital front-end using IBM citizen engagement to start to allow the applications that benefits, um, and they set it up in a matter of weeks. And as I mentioned, we, uh, Clark County had a backend legacy system where they could connect to and process those applications. And this case, this is a brand new program and the case management system that they brought up was on cloud. And they had to set up a new one, but allow them to set up a, what we used to call straight through processing, I think has been now turned, turned or coined contact less, uh, processing and allowing us to really start to move those benefits and get those capabilities out to the citizens in even a faster way than has been imagined. Uh, pre pandemic. >>Karen, I have one follow-up question. I want to ask you, having had a lot of experience with large projects in government. Sometimes there's a real gap between getting to identified real requirements and then actions. How do you, how do you work with clients to make sure that process time to benefit is shortened? >>So we really focus on the user themselves and we take a human centered design focus and really prioritizing what those needs are. Um, so working with the clients, uh, effectively, and then going through agile iterations of brain, that capability out as, um, in, in a phased approach to, so the idea of getting what we can bring out that provides quality and capability to the users, and then over time starting to really roll out additional functions and, um, other, uh, things that citizens or individuals and families would need >>Very helpful. Tim, this is an interesting partnership. It's always good to see partnerships between private sector and government. Tell us a little bit about how the partnership with IBM Watson health was established and what challenges or they were brought into assist, where they brought into assist with back to requirements. Again, within the requirements definitely shifted on us. You know, we had the con looking at, uh, Watson on our child welfare, uh, side of the house that I'm responsible for and how that we could, uh, increase access to everything from tele-health to, to, uh, foster parent benefit, uh, kinship, placement benefits, all those types of things that, that right now are very manual, uh, on the child welfare side. Uh, and then the pandemic kid. And we very quickly realized that we needed, uh, to stand up a, um, a new program because, uh, a little bit for context, uh, the park County, we don't administer TANIF or Medicaid at the County level. >>It is done at the state level. So we don't have, uh, unemployment systems or Medicaid, 10 of snap benefits systems to be able to augment and enroll out. We provide, uh, the indigent supports the, the homelessness prevention, referee housing continuum of care, long-term care, really deep emergency safety net services for our County, which is a little bit different and how those are done. So that was really our focus, which took a lot of in-person investigation. We're helping people qualify for disability benefits so they can get into permanent supportive housing, uh, things that are very intensive. And yet now we have a pandemic where we need things to happen quickly because the cares act money expires at the end of December. And people were facing eviction and eviction can help spread exposure to, to COVID. Uh, so, uh, be able to get in and very rapidly, think about what is the minimal pelvis to MVP. >>What's the minimum viable product that we can get out the door that will help people, uh, entrance to a system as contactless as possible, which again was a complete one 80 from how we had been doing business. Um, and, uh, so the idea that you could get on and you have this intelligent chat bot that can walk you through questions, help you figure out if you look like you might be eligible, roll you right into an application where you can upload the few documents that we're going to require to help verify your coat would impact and do that from a smartphone and under, you know, 20 minutes. Um, it, it, it is amazing. And the fact that we've stood that up and got it out the door in 90 days, it's just amazing to me, uh, when it shows the, uh, strength of partnership. Um, I think we can, we have some shared language because we had that ongoing partnership, but we were able to actually leverage some system architects that we had that were familiar with our community and our other products. So it really helped expedite, uh, getting this, uh, getting this out to the citizens. >>So, uh, I assume that there are some complexities in doing this. So overall, how has this deployment of citizen engagement with Watson gone and how do you measure success other than you got it out quick? How do you know if it's working? >>Yeah. Right. So it's the adage of, you know, quick, fast and good, right. Um, or fast, good and cheap. So, uh, we measure success in this way. Um, how are we getting access as our number one quality measurement here? So we were able to collect, uh, about 13,000 applications, uh, manual NRC, manually folks had to go onto our website, download a PDF, fill it out, email it, or physically drop it off along with their backup. One of their choice of 14 non-profits in town, whichever is closest to them. Um, and, uh, and then wait for that process. And they were able to get 13,000 of those, uh, process for the last six months. Uh, we have, I think we had about 8,000 applications the first month come into the portal and about an equal amount of folks who could not provide the same documentation that it was needed. >>And self-selected out. If we had not had the, the tool in place, we would have had 16,000 applications, half of which would have been non-eligible would have been jamming up the system, uh, when we don't have the bandwidth to deal to deal with that, we, we need to be able to focus in on, uh, Judy Kenny applications that we believe are like a 95% success rate from the moment our staff gets them, but because we have the complex and he was on already being dependent upon the landlord, having to verify the rent amount and be willing to work with us, um, which is a major hurdle. Um, but, uh, so w we knew we could not do is go, just reinvent the manual process digitally that that would have been an abject failure on our behalf. So, uh, the ideas that, uh, folks had can go on a very, had this very intuitive conversation to the chat bot, answer some questions and find out if they're eligible. >>And then self-select out was critical for us to not only make sure that the citizens got the help they needed, but not so burnt out and overload our workforce, which is already feeling the strain of the COVID pandemic on their own personal lives and in their homes and in the workplace. Um, so that was really critical for us. So it's not just about speed, ease of access was important. Uh, the ability to quickly automate things on the fly, uh, we have since changed, uh, the area median income, a qualifier for the rental assistance, because we were able to reallocate more money, uh, to the program. So we were able to open it up to more people. We were able to make that, uh, change to the system very quickly. Uh, the idea that we can go on the home page and put updates, uh, we recognized that, uh, some of our monolingual Hispanic residents were having difficulty even with some guidance getting through the system. >>So we're able to record a, a Spanish language walkthrough and get done on the home page the next day, right into the fordable, there'll be a fine, so they could literally run the YouTube video while they're walking through their application. Side-by-side so things like that, that those are how we are able to, for us measured success, not just in the raw dollars out the door, not just in the number of applications that have come in, but our ability to be responsive when we hear from our constituents and our elected officials that, Hey, I want, I appreciate the 15,000 applications as you all, a process and record time, I've got three, four, five, six, 10 constituents that having this type of problem and be able to go back and retool our systems to make them more intuitive, to do, be able to keep them responsive for us is definitely a measure of success and all of this, probably more qualitative than here we're looking >>For, but, uh, that's for us, that's important. Actually the qualitative side is what usually gets ignored. Uh, Karen, I've got a question that's a follow up for you on the same topic. How does IBM facilitate reporting within this kind of an environment given the different needs of stakeholders, online managers and citizens? What kinds of things do you, are you able to do >>So with, um, the influx of digitalization? I think it allows us to really take a more data-driven approach to start looking at that. So, as, as Tim was mentioning, you can see where potentially users are spending more time on certain questions, or if they're stuck on a question, you can see where the abandoned rate is. So using a more data-driven approach to go in to identify, you know, how do we actually go and, um, continue to drive that user experience that may not be something that we drive directly from the users. So I would say that analytics is really, uh, I think going to continue to be a driving force as government agencies go forward, because now they are capturing the data. But one thing that they have to be careful of is making sure that the data that they're getting is the right data to give them the information, to make the right next steps and decisions. >>And Tim, you know, use a really good example with, um, the chatbot in terms of, you know, with the influx of everything going on with COVID, the citizens are completely flooded with information and how do they get the right information to actually help them decide, can I apply for this chap program? Or should I, you know, not even try and what Tim mentioned just saved the citizens, you know, the people that may not be eligible a lot of time and going through and applying, and then getting denied by having that upfront, I have questions and I need answers. Um, so again, more data-driven of how do we provide that information? And, you know, we've seen traditionally citizens having to go on multiple website, web pages to get an answer to the question, because they're like, I think I have a question in this area, but I'm not exactly sure. And they, then they're starting to hunt and hunt and hunt and not even potentially get an answer. So the chocolate really like technology-wise helps to drive, you know, more data-driven answers to what, um, whether it's a citizen, whether it's, um, Tim who needs to understand how and where my citizens getting stuck, are they able to complete the application where they are? Can we really get the benefits to, um, this individual family for the housing needs >>Too many comments on the same thing. I know you have to communicate measures of success to County executives and others. How do you do that? I mean, are you, do you have enough information to do it? Yeah, we're able to, we actually have a standup meeting every morning where the first thing I learn is how many new applications came in overnight. How many of those were completed with full documentation? How many will be ported over into our system, assigned the staff to work, where they're waiting >>On landlord verification. So I can see the entire pipeline of applications, which helps us then determine, um, Oh, it's, it's not, you know, maybe urban legend is that folks are having difficulty accessing the system. When I see really the bottleneck there, it got gotten the system fine, the bottlenecks laying with our landlord. So let's do a landlord, a town hall and iterate and reeducate them about what their responsibilities are and how easy it is for them to respond with the form they need to attest to. And so it lets us see in real time where we're having difficulties, uh, because, uh, there's a constant pressure on this system. Not just that, uh, we don't want anyone to lose their home, uh, but these dollars also go away within a December. So we've got this dual pressure of get it right and get it right now. >>Uh, and so th the ability to see these data and these metrics on, on a daily basis is critical for us to, to continue to, uh, ModuLite our response. Um, and, and not just get comfortable are baked into well, that's why we developed the flowchart during requirements, and that's just the way things are gonna stay. Uh, that's not how you respond to a pandemic. Uh, and so having a tool and a partner that helps us, uh, stay flexible, state agile, I guess, to, to, to leverage some terminology, uh, is important. And, and it's, it's paid dividends for our citizens. Karen, again, is another up to the same thing. I'm kind of curious about one of the problems of government from time to time. And Tim, I think attest to this is how do you know when Dunn has been reached? How did you go about defining what done would look like for the initial rollout with this kind of a customer? >>So I think Doug, I guess in this case, um, is, is this, isn't able to get the benefits that they're looking for and how do we, uh, you know, starting from, I think what we were talking about earlier, like in terms of requirements and what is the minimum viable, um, part of that, and then you start to add on the bells and whistles that we're really looking to do. So, um, you know, our team worked with him to really define what are those requirements. I know it's a new program. So some of those policy decisions were still also being worked out as the requirements were being defined as well. So making sure that you are staying on top of, okay, what are the key things and what do we really need to do from a compliance standpoint, from a functionality, and obviously, um, the usability of how, uh, an assistant can come on and apply and, um, have those, uh, requirements, make sure that you can meet that, that version before you start adding on additional scope. >>Very helpful. Jim, what's your comment on this since I know done matters to you? Yeah. And look, I I've lived through a, again, multiple, uh, county-wide it implementations and some department wide initiatives as well. So I think we know that our staff always want more so nothing's ever done, uh, which is a challenge and that's on our side of the customer. Um, but, uh, for this, it really was our, our experience of recognizing the, the time was an essence. We didn't have a chance. We didn't have, uh, the space to get into these endless, uh, conversations, uh, the agile approach, rather than doing the traditional waterfall, where we would have been doing requirements tracking for months before we ever started coding, it was what do we need minimally to get a check in the hands of a landlord on behalf of a client, so they don't get evicted. >>And we kept just re honing on that. That's nice. Let's put that in the parking lot. We'll come back to it because again, we want to leverage this investment long term, uh, because we've got a we, and we've got the emergency solutions and CDBG, and then our, uh, mainstream, uh, services we brought on daily basis, but we will come back to those things speed and time are of the essence. So what do we need, uh, to, to get this? So a chance to really, um, educate our staff about the concepts of agile iteration, um, and say, look, this is not just on the it side. We're gonna roll a policy out today around how you're doing things. And we may figure out through data and metrics that it's not working next week, and we'll have to have that. You want it. And you're going to get the same way. >>You're getting updated guidance from the CDC on what to do and what not to do. Uh, health wise, you're getting the same from us, uh, and really to helping the staff understand that process from the beginning was key. And, uh, so, and, and that's, again, partnering with, with our development team in that way was helpful. Um, because once we gave them that kind of charter as I am project champion, this is what we're saying. They did an equally good job of staying on task and getting to the point of is this necessary or nice. And if it wasn't necessary, we put it in the nice category and we'll come back to it. So I think that's really helpful. My experience having done several hundred sheet applications also suggest the need for MBP matters, future stages really matter and not getting caught. My flying squirrels really matters. So you don't get distracted. So let's move on to, let's do a polling question before we go on to some of our other questions. So for our audience, do you have a digital front ends for your benefit delivery? Yes, no. Or we're planning to a lot of response here yet. There we go. Looks like about half, have one and half note. So that's an interesting question. What's going to one more polling question, learn a little more here. Has COVID-19 >>Accelerated or moved cloud. Yes, no. We already run a majority of applications on cloud. Take a moment and respond if you would, please. So this is interesting. No real acceleration was taken place and in terms of moving to cloud is not what I was expecting, but that's interesting. So let's go onto another question then. And Karen, let me direct this one to you, given that feedback, how do you envision technologies such as citizen engagement and watching the system will be used, respond to emergency situations like the pandemic moving forward? I mean, what should government agencies consider given the challenges? This kind of a pandemic is brought upon government and try to tie this in, if you would, what, what is the role of cloud in all of this for making this happen in a timely way? Karen, take it away. >>Okay. Thanks Bob. So as we started the discussion around the digital expansion, you know, we definitely see additional programs and additional capabilities coming online as we continue on. Um, I think, uh, agencies have really seen a way to connect with their citizens and families and landlords, um, in this case an additional way. And he prepared them like there were, uh, presuppose assumptions that the, um, the citizens or landlords really wanted to interact with agency face-to-face and have that high touch part. And I think, um, through this, the governments have really learned that there is a way to still have an impact on the citizen without having a slow, do a face to face. And so I think that's a big realization for them to now really explore other ways to digitally explain, expand their programs and capabilities. Another area that we touched on was around the AI and chat bot piece. >>So as we start to see capabilities like this, the reason why Clark County was able to bring it up quickly and everything was because it was housed on cloud, we are seeing the push of starting to move some of the workloads. I know from a polling question perspective that it's been, um, lighter in terms of getting, uh, moving to the cloud. But we have seen the surge of really chatbots. I think we've been talking about chatbots for a while now. And, um, agencies hadn't really had the ability to start to implement that and really put it into effect. But with the pandemic, they were able to bring things up and, you know, very short amount of time to solve, um, a big challenge of not having the call center be flooded and have a different way to direct that engagement between the citizen and the government. >>So really building a different type of channel for them to engage rather than having to call or to come into an office, which wasn't really allowed in terms of, um, the pandemic. Um, the other thing I'll touch on is, um, 10 mentioned, you know, the backlog of applications that are coming in and we're starting to see the, um, the increase in automation. How do we automate areas where it's administratively highly burdened, but it's really a way that we can start to automate those processes, to give our workers the ability to focus on more of those complex situations that really need attention. So we're starting to see where the trends of trying to push there of can we automate some of those processes, um, uh, uploading documents and verification documents is another way of like, trying to look at, is there a way that we can make that easier? >>Not only for the applicant that's applying, but also for the caseworker. So there's not having to go through that. Um, does the name match, um, the applicant, uh, information and what we're looking on here, and Bob, you mentioned cloud. So behind the scenes of, you know, why, uh, government agencies are really pushing the cloud is, um, you heard about, I mean, with the pandemic, you see a surge of applicants coming in for those benefits and how do we scale for that kind of demand and how do you do that in an inappropriate way, without the huge pressures that you put on to your data center or your staff who's already trying to help our citizens and applicants, applicants, and families get the benefits they need. And so the cloud, um, you know, proposition of trying, being able to be scalable and elastic is really a key driver that we've seen in terms of, uh, uh, government agencies going to cloud. >>We haven't really seen during a pandemic, the core competencies, some of them moving those to cloud, it's really been around that digital front end, the chat bot area of how do we start to really start with that from a cloud perspective and cloud journey, and then start to work in the other processes and other areas. Um, security is also huge, uh, focus right now with the pandemic and everything going online. And with cloud allows you to be able to make sure that you're secure and be able to apply the right security so that you're always covered in terms of the type of demand and, um, impact, uh, that is coming through >>Very helpful. Tim, I'm going to ask to follow up on this of a practical nature. So you brought this up very quickly. Uh, there's a certain amount of suspicion around state government County government about chatbots. How did you get a chat much and be functional so quickly? And were you able to leverage the cloud in this process? Yeah, so on the trust is important. Uh, and I'll go back to my previous statement about individuals being able to see upfront whether they believe they're eligible or not, because nothing will erode trust more than having someone in hours applying and weeks waiting to find out they were denied because they weren't eligible to begin with, uh, that erodes trust. So being able to let folks know right up front, here's what it looks like to be eligible, actually help us build some of that, uh, cause they don't feel like, uh, someone in the bureaucracy is just putting them through the ringer for no reason. >>Um, now in regard to how do we get the chat bot out? I will say, uh, we have a, uh, dynamic it and leadership, uh, team at the highest level of County government who we have been already having conversations over the last year about what it meant to be smart government, uh, the department of social service and family services that I'm responsible for. We're already, uh, hands up first in line, you know, Guinea pigs volunteering to be on the front end of, uh, certain projects. So w we have primed ourselves for, for some of this readiness in that aspect. Um, but for citizen trust, um, the timeliness of application right now is the biggest element of trust. Uh, so I've applied I've I feel like I put my housing future in your hands. Are you going to deliver and having the ability for us to rapidly scale up? >>Uh, we typically have 120 staff in the department of social service that, that are adjudicating benefits for programs on daily basis. We've doubled that with temporary staff, uh, through some partnerships, uh, we're, we're gonna, as of next week, probably have more temporary per professional staff helping an adjudicator applications. No, do full-time County staff, because again, this rush to get the dollars out, out the door. So having a system where I can easily, uh, ramp on new users and manage them without having to be solely dependent upon an already, uh, overworked it staff who were trying to support 37 other departments in the County, um, around infrastructure needs has been greatly helpful. Sounds to me like a strong outcome focus and one that seems to work. Let's move on now to our audience questions. We're getting close to the end of our time. So let's jump into some questions from the audience. A number of you have been asking about getting copies of today's presentation within the next 48 hours. Government technology will provide all attendees with the link to the recording for your reference, or to share with colleagues. Well, let's go to our first question. So this is an interesting one. And Karen, this is for you did IBM work with other counties and States to provide digital engagement portals. >>We did Bob, uh, we've worked, um, so globally we've provided guidance on this. We work closely with New York city. They've been the integral part of the development also with our citizen engagement offering. Um, we work closely with the States. So we worked with New York city. Um, North Carolina was also another state who, um, improved their, uh, citizen engagement piece, bring up their Medicaid and snap, um, applications along with Medicaid. COVID testing along that. And I mentioned, um, the economic and social development in Canada as well. And we also work with the ministry of social development in Singapore. So a number of our customers had put up, uh, a global, uh, or sorry, a citizen engagement frontend. And during this timeframe, >>Very helpful. I don't know how much did you hear your mom provide you, but how much did it cost for initial deployment and what are the ongoing costs in other words, is this thing going to be sustainable over time? >>Yeah, absolutely. So total, uh, to date, we've spent about a $1.8 million on development implementations and licensure. A big chunk of that again has been the rapid extended of licensure, uh, for this program. Um, I think over a third of that is probably licensing because again, we need to get the dollars out and we need staff to do that and making the short term several hundred thousand dollar investment in a professional support staff and having them be able to work this portal is much cheaper than the long-term investment of bringing on a staff, printing a job, uh, during a financial difficulty that we're facing, uh, the single largest fiscal cliff let's get into that us history. Um, so it's not smart to create jobs that have a 30 year, one way to retirement, uh, inside our in unionized government environment here. So having this, the staff that would come on and do this and get out the door on these federal dollars was critical for us. Um, and there is a $800,000 a year, I believe so ongoing costs associated with licensure and, and the programming support. Uh, but once again, we're going to be moving, um, our traditional services into this digital front end. We'll be continuing this because we're, we're, we're facing, it took us, I think, six and a half, seven years to come back from the previous recession. Undoubtedly, take a little longer to get back >>From this one. Here's another interesting question, I guess really primarily Tim Tim was the solution on primarily on premise or in the cloud. >>So we'll, we've done a mix. Uh, the, and I'm starting a lot of feedbacks. I don't know if you all can hear that or not, but the, uh, I think we went on prem for, uh, some people because of the, uh, bridge into our service case manager system, which is on prem. So we did some management there. I do believe the chat bot piece of it though is in the cloud. So we're bringing it down to, from one system to the other. Uh, and, and part of that was a student negotiations and costs and worrying about what long-term is that we have a very stated goal of moving, uh, our Curam platform, which is on-prem, this is the backend. So how are we? We, we set our IBM Watson, uh, portal up, uh, and moving all of that on cloud, uh, because I mean, we've got, uh, a workforce who, uh, has the ability to retire at a very high rate over the next five years. >>And, uh, having 24 seven support in the cloud is, is as a, someone who would be called to respond to emergency situations like the is, is a much better Cod deal for, for myself and the citizen. So migrating, uh, and, um, our typical on-prem stuff up into the cloud, uh, as we continue on this, uh, evolution of what IBM Watson, uh, and the plug into our Curam, uh, system looks like Karen related question for another user is the portal provided with Clara County and others linked to other third-party backend office apps, or can it be, >>Yeah, the answer is it can be it's interoperable. So through APIs, uh, rest, uh, however, um, assistance that they need to be integrated with can definitely be integrated with, uh, like, uh, Tim mentioned, we, we went to the case management solution, but it can be integrated with other applications as well. >>Tim, did you use some other backend third party apps with yours? Uh, we did not. Uh, again, just for speed of getting, uh, this MVP solution out the door. Uh, now what we do with that on the go forward, it is going to look different and probably will include some, another practical question. Given the cares funding should be expended by December. Can this application even be employed at this late date? And you want to take a cut at that? Yeah, for us, uh, once again, we brought up earlier, um, the emergency solutions grants and the community development block grants, which have a Corona virus, uh, CV traunch, each one of those, and those have two to three year expenditure timeframes on them. Uh, so we were going to leverage those to keep this system and some of these programs going once again, that the housing needs, uh, will outstrip our capacity for years to come. >>I guess probably I should have said upfront Las Vegas has one of the worst affordable housing inventories in the nation. Uh, so we know we're going to be facing a housing issue, um, because of this for, for a long time. So we'll be using those two traunches of dollars, ESE, ESPs, uh, CV CDBG, CB funds, uh, in addition to dollars earmarked through some, uh, recreational marijuana license fees that have been dedicated to our homelessness. And when you consider this housing, uh, stability program was part of that homelessness prevention. That's our funding mix locally. Very helpful. So questions maybe for bolts for you on this one, you can probably also teach respond is the system has been set up helping the small business community. Um, this user's been canvassing and the general feeling is that small businesses have been left behind and they've been unable to access funds. What's your response on that? Karen, do you want to take that first? >>Um, yes. So in terms of, uh, the security and sorry. Um, but, uh, can you repeat the last part of that? I just missed the last part when you >>Behind it, but unable to access funds. >>Uh, yeah, so I think from a funding perspective, there's different types of, I think what Tim mentioned in terms of the cares funding, there was different types of funding that came out from a government perspective. Uh, I think there were also other grants and things that are coming out one, uh, that we're still looking at. And I think as we go into the new year, it'll be interesting to see, you know, what additional funding, um, hopefully is, is provided. Uh, but in terms of creativity, we've seen other creative ways that organizations come together to kind of, uh, help with the different agencies, to provide some, some guidance to the community, um, and helping to, uh, provide efforts and, uh, maybe looking at different ways of, um, providing, uh, some of the capabilities that the, either at the County or at the state level that they're able to leverage. But Tim happy to maybe have you chime in here too. >>Yeah. So I'll first start with my wheelhouse and I'll expand out to, to some of my partners. Uh, so the primary, small business, we knew the idea was a daily basis inside this realm is going to be landlords. Uh, so actually this afternoon, we're doing a town hall with folks to be able to roll out, uh, which they will go to our portal to find a corporate landlord program. Uh, so that I seem a landlord for Camille the application pack and on behalf of a hundred residents, rather than us having to adjudicate a hundred individual applications and melon a hundred checks. Uh, so that is because we were listening to that particular segment of the, uh, the business community. Now I know early on, we were, we were really hoping that the, the paycheck protection program federally would have, uh, been dispersed in a way that helped our local small businesses. >>Uh, more we did a, our economic development team did a round of small business supports through our cares act. Uh, our quarterly unfortunate was not open yet. It was just about 15, 20 days shy. So we use, uh, another traditional grant mechanism that we have in place to dedicate that. Uh, but on a go forward board, willing to Congress passes something over the next 30 days, um, that if there's a round two of cares or some other programs, we absolutely now have a tool that we know we can create a digital opening for individuals to come figure out if they're eligible or not for whatever program it is, the it housing, the it, uh, small business operations supports, uh, and it would apply through that process and in a very lightweight, so we're looking forward to how we can expand our footprint to help all of the needs that are present in our community. This leads to another question which may be our last one, but this is an interesting question. How can agencies use COVID-19 as a proof point providing a low cost configurable solutions that can scale across government. Karen, do you want to respond to that? And then Tim also, >>Thanks, Bob. So I believe like, you know, some of the things that we've said in terms of examples of how we were able to bring up the solution quicker, I definitely see that scaling as you go forward and trying to really, um, focus in on the needs and getting that MVP out the door. Uh, and then Tim alluded to this as well. A lot of the change management processes that went into re-imagining what these processes look like. I definitely see a additional, you know, growth mindset of how do we get better processes in place, or really focusing on the core processes so that we can really move the ball forward and continuing to go that path of delivering on a quicker path, uh, leveraging cloud, as we mentioned of, um, some, some of the capabilities around the chat bot and other things to really start to push, um, uh, the capabilities out to those citizens quicker and really reduce that timeline that we have to take on the backend side, um, that that would be our hope and goal, um, given, you know, sort of what we've been able to accomplish and hoping using that as a proof point of how we can do this for other types of, uh, either programs or other processes. >>Yeah, I think, um, the, you know, the tool has given us capability now there, whether we use local leaders leverage that to the fullest really becomes a coming upon us. So do we take a beat, uh, when we can catch our breath and then, you know, work through our executive leadership to say, look, here's all the ways you can use this tool. You've made an enterprise investment in. Um, and I know for us, uh, at Clark County, we've stood up, uh, enterprise, uh, kind of governance team where we can come and talk through all of our enterprise solutions, uh, encourage our other department head peers, uh, to, to examine how you might be able to use this. Is there a way that, um, you know, parks and rec might use this to better access their scholarship programs to make sure that children get into youth sports leagues and don't get left out, uh, because we know youth suicide on the rise and they need something positive to do when this pandemic is clear, I'm there for them to get out and do those things. >>So the possibilities really are out there. It really becomes, um, how do we mind those internally? And I know that being a part of listservs and, uh, you know, gov tech and all the magazines and things are out there to help us think about how do we better use our solutions, um, as well as our IBM partners who are always eager to say, Hey, have you seen how they're using this? Um, it is important for us to continue to keep our imaginations open, um, so that we continue to iterate through this process. Um, cause I, I would hate to see the culture of, um, iteration go away with this pandemic. >>Okay. We have time for one final question. We've already addressed this in part two, and this one is probably for you and that you've used the cares act to eliminate some of the procurement red tape that's shown up. Well, how do you somehow that's been very positive. How do you see that impacting you going forward? What happens when the red tape all comes back? >>Yeah, so I think I mentioned a little bit, uh, about that when some of the folks who are deemed non essential came back during our reopening phases and they're operating at the speed of prior business and red tape where we had all been on this, these green tape, fast tracks, uh, it, it was a bit of a organizational whiplash. Uh, but it, for us, we've had the conversation with executive management of like, we cannot let this get in the way of what our citizens need. So like keep that pressure on our folks to think differently. Don't and, uh, we've gone so far as to, uh, even, uh, maybe take it a step further and investigate what had been done in, in, in Canada. Some other places around, um, like, like going right from in a 48 hour period, going from a procurement statement through a proof of concept and doing purchasing on the backside, like how can we even get this even more streamlined so that we can get the things we need quickly, uh, because the citizens don't understand, wait, we're doing our best, uh, your number 3000 and queue on the phone line that that's not what they need to hear or want to hear during times of crisis. >>Very helpful. Well, I want to be respectful of our one hour commitment, so we'll have to wrap it up here in closing. I want to thank everyone for joining us for today's event and especially a big, thank you goes to Karen and Tim. You've done a really great job of answering a lot of questions and laying this out for us and a special thanks to our partners at IBM for enabling us to bring this worthwhile discussion to our audience. Thanks once again, and we look forward to seeing you at another government technology event,

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS >>reinvent 2020 sponsored >>by Intel, AWS and our community partners. Welcome back to the cubes. Virtual coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. It's virtual this year. We're not in person, so we're doing remote interviews. Part of the three weeks we'll be covering wall to wall a lot of great conversations. News to cover and joining me today Off Fresh off the news off Andy Jackson's keynote, We have two great guests here. Jason Kapoor, senior product manager for Accelerated Computing at A. W S and eight time Medina Chief business officer, Havana Labs, which was recently acquired by Intel Folks. Thanks for coming on, gentlemen. Thank you for spending the time for coming on the key. Appreciate it. >>Thanks for having us. >>J Town. So talk about the news, actually. Uh, computers changing. It's being reinvented. That's the theme from Andy's keynote. What did Andy announced? Could you take a minute to explain the announcement? What services? What ap What's gonna be supported? What's this about? Take a minute to explain. >>Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So today >>we >>announced our plans to launch and easy to instance based on hardware accelerators from Havana labs. We expect these businesses to be available in the first time from next year. And these air custom designed for accelerating training off deep learning models, a zoo we all know like training of deep learning models is a really competition. Aly extensive task. Oftentimes it takes too long and cost too much. And we're really excited about getting these instances out of the market as we expect for them to provide up to 40% better price performance. Thani on top of the line GPU instances, >>a lot of improvements. Why did anybody do this? Why heaven or what's the what the working backwards document tell you? What is it customers looking for here is or specific use case? >>Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, over the years, uh, the use of machine learning and deep learning has, like, really skyrocketed, right? So we're seeing companies from all the way like 14, 500 to like start ups just reinventing their business models and use using deep learning more pervasively. Right. So we have companies like Pinterest, you know, you'd use deep learning for content recommendations and object detection to Toyota Research Institute that are advancing the science behind autonomous vehicles. And there's a consistent cream from a lot of these customers that are, you know, innovating in the deep learning space that you know the cost it takes to experiment, train and optimize the deep learning models. It's too high. And, you know, they're looking at us as one of their partners to help them optimize their costs, you know, bring them as well as possible while giving them really performing products and enable them to actually bring their markets, their innovations to market as soon as possible. Right? S o. Do you answer your questions straight on your wants? The working backwards. It's a feedback from customers that they want choice on. They want our help Thio lower. Uh, the amount of compute resources and the cost it takes to train the new planning models. >>Hey, Tom, why don't you weigh in here on Havana and now part of intel? What trends are driving this? What's the motivation? Were you guys fit in? What's your view on this? >>Yeah, So Havana was founded in 2016 to deliver a I processors for the data center and cloud for training and inference deep learning models. So while building chips is hard, building, the software and ecosystem is even harder. So joining forces with intel simply helps us connect the dots. Ever since the acquisition last year, we were able to significantly boost our armed. The resource is, and now we're leveraging inter scale in number of customers and ecosystem and partner support. >>So what's the name of the product? Is there a chip name got? Was it Gowdy is the name? >>Yes, the product is man angle. >>Okay. And so it's gonna be hardware. So it's the hardware software. What's involved? Take us through the product. >>Yes. So Gandhi was designed from the ground up to do one task which is training deep learning models. To do that well, we focus the architectural to aspect efficiency and scalability. The computer architectures is a combination of fully programmable TPC tensile process, of course, and a central g M n G. These DPC course are programmable Villa W seen the machines that we designed with custom instruction, set architecture, er and special functions that will developed specifically for a I. The Gandhi cheap integrates also 32 gigabyte off H B M to memory which makes it easy to port to. For GPU developers, Gandhi is unique in integrating 10 parts of 100 gigabit Internet rocky on cheap. And this is opposed to other architectural, which use proprietary interfaces. So overall, improving the cost performance is achieved through efficiency, namely higher utilization off the computer and memory resource is on cheap and the native integration off the rocky interfaces >>J Town. This is actually interesting, as this is the theme for reinvent. We're seeing it right on stage today. Play out again another command performance by Andy Jassy. Slew of announcements. How does Gowdy fit into the AI portfolio or Amazon strategy? Because what a town saying is it sounds like he's doing the heavy lifting on all this training stuff when people want to just get to the outcome. I mean, the theme has been, just let the product do what they do kind of put stuff under the covers and just let it scale. Is that the theme here is this. >>What does this >>all fit in? Take us through how this fits into the A, I strategy for Amazon and also what what what is Havana Intel bring to the table? >>Absolutely. Yeah. So with respect to our overall strategy and portfolio units, it's relatively straightforward, right? So we're laser focused on making sure we have the broadest and deepest portfolio off services for machine learning, right? So these range from infrastructure services specifically compute networking and storage all the way up to, like, managed and all services, which come with pre trained models and customers can simply invoke them using an A P. I call right eso. So from a strategy perspective, you want to make sure that we provide a customer to a choice, uh, enable them to pick the right platform for the right use case, help them get to the Khan structure they actually want, right eso with Havana. And you know, their acquisition with Intel, we finally have access to hardware software and the ability to kind of build out a ecosystem beyond what you know judicially is being used. Which is was a GP used right eso. So the engagement with with Havana, you know, allows us to take their products and capabilities, wrap it around, and easy to instance, which is what customers will be able to launch right on doing so. We're enabling them to tap into the innovation that Teton the rest of the Havana team are working on while having a solution that is integrated with the full AWS stack. Right? So you don't you don't have to rack in stock hard. Bring your data center thes. They're gonna be available standard. Easy to instances. You can just click and launch them. Get access to software that's already pre integrated and big den and ready to go right. Eso so it actually comes down to taking their innovations, coupling it with an AWS solution and making it too easy for customers together. I've been running with the respective training the deepened models. >>Well, here is the question that I want to get to. I think everyone's on everyone's mind is how is it Gowdy different or similar than other GPU? Specifically, you mentioned the software stack on the AWS What you get the software stack inside the chip. How is this different or similar? Two other GP use. And what's the difference between the software stack versus a traditional libraries? >>So from day one, we were focused on the software experience and we were mindful in the need to make it easy for developers to use the innovations we have in the hardware. Most developers, if not all of them, are using deep learning frameworks such as tensile flowing pytorch for building their deep learning models. So God is synapse AI software suite comes integrated and optimized for tensorflow and pilotage, so we expect most developers to be able to take their existing models and with minor changes to the training strips to be able to run them on Gowdy based instances. In addition, expert developers that are familiar with writing their own kernels will be provided with food too sweet for writing their own TPC kernels that can augment the Havana provided library. >>So that's the user experience for the developers, right? That's what you're saying >>exactly, exactly, and we will provide detailed guides for developers. In doing that, Havana will provide open access to documentation library software models and left toe Havana's kita and bi directional communication with the Havana developer community. All these resources will be available concurrently with the AWS Instances launch. >>Okay, so I'm a developer. How did I get involved? It's software on git hub I use the hardware is on Amazon, obviously, in their instances. It's a new instance. Take me through the workflow develop. I'm into this. I wanna I wanna get involved. What I what am I doing? Take me >>through? Yes, I think it s so If the developer is accustomed to using GPS for training the deep learning models three experience is gonna be practically the same, right? So they'll have multiple options to get started. One of them would be, for example, to take our deep learning, Um, it's or Amazon machine images that will come integrated with software from Havana labs. Right. So customers will take the deep Learning Army and launch it on an easy to instance, featuring the gaudy accelerators. Right? So when with that, they'll have, you know, the baseline construct off software and hardware available to get up and running with right, we'll support, you know, all different types of work flows. So if customers want to use containerized solutions, thes instances will be supported R E C s and E s services. Eso using containerized kubernetes you know, thes the solution will just work on. Lastly, we also intend to support these instances through sage maker eso. Just a quick recap on stage maker. That's a manage service that does end to end that provides end to end capabilities for training, debugging, building and deploying machine learning applications. Eso these instances will also be supporting sage maker. So if you're fiddling with sage maker, you can get up and running with this. This is fairly quickly. >>It sounds like it's gonna enable a lot of action and sage maker level. Then can that layer on the use cases? I gotta ask you guys quickly, What's the low hanging fruit use case applications for this product thing? This partnership, Because you know that's gonna be the first Traction said, What are some of these applications gonna be used for? What can we expect to see? >>So typical applications would be image classifications, object detection, natural language processing, the recommendation systems. You'll find reference models in our get up for that and will be growing at least a Z you can imagine. >>Okay, where can people find more info? Give us the data. Take him in to explain. Put a plug in for how What's all the coordinates? U r l sites support how people create, Um, how people get involved. The community. >>Yeah, so customers will be able to access information on AWS websites and also on Havana Labs website. So you will be kicking off a preview early next year. Eso I would highly recommend for customers to find our product pages and signed up for already access and previous information. Utah. >>Yes, and you'll find more information on Havana. A swell a Savannah's get up over time. >>Great announcement. Congratulations. Thanks for sharing the news and some commentary on it. This is really the big theme. You know what Cove in 19 and this pandemic has shown is massive acceleration of digital transformation and having the software and hardware out there that accelerates the heavy lifting and creates value around the data. Super valuable. Thanks for for doing that. Appreciate taking the time. Thank >>you so much. >>Yeah. Thanks for having >>us. Okay, this is the cubes coverage at 80. Best reinvent next three weeks. We're here on the ground. Will remote. We're live inside the studio. We wish we could be there in person, but it's remote this year. But stay tuned. Check out silicon angle dot com. Exclusive interviews with Andy Jassy and Amazon executives and the big news covering. They're all there in one spot. Check it out. We'll be back with more coverage after this break. Thanks for watching. Yeah.

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe. It's The CUBE, with digital coverage of AWS public sector online, (upbeat music) brought to you by, Amazon Web Services. >> Everyone welcome back to The CUBE virtual coverage, of AWS public sector summit online. I'm John Furrier, your host of The CUBE. Normally we're in person, out on Asia-Pacific, and all the different events related to public sector. But this year we have to do it remote, and we're going to do the remote virtual CUBE, with Data Virtual Public Sector Online Summit. And we have two great guests here, about Digital Earth Africa project, Clive Charlton. Head of Solutions Architecture, Sub-Saharan Africa with AWS, Clive thanks for coming on, and Aditya Agrawal founder of D4DInsights, and also the advisor for the Digital Earth Africa project with AWS. So gentlemen, thank you for coming on. Appreciate you coming on remotely. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you for having us, John. >> So Clive take us through real quickly. Just take a minute to describe what is the Digital Earth Africa Project. What are the problems, that you're aiming to solve? >> Well, we're really aiming to provide, actionable data to governments, and organization around Africa, by providing satellite imagery, in an easy to use format, and doing that on the cloud, that serves countries throughout Africa. >> And just from a cloud perspective, give us a quick taste of what's going on, just with the tech, it's on Amazon. You got a little satellite action. Is there ground station involved? Give us a little bit more color around, you know, what's the scope of the project. >> Yeah, so, historically speaking you'd have to process satellite imagery down link it, and then do some heavy heavy lifting, around the processing of the data. Digital Earth Africa was built, from the experiences from Digital Earth Australia, originally developed by a Geo-sciences Australia and they use container services for Kubernetes's called Elastic Kubernetes Service to spin up virtual machines, which we are required to process the raw satellite imagery, into a format called a Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF. This format is used to store very large volumes of data in a format that's really easy to query. So, organizations can just use NHTTP get range request. Just a query part of the file, that they're interested in, which means, the results are served much, much quicker, from much, much better overall experience, under the hood, the store where the data is stored in the Amazon Simple Storage Service, which is S3, and the Metadata Index in a Relational Database Service, that runs the Open Data CUBE Library, which is allows Digital Earth Africa, to store this data in both space and time. >> It's interesting. I just did a, some interviews last week, on a symposium on space and cybersecurity, and we were talking about , the impact of satellites and GPS and just the overall infrastructure shift. And it's just another part of the edge of the network. Aditya, I want to get your thoughts on this, and your reaction to the Digital Earth, cause you're an advisor. Let's zoom out. What's the impact of people's lives? Give us a quick overview, of how you see it playing out because, explaining to someone, who doesn't know anything about the project, like, okay what is it about, and how does it actually impact people? >> Sure. So, you know, as, as Clive mentioned, I mean there's, there's definitely a, a digital infrastructure behind Digital Earth Africa, in a way that it's going to be able to serve free and open satellite data. And often the, the issue around satellite data, especially within the context of Africa, and other parts of the world is that there's a level of capacity that's required, in order to be able to use that data. But there's also all kinds of access issues, because, traditionally satellite data is heavy. There's the old model of being able to download the data and then being able to do something with it. And then often about 80% of the time, that you spend on satellite data is spent, just pre processing the data, before you can actually, do any of the fun analysis around it, that really sort of impacts the kinds of decisions and actions that you're looking for. And so that's why Digital Earth Africa. And that's why this partnership, with Amazon is a fantastic partnership, because it really allows us, to be able, to scale the approach across the entire continent, make it easy for that data to be accessed and make it easier for people to be able to use that data. The way that Digital Earth Africa is being operationalized, is that we're not just looking at it, from the perspective of, let's put another infrastructure into Africa. We want this program, and it is a program, that we want institutionalized within Africa itself. One that leverages expertise across the continent, and one that brings in organizations across the continent to really sort of take the leadership and ownership of this program as it moves forward. The idea of it is that, once you're able to have this information, being able to address issues like food security, climate change, coastal resilience, land degradation where illegal mining is, where is the water? We want to be able to do that, in a way that it's really looking at what are the national development priorities within the countries themselves, and how does it also then support regional and global frameworks like Africa's Agenda 2063 and the sustainable development goals. >> No doubt in my mind, obviously, is that huge benefits to these kinds of technologies. I want to also just ask you, as a follow up is a huge space race going on, right now, explosion of availability of satellite data. And again, more satellites going up, There's more congestion, more contention. Again, we had a big event on that cybersecurity, and the congestion issue, but, you know, satellite data was power everyone here in the United States, you want an Uber, you want Google Maps you've got your everywhere with GPS, without it, we'd be kind of like (laughing), wondering what's going on. How do we even vote these days? So certainly an impact, but there's a huge surge of availability, of the use of satellite data. How do you explain this? And what are some of the challenges, from the data side that's coming, from the Digital Earth Africa project that you guys hope to resolve? >> Sure. I mean, that's a great question. I mean, I think at one level, when you're looking at the space race right now, satellites are becoming cheaper. They're becoming more efficient. There's increased technology now, on the types of sensors that you can deploy. There's companies like Planet, that are really revolutionizing how even small countries are able to deploy their own satellites, and the constellation that they're putting forward, in terms of the frequency by which, you're able to get data, for any given part of the earth on a daily basis, coupled with that. And you know, this is really sort of in climbs per view, but the cloud computing capabilities, and overall computing power that you have today, then what you had 10 years, 15 years ago is so vastly different. What used to take weeks to do before, for any kind of analysis on satellite data, which is heavy data now takes, you know, minutes or hours to do. So when you put all that together, again, you know, I think it really speaks, to the power of this partnership with Amazon and really, what that means, for how this data is going to be delivered to Africa, because it really allows for the scalability, for anything that happens through Digital Earth Africa. And so, for example, one of the approaches, that we're taking us, we identify what the priorities, and needs are at the country level. Let's say that it's a land degradation, there's often common issues across countries. And so when we can take one particular issue, tested with additional countries, and then we can scale it across the whole continent because the infrastructure is there for the whole continent. >> Yeah. That's a great point. So many storylines here. We'll get to climb in a second on sustainability. And I want to talk about the Open Data Platform. Obviously, open data, having data is one thing, but now train data, and having more trusted data becomes a huge issue. Again, I want to dig into that for a second, but, Clive, I want to ask you, first, what region are we in? I mean, is this, you guys actually have a great, first of all, we've been covering the region expansion from Bahrain all the way, as moves around the world, probably soon in space. There'll be a region Amazon space station region probably, someday in the future but, what region are you running the project out of? Can you, and why is it important? Can you share the update on the regional piece? >> Well, we're very pleased, that Digital Earth Africa, is using the new Africa region in Cape Town, in South Africa, which was launched in April of this year. It's one of 24 regions around the world and we have another three new regions announced, what this means for users of Digital Earth Africa is, they're able to use region closest to them, which gives them the best user experience. It's the, it's the quickest connection for them. But more importantly, we also wanted to use, an African solution, for African people and using the Africa region in Cape Town, really aligned with that thinking. >> So, localization on the data, latency, all that stuff is kind of within the region, within country here. Right? >> That's right, Yeah >> And why is that important? Is there any other benefits? Why should someone care? Obviously, this failover option, I mean, in any other countries to go to, but why is having something, in that region important for this project? >> Well, it comes down to latency for the, for the users. So, being as close to the data, as possible is, is really important, for the user experience. Especially when you're looking at large data sets, and big queries. You don't want to be, you don't want to be waiting a long lag time, for that query to go backwards and forwards, between the user and the region. So, having the data, in the Africa region in Cape Town is important. >> So it's about the region, I love when these new regions rollout from Amazon, Cause obviously it's this huge buildup CapEx, in this huge data center servers and everything. Sustainability is a huge part of the story. How does the sustainability piece fit into the, the data initiative supported in Africa? Can you share some updates on that? >> Well, this, this project is also closely aligned with the, Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative, which looks to accelerate sustainability research. and innovation, really by minimizing the cost, and the time required to acquire, and analyze large sustainability datasets. So the initiative supports innovators, and researchers with the data and tools, and, and technical experience, that they need to move sustainability, to the next level. These are public datasets and publicly available to anyone. In addition, to that, the initiative provides cloud grants to those who are interested in exploring, exploring the use of AWS technology and scalable infrastructure, to serve sustainability challenges, of this nature. >> Aditya, I want to hear your thoughts, on this comment that Clive made around latency, and certainly having a region there has great benefits. You don't need to hop on that. Everyone knows I'm a big fan of the regional model, but it brings up the issue, of what's going on in the country, from an infrastructure standpoint, a lot of mobility, a lot of edge computing. I can almost imagine that. So, so how do you see that evolving, from a business standpoint, from a project standpoint data standpoint, can you comment and react to that edge, edge angle? >> Yeah, I mean, I think, I think that, the value of an open data infrastructure, is that, you want to use that infrastructure, to create a whole data ecosystem type of an approach. And so, from the perspective of being able. to make this data readily accessible, making it efficiently accessible, and really being able to bring industry, into that ecosystem, because of what we really want as we, as the program matures, is for this program, to then also instigate the development of new businesses, entrepreneurship, really get the young people across Africa, which has the largest proportion of young people, anywhere in the world, to be engaged around what you can do, with satellite data, and the types of businesses that can be developed around it. And, so, by having all of our data reside in Cape Town on the continent there's obviously technical benefits, to that in terms of, being able to apply the data, and create new businesses. There's also a, a perception in the fact that, the data that Digital Earth Africa is serving, is in Africa and residing in Africa which does have, which does go a long way. >> Yeah. And that's a huge value. And I can just imagine the creativity cloud, if you can comment on this open data platform idea, because some of the commentary that we've been having on The CUBE here, and all around the world is data's great. We all know we're living with a lot of data, you starting to see that, the commoditization and horizontal scalability of data, is one thing, but to put it into software defined environments, whether, it's an entrepreneur coding up an app, or doing something to share some transparency, around some initiatives going on within the region or on the continent, it's about trusted data. It's about sharing algorithms. AI is also a consumer of data, machines consume data. So, it's not just the technology data, is part of this new normal. What's this Open Data Platform, And how does that translate into value in your opinion? >> I, yeah. And you know, when, when data is shared on, on AWS anyone can analyze it and build services on top of it, using a broad range of compute and data to data analytics products, you know, things like Amazon EC2, or Lambda, which is all serverless compute, to things like Amazon Elastic MapReduce, for complex extract and transformation processes, but sharing data in the cloud, lets users, spend more time on the data analysis, rather than, than the data acquisition. And researchers can analyze data shared on AWS, without needing to pay to store their own copy, which is what the Open Data Platform provides. You only have to pay for the compute that you use and you don't need to purchase storage, to start a new project. So the registry of the open data on AWS, makes it easy to find those datasets, but, by making them publicly available through AWS services. And when you share, share your data on AWS, you make it available, to a large and growing community of developers, and startups, and enterprises, all around the world. And you know, and we've been talking particularly around, around Africa. >> Yeah. So it's an open source model, basically, it's free. You don't, it doesn't cost you anything probably, just started maybe down the road, if it gets heavy, maybe to charging but the most part easy for scientists to use and then you're leveraging it into the open, contributing back. Is that right? >> Yep. That's right. To me getting, getting researchers, and startups, and organizations growing quickly, without having to worry about the data acquisition, they can just get going and start building. >> I want to get back to Aditya, on this skill gap issue, because you brought up something that, I thought was really cool. People are going to start building apps. I'm going to start to see more innovation. What are the needs out there? Because we're seeing a huge onboarding of new talent, young talent, people rescaling from existing jobs, certainly COVID accelerated, people looking for more different kinds of work. I'm sure there's a lot of (laughing) demand to, to do some innovative things. The question I always get, and want to get your reaction is, what are the skills needed to, to get involved, to one contribute, but also benefit from it, whether it's the data satellite, data or just how to get involved skill-wise >> Sure. >> Yes. >> Yeah. So most recently we've created a six week training course. That's really kind of taken users from understanding, the basics of Earth Observation Data, to how to work, with Python, to how to create their own Jupyter notebooks, and their own Use cases. And so there's a, there's a wide sort of range of skill sets, that are required depending on who you are because, effectively, what we want to be able to do is get everyone from, kind of the technical user, that might have some remote sensing background to the developer, to the policy maker, and decision maker, to understand the value of this infrastructure, whether you're the one who's actually analyzing the data. If you're the one who's developing new applications, or you're taking that information from a managerial or policy level discussion to actually deliver the action and sort of impact that you're looking for. And so, you know, in, in that regard, we're working with ITC in the Netherlands and again, with institutions across Africa, that already have a mandate, and expertise in this particular area, to create a holistic capacity development program, that will address all of those different factors. >> So I guess the follow up question I want to have is, how do you ensure the priorities of Africa are addressed, as part of this program? >> Yeah, so, we are, we've created a governance model, that really is both top down, and bottom up. At the bottom up level, We have a technical advisory committee, that has over 15 institutions, many of which are based across Africa, that really have a good understanding of the needs, the priorities, and the mandate for how to work with countries. And at the top down level, we're developing a governing board, that will be inclusive, of the key continental level institutions, that really provide the political buy-in, the sustainability of the program, and really provide overall guidance. And within that, we're also creating an operational models, such that these institutions, that do have the capacity to support the program, they're actually the ones, who are also going to be supporting, the implementation of the program itself. >> And there's been some United Nations, sustained development projects all kinds of government involvement, around making sure certain things would happen, within the country. Can you just share, some of the highlights, or some of the key initiatives, that are going on, that you're supporting, to make it a better, better world? >> Yeah. So this is, this program is very closely aligned to a sustainable development agenda. And so looking after, looking developing methods, that really address, the sustainable development goals as one facet, in Africa, there's another program looking overall, overall national development priorities and sustainability called the Agenda 2063. And really like, I think what it really comes down to this, this wouldn't be happening, without the country level involvement themselves. So, this started with five countries, originally, Senegal, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, and the government of Kenya itself, has really been, a kind of a founding partner for, how Digital Earth Africa and it's predecessor of Africa Regional Data Cube, came to be. And so without high level support, and political buying within those governments, I mean, it's really because of that. That's why we're, we're where we are. >> I need you to thank you for coming on and sharing that insight. Clive will give you the final word, for the folks watching Digital Earth Africa, processes, petabytes of data. I mean the satellite data as well, huge, you mentioned it's a new region. You're running Kubernetes, Elastic Kubernetes Service, making containers easy to use, pay as you go. So you get cutting edge, take the one minute to, to share why this region's cutting edge. Does it have the scale of other regions? What should they know about AWS, in Cape Town, for Africa's new region? Take a minute to, to put plugin. >> Yeah, thank you for that, John. So all regions are built in the, in the same way, all around the world. So they're built for redundancy and reliability. They typically have a minimum of three, what we call Availability Zones. And each one is a contains a, a cluster of, of data centers, and all interconnected with fast fiber. So, you know, you can survive, you know, a failure with with no impact to your services. And the Cape Town region is built in exactly the same the same way, we have most of the services available in the, in the Cape Town region, like most other regions. So, as a user of AWS, you, you can have the confidence that, You can deploy your services and workloads, into AWS and run it in the same in the same way, with the same kind of speed, and the same kind of support, and infrastructure that's backing any region, anywhere else in the world. >> Well great. Thanks for that plug, Aditya, thank you for your insight. And again, innovation follows cloud computing, whether you're building on top of it as a startup a government or enterprise, or the big society better, in this case, the Digital Earth Africa project. Great. A great story. Thank you for sharing. I appreciate it. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us, John >> I'm John Furrier with, The CUBE, virtual remote, not in person this year. I hope to see you next time in person. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music) (upbeat music decreases)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Women Transforming Technology. Brought to you by VMware. >> Welcome to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin covering the fifth annual Women Transforming Technology. The first year that this event has gone completely digital. We're very pleased to welcome back to theCUBE one of our favorite alumni, the Chief People Officer of VMware, Betsy Sutter. Betsy, welcome back! >> Oh, thank you, Lisa. It's great to see you and it's great to be back. Love this time of year. >> Likewise, me too. And you know, I've had the great opportunity and pleasure of covering WT2 for theCUBE the last few years so I know walking into that courtyard area in Palo Alto, VMware's headquarters, you feel the energy and the excitement, and it's really genuine. And so, knowing that you had to pivot a couple you know, eight weeks or so ago or more, to convert what is such an engaging in-person experience to digital, hard decision, the right decision, but huge in terms of the number of attendees. Tell us a little bit about that process of taking We Rise digital. >> Yeah, you know, it was a pretty quick decision. At VMWare, we were starting to virtualize some other events, and so in realtime, we said, "let's go ahead "and virtualize Women Transforming Technology 2020." And so, when we immediate, flipped to that mode, things started to really open up. The possibilities became pretty interesting. And so honestly, we did not imagine you know, the people attending would grow from roughly thousands to over 5,000. And that's what digitalizing the event, virtualizing the event did. And it was super fun to use technology to make it so much more inclusive and accessible for people around the world. I'm sure you've heard that we had over 5,000 people from over 500 companies represented from 30 different countries. So that was amazing in its own right. >> One of the things that I think was a great advantage knowing that this was the fifth one, but that you had the opportunity to build the community, and such a strong, tight-knight community over the last few years, I think was probably a great facilitator of the event being so much bigger digitally. But when I spoke with a number of your speakers, everybody said, and I saw the Twitter stream, that the engagement, it wasn't like they were watching a video. It was really interactive, and that is hard to achieve with digital. >> Yeah, you know, what I love about the technology was that there were chat rooms, and there were Q&A rooms. And so, there was a lot of back and forth in realtime, even while the speakers were talking. You could sort of multitask, and the speakers were really, really fun to interact with that way as well. And it's super fun to see people in their home environments. You know, it's a just a little bit more information about them, and they seem a little bit more relaxed too, so it was tremendous. Watching Laura Dern, who is an activist and an obviously a very famous actress, in her own home talking to us about the issues she's faced as a woman in her industry, and then moving to another woman named Kathryn Finney, who is the CEO of digitalundivided, in her home with all the activity, she had a four-year old sort of in the background, was super fun and really landed their conversations with us even more solidly. It was a great day. >> I heard that throughout Twitter that people really felt that there was a personal connection. Lot of people talking about, I'm sitting here zooming with Laura Dern, what are you doing today? And some of the things that she said about, you know, you don't have to stay in your own swimlane. That resonated with me and I think with your community very well. >> You know,the diversity, the eclecticness of the women that were able to join from around the world and from many different industries, but you know, technical women, women in tech, was, it just up-leveled everything and it fit into the theme of the conference which was "We Rise", because you know, you're trying to rise as an individual, but there we were rising as a collective for a full day, and the workshops were super fun. I mean I participated in a number of 'em, and I literally went through a workshop with I don't know how many women, but you know, I was drawing on paper then engaging on the screen, then chatting, using the Q&A feature. It was a really dynamic day. I'm wondering now if we'll ever go back, honestly. >> Right, well I was already thinking, "Wow, you can take WT to global and do original events." And there's so much opportunity right now. Tremendous amount of challenge but on the same time, there is a lot of opportunity. In fact, when I was speaking with Sharmain (mumbles) yesterday, it was amazing that she was talking about, you know, right now, like the percentage increase, in people actually reading email because they have more time to, the commute time is gone. And so her advice to be really vivid, in making yourself visual, in terms of how you communicate, and evaluate your role and how you can add new value during this challenging time and I thought that was such a powerful message because we do need to look at what opportunities are we going to be able to uncover? There will be certain things that will go away, to your point, maybe we do digital because we can engage, we can interact and we can reach a bigger audience and learn from more people. >> Yeah, I think that's spot on. I couldn't have said that better. And you could really feel it that day and then the response from both the attendees, but even the keynote speakers, both Laura and Kathryn reaching back to us and talking about the experience they had. It was a pretty uplifting day, I'm still flying pretty high from it. And it was Cinco de Mayo so there had to have been at least margaritas, skinny margaritas, maybe, you know, virgin margaritas. But something there to celebrate an accomplishment of doing something in a short period of undertaking that community and being able to push the energy through the screen is awesome. I'd love to understand, you've been the Chief People Officer at the VMware for a while, the COVID crisis is so challenging in every aspect of life. We often talk about disruption, you know, in technology, a technology disruptor, you know, video streaming was a technology disruptor and Uber was a disruptor to transportation and the taxi service, but now the disruption is an unseen, scary thing and so the emotional impact, people are talking and a number of your folks I spoke to as well said it's hard to be motivated but it's important to acknowledge that I don't feel so motivated today for managers to be able to have that check-in with our employees and our teams. Tell me a little bit about the culture of VMware and how maybe the "We Rise" theme is really kind of, pervasive across VMware right now. >> Yeah, you know, one of the things that I believe and that I've seen in the people business is that more and more people join communities, they join companies but they join communities and communities come together based on you know, their actions, their ideas, their behaviors and what I've seen in terms of VMware's response to COVID-19 has been pretty remarkable. I think at first, you know, we were in crisis mode, sort of going in triage mode about what we do to keep our people feeling safe and healthy. But now we're sort of in a mode of "okay, there's a lot of opportunity that this presents." Now, we are very very fortunate, very blessed to be in the industry that we're in, and a lot of what we do and build and provide for our customers and partners fits into this new business model of working distributedly, so there's been some highs and some lows as we've navigated. First and foremost, we've just put our employees first and their health and safety, making sure that they're comfortable is just been top of mind for us. We just did a small sentiment survey, six questions. Because about two weeks ago, I realized, "I wonder if we really know how people are feeling about this?" And one of the things that came through, I'll say this, out of 32,000 people within 24 hours, over 10,000 people responded to this six question survey, they wanted to tell us how they were doing. But over 70% said they felt, if not the same amount of connection but more connection with each other working in a distributed fashion. And I think COVID-19's brought that alive. That we're going to work in a new way, it's a new business model and so we're doing it at VMware and then we're really pleased that we can offer that to our customers and partners around the globe. >> You know, I'm glad that you talked about the employee experience because obviously, with any business, customers are critical to the life, blood of that business. But equally important, if not sometimes more impactful to the revenue of an organization is the employee experience and being productive day in and day out. And that, if the employee experience is, I think, I don't know, you can't have a good customer experience without a good employee experience. And to (mumbles) that focus is key. So it must have been really nice for the VMware employees to go, "they're wanting to know how I feel right now." That's huge for people to know, the executive team genuinely cares. >> Yeah, you know, Lisa, we have really amped up our communications. We have done more town halls, whether it's to our management community our leadership and executive community or to the whole company. Yesterday alone, I think I did six town halls and two ask-me-anythings just to make sure we know it's on top of people's minds, what's important to them and that's kind of the new normal. And it's so much easier, right? I'm not trying to get to places, I'm just kind of clicking on a button and I'm all of a sudden talking to the employees in India. And you know, when I talk to my colleagues in other industries, like, Beth Axelrod or Tracey Ballow, that are in the you know, the Marriott and the Air BnB industries, their challaneges are so different. And what they're facing in this short-term, in the medium term. VMware is in a position where we can really help these businesses and at the core of that is really, how well our employees are doing and so that's been our focus. >> One of the things that I also talked about yesterday with Jo Miller, the CEO of Be Leaderly, was the difference between a mentor and a sponsor. And I had never even understood that they were two different things until WT2. And so, I thought, you know, we all know about mentors, we talk about that all the time. But I, she was really, I think it's an important message for your audience and ours to understand the difference and she said, "people are often over-mentored and under-sponsored." And so I thought, well, "I want to understand VMware's culture of sponsorship." Tell me what's going on in that respect. >> Yeah, we're, well, I agree with everything that you said on the mentorship side and so what we've instituted on the mentorship side at VMware's reverse mentorship. So every executive at VMware has a reverse mentor, so that they can learn something that they might not be thinking about. And whether it's a reverse mentor who happens to be, if you're a man, who happens to be a woman, or if you want to engage with the under-represented minority, or if you just want to learn about the different aspect of the business, we're big on reverse mentoring. On the sponsorship side, we do do that. And that's a really important aspect to any company's culture if you're trying to cultivate talent. And sponsorship is really championship, right? And I know I champion a lot of people, a lot of the talent around the company and it's very different than maybe coaching, advicing, and interacting in that venue. It's more about, what's the right opportunity for this person? When I'm in the board room, or when I'm in the executive staff meeting, actually advocating for that person, and I'm fierce about that. Especially for women right now at VMware, and it's just important. And a lot of people are starting to adopt that mindset because there's a lot more power and influence in having sponsorship behind you than having mentorship. >> I completely agree. Are you saying that, you know, we often talk about the hard skills and then the soft skills. And I always think soft is the wrong word but I keep forgetting to look it up on the thesaurus to get a better word. Because right now, I think, more important than ever, looking at someone who might have all of the hard skills to be on this the track to the c-suite,  but the importance of authenticity and empathy, I think now are under a microscope. We talked a lot about that too with some of your guests, tell me little bit about those kinds of conversations, that came up during the interactive sessions with WT2. >> Yeah, well, you know, this is one of the blessings that's come out of COVID-19, and this pandemic is that people are starting to see, because everyone's impacted by this and not just in one way, but in multiple ways. So, there's really this once in a lifetime opportunity, at least as far as what I've seen in my lifetime, to seize this heightened level of compassion and empathy for all the people around you in terms of what we're doing. At WT2, I saw it a lot in terms of the quality of the conversations that were happening virtually and sometimes with the key notes and the guest speakers, with the audience, there was always a lead-in with compassion and empathy in terms of all of us. All of us, no matter where you are in the world, or no matter what you're doing, adjusting to what we're calling this new normal. And there's a new business normal but the new normal on the personal side I think is going to take a little bit longer, right? In terms of what people are managing. But in the business world, I think you know, people are starting to re-bound and rebuild, they're honing those skills, and they're going to be wiser and better because of it. But at the heart of it all is, as you said, a lot more compassion and empathy 'cause never before, have we all kind of gone through something quite so traumatic as COVID-19. >> Traumatic and surreal. And you know, we are all in this same storm and I think there's a level of comfort there, that I know I feel with knowing, okay, everyone is going to be feeling this rollercoaster at some point. Some days you're here, some days you're here. But we're all in this, whether you're, you know, in your role, or Pat Gelsinger or an individual contributor role, we're all in the same sea. Betsy, congratulations on a successful fifth WT2, first digital. I'm so glad the theCUBE and myself was able to participate digitally. It's always one of my favorite events every year and I look forward to seeing you again soon, which I soon will be digitally, but I look forward to it. >> Lisa, thank you so much and thanks for all of your sponsorship and mentorship with WT2 over the years too. Thank you. >> All right, you too. That was Betsy Sutter, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Women Transforming Technology 2. Thanks for watching, see you next time. (soft music)

>>live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube covering Splunk dot com. 19. Brought to You by spunk >>Hey, welcome back, everyone. We're live here in Las Vegas for Splunk dot com. I'm John Ferrier with Q two great guests. Tim would Bury, director of state and local affairs for Splunk and Charlie Crocker, CEO Zone Haven. Very innovative. Start up doing some incredible things with Splunk Ventures Financing Summerlee Financing around Really check for good guys. Welcome. Thank you, Charlie. First, explain what you guys are doing real quick because I think this is a great example of what I've been seeing now for two years now. But now, in the past year, renaissance of entrepreneurial activity around mission driven tech for good, where entrepreneurs are using the cloud and sass models and platforms like Splunk to stand up Mission Value Commission >>value. I like the term. Explain what you're doing. So simply put, we're building in evacuation planning and support to. So right now, there are more stronger fires happening. Over the last five years, we've had more than half of California's most destructive wildfires happened just in the last five years. So it's it's mission critical that we figure this out. Now the's fires air. So big goal is really just to get people out of harm's way. And that's a difficult job to figure out at three in the morning with a map on the hood of a pickup truck. So we're building Zillah ways for fire. There's no ways for five ways has got public safety >>people no ways. But the thing is, is that yesterday I was watching on TV and Pacific Palisades, California air drop of water on the canyon, right before house, and I see the people running right. You like running for their lives. There was a serious business. Exactly. You guys are trying to provide system >>we're trying to do. What we've built are a set of zones, the ability for the Fire Department, law enforcement and, oh yes, to work on customizing hyper local evacuation plans, hyperlocal down to the neighborhood level and then we're scaling that statewide. So how do you make sure that this fire department on these three law enforcement groups are coordinated before and how do they have the conversation with community before the event happens? If we can save five minutes at the time, the event happens, we're going to save lives. >>So this is really about making efficiency around the first responders on the scene from leveraging data which maps or their >>maps, data dynamic data, telemetry, data where the fire's gonna go simulations for how the fire could potentially grow. Who needs to get out of harm's way first. What's that gonna do to the traffic and Road Network? Talk >>about the original story. Then we get to this plug involvement, the origination stories you're sitting around. You're talking to friends in the business. >>So we have colleagues and friends that are in the business and many of them, you know, from the Silicon Valley these guys are innovative leaders in in fire on. They've got a lot of really good ideas on how to make their jobs better. >>They >>don't have a tech team, they don't have a tech arms. So we literally said, Look, we'll come in and we'll make work what your vision is, and that started to expand on. Now we started to move from these smaller jurisdictions. Too much larger >>jurisdictions. Data is driving the future. That's a tagline I'm reading. I've seen the new branding by the way, the new brains very strong, by the way. Love it, Thank you. So this is a good example of data driven value constituency fire professionals. That's all they think about is how to make people save put, get in harm's way to try to solve the fires. They don't have tech teams. You don't have a data center they don't have, like with boot up a consulting. To come into a waterfall of a meeting by that sign is just, Yeah, you can't just do that. They can't stand up. How did you guys get involved in this? It's data driven, obviously. What's the story? >>Way, Say, dated everything. We really mean it. It's really you know, it's a personal story for me. I am on the government affairs team here. It's flowing, so I manage relationships with governors and mayors, and these are the issues that they care about right When the city's burning down, the mayor cares about that. The governor, This is you know, one of the governor in California's major initiatives is trying to find solutions on wildfires. I met Charlie, my hometown. Orinda, California Aren't Fire Chief in that town was one of sort of the outside advisers working with Charlie on this idea. And we're and I met him at a house party where the fire chief was telling me to trim my trees back and shrubs back. And then I was at a conference three days later that same fire chief, Dave Liniger. I was on a panel with folks from a super computer lab and NASA and M i t was like, you know, my fire chiefs, Still the smartest guy in that panel. I gotta meet this guy. A few weeks later, we were literally in the field doing these concepts with sensors and data. Super savvy folks. Some of the other folks from Cal Fire there. Dr. Cox was with us today. Here on. You know, we've just been collaborating the whole time and seeing you know that that Splunk and really put some fire power power behind these guys and we see like, Look, they've got the trust of these customers and we need to make sure this idea happens. It's a great idea, and it's gonna save lives. >>It's crazy way did a test burn where we run a small burn on a day where we're very confident it won't grow. Put the sensors out right next to a school in Arena. It was his kid's school. >>Yeah, I have a kindergartner that goes to that school, so >>it's slightly personal for you. I could >>be I could be said that this is just me protecting my own. But it is something that I think will save lives around the world. >>First of all, this, there is huge human safety issues on both sides. The ire safety put in harm's way. Those professionals go out all day long, putting their lives at risk to save human, the other human beings. And so that's critical. But if you look at California, this other impact cost impact rolling blackouts because they can't instrument the lines properly just because of the red red flag warnings off wind. I mean, I could be disrupted businesses, disruptive safety. So so PG and e's not doing us any favors either. Sound so easy. Just fix it. >>It sounds easy, but I think with be Jeannie, it's interesting way do need to prevent wildfires and really any way that we can. But like you said, if we could bring more data to the problem maybe we can have the blackouts be smaller. You know, they don't have to be a CZ big. >>There's certainly no lack of motivation to find solutions to this issue. There are lives on the line. There's billions of dollars on the line that these types of solutions own haven a part of part of what is going to fix it. But there are many very large stake holders that need these solutions very quickly. >>Well, you know the doers out there making it happen of the people in the front lines on the people they're trying to protect our cities, our citizens on this sounds like a great example of tech for good, where you guys are doing an entrepreneurial efforts with people who need it. There's a business, miles, not free non profit. You're gonna get paid. It's a business model behind. >>There is a business bottle behind it, and I think the value proposition is only beginning to be understood, right? There were so many missions in so many different ways. Wildfires are massive. You can come at him from satellite, come at him from on the ground. We're working with the people on the ground who need to get people out of harm's way. We're focusing on making their jobs easier, so they're safer and they get people out >>more quickly. You guys in the tech business, we always talking. We go. These events were re platforming our business. A digital transformation. You know all the buzz, right? Right. This is actually an acute example of what I would call re platforming life because you're taking a really life example. Fire California Fire forest There, out in the trees trimming thing is all real life. This isn't like, you know, some digital website. >>We certainly I mean, I've been in the data business for more more time than I can remember, and we've got the tools, tools, like Splunk tools. Like Amazon Web service is we've got the data. There's satellites all over. We've got smart people in machine learning way. Need to start applying that to do good, right? It exists. We do not need to go invent new technology right now in order to solve this problem, >>Charlie, really inspired by your position and your your posture. I want you to spend more time talking about that feature because you're an entrepreneur. You're not just detect for good social justice Warrior, You're an experienced data entrepreneur, applying it to a social good project. It's not like I'm gonna change the world, you actually doing it. There's a path for other entrepreneurs to make money to do good things fast. Talk about the journey because with cloud computing, it's not like a 10 year horizon. There's a path for immediate benefit. I >>mean the pat. So I mean in terms of creating a profitable venture. We're a young company way feel like we have a good, good direction way feel like there is a market for this way. Also feel like there's public private partnerships Here is well, I think that we can take the same solutions that we have here and apply them to campuses. You could apply it to, you know, a biotech campus, a university campus. You could apply it to a military base, right? There's insurance could be involved in this because insurance risk people are losing insurance in their homes as well. So you know, there's a lot of different angles that we can take for this exact same. Say >>that what's the expression dated to everything. Yet this is an example of taking data on applying it to some use case. >>A very specific cool evacuation neighborhood evacuation and really building the community fabric so that people take care of each other and can get out together. Where are the vulnerable populations in that zone? Who's gonna go respond to those If if the fire department can't come in, right, How are we gonna get those people out? >>I love the vision. You guys were also for putting some cash in their spunk. Ventures. Congratulations. Talk about the product. Where you guys at using Splunk. You putting data sensors out there, You leveraging existing data. Both take us through some of the nuts and bolts of what's going on the >>price. So part of it is building out some data sets. So there are some data sets that don't exist. But the government and the counties and the private sector have built out a huge corpus of data around where the buildings are, where the people are, where the cell phones are, where the traffic is. So we're able to leverage that information as we have it today. Technology. We're using the Amazon stack. It's easy for us to spin up databases. It's easy for us to build out and expand, as as we grow online with Splunk were able to have a place for all this real time data toe land. And for us to be able to build a P I's to pull it out very >>simply having a conversation with Teresa Carlson, who runs Amazon Web sites. Public sector variety of these things of projects are popping up. Check for good. That's for profit. It helps people and the whole idea of time to value with cloud and flunks. Platform of leveraging diverse data making Data Realtor whether it's real time, time, serious data or using a fabric surge or accelerated processing capabilities is that you can get the value quicker. So if you got an idea for you to wait two years of just e whether it was it a hit or not, you can illiterate now. So this idea of the start of agile startup is now being applied to these public sadly like things. So it's everything >>you spot on, and you know the unique element of Splunk with some of these data sources way don't necessarily know which ones are gonna be the right ones. We're talking about satellite data, sensor data. Some of this on. Part of it is we're building an outdoor smoke alarm, right? No one's ever done that before. So, you know, with court nature of Splunk technology being able to easily, you know, try to see if that is the right data source is critical, giving people the man with two go try to make this happen. >>You guys are a great example of zone haven, Charlie, You and your team of what I call a reconfiguration of the value creation of startups. You don't need to have full stack develop. You got half the stack and Amazon domain expertise in the inertial properties flipped around from being software on this intellectual mode to domain specific intellectual property. You took the idea of firefighters and you're implementing their idea into your domain expertise using scale and data to create a viable, busy >>other thing. I want to throw in there, though, and this is something that people often forget a big part of our investments going to be in user experience. This thing needs to be usable by the masses. It cannot be a complicated solution. >>You X is the new software data is the new code, but anyone can start a company if they have an innovative idea. You don't have to have a unique algorithm that could be a use case to solve a problem. >>If you have a very Calgary them, you can put it on Splunk Platform or Amazons platform and scale it. >>This is going to change, I think, the economic landscape of what I call tech for good now. But it's entrepreneurship redefined. You guys are great working example of that. Congratulations on the vision. Thank you to you and your team. Thanks for coming on the Q. Thanks for sharing. It's great to be here. It's a great example of what's going on with data for everything. Of course, this acute were cute for everything. We go to all the events of smart people and get the data and share that with you here in Las Vegas for dot com. 10 years of conference our seventh year, I'm John Ferrier. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break

>> Announcer: From Miami Beach, Florida, it's The Cube, covering Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2019. Brought to you by Acronis. >> Welcome back everyone. We are here with The Cube coverage for two days. We're wrapping up, getting down on day one in the books for the Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2019. I'm John Furrier, your host of The Cube. We are in Miami Beach, the Fontainebleau Hotel. I'm personally excited for this next guest because I'm a huge Red Sox fan, even though I got moved out to California. Giants is in a different area. National League is different than American League, still my heart with the Red Sox. And we're here with an industry veteran, seasoned professional in IT and data, Brian Shield. Boston Red Sox Vice President of Technology and IT. Welcome to The Cube, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. It's great to be here. >> John: So congratulations on the rings. Since I moved out of town, Red sox win their World Series, break the curse of the Bambino. >> Hey we appreciate that. Thank you. >> My family doesn't want me back. You got to show >> Yeah, maybe I'll put this one up for the, maybe someone can zoom in on this. Which camera is the good one? This one here? So, there ya go. So, World Series champs for at least for another week. (laughter) >> Bummer about this year. Pitching just couldn't get it done. But, good team. >> Happens. >> Again, things move on, but you know. New regime, new GM going to come on board. >> Yup. >> So, but in general, Red Sox, storied franchise. Love it there. Fenway Park, the cathedral of baseball parks. >> Brian: Defnitely. >> And you're seeing that just play out now, standard. So just a great place to go. We have tickets there. So, I got to ask you. Technology, sports, really is modernized faster than I think any category. And certainly cyber security forced to modernize because of the threats. But sports, you got a business to run, not just IT and making the planes run on time. >> Sure. >> Scouts, money, whatever. >> Fans. >> You got fan experience. >> Stadium opportunities. >> Club management, scouts are out there. So you got business, team, fans. And data's a big part of it. That's part of your career. Tell us what the cutting edge innovation is at the Red Sox these days. >> I think baseball in general, as you indicated, it's a very evolving kind of environment. I mean historically I think people really sort of relish the nostalgia of sports and Fenway Park being as historic as it is, was probably the pinnacle of that, in some respects. But Red Sox have always been leaders and baseball analytics, you know. And everyone's pretty familiar with "Moneyball" and Brad Pitt. >> John: Is that a true story, he turned down the GM job? >> I'm told it is. (laughter) I don't know if I fully vetted that question. But over the last six, seven years, you know we've really turned our attention to sort of leveraging sort of technology across the businesses, right? Not just baseball and analytics and how we do scouting, which continues to evolve at a very rapid pace. But also as you pointed out, running a better business, understanding our fans, understanding fan behavior, understanding stadiums. There's a lot of challenges around running an effective stadium. First and foremost to all of us is really ensuring it's a great fan experience. Whether it's artificial intelligence, or IoT technologies or 5G or the latest Wifi, all those things are coming up at Fenway Park. You and I talked earlier about we're about to break ground for a new theater, so a live theater on the outside, beyond the bleachers type of thing. So that'll be a 5,400-seat arena, 200 live performances a year, and with e-sports, you know, complementing it. It just gives you an example of just how fast baseball is sort of transitioning. >> And the theater, is that going to be blown out from where that parking garage is, structure and going towards >> So the corner of Landsdown and Ipswich, if you think of that sort of corner back there, for those that are familiar with the Fenway area. So it's going to be a very big change and you'll see the difference too from within the ballpark. I think we'll lose a couple of rows of the bleachers. That'll be replaced with another gathering area for fans and things like that, on the back end of that theater. So build a great experience and I think it really speaks to sort of our ability to think of Fenway as more of a destination, as a venue, as a complementary experience. We want people to come to the area to enjoy sports and to enjoy entertainment and things. >> You know Brian, the consumerization of IT has been kicked around. Last decade, that was a big buzzword. Now the blending of a physical event and digital has certainly consumed the world. >> Absolutely. >> And we're starting to see that dynamic. You speak to a theater. That's a physical space. But digital is also a big part of kind of that complementary. It's not mutually exclusive for each other. They're integrated business models. >> Absolutely. >> So therefore, the technology has to be seamless. The data has to be available. >> Yup. >> And it's got to be secure. >> Well the data's got to be ubiquitous, right? I mean you don't want to, if we're going to have fans attending theater and then you're going to go to Fenway Park or they leave a game and then go to some other event or they attend a tour of Fenway Park, and beyond maybe the traditional what people might think about, is certainly when you think about baseball and Fenway Park. You know we have ten to twelve concerts a year. We'll host Spartan games, you know. This Christmas, I'm sorry, Christmas 2020 we now have sort of the Fenway Bowl. So we'll be hosting the AAC ACC championship games there with ESPN. >> John: Hockey games? >> Hockey games. Obviously we have Liverpool soccer being held there so it's much more of a destination, a venue for us. How we leverage all the wonderful things about Fenway Park and how we modernize, how we get basically the best of what makes Fenway Park as great as it is, yet as modern as we can make it, where appropriate to create a great fan experience. >> It's a tough balance between balancing the brand and having things on brand as well. >> Sure. >> Does that come into your job a lot around IT? Saying being on brand, not kind of tearing down the old. >> Yeah absolutely. I think our CEOs and leadership team, I mean it's not success for us if you pan to the audience and everyone is looking at their phone, right? That's not what we aspire to. We aspire to leverage technology to simplify people's experience of how do you get to the ballpark, how do I park, how do I get if I want to buy concessions or merchandise, how do I do it easily and simply? How do we supplement that experience with maybe additional data that you may not have had before. Things like that, so we're doing a lot of different testing right now whether it's 4D technologies or how we can understand, watch a play from different dimensions or AI and be able to perhaps see sort of the skyline of Boston since 1912, when Fenway Park launched... And so we sort of see all these technologies as supplemental materials, really kind of making it a holistic experience for fans. >> In Las Vegas, they have a section of Las Vegas where they have all their test beds. 5G, they call it 5G, it's really, you know, evolution, fake 5G but it's a sandbox. One of the challenges that you guys have in Boston, I know from a constraint standpoint physically, you don't have a lot of space. How do you sandbox new technologies and what are some of the things that are cool that people might not know about that are being sandboxed? So, one, how do you do it? >> Yeah. >> Effectively. And then what are some of the cool things that you guys are looking at or things they might not know about that would be interesting. >> Sure. Yeah so Fenway Park, we struggle as you know, a little bit with our footprint. You know, honestly, I walk into some of these large stadiums and I get instant jealousy, relative to just the amount of space that people have to work with and things. But we have a great relationship with our partners so we really partner, I think, particularly well with key partners like Verizon and others. So we now have 5G partially implemented at Fenway Park. We expect to have it sort of fully live come opening day next year. So we're really excited about that. We hope to have a new version of Wifi, the latest version of Wifi available, for the second half of the year. After the All-Star Break, probably after the season's over. But before our bowl game hopefully. We're looking at some really interesting ways that we can tease that out. That bowl game, we're really trying to use that as an opportunity, the Fenway Bowl, as an opportunity to make it kind of a high-tech bowl. So we're looking at ways of maybe doing everything from hack-a-thons to a pre-egaming sort of event to some interesting fan experiential opportunities and things like that. >> Got a lot of nerds at MIT, Northeastern, BU, Bentley, Babson, all the schools in the area. >> Yeah, so we'll be reaching out to colleges and we'll be reaching out to our, the ACC and AACs as well, and see what we can do to kind of create sort of a really fun experience and capitalize on the evolving role of e-sports and the role that technology can play in the future. >> I want to get to the e-sports in a second but I want to just get the plug in for Acronis. We're here at their Global Cyber Summit. You flew down for it, giving some keynote speeches and talks around security. It's a security company, data protection, to cyber protection. It is a data problem, not a storage appliance problem. It's a data problem holistically. You get that. >> Sure. Sure. >> You've been in the business for a long time. What is the security kind of posture that you guys have? Obviously you want to protect the data, protect privacy. But you got to business. You have people that work with you, supply chain, complex but yet dynamic, always on environment. >> That's a great question. It's evolving as you indicated. Major League Baseball, first and foremost, does an outstanding job. So the last, probably last four plus years, Major League Baseball has had a cyber security program that all the clubs partake in. So all 30 clubs are active participants in the program. They basically help build out a suite of tools as well as the ability to kind of monitor, help participate in the monitoring, sort of a lot of our cyber security assets and logs And that's really elevated significantly our posture in terms of security. We supplement that quite a bit and a good example of that is like Acronis. Acronis, for us, represents the ability for us to be able to respond to certain potential threats like ransom-ware and other things. As well as frankly, what's wonderful about a tool like this is that it allows us to also solve other problems. Making our scouts more efficient. We've got these 125 scouts scattered around the globe. These guys are the lifeblood of our, you know, the success of our business. When they have a problem, if they're in Venezuela or the Dominican or someplace else, in southeast Asia, getting them up and running as quickly as we can, being able to consume their video assets and other things as they're scouting prospects. We use Acronis for those solutions. It's great to kind of have a partner who can both double down as a cyber partner as well as someone who helps drive a more efficient business. >> People bring their phone into the stadiums too so those are end points now connecting to your network. >> Definitely. And as you pointed out before, we've got great partnerships. We've got a great concession relationship with Aramark and they operate, in the future they'll be operating off our infrastructure. So we're in the point of rolling out all new point-of-sale terminals this off-season. We're excited about that 'cause we think for the first time it really allows us to build a very comprehensive, very secure environment for both ourselves and for all the touchpoints to fans. >> You have a very stellar career. I noticed you were at Scudder Investments back in the '80s, very cutting-edge firm. FTD that set the whole standard for connecting retailers. Again, huge scale play. Can see the data kind of coming out, they way you've been a CIO, CTO. The EVP CIO at The Weather Channel and the weather.com again, first mover, kind of pioneer. And then now the Red Sox, pioneering. So I got to ask you the modernization question. Red Sox certainly have been cutting-edge, certainly under the last few owners, and the previous Henry is a good one, doing more and more, Has the business model of baseball evolved, 'cause you guys a franchise. >> Sure. >> You operate under the franchisor, Major League Baseball, and you have jurisdictions. So has digital blurred the lines between what Advanced Media unit can do. You got communities developing outside. I watch the games in California. I'm not in there but I'm present digitally. >> Sure. Sure. >> So how has the business model flexed with the innovation of baseball? >> That's a great question. So I mean, first off, the relationship between clubs like ours and MLB continue to evolve. We have a new commissioner, relatively new commissioner, and I think the whole one-baseball model that he's been promoting I think has been great. The boundaries sometimes between digital assets and how we innovate and things like that continues to evolve. Major League Baseball and technology groups and product groups that support Major League Baseball have been a fantastic partner of ours. If you look at some of the innovations with Statcast and some of the other types of things that fans are now becoming more familiar with. And when they see how fast a runner goes or how far a home run goes and all those sort of things, these kinds of capabilities are on the surface, but even like mobile applications, to make it easy for fans to come into ballparks and things like that really. What we see is really are platforms for the future touchpoints to all of our customers. But you're right, it gets complicated. Streaming videos and people hadn't thought of before. >> Latin America, huge audience for the Red Sox. Got great players down there. That's outside the jurisdiction, I think, of the franchise agreement, isn't it? (laughs) >> Well, it's complicated. As this past summer, we played two games in England, right? So we enjoy two games in London, sadly we lost to the Yankees in both of those, but amazing experience and Major League Baseball really hats off to those guys, what they did to kind of pull that together. >> You mentioned Statcast. Every year when I meet with Andy Jassy at AWS, he's a sports fan. We love to talk sports. That's a huge, kind of shows the power of data and cloud computing. >> No doubt. >> How do you guys interface with Statcast? Is that an Amazon thing? Do they come to you? Are they leveraging dimensions, camera angles? How does that all work? Are you guys involved in that or? >> Brian: Oh yeah, yeah. >> Is that separate? >> So Statcast is just one of many data feeds as you can imagine. One of the things that Major League Baseball does is all that type of data is readily available to every club. So every club has access to the data. The real competitive differentiator, if you will, is how you use it internally. Like how your analysts can consume that data. We have a baseball system we call Beacon. We retired Carmine, if you're familiar with the old days of Carmine. So we retired Carmine a few years ago with Beacon. And Beacon for us represents sort of our opportunity to effectively collapse all this information into a decision-making environment that allows us to hopefully to kind of make the best decisions to win the most games. >> I love that you're answering all these questions. I really appreciate it. The one I really want to get into is obviously the fan experience. We talked about that. No talent on the field means no World Series so you got to always be constantly replenishing the talent pool, farm system, recruiting, scouting, all these things go on. They're instrumental. Data's a key driver. What new innovations that the casual fan or IT person might be interested in what's going on around scouting and understanding the asset of a human being? >> Right. Sure. I mean some of this gets highly confidential and things, but I think at a macro level, as you start to see both in the minor leagues and in some portions of the major leagues, wearable technologies. I think beyond just sort of player performance information that you would see traditionally with you might associate it with like Billy Beane, and things like that with "Moneyball" which is evolved obviously considerably since those days. I mean understanding sort of player wellness, understanding sort of how to get the most out of a player and understanding sort of, be able to kind of predict potential injuries and accelerate recoveries and being able to use all of this technology where appropriate to really kind of help sort of maximize the value of player performance. I mean, David Ortiz, you know, I don't know where we would have been in 2018 without, you know, David. >> John: Yeah. >> But like, you know >> Longevity of a player. >> Absolutely. >> To when they're in the zone. You wear a ring now to tell you if you're sleeping well. Will managers have a visual, in-the-zone, don't pull 'em out, he can go an extra inning? >> Well, I mean they have a lot of data. We currently don't provide all that data to the clubhouse. I mean, you know, and so If you're in the dugout, that information isn't always readily available type of thing. But players know all this information. We continue to evolve it. At the end of the day though, it's finding the balancing act between data and the aptitudes of our coaching staff and our managers to really make the wise decisions. >> Brian, final question for you. What's the coolest thing you're working on right now? Besides the fan having a great experience, 'cause that's you kind of touched on that. What's the coolest thing that you're excited about that you're working on from a tech perspective that you think is going to be game-changing or interesting? >> I think our cloud strategy coming up in the future. It's still a little bit early stage, but our hope would be to kind of have clarity about that in the next couple months. I think is going to be a game-changer for us. I think having, you know, we enjoy a great relationship with Dell EMC and yet we also do work in the cloud and so being able to leverage the best of both of those to be able to kind of create sort of a compelling experience for both fans, for both player, baseball operations as well as sort of running an efficient business, I think is really what we're all about. >> I mean you guys are the poster child for hybrid cloud because you got core, data center, IoT, and >> No doubt. So it's exciting times. And we're very fortunate that with our relationship organizations like Dell and EMC, we have leading-edge technologies. So we're excited about where that can go and kind of what that can mean. It'll be a big step. >> Okay two personal questions from me as a fan. One is there really a money-counting room like in the movie "The Town"? Where they count a big stack of dollar bills. >> Well, I'm sure there is. I personally haven't visited it. (laughs) I know it's not in the room that they would tell you it is on the movie. (laughter) >> And finally, can The Cube get press passes to cover the games, next to NESN? Talk tech. >> Yeah, we'll see what we can do. >> They can talk baseball. We can talk about bandwidth. Right now, it's the level five conductivity. We're looking good on the pipes. >> Yeah we'll give you a tech tour. And you guys can sort of help us articulate all that to the fans. >> Thank you so much. Brian Shield, Vice President of Technology of the Boston Red Sox. Here talking about security and also the complications and challenges but the mega-opportunities around what digital and fan experiences are with the physical product like baseball, encapsulates kind of the digital revolution that's happening. So keep covering it. Here in Miami, I'm John Furrier. We'll be right back after this short break. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from New York, it's theCube! Covering AWS Global Summit 2019, brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back, we're here at the Javits Center in New York City for AWS Summit, I'm Stu Miniman, my cohost is Corey Quinn and happy to welcome to the program Scott Mullins, who's the head of Worldwide Financial Services Business Development with Amazon Web Services based here in The Big Apple, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me, Stu, thanks for having me, Corey. >> All right so we had obviously financial services big location here in New York City. We just had FINRA on our program, had a great conversation about how they're using AWS for their environments, but give us a thumbnail if you will about your business, your customers and what you're seeing there. >> Sure, we're working with financial institutions all the way from the newest FinTech startups, all the way to organizations like FINRA, the largest exchanges and brokers dealers like Nasdaq, as well as insurers and the largest banks. And I've been here for five years and in that time period I actually went from being a customer speaking at the AWS Summit here in the Javits Center on stage like Steve Randich was today to watching more and more financial institutions coming forward, talking about their use in the cloud. >> Yeah before we get into technology, one of the biggest trends of moving to cloud is I'm moving from CapEx more to OpEx and oh my gosh there's uncertainty because I'm not locking in some massive contract that I'm paying up front or depreciating over five years but I've got flexibility and things are going to change. I'm curious what you're seeing as the financial pieces of how people both acquire and keep on the books what they're doing. >> Yeah it can be a little bit different, right, then what most people are used to. They're used to kind of that muscle memory and that rhythm of how you procured technology in the past and there can be a stage of adjustment, but cost isn't really the thing that people I think look to the most when it comes to cloud today, it's all about agility and FINRA is a great example. Steve has talked about over and over again over the last several years how they were able to gain such business agility and actually to do more, the fact that they're now processing 155 billion market events every night and able to run all their surveillance routines. That's really indicative of the value that people are looking for. Being able to actually get products to market faster and reducing development cycles from 18 months to three months, like Allianz, one of our customers over in Europe has been able to do. Being able to go faster I think actually trumps cost from the standpoint of what that biggest value driver that we're seeing our customers going after in financial services. >> We're starting to see such a tremendous difference as far as the people speaking at these keynotes. Once upon a time you had Netflix and folks like that on stage telling a story about how they're using cloud to achieve all these amazing things, but when you take a step back and start blinking a little bit, they fundamentally stream movies and yes, produce some awesome original content. With banks and other financial institutions if the ATM starts spitting out the wrong number, that's a different point on the spectrum of are people going to riot in the street. I'm not saying it's further along, people really like their content but it's still a different use case with a different risk profile. Getting serious companies that have world shaking impact to trust public cloud took time and we're seeing it with places like FINRA, Capital One has been very active as far as evangelizing their use of cloud. It's just been transformative. What does that look like, from being a part of that? >> Well you know it's interesting, so you know you just said it, financial services is the business of risk management. And so to get more and when you see more and more of these financial institutions coming forward and talking about their use of cloud, what that really equates to is comfort, they've got that muscle memory now, they've probably been working with us in some way, shape or form for some great period of time and so if you look at last year, you had Dean Del Vecchio from Guardian Life Insurance come out on stage at Reinvent and say to the crowd "Hey we're a 158 year old insurance company but we've now closed our data center and we're fully on AWS and we've completed the transformation of our organization". The year before you saw Goldman Sachs walk out and say "Yeah we've been working with AWS for about four years now and we're actually using them for some very interesting use cases within Goldman Sachs". And so typically what you've seen is that over the course of about a two year to sometimes a four year time period, you've got institutions that are working deeply with us, but they're not talking about it. They're gaining that muscle memory, they're putting those first use cases to begin to scale that work up and then when they're ready man, they're ready to talk about it and they're excited to talk about it. What's interesting though is today we're having this same summit that we're having here in Cape Town in Africa and we had a customer, Old Mutual, who's one of the biggest insurers there, they just started working with us in earnest back in May and they were on stage today, so you're seeing that actually beginning to happen a lot quicker, where people are building that muscle memory faster and they're much more eager to talk about it. You're going to see that trend I think continue in financial services over the next few years so I'm very excited for future summits as well as Reinvent because the stories that we're going to see are going to come faster. You're going to see more use cases that go a lot deeper in the industry and you're going to see it covering a lot more of the industry. >> It's very much not, IT is no longer what people think of in terms of Tech companies in San Francisco building products. It's banks, it's health care and these companies are transitioning to become technology companies but when your entire, as you mentioned, the entire industry becomes about risk management, it's challenging sometimes to articulate things when you're not both on the same page. I was working with a financial partner years ago at a company I worked for and okay they're a financial institution, they're ready to sign off on this but before that they'd like to tour US East one first and validate that things are as we say they are. The answer is yeah me too, sadly, you folks have never bothered to invite me to tour an active AZ, maybe next year. It's challenging to I guess meet people where they are and speak the right language, the right peace for a long time. >> And that's why you see us have a financial services team in the first place, right? Because your financial services or health care or any of the other industries, they're very unique and they have a very specific language and so we've been very focused on making sure that we speak that language that we have an understanding of what that industry entails and what's important to that industry because as you know Amazon's a very customer obsessed organization and we want to work backwards from our customers and so it's been very important for us to actually speak that language and be able to translate that to our service teams to say hey this is important to financial services and this is why, here's the context for that. I think as we've continued to see more and more financial institutions take on that technology company mindset, I'm a technology company that happens to run a bank or happens to run an exchange company or happens to run an insurance business, it's actually been easier to talk to them about the services that we offer because now they have that mindset, they're moving more towards DevOps and moving more towards agile. And so it's been really easy to actually communicate hey, here are the appropriate changes you have to make, here's how you evolve governance, here's how you address security and compliance and the different levels of resiliency that actually improve from the standpoint of using these services. >> All right so Scott, back before I did this, I worked for some large technology suppliers and there were some groups on Wall Street that have huge IT budgets and IT staffs and actually were very cutting edge in what they were building, in what they were doing and very proud of their IT knowledge, and they were like, they have some of the smartest people in the industry and they spend a ton of money because they need an edge. Talking about transactions on stock markets, if I can translate milliseconds into millions of dollars if I can act faster. So you know, those companies, how are they moving along to do the I need to build it myself and differentiate myself because of my IT versus hey I can now have access to all the services out there because you're offering them with new ones every day, but geez how do I differentiate myself if everybody can use some of these same tools. >> So that's my background as well and so you go back that and milliseconds matter, milliseconds are money, right? When it comes to trading and actually building really bespoke applications on bespoke infrastructure. So I think what we're seeing from a transitional perspective is that you still have that mindset where hey we're really good at technology, we're really good at building applications. But now it's a new toolkit, you have access to a completely new toolkit. It's almost like The Matrix, you know that scene where Neo steps into that white room and hey says "I need this" and then the shelves just show up, that's kind how it is in the cloud, you actually have the ability to leverage the latest and greatest technologies at your fingertips when you want to build and I think that's something that's been a really compelling thing for financial institutions where you don't have to wait to get infrastructure provisioned for you. Before I worked for AWS, I worked for large financial institutions as well and when we had major projects that we had to do that sometimes had a regulatory implication, we were told by our infrastructure team hey that's going to be six months before we can actually get your dev environment built so you can actually begin to develop what you need. And actually we had to respond within about thirty days and so you had a mismatch there. With the cloud you can provision infrastructure easily and you have an access to an array of services that you can use to build immediately. And that means value, that means time to market, that means time to answering questions from customers, that means really a much faster time to answering questions from regulatory agencies and so we're seeing the adoption and the embrace of those services be very large and very significant. >> It's important to make sure that the guardrails are set appropriately, especially for a risk managed firm but once you get that in place correctly, it's an incredible boost of productivity and capability, as opposed to the old crappy way of doing governance of oh it used to take six weeks to get a server in so we're going to open a ticket now whenever you want to provision an instance and it only takes four, yay we're moving faster. It feels like there's very much a right way and a wrong way to start embracing cloud technology. >> Yeah and you know human nature is to take the run book you have today and try to apply it to tomorrow and that doesn't always work because you can use that run book and you'll get down to line four and suddenly line four doesn't exist anymore because of what's happened from a technological change perspective. Yeah I think that's why things like AWS control tower and security hub, which are those guardrails, those services that we announced recently that have gone GA. We announced them a couple of weeks ago at Reinforce in Boston. Those are really interesting to financial services customers because it really begins to help automate a lot of those compliance controls and provisioning those through control tower and then monitoring those through security hub and so you've seen us focus on how do we actually make that easier for customers to do. We know that risk management, we know that governance and controls is very important in financial services. We actually offer our customers a way to look from a country specific angle, add the different countries and the rule sets and the requirements that exist in those countries and how you map those to our controls and how you map those into your own controls and all the considerations that you have, we've got them on our public website. If you went to atlas.aws right now, that's our compliance center, you could actually pick the countries you're interested in and we'll have that mapping for you. So you'll see us continue to invest in things like that to make that much easier for customers to actually deploy quickly and to evolve those governance frameworks. >> And things like with Artifact, where it's just grab whatever compliance report you need, submit it and it's done without having to go through a laborious process. It's click button, receive compliance in some cases. >> If you're not familiar with it you can go into the AWS console and you've got Artifact right there and if you need a SOC report or you need some other type of artifact, you can just download it right there through the console, yeah it's very convenient. >> Yeah so Scott you know we talked about some of the GRC pieces in place, what are you seeing trends out there kind of globally, you know GDRP was something that was on everybody's mind over the last year or so. California has new regulations that are coming in place, so anything specific in your world or just the trends that you're seeing that might impact our environments-- >> I think that the biggest trends I would point to are data analytics, data analytics, data analytics, data analytics. And on top of that obviously machine learning. You know, data is the lifeblood of financial services, it's what makes everything go. And you can look at what's happening in this space where you've got companies like Bloomberg and Refinitiv who are making their data products available on AWS so you can get B-Pipe on AWS today, you can also get the elektron platform from Refintiv and then what people are trying to do in relation to hey I want to organize my data, I want to make it much easier to actually find value in data, both either from the standpoint of regulatory reporting, as you heard Steve talk about on stage today. FINRA is building a very large data repository that they have to from the standpoint of a regulatory perspective with CAT. Broker dealers have to actually feed the CAT and so they are also worried about here in the US, how do I actually organize my data, get all the elements I have to report to CAT together and actually do that in a very efficient way. So that's a big data analytic project. Things that are helping to make that much easier are leg formations, so we came up with leg formation last year and so you've got many financial institutions that are looking at how do you make building a data leg that much easier and then how do you layer analytics on top of that, whether it's using Amazon elastic map reduce or EMR to actually run regulatory reporting jobs or how do I begin to leverage machine learning to actually make my data analytics from a standpoint of trade surveillance or fraud detection that much more enriched and actually looking for those anomalies rather than just looking for a whole bunch of false positives. So data analytics I think is what I would point to as the biggest trend and how to actually make data more useful and how to get to data insights faster. >> On the one end it seems like there's absolutely a lot of potential in this, on the other it feels in many cases with large scale data analytics, it's we have all these tools for machine learning and the rest that we can wind up passing out to you but you need to figure out what to do with them, how to make it work and it's unclear outside of a few specific use cases and I think you've alluded to a couple of those how to take in a typical business that maybe doesn't have an enormous pile of data and start applying machine learning to it in a way that makes intelligent sense. That feels right now like a storytelling failure to some extent industry wide. We're starting to see some stories emerge but it still feels a little "Gold Rush"-y to some extent. >> Yeah I would say, and my advice would be don't try to boil the ocean or don't try to boil the data leg, meaning you want to do machine learning, you've got a great amount of earnestness about that but picture use case, really hone in on what you're trying to accomplish and work backwards from that. And we offer tooling that can be really helpful in that, you know with stage maker you can train your models and you can actually make data science available to a much broader array of people than just your data scientists. And so where we see people focusing first, is where it matters to their business. So if you've got a regulatory obligation to do surveillance or fraud detection, those are great use cases to start with. How do I enhance my existing surveillance or fraud detection, so that I'm not just wading again through a sea of false positives. How do I actually reduce that workload for a human analyst using machine learning. That's a one step up and then you can go from there, you can actually continue to work deeper into the use cases and say okay how do I treat those parameters, how do I actually look for different things that I'm used to with the rules based systems. You can also look at offering more value to customers so with next best offer with Amazon Personalize, we now have encapsulated the service that we use on the amazon.com retail site as a service that we offer to customers so you don't have to build all that tooling yourself, you can actually just consume Personalize as a service to help with those personalized recommendations for customers. >> Scott, really appreciate all the updates on your customers in the financial services industry, thanks so much for joining us. >> Happy to be here guys, thanks for having me. >> All right for Corey Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman, back with more here at AWS Summit in New York City 2019, thanks as always for watching theCube.

>> Live from San Diego, California It's the queue covering Sisqo live US 2019 Tio by Cisco and its ecosystem. Barker's >> Welcome Back Here in the San Diego Convention Center. I'm student in my co host, David Dante, and you're watching the Cube, the leader in worldwide Tech coverage, and its Sisqo Live 2019 happening. Welcome back to the program. One of our Cuba, Lem's Russ Curie, who is the vice president Enterprise strategy at Net Scout. It's great to see you. Thanks for joining you guys. Thanks for having me. Alright, we always say, we got a bunch of Massachusetts guys that had to fly all the way across the country to talk to each other really well. So a couple hours for the beast hip, all everybody excited. But a lot of excitement here in the definite zone specifically and Sisqo live overall, 28,000 intended you've been to a lot of customer meetings, gives a little insight. What's been your take away from the show so >> far? I think that there's a lot of energy towards the multi cloud called Deployments in general Security. The whole introduction of Umbrella has got a lot of conversation started. It's amazing the amount of cos you see out there talking about just visibility in general, and that's being one of them as well. So it's been a lot of fun. >> Good show this year, Russ. I've been looking for this conversation. We heard from Chuck Robbins in the keynote. He said The network sees a lot of things, and Cisco says they're going to give customers that visibility. Of course, that ties in a lot, too. What Net scouted love, you know, give us. You know, your thoughts on Multi Cloud. How Cisco doing in the space? And how does Net Scout fit into that whole picture? >> Well, I think that one of things as Chuck talks about that, it's the cloud is the one thing, or the network is the one thing that's common for all. Coming along the devices right? I have. If I go into a different cloud, I have one set a performance metrics I might be able to gather about. You look at what device or an operating system. It's all different. But all the communications on the network T C P I. P is common. That really provides that thread that you're able to provide that level of visibility. So it really becomes one of those things that the network is a unique place to gain perspective on both the performance in the security that we're delivering to our customers. So can >> you just summarize the problem that Net Scout solves for our audience? Sure, I think that primarily it's one of these situations where I've been my own prime environment. It was pretty easy. I had access to everything. I could see what was going on. Quite readily. I started introduced visual ization and now traffic start to move much more East West and became a problem for folks. I think can Cisco recently said 85% of the traffic there seeing on the network is East West traffic, right? And then we moved to the cloud, and it's even more obvious gay that I can't see anything in new ways of network traffic. There typically live in clover and desert starting to address that, but really being able to gain that level of visibility so you can understand exactly what's happening just gaining that perspective. So let's explain it. >> I'm going to stay with the East West north seven metaphor. Why is it easier to get visibility in a column? >> Then? It is a row, I think, because in a column is everything exploding north and self. So you've got everything right there, and usually you have a place where you can look into it. But when you're flat, it starts to become really different you're looking at. But advice is talking to know the devices that don't necessarily have to traverse any part of the network it. Khun, stay within. Ah, hi provides, for example, so providing solutions lawyer game visibility into that environment is really important and the protocols that we use their change a bit so traditional tools don't necessarily fit well. So what's the general solution to >> solving that problem? And then I want to understand the Net Scouts secret sauce. But let's stop. Let's start of high level. How does the industry solved that problem? So the industry >> has been trying to solve that problem mostly by looking at the goodwill of third parties, looking at things like net blower, log events and aggregating that normalizing it. You've had solution sets that looked at network traffic, but it becomes very difficult for a lot of folks to make use of that network traffic, and what we've done is really provide the ability to look into that network. Traffic and gain gather from really anywhere it's deployed whether it's public loud, private cloud, our solution said, That's our secret sauce. Our solution. Second go anyway. >> So so add some color to that in terms of your able to inspect deeper through what just magic software you got. You got a pro you send in so >> well. Actually, we have a device. It's called a SNG, and in the virtual world we use something that we call be stream. In the physical world, we have some that we call in Finnish Stream N. G. And that leverage is a technology that we've developed, called Sai, which is adaptive service intelligence and well, also do is watch all that traffic and build meta data in real time so we can surface key indicators of performance and security events. Get that information up into a collection mechanism that doesn't have to normalize that data. It just looks at it as is way. Build it into a service Contact services context laws uses to see across a multi cloud environment in a single pane of glass. Okay, so one of >> the biggest challenges for customers is that they're changing these environment. It's what happens. Their applications, you know, applications used to be rather self contained. Even the bm They might have moved some, but now we're talking about, you know, micro services, architecture, multi cloud environment. There's there's a lot going on there, you know? What's the impact on that for your world, >> Right? That's been exactly it. Weigh three tier application was kind of pretty straight forward, even though at the point we started introducing, we thought that was a really tough stuff. Now what we're doing, as you say, it's doing micro services architectures, and I might take my presentation layer and put out in the cloud and the public cloud in particular. So I'm closer to the UN user and delivering better high performance capabilities to them lower lately, Auntie and the like and I take my application server and I split that up all over the place, and I might put some in public. Claude. I might put some in private club. I maintain some of it in the legacy. So all that interconnection, all that independency is really, really hard to get your hands around and that complexity. We looked at the street study that said 94% of the 600 respondents said that the the networks are as complex or more complex than they have been two years ago. >> Yeah, that's not surprising, unfortunately to hear that, but you know, when we talk to customers out there, it used to be, you know, the network is something You set it up. You turned all your knobs and then don't breathe on this thing because I've got a just where I want today. It can't be like that. You know, I I we know that it's very dynamic has changed. The message from Cisco has been We need to simplify things and, you know, obviously everybody wants that. But how do you make sure you ensure that application, performance and security, without having the poor admit, have to constantly, you know, be getting tickets in dealing with things >> I think are Solution really provides a common framework for visibility, and that's really what I think is really important. When you're starting to infer based upon different data sets, it becomes very difficult to put your finger on the problem and identified. That's really a problem. And it's trying to blend the organization. Let's sit this concept of the versatile list and trying to make sure that people are more capable in addressing problems in kind of a multi dimensional role that they have now in particular network and security. The organizations, they're trying to come together, God, they rely on different data sense, and that's where it kind of falls apart. If you have a common day to say, you're going to have a better perspective, Okay, >> I was just a front from that application standpoint. How much of this is just giving notification to invisibility? Intuit vs, you know? Is it giving recommendations or even taking actions along those lines? >> Yeah, I think it has. It has to give you recommendations and has to give you pinpoints. You really? You've got to be able to say there here's a problem. This is what you need to do to fix it right? I think what often when I'm talking to folks, I say it's about getting the right information to the right person at the right time to do the right thing If you're able to do that, you're going to be much more effective. Yes. OK, so you've got this early warning system, essentially, hopefully not a tulip. But that's what practitioners want. Tell me something. Tell me. Give me a a gap and tell me the action to take before something goes wrong. Ideally. And so you could do that. You could give them visibility on it, Kind of pinpoint it. And do you see the day, Russ, where you can use machine intelligence toe as Stuart suggesting start to maybe suggest remedial action or even take remedial action? Oh, absolutely. I mean, there are some things that you can really do and do quite well. Walking for security events, for example, is the primary one. We've always had the ideas in place in the early days, a lot of folks who are cautious because they wanted to have a negative impact on the business. But when we take a look at ex filtration and blocking outbound connections, if you know the bad actors and you know the bad addresses, you can stop that before it gets out of your network. So people aren't gonna have that X illustration of your information. >> All right. So, Russ, you've been meeting with a bunch of customers here at the show, What's top of mind for them And if some of the conversation I've been having this week, you know, security, you know, has been climbing that that list for many years now. But in your world, what are some of the top issues? >> Yeah, security, definitely. There's no question. I think it's one of those environments where you can almost never have enough. There is always hungry more and more and better and more accurate solutions. I I think I saw something recently. There was a top 125 security solutions that's like top 120 times really way. Doyle The Town 25 Exactly. And I think I D. C's taxonomy has 73 sub categories to the security. So security is, you know, more than a $500 word. You know, it might be a $5,000 word. It's crazy and same with club, right, because it's not like, you know, in fact, I was talking to someone recently, and it's with the club village Go. It's not a club village. A more This is everything we're doing is the cloud. So it's change in mindset. So it's It's interesting as a cloud universe. So what's next for Net Scout, you know, give us a little road map? What Khun observers expect coming from you guys more significant, pushing the security in particular. One of things we see is that our data set really has the ability to be leverage for both security and performance work. Load sport floats were integrating the products that we bought with the Harbour acquisition we bought over networks. And they have a highly curated threat intelligence feed that we're going to bring in and add to our infinite streams and have the ability to detect problems deep inside the network. You know, it's one of these things the bad actors kind of live off the land. They get in there and they know their way around slowly and methodically and drought dribble information. No. Well, the only way to catch that is like continually monitoring the network. So having that perspective so continuing to grow that out and provide again more of that, eh? I aml approach to understanding and be more predictive when we see things and be able to surf. It's that type of information. Security already used to be activists. And now it's become, you know, high crime even. Yeah, even, you know, nation states, right. And the job of ah of a security technology company is to raise the cost, lower the value right to the hacker, right to the infiltrator so that they go somewhere else. All right. Hey, make it really expensive for them. So either get through. But we ve what's like you get through, make it really hard for them to take stuff out. And that's really what you're doing. >> It was like you made sure to lock the front door now because it stopped them. But, you know, maybe I'll go somewhere else, right? It's a little bit >> different. Preventing you wanna minimize your risk, right? So if you're able to minimize the risk from performance and security problems, it's really all about understanding what you've got, what your assets are protecting them. And then when that someone's trying to look at them stopping it from happening, >> OK, last question I have for you, Russ, is being in this Cisco ecosystem out there. We're watching Cisco go through a transformation become more and more software company now, four years into the Chuckle Robin's era. So you know, how's that going in? What's it mean to partner Francisco today? >> It's going really well, and I think that we adopted a lot of way or adopted a lot of what the Sisko has done as well and really transform Nets go from what was primarily a hardware first company into a software first company. You know, it's kind of I was in a conference once and we were talking about software eating the world, right and but ultimately, its hardware. That's doing the chewing right. So I think it's one of those balancing acts. You know, it's Cisco's still of selling a ton of hardware, but it's a software solution sets so they deploy on their hardware. That makes it happen. And it's similar for us. You know, we're building out software solutions that really address the issues that people have building all these complex environments. All right, >> Russ Curie, congratulations on all the progress there and look forward to keeping up with how Netscape's moving forward in this multi cloud world. Thank you. All right, we'll be back with lots more coverage here from Cisco Live, San Diego for David Dante Obst Amendment. Lisa Martin's also here. Thanks, as always, for watching the Cube.

[Music] when welcome to the special exclusive cube conversation here in Palo Alto in our studios I'm John for your host of the cube we have a very special guest speaking for the first time around some alleged alleged accusations and also innuendo around the Amazon Web Services Jedi contract and his firm c5 capital our guest as Andre Pienaar who's the founder of c5 capital Andre is here for the first time to talk about some of the hard conversations and questions surrounding his role his firm and the story from the BBC Andre thanks for a rat for meeting with me John great to have me thank you so you're at the center of a controversy and just for the folks who know the cube know we interviewed a lot of people I've interviewed you at Amazon web sources summit Teresa Carl's event and last year I met you and bought a rein the work you're doing there so I've met you a few times so I don't know your background but I want to drill into it because I was surprised to see the BBC story come out last week that was basically accusing you of many things including are you a spy are you infiltrating the US government through the Jedi contract through Amazon and knowing c-5 capital I saw no correlation when reading your article I was kind of disturbed but then I saw I said a follow-on stories it just didn't hang together so I wanted to press you on some questions and thanks for coming in and addressing them appreciate it John thanks for having me so first thing I want to ask you is you know it has you at the center this firm c5 capital that you the founder of at the center of what looks like to be the fight for the big ten billion dollar DoD contract which has been put out to multiple vendors so it's not a single source deal we've covered extensively on silicon angle calm and the cube and the government the government Accounting Office has ruled that there are six main benefits of going with a sole provider cloud this seems to be the war so Oracle IBM and others have been been involved we've been covering that so it kind of smells like something's going along with the story and I just didn't believe some of the things I read and I want to especially about you and see five capitals so I want to dig into what the first thing is it's c5 capital involved in the Jedi contract with AWS Sean not at all we have absolutely no involvement in the Jedi contract in any way we're not a bidder and we haven't done any lobbying as has been alleged by some of the people who've been making this allegation c5 has got no involvement in the general contract we're a venture capital firm with a British venture capital firm we have the privilege of investing here in the US as a foreign investor and our focus really is on the growth and the success of the startups that we are invested in so you have no business interest at all in the deal Department of Defense Jedi contract none whatsoever okay so to take a minute to explain c5 firm I read some of the stories there and some of the things were intricate structures of c5 cap made it sound like there was like a cloak-and-dagger situation I want to ask you some hard questions around that because there's a link to a Russian situation but before we get to there I want to ask you explain what is c5 capital your mission what are the things that you're doing c5 is a is a British venture capital firm and we are focused on investing into fast-growing technology companies in three areas cloud computing cyber security and artificial intelligence we have two parts our business c5 capital which invests into late stage companies so these are companies that typically already have revenue visibility and profitability but still very fast-growing and then we also have a very early stage startup platform that look at seed state investment and this we do through two accelerators to social impact accelerators one in Washington and one in Bahrain and it's just size of money involved just sort of order magnitude how many funds do you have how is it structure again just share some insight on that is it is there one firm is there multiple firms how is it knows it work well today the venture capital business has to be very transparent it's required by compliance we are a regulated regulated firm we are regulated in multiple markets we regulated here in the US the sec as a foreign investor in london by the financial conduct authority and in Luxembourg where Afonso based by the regulatory authorities there so in the venture capital industry today you can't afford to be an opaque business you have to be transparent at all levels and money in the Western world have become almost completely transparent so there's a very comprehensive and thorough due diligence when you onboard capital called know your client and the requirements standard requirement now is that whenever you're onboard capital from investor you're gonna take it right up to the level of the ultimate beneficial ownership so who actually owns this money and then every time you invest and you move your money around it gets diligence together different regulators and in terms of disclosure and the same applies often now with clients when our portfolio companies have important or significant clients they also want to know who's behind the products and the services they receive so often our boards our board directors and a shell team also get diligence by by important clients so explain this piece about the due diligence and the cross country vetting that goes on is I think it's important I want to get it out because how long has been operating how many deals have you done you mentioned foreign investor in the United States you're doing deals in the United States I know I've met one of your portfolio companies at an event iron iron on it iron net general Keith Alexander former head of the NSA you know get to just work with him without being vetted I guess so so how long a c5 capital been in business and where have you made your investments you mentioned cross jurisdiction across countries whatever it's called I don't know that so we've been and we've been in existence for about six years now our main focus is investing in Europe so we help European companies grow globally Europe historically has been underserved by venture capital we on an annual basis we invest about twenty seven billion dollars gets invested in venture capital in Europe as opposed to several multiples of that in the US so we have a very important part to play in Europe to how European enterprise software companies grow globally other important markets for us of course are Israel which is a major center of technology innovation and and the Middle East and then the u.s. the u.s. is still the world leader and venture capital both in terms of size but also in terms of the size of the market and of course the face and the excitement of the innovation here I want to get into me early career because again timing is key we're seeing this with you know whether it's a Supreme Court justice or anyone in their career their past comes back to haunt them it appears that has for you before we get there I want to ask you about you know when you look at the kind of scope of fraud and corruption that I've seen in just on the surface of government thing the government bit Beltway bandits in America is you got a nonprofit that feeds a for-profit and then what you know someone else runs a shell corporation so there's this intricate structures and that word was used which it kind of implies shell corporations a variety of backroom kind of smokey deals going on you mentioned transparency I do you have anything to hide John in in in our business we've got absolutely nothing to hide we have to be transparent we have to be open if you look at our social media profile you'll see we are communicating with the market almost on a daily basis every time we make an investment we press release that our website is very clear about who's involved enough who our partners are and the same applies to my own personal website and so in terms of the money movement around in terms of deploying investments we've seen Silicon Valley VCS move to China get their butts handed to them and then kind of adjust their scenes China money move around when you move money around you mentioned disclosure what do you mean there's filings to explain that piece it's just a little bit so every time we make an investment into a into a new portfolio company and we move the money to that market to make the investment we have to disclose who all the investors are who are involved in that investment so we have to disclose the ultimate beneficial ownership of all our limited partners to the law firms that are involved in the transactions and those law firms in turn have applications in terms of they own anti-money laundering laws in the local markets and this happens every time you move money around so I I think that the level of transparency in venture capital is just continue to rise exponentially and it's virtually impossible to conceal the identity of an investor this interesting this BBC article has a theme of national security risk kind of gloom and doom nuclear codes as mentioned it's like you want to scare someone you throw nuclear codes at it you want to get people's attention you play the Russian card I saw an article on the web that that said you know anything these days the me2 movement for governments just play the Russian card and you know instantly can discredit someone's kind of a desperation act so you got confident of interest in the government national security risk seems to be kind of a theme but before we get into the BBC news I noticed that there was a lot of conflated pieces kind of pulling together you know on one hand you know you're c5 you've done some things with your hat your past and then they just make basically associate that with running amazon's jedi project yes which i know is not to be true and you clarified that joan ends a problem joan so as a venture capital firm focused on investing in the space we have to work with all the Tier one cloud providers we are great believers in commercial cloud public cloud we believe that this is absolutely transformative not only for innovation but also for the way in which we do venture capital investment so we work with Amazon Web Services we work with Microsoft who work with Google and we believe that firstly that cloud has been made in America the first 15 companies in the world are all in cloud companies are all American and we believe that cloud like the internet and GPS are two great boons which the US economy the u.s. innovation economy have provided to the rest of the world cloud computing is reducing the cost of computing power with 50 percent every three years opening up innovation and opportunities for Entrepreneurship for health and well-being for the growth of economies on an unprecedented scale cloud computing is as important to the global economy today as the dollar ease as the world's reserve currency so we are great believers in cloud we great believers in American cloud computing companies as far as Amazon is concerned our relationship with Amazon Amazon is very Amazon Web Services is very clear and it's very defined we participate in a public Marcus program called AWS activate through which AWS supports hundreds of accelerators around the world with know-how with mentoring with teaching and with cloud credits to help entrepreneurs and startups grow their businesses and we have a very exciting focus for our two accelerators which is on in Washington we focus on peace technology we focus on taking entrepreneurs from conflict countries like Sudan Nigeria Pakistan to come to Washington to work on campus in the US government building the u.s. Institute for peace to scale these startups to learn all about cloud computing to learn how they can grow their businesses with cloud computing and to go back to their own countries to build peace and stability and prosperity their heaven so we're very proud of this mission in the Middle East and Bahrain our focus is on on female founders and female entrepreneurs we've got a program called nebula through which we empower female founders and female entrepreneurs interesting in the Middle East the statistics are the reverse from what we have in the West the majority of IT graduates in the Middle East are fimo and so there's a tremendous talent pool of of young dynamic female entrepreneurs coming out of not only the Gulf but the whole of the MENA region how about a relation with Amazon websites outside of their normal incubators they have incubators all over the place in the Amazon put out as Amazon Web Services put out a statement that said hey you know we have a lot of relationships with incubators this is normal course of business I know here in Silicon Valley at the startup loft this is this is their market filled market playbook so you fit into that is that correct as I'm I get that that's that's absolutely correct what we what is unusual about a table insists that this is a huge company that's focused on tiny startups a table started with startups it double uses first clients with startups and so here you have a huge business that has a deep understanding of startups and focus on startups and that's enormous the attractor for us and terrific for our accelerators department with them have you at c5 Capitol or individually have any formal or conversation with Amazon employees where you've had outside of giving feedback on products where you've tried to make change on their technology make change with their product management teams engineering you ever had at c5 capital whore have you personally been involved in influencing Amazon's product roadmap outside they're just giving normal feedback in the course of business that's way above my pay grade John firstly we don't have that kind of technical expertise in C 5 C 5 steam consists of a combination of entrepreneurs like myself people understand money really well and leaders we don't have that level of technical expertise and secondly that's what one our relationship with AWS is all about our relationship is entirely limited to the two startups and making sure that the two accelerators in making sure that the startups who pass through those accelerators succeed and make social impact and as a partner network component Amazon it's all put out there yes so in in a Barren accelerator we've we formed part of the Amazon partner network and the reason why we we did that was because we wanted to give some of the young people who come through the accelerator and know mastering cloud skills an opportunity to work on some real projects and real live projects so some of our young golf entrepreneurs female entrepreneurs have been working on building websites on Amazon Cloud and c5 capital has a relationship with former government officials you funded startups and cybersecurity that's kind of normal can you explain that positioning of it of how former government if it's whether it's US and abroad are involved in entrepreneurial activities and why that is may or may not be a problem certainly is a lot of kind of I would say smoke around this conversation around coffin of interest and you can you explain intelligence what that was it so I think the model for venture capital has been evolving and increasingly you get more and more differentiated models one of the key areas in which the venture capital model is changed is the fact that operating partners have become much more important to the success of venture capital firms so operating partners are people who bring real world experience to the investment experience of the investment team and in c-five we have the privilege of having a terrific group of operating partners people with both government and commercial backgrounds and they work very actively enough firm at all levels from our decision-making to the training and the mentoring of our team to helping us understand the way in which the world is exchanging to risk management to helping uh portfolio companies grow and Silicon Valley true with that to injuries in Horowitz two founders mr. friendly they bring in operating people that have entrepreneurial skills this is the new model understand order which has been a great source of inspiration to us for our model and and we built really believe this is a new model and it's really critical for the success of venture capitals to be going forward and the global impact is pretty significant one of things you mentioned I want to get your take on is as you operate a global transaction a lots happened a lot has to happen I mean we look at the ICO market on the cryptocurrency side its kind of you know plummeting obsoletes it's over now the mood security children's regulatory and transparency becomes critical you feel fully confident that you haven't you know from a regulatory standpoint c5 capital everything's out there absolutely risk management and regulated compliance and legal as the workstream have become absolutely critical for the success of venture capital firms and one of the reasons why this becomes so important John is because the venture capital world over the last few years have changed dramatically historically all the people involved in venture capital had very familiar names and came from very familiar places over the last few years with a diversification of global economic growth we've seen it's very significant amounts of money being invest invested in startups in China some people more money will invest in startups this year in China than in the US and we've seen countries like Saudi Arabia becoming a major source of venture capital funding some people say that as much as 70% of funding rounds this year in some way or another originated from the Gulf and we've seen places like Russia beginning to take an interest in technology innovation so the venture capital world is changing and for that reason compliance and regulation have become much more important but if Russians put 200 million dollars in face book and write out the check companies bright before that when the after 2008 we saw the rise of social networking I think global money certainly has something that I think a lot of people start getting used to and I want on trill down into that a little bit we talked about this BBC story that that hit and the the follow-on stories which actually didn't get picked up was mostly doing more regurgitation of the same story but one of the things that that they focus in on and the story was you and the trend now is your past is your enemy these days you know they try to drum up stuff in the past you've had a long career some of the stuff that they've been bringing in to paint you and the light that they did was from your past so I wanted to explore that with you I know you this is the first time you've talked about this and I appreciate you taking the time talk about your early career your background where you went to school because the way I'm reading this it sounds like you're a shady character I like like I interviewed on the queue but I didn't see that but you know I'm going to pressure here for that if you don't mind I'd like to to dig into that John thank you for that so I've had the I've had the privilege of a really amazingly interesting life and at the heart of at the heart of that great adventures been people and the privilege to work with really great people and good people I was born in South Africa I grew up in Africa went to school there qualified as a lawyer and then came to study in Britain when I studied international politics when I finished my studies international politics I got head hunted by a US consulting firm called crow which was a start of a 20 years career as an investigator first in crawl where I was a managing director in the London and then in building my own consulting firm which was called g3 and all of this led me to cybersecurity because as an investigator looking into organized crime looking into corruption looking into asset racing increasingly as the years went on everything became digital and I became very interested in finding evidence on electronic devices but starting my career and CRO was tremendous because Jules Kroll was a incredible mentor he could walk through an office and call everybody by their first name any Kroll office anywhere in the world and he always took a kindly interest in the people who work for him so it was a great school to go to and and I worked on some terrific cases including some very interesting Russian cases and Russian organized crime cases just this bag of Kroll was I've had a core competency in doing investigative work and also due diligence was that kind of focus yes although Kroll was the first company in the world to really have a strong digital practice led by Alan Brugler of New York Alan established the first computer forensics practice which was all focused about finding evidence on devices and everything I know about cyber security today started with me going to school with Alan Brolin crawl and they also focused on corruption uncovering this is from Wikipedia Kroll clients help Kroll helps clients improve operations by uncovering kickbacks fraud another form of corruptions other specialty areas is forensic accounting background screening drug testing electronic investigation data recovery SATA result Omar's McLennan in 2004 for 1.9 billion mark divested Kroll to another company I'll take credit risk management to diligence investigator in Falls Church Virginia over 150 countries call Kroll was the first CRO was the first household brand name in this field of of investigations and today's still is probably one of the strongest brand names and so it was a great firm to work in and was a great privilege to be part of it yeah high-end high-profile deals were there how many employees were in Kroll cuz I'd imagine that the alumni that that came out of Kroll probably have found places in other jobs similar to yes do an investigative work like you know they out them all over the world many many alumni from Kroll and many of them doing really well and doing great work ok great so now the next question want to ask you is when you in Kroll the South Africa connection came up so I got to ask you it says business side that you're a former South African spy are you a former South African spy no John I've never worked for any government agency and in developing my career my my whole focus has been on investigations out of the Kroll London office I did have the opportunity to work in South Africa out of the Kroll London office and this was really a seminal moment in my career when I went to South Africa on a case for a major international credit-card company immediately after the end of apartheid when democracy started to look into the scale and extent of credit card fraud at the request of this guy what year was there - how old were you this was in 1995 1996 I was 25 26 years old and one of the things which this credit card company asked me to do was to assess what was the capability of the new democratic government in South Africa under Nelson Mandela to deal with crime and so I had the privilege of meeting mr. Mandela as the president to discuss this issue with him and it was an extraordinary man the country's history because there was such an openness and a willingness to to address issues of this nature and to grapple with them so he was released from prison at that time I remember those days and he became president that's why he called you and you met with him face to face of a business conversation around working on what the future democracy is and trying to look at from a corruption standpoint or just kind of in general was that what was that conversation can you share so so that so the meeting involved President Mandela and and the relevant cabinet ministers the relevant secretaries and his cabinet - responsible for for these issues and the focus of our conversation really started with well how do you deal with credit card fraud and how do you deal with large-scale fraud that could be driven by organized crime and at the time this was an issue of great concern to the president because there was bombing in Kate of a Planet Hollywood cafe where a number of people got very severely injured and the president believed that this could have been the result of a protection racket in Cape Town and so he wanted to do something about it he was incredibly proactive and forward-leaning and in an extraordinary way he ended the conversation by by asking where the Kroll can help him and so he commissioned Kroll to build the capacity of all the black officers that came out of the ANC and have gone into key government positions on how to manage organized crime investigations it was the challenge at that time honestly I can imagine apartheid I remember you know I was just at a college that's not properly around the same age as you it was a dynamic time to say the least was his issue around lack of training old school techniques because you know that was right down post-cold-war and then did what were the concerns not enough people was it just out of control was it a corrupt I mean just I mean what was the core issue that Nelson wanted to hire Kroll and you could work his core issue was he wanted to ensure the stability of South Africa's democracy that was his core focus and he wanted to make South Africa an attractive place where international companies felt comfortable and confident in investing and that was his focus and he felt that at that time because so many of the key people in the ANC only had training in a cold war context that there wasn't a Nessy skill set to do complex financial or more modern investigations and it was very much focused he was always the innovator he was very much focused on bringing the best practices and the best investigative techniques to the country he was I felt in such a hurry that he doesn't want to do this by going to other governments and asking for the help he wanted to Commission it himself and so he gave he gave a crawl with me as the project leader a contract to do this and my namesake Francois Pienaar has become very well known because of the film Invictus and he's been he had the benefit of Mandela as a mentor and as a supporter and that changed his career the same thing happened to me so what did he actually asked you to do was it to train build a force because there's this talk that and was a despite corruption specifically it was it more both corruption and or stability because they kind of go hand in hand policy and it's a very close link between corruption and instability and and president Ellis instructions were very clear to Crowley said go out and find me the best people in the world the most experienced people in the world who can come to South Africa and train my people how to fight organized crime so I went out and I found some of the best people from the CIA from mi6 the British intelligence service from the Drug Enforcement Agency here in the US form officers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's detectives from Scotland Yard prosecutors from the US Justice Department and all of them for a number of years traveled to South Africa to train black officers who were newly appointed in key roles in how to combat organized crime and this was you acting as an employee he had crow there's not some operative this is he this was me very much acting as a as an executive and crow I was the project leader Kroll was very well structured and organized and I reported to the chief executive officer in the London office nor Garret who was the former head of the CIA's Near East Division and Nelson Mandela was intimately involved in this with you at Krall President Mandela was the ultimate support of this project and he then designated several ministers to work on it and also senior officials in the stories that had been put out this past week they talked about this to try to make it sound like you're involved on two sides of the equation they bring up scorpions was this the scorpions project that they referred to so it was the scorpions scorpion sounds so dangerous and a movie well there's a movie a movie does feature this so at the end of the training project President Mandela and deputy president Thabo Mbeki who subsequently succeeded him as president put together a ministerial committee to look at what should they do with the capacity that's been built with this investment that they made because for a period of about three years we had all the leading people the most experienced people that have come out of some of the best law enforcement agencies and some of the best intelligence services come and trained in South Africa and this was quite this was quite something John because many of the senior officers in the ANC came from a background where they were trained by the opponents of the people came to treat trained them so so many of them were trained by the Stasi in East Germany some of them were trained by the Russian KGB some of them were trained by the Cubans so we not only had to train them we also had to win their trust and when we started this that's a diverse set of potential dogma and or just habits a theory modernised if you will right is that what the there was there was a question of of learning new skills and there was a question about also about learning management capabilities there was also question of learning the importance of the media for when you do difficult and complex investigations there was a question about using digital resources but there was also fundamentally a question of just building trust and when we started this program none of the black officers wanted to be photographed with all these foreign trainers who were senior foreign intelligence officers when we finished that everyone wanted to be in the photograph and so this was a great South African success story but the President and the deputy president then reflected on what to do with his capacity and they appointed the ministerial task force to do this and we were asked to make recommendations to this Minister ministerial task force and one of the things which we did was we showed them a movie because you referenced the movie and the movie we showed them was the untouchables with Kevin Costner and Sean Connery which is still one of my favorite and and greatest movies and the story The Untouchables is about police corruption in Chicago and how in the Treasury Department a man called Eliot Ness put together a group of officers from which he selected from different places with clean hands to go after corruption during the Probie and this really captured the president's imagination and so he said that's what he want and Ella yeah okay so he said della one of the untouchables he wanted Eliot Ness exactly Al Capone's out there and and how many people were in that goodness so we asked that we we established the government then established decided to establish and this was passed as a law through Parliament the director of special operations the DSO which colloquy became known as the scorpions and it had a scorpion as a symbol for this unit and this became a standalone anti-corruption unit and the brilliant thing about it John was that the first intake of scorpion officers were all young black graduates many of them law graduates and at the time Janet Reno was the US Attorney General played a very crucial role she allowed half of the first intake of young cratchits to go to Quantico and to do the full FBI course in Quantico and this was the first group of foreign students who've ever been admitted to Quantico to do the full Quantico were you involved at what score's at that time yes sir and so you worked with President Mandela yes the set of the scorpions is untouchable skiing for the first time as a new democracy is emerging the landscape is certainly changing there's a transformation happening we all know the history laugh you don't watch Invictus probably great movie to do that you then worked with the Attorney General United States to cross-pollinate the folks in South Africa black officers law degrees Samar's fresh yes this unit with Quantico yes in the United States I had the privilege of attending the the graduation ceremony of the first of South African officers that completed the Quantico course and representing crow they on the day you had us relationships at that time to crawl across pollen I had the privilege of working with some of the best law enforcement officers and best intelligence officers that has come out of the u.s. services and they've been tremendous mentors in my career they've really shaped my thinking they've shaped my values and they've they've shaved my character so you're still under 30 at this time so give us a is that where this where are we in time now just about a 30 so you know around the nine late nineties still 90s yeah so client-server technologies there okay so also the story references Leonard McCarthy and these spy tapes what is this spy tape saga about it says you had a conversation with McCarthy me I'm thinking that a phone tap explain that spy tape saga what does it mean who's Lennon McCarthy explain yourself so so so Leonard McCarthy it's a US citizen today he served two terms as the vice president for institutional integrity at the World Bank which is the world's most important anti-corruption official he started his career as a prosecutor in South Africa many years ago and then became the head of the economic crimes division in the South African Justice Department and eventually became the head of the scorpions and many years after I've left Kroll and were no longer involved in in the work of the scorpions he texted me one evening expressing a concern and an anxiety that I had about the safety of his family and I replied to him with two text messages one was a Bible verse and the other one was a Latin saying and my advice name was follow the rule of law and put the safety of your family first and that was the advice I gave him so this is how I imagined the year I think of it the internet was just there this was him this was roundabout 2000 December 2007 okay so there was I phone just hit so text messaging Nokia phones all those big yeah probably more text message there so you sitting anywhere in London you get a text message from your friend yep later this past late tonight asking for help and advice and I gave him the best advice I can he unfortunately was being wiretapped and those wiretaps were subsequently published and became the subject of much controversy they've now been scrutinized by South Africa's highest court and the court has decided that those wiretaps are of no impact and of importance in the scheme of judicial decision-making and our unknown provenance and on and on unknown reliability they threw it out basically yeah they're basically that's the president he had some scandals priors and corruption but back to the tapes you the only involvement on the spy tapes was friend sending you a text message that says hey I'm running a corruption you know I'm afraid for my life my family what do I do and you give some advice general advice and that's it as there was there any more interactions with us no that's it that's it okay so you weren't like yeah working with it hey here's what we get strategy there was nothing that going on no other interactions just a friendly advice and that's what they put you I gave him my I gave him my best advice when you when you work in when you work as an investigator very much as and it's very similar in venture capital it's all about relationships and you want to preserve relationships for the long term and you develop deep royalties to its people particularly people with whom you've been through difficult situations as I have been with Leonard much earlier on when I was still involved in Kroll and giving advice to South African government on issues related to the scorpius so that that has a lot of holes and I did think that was kind of weird they actually can produce the actual tax I couldn't find that the spy tapes so there's a spy tape scandal out there your name is on out on one little transaction globbed on to you I mean how do you feel about that I mean you must've been pretty pissed when you saw that when you do it when when you do when you do investigative work you see really see everything and all kinds of things and the bigger the issues that you deal with the more frequently you see things that other people might find unusual I are you doing any work right now with c5 at South Africa and none whatsoever so I've I retired from my investigative Korea in 2014 I did terrific 20 years as an investigator during my time as investigator I came to understood the importance of digital and cyber and so at the end of it I saw an opportunity to serve a sector that historically have been underserved with capital which is cyber security and of course there are two areas very closely related to cyber security artificial intelligence and cloud and that's why I created c5 after I sold my investigator firm with five other families who equally believed in the importance of investing private capital to make a difference invest in private capital to help bring about innovation that can bring stability to the digital world and that's the mission of c-5 before I get to the heart news I want to drill in on the BBC stories I think that's really the focal point of you know why we're talking just you know from my standpoint I remember living as a young person in that time breaking into the business you know my 20s and 30s you had Live Aid in 1985 and you had 1995 the internet happened there was so much going on between those that decade 85 to 95 you were there I was an American so I didn't really have a lot exposure I did some work for IBM and Europe in 1980 says it's co-op student but you know I had some peak in the international world it must been pretty dynamic the cross-pollination the melting pot of countries you know the Berlin Wall goes down you had the cold war's ending you had apartheid a lot of things were going on around you yes so in that dynamic because if if the standard is you had links to someone you know talked about why how important it was that this melting pot and how it affected your relationships and how it looks now looking back because now you can almost tie anything to anything yes so I think the 90s was one of the most exciting periods of time because you had the birth of the internet and I started working on Internet related issues yet 20 million users today we have three and a half billion users and ten billion devices unthinkable at the time but in the wake of the internet also came a lot of changes as you say the Berlin Wall came down democracy in South Africa the Oslo peace process in the time that I worked in Kroll some of them made most important and damaging civil wars in Africa came to an end including the great war in the Congo peace came to Sudan and Angola the Ivory Coast so a lot of things happening and if you have a if you had a an international career at that time when globalization was accelerating you got to no a lot of people in different markets and both in crow and in my consulting business a key part of what it but we did was to keep us and Western corporations that were investing in emerging markets safe your credibility has been called in questions with this article and when I get to in a second what I want to ask you straight up is it possible to survive in the international theatre to the level that you're surviving if what they say is true if you if you're out scamming people or you're a bad actor pretty much over the the time as things get more transparent it's hard to survive right I mean talk about that dynamic because I just find it hard to believe that to be successful the way you are it's not a johnny-come-lately firms been multiple years operating vetted by the US government are people getting away in the shadows is it is is it hard because I almost imagine those are a lot of arbitrage I imagine ton of arbitrage that you that are happening there how hard or how easy it is to survive to be that shady and corrupt in this new era because with with with investigated with with intelligence communities with some terrific if you follow the money now Bitcoin that's a whole nother story but that's more today but to survive the eighties and nineties and to be where you are and what they're alleging I just what's your thoughts well to be able to attract capital and investors you have to have very high standards of governance and compliance because ultimately that's what investors are looking for and what investors will diligence when they make an investment with you so to carry the confidence of investors good standards of governance and compliance are of critical importance and raising venture capital and Europe is tough it's not like the US babe there's an abundance of venture capital available it's very hard Europe is under served by capital the venture capital invested in the US market is multiple of what we invest in Europe so you need to be even more focused on governance and compliance in Europe than you would be perhaps on other markets I think the second important point with Gmail John is that technology is brought about a lot of transparency and this is a major area of focus for our piece tech accelerator where we have startups who help to bring transparency to markets which previously did not have transparency for example one of the startups that came through our accelerator has brought complete transparency to the supply chain for subsistence farmers in Africa all the way to to the to the shelf of Walmart or a big grocery retailer in in the US or Europe and so I think technology is bringing a lot more more transparency we also have a global anti-corruption Innovation Challenge called shield in the cloud where we try and find and recognize the most innovative corporations governments and countries in the space so let's talk about the BBC story that hit 12 it says is a US military cloud the DoD Jedi contractor that's coming to award the eleventh hour safe from Russia fears over sensitive data so if this essentially the headline that's bolded says a technology company bidding for a Pentagon contract that's Amazon Web Services to store sensitive data has close partnerships with a firm linked to a sanctioned Russian oligarch the BBC has learned goes on to essentially put fear and tries to hang a story that says the national security of America is at risk because of c5u that's what we're talking about right now so so what's your take on this story I mean did you wake up and get an email said hey check out the BBC you're featured in and they're alleging that you have links to Russia and Amazon what Jon first I have to go I first have to do a disclosure I've worked for the BBC as an investigator when I was in Kroll and in fact I let the litigation support for the BBC in the biggest libel claim in British history which was post 9/11 when the BBC did a broadcast mistakenly accusing a mining company in Africa of laundering money for al-qaeda and so I represented the BBC in this case I was the manager hired you they hired me to delete this case for them and I'm I helped the BBC to reduce a libel claim of 25 million dollars to $750,000 so I'm very familiar with the BBC its integrity its standards and how it does things and I've always held the BBC in the highest regard and believed that the BBC makes a very important contribution to make people better informed about the world so when I heard about the story I was very disappointed because it seemed to me that the BBC have compromised the independence and the independence of the editorial control in broadcasting the story the reason why I say that is because the principal commentator in this story as a gentleman called John Wheeler who's familiar to me as a someone who's been trolling our firm on internet for the last year making all sorts of allegations the BBC did not disclose that mr. Weiler is a former Oracle executive the company that's protesting the Jedi bidding contract and secondly that he runs a lobbying firm with paid clients and that he himself often bid for government contracts in the US government context you're saying that John Wheeler who's sourced in the story has a quote expert and I did check him out I did look at what he was doing I checked out his Twitter he seems to be trying to socialise a story heavily first he needed eyes on LinkedIn he seems to be a consultant firm like a Beltway yes he runs a he runs a phone called in interoperability Clearing House and a related firm called the IT acquisition Advisory Council and these two organizations work very closely together the interoperability Clearing House or IC H is a consulting business where mr. Weiler acts for paying clients including competitors for this bidding contract and none of this was disclosed by the BBC in their program the second part of this program that I found very disappointing was the fact that the BBC in focusing on the Russian technology parks cocuwa did not disclose the list of skok of our partners that are a matter of public record on the Internet if you look at this list very closely you'll see c5 is not on there neither Amazon Web Services but the list of companies that are on there are very familiar names many of them competitors in this bidding process who acted as founding partners of skok about Oracle for example as recently as the 28th of November hosted what was described as the largest cloud computing conference in Russia's history at Skolkovo this is the this is the place which the BBC described as this notorious den of spies and at this event which Oracle hosted they had the Russian presidential administration on a big screen as one of their clients in Russia so some Oracle is doing business in Russia they have like legit real links to Russia well things you're saying if they suddenly have very close links with Skolkovo and so having a great many other Khayyam is there IBM Accenture cisco say Microsoft is saying Oracle is there so Skolkovo has a has a very distinguished roster of partners and if the BBC was fair and even-handed they would have disclosed us and they would have disclosed the fact that neither c5 nor Amazon feature as Corcovado you feel that the BBC has been duped the BBC clearly has been duped the program that they broadcasted is really a parlor game of six degrees of separation which they try to spun into a national security crisis all right so let's tell us John while ago you're saying John Wyler who's quoted in the story as an expert and by the way I read in the story my favorite line that I wanted to ask you on was there seems to be questions being raised but the question is being raised or referring to him so are you saying that he is not an expert but a plant for the story what's what's his role he's saying he works for Oracle or you think do you think he's being paid by Oracle like I can't comment on mr. Wireless motivation what strikes me is the fact that is a former Oracle executive what's striking is that he clearly on his website for the IC H identifies several competitors for the Jedi business clients and that all of this should have been disclosed by the BBC rather than to try and characterize and portray him as an independent expert on this story well AWS put out a press release or a blog post essentially hum this you know you guys had won it we're very clear and this I know it goes to the top because that's how Amazon works nothing goes out until it goes to the top which is Andy chassis and the senior people over there it says here's the relationship with c5 and ATS what school you use are the same page there but also they hinted the old guard manipulation distant I don't think they use the word disinformation campaign they kind of insinuate it and that's what I'm looking into I want to ask you are you part are you a victim of a disinformation campaign do you believe that you're not a victim being targeted with c5 as part of a disinformation campaign put on by a competitor to AWS I think what we've seen over the course of this last here is an enormous amount of disinformation around this contract and around this bidding process and they've a lot of the information that has been disseminated has not only not been factual but in some cases have been patently malicious well I have been covering Amazon for many many years this guy Tom Wyler is in seems to be circulating multiple reports invested in preparing for this interview I checked Vanity Fair he's quoted in Vanity Fair he's quoted in the BBC story and there's no real or original reporting other than those two there's some business side our article which is just regurgitating the Business Insider I mean the BBC story and a few other kind of blog stories but no real original yes no content don't so in every story that that's been written on this subject and as you say most serious publication have thrown this thrown these allegations out but in the in those few instances where they've managed to to publish these allegations and to leverage other people's credibility to their advantage and leverage other people's credibility for their competitive advantage John Wheeler has been the most important and prominent source of the allegations someone who clearly has vested commercial interests someone who clearly works for competitors as disclosed on his own website and none of this has ever been surfaced or addressed I have multiple sources have confirmed to me that there's a dossier that has been created and paid for by a firm or collection of firms to discredit AWS I've seen some of the summary documents of that and that is being peddled around to journalists we have not been approached yet I'm not sure they will because we actually know the cloud what cloud computing is so I'm sure we could debunk it by just looking at it and what they were putting fors was interesting is this an eleventh-hour a desperation attempt because I have the Geo a report here that was issued under Oracle's change it says there are six conditions why we're looking at one sole cloud although it's not a it's a multiple bid it's not an exclusive to amazon but so there's reasons why and they list six service levels highly specialized check more favorable terms and conditions with a single award expected cause of administration of multiple contracts outweighs the benefits of multiple awards the projected orders are so intricately related that only a single contractor can reasonably be perform the work meaning that Amazon has the only cloud that can do that work now I've reported on the cube and it's looking angle that it's true there's things that other clouds just don't have anyone has private they have the secret the secret clouds the total estimated value of the contract is less than the simplified acquisition threshold or multiple awards would not be in the best interest this is from them this is a government report so it seems like there's a conspiracy against Amazon where you are upon and in in this game collect you feel that collateral damage song do you do you believe that to be true collateral damage okay well okay so now the the John Wheeler guys so investigate you've been an investigator so you mean you're not you know you're not a retired into this a retired investigator you're retired investigated worked on things with Nelson Mandela Kroll Janet Reno Attorney General you've vetted by the United States government you have credibility you have relationships with people who have have top-secret clearance all kinds of stuff but I mean do you have where people have top-secret clearance or or former people who had done well we have we have the privilege of of working with a very distinguished group of senior national security leaders as operating partisan c5 and many of them have retained their clearances and have been only been able to do so because c5 had to pass through a very deep vetting process so for you to be smeared like this you've been in an investigative has you work at a lot of people this is pretty obvious to you this is like a oh is it like a deep state conspiracy you feel it's one vendor - what is your take and what does collateral damage mean to you well I recently spoke at the mahkum conference on a session on digital warfare and one of the key points I made there was that there are two things that are absolutely critical for business leaders and technology leaders at this point in time one we have to clearly say that our countries are worth defending we can't walk away from our countries because the innovation that we are able to build and scale we're only able to do because we live in democracies and then free societies that are governed by the rule of law the second thing that I think is absolutely crucial for business leaders in the technology community is to accept that there must be a point where national interest overrides competition it must be a point where we say the benefit and the growth and the success of our country is more important to us than making commercial profits and therefore there's a reason for us either to cooperate or to cease competition or to compete in a different way what might takes a little bit more simple than that's a good explanation is I find these smear campaigns and fake news and I was just talking with Kara Swisher on Twitter just pinging back and forth you know either journalists are chasing Twitter and not really doing the original courting or they're being fed stories if this is truly a smear campaign as being fed by a paid dossier then that hurts people when families and that puts corporate interests over the right thing so I think I a personal issue with that that's fake news that's just disinformation but it's also putting corporate inches over over families and people so I just find that to be kind of really weird when you say collateral damage earlier what did you mean by that just part of the campaign you personally what's what's your view okay I think competition which is not focused on on performance and on innovation and on price points that's competition that's hugely destructive its destructive to the fabric of innovation its destructive of course to the reputation of the people who fall in the line of sight of this kind of competition but it's also hugely destructive to national interest Andrae one of the key stories here with the BBC which has holes in it is that the Amazon link which we just talked about but there's one that they bring up that seems to be core in all this and just the connections to Russia can you talk about your career over the career from whether you when you were younger to now your relationship with Russia why is this Russian angle seems to be why they bring into the Russia angle into it they seem to say that c-5 Cable has connections they call deep links personal links into Russia so to see what that so c5 is a venture capital firm have no links to Russia c5 has had one individual who is originally of Russian origin but it's been a longtime Swiss resident and you national as a co investor into a enterprise software company we invested in in 2015 in Europe we've since sold that company but this individual Vladimir Kuznetsov who's became the focus of the BBC's story was a co investor with us and the way in which we structure our investment structures is that everything is transparent so the investment vehicle for this investment was a London registered company which was on the records of Companies House not an offshore entity and when Vladimir came into this company as a co investor for compliance and regulatory purposes we asked him to make his investment through this vehicle which we controlled and which was subject to our compliance standards and completely transparent and in this way he made this investment now when we take on both investors and Co investors we do that subject to very extensive due diligence and we have a very robust and rigorous due diligence regime which in which our operating partners who are leaders of great experience play an important role in which we use outside due diligence firms to augment our own judgment and to make sure we have all the facts and finally we also compare notes with other financial institutions and peers and having done that with Vladimir Kuznetsov when he made this one investment with us we reached the conclusion that he was acting in his own right as an independent angel investor that his left renova many years ago as a career executive and that he was completely acceptable as an investor so that you think that the BBC is making an inaccurate Association the way they describe your relationship with Russia absolutely the the whole this whole issue of the provenance of capital has become of growing importance to the venture capital industry as you and I discussed earlier with many more different sources of capital coming out of places like China like Russia Saudi Arabia other parts of the world and therefore going back again to you the earlier point we discussed compliance and due diligence our critical success factors and we have every confidence in due diligence conclusions that we reached about vladimir quits net source co-investment with us in 2015 so I did some digging on c5 razor bidco this was the the portion of the company in reference to the article I need to get your your take on this and they want to get you on the record on this because it's you mentioned I've been a law above board with all the compliance no offshore entities this is a personal investment that he made Co investment into an entity you guys set up for the transparency and compliance is that true that's correct no side didn't see didn't discover this would my my children could have found this this this company was in a transparent way on the records in Companies House and and Vladimir's role and investment in it was completely on the on the public record all of this was subject to financial conduct authority regulation and anti money laundering and no your client standards and compliance so there was no great big discovery this was all transparent all out in the open and we felt very confident in our due diligence findings and so you feel very confident Oh issue there at all special purpose none whatsoever is it this is classic this is international finance yes sir so in the venture capital industry creating a special purpose vehicle for a particular investment is a standard practice in c-five we focus on structuring those special-purpose vehicles in the most transparent way possible and that was his money from probably from Russia and you co invested into this for this purpose of doing these kinds of deals with Russia well we just right this is kind of the purpose of that no no no this so in 2015 we invested into a European enterprise software company that's a strategic partner of Microsoft in Scandinavian country and we invested in amount of 16 million pounds about at the time just more than 20 million dollars and subsequent in August of that year that Amir Kuznetsov having retired for nova and some time ago in his own right as an angel investor came in as a minority invest alongside us into this investment but we wanted to be sure that his investment was on our control and subject to our compliance standards so we requested him to make his investment through our special purpose vehicle c5 raised a bit co this investment has since been realized it's been a great success and this business is going on to do great things and serve great clients it c5 taking russian money no see if I was not taking Russian money since since the onset of sanctions onboarding Russian money is just impossible sanctions have introduced complexity and have introduced regulatory risk related to Russian capital and so we've taken a decision that we will not and we can't onboard Russian capital and sanctions have also impacted my investigative career sanctions have also completely changed because what the US have done very effectively is to make sanctions a truly global regime and in which ever country are based it doesn't really matter you have to comply with US sanctions this is not optional for anybody on any sanctions regime including the most recent sanctions on Iran so if there are sanctions in place you can't touch it have you ever managed Russian oligarchs money or interests at any time I've never managed a Russian oligarchs money at any point in time I served for a period of a year honest on the board of a South African mining company in which Renova is a minority invest alongside an Australian company called South 32 and the reason why I did this was because of my support for African entrepreneurship this was one of the first black owned mining companies in South Africa that was established with a British investment in 2004 this business have just grown to be a tremendous success and so for a period of a year I offered to help them on the board and to support them as they as they looked at how they can grow and scale the business I have a couple more questions Gabe so I don't know if you wanna take a break you want to keep let's take a break okay let's take a quick break do a quick break I think that's great that's the meat of it great job by the way fantastic lady here thanks for answering those questions the next section I want to do is compliment

>> From York Town Heights, New York, it's theCUBE covering IBM Cloud Analyst Summit, brought to you by IBM. (techy music) >> Hi, welcome back, I'm Peter Burris of theCUBE, and we're having conversations here at the IBM Innovation Day at the Thomas J. Watson Research Lab in York Town Heights, New York. We've got a great conversation. Don Bolia is the general manager of cloud developer services at IBM, welcome to theCUBE, Don. >> Thank you very much. >> Or should I say welcome back to theCUBE? >> (chuckling) Yes, thank you. >> So, Don, we were talking with one of your colleagues, Hillery Hunter, who's the CTO-- >> Mm-hm. >> Of here at the cloud infrastructure team, and about the fact that everybody's talking about the rate of growth of data, and nobody's really discussing the rate of growth of software, which is perhaps even more important, ultimately, to business. What is that rate of growth look like, and how is it related to the role of cloud? >> Yeah, so it's a great question. I mean, with my role as kind of owner of our platform services from the cloud perspective, one of the things we've noticed over the last probably five or 10 years is just a massive rate and pace change with respect to iteration on the software development cycle. So, they started with mobile, I would say, and then has moved to cloud since then, where you know, the expectation is everything is updating all the time, you know, everyday, all times of the day. Within our own Kubernetes and container service, as an example, we push over 500 updates a week to that software stack on behalf of our customers, and so I think there's a rate and pace of how things are changing from that perspective, but then there's also the fact that everybody's leveraging those services to then build the next generation of software. So, in our case we have a set of base services that I provide for things like containers that then the Watson team, for example, uses to build their microservices, which are then, you know, realized as machine learning and other types of services that they provide. So, you see the stacking of software, if you will, from you know, the high iteration rate at the bottom all the way to the next level and the next level, and the ability to unlock value now is something that happens in, you know, hours in some cases, or a couple of days, whereas before just provisioning the software would've taken months, and so we're really seeing just a whole change in the way people can develop things and how quickly they can get to the end result. >> Now, we're here at the Thomas J. Watson Research Lab, and downstairs is this wall of all IBM fellows, and one of them E.F. Codd, the famous originator of database and the role that SQL played, et cetera-- >> Mm-hm. >> In relational database technology. He wrote a seminal paper back in the early 1970s about how the notion of developer was going to evolve over time, and he might've been a little aggressive in thinking that we were going to end up with these citizens developers than we actually happened, but we are seeing the role of developer changing, and we are seeing new classes of professionals become more developer-like. >> Mm-hm. >> How is that relationship changing the way that we think of developer services that you serve? >> Yeah, it's a great question. I think, first of all, software is sort of invading almost every single industry, and so, you know, people have got to have some amount of those skills to be able to function in kind of the optimal way for whatever industry they're in. So, what we're seeing is that as we've built more and more foundational services, the act of actually creating something new is more about stitching together, composing, orchestrating a set of things, as opposed to really building from scratch everything from the ground up, and you know, things like our Watson services are a great example, right? The ability to tap into something like that with a couple lines of code in an hour, as opposed to what would've taken, you know, months, years, whatever, and even really, frankly, been out of the reach of most developers to begin with is now something you can have somebody come in and do, you know, with a fairly low level of skill and get a good result on the outside. >> So, we've got more demand for code as we move to digital business, more people participating in that process, cloud also enables paths, a lot of new classes of tools that are going to increase the productivity-- >> Yep. >> Including automated code generation. How is the process, how is that tool set evolving, especially as it pertains to the cloud? >> Yeah, so I think one of the mantras of cloud is automation, and in order to standardize and automate, that's really how you get to the kind of scale that we would see in, say, a public cloud like the IBM cloud. So, it really is kind of a fundamental premise of anything you do has to be something that you automate, and so we've seen a whole class of tools, to your points, really start to emerge, which allow people to get that kind of, you know, automated capability. So, nobody thinks of, for example, creating a, you know, a build pipeline these days without using a set of tools. You know, often they're opensource tools, and there's a lot of choice within that whole spectrum of tools, and we support a bunch of different varieties, but you would never think today of having a build process that isn't totally automated, right, that can't be instantly recreated. Even the whole process of how you deploy code in a cloud these days is sort of an assumption that you can destroy that and restart at any point, and in order to do that, you really need the automation behind that, so I think it's a base premise now. I don't think you can really be at the velocity that people are expecting out of software without having a totally automated process to go through that. >> So, any digital business strategy presumes that data's an asset, and things that are related to data are assets, including software in many... Well, software is data when you come right down to it. >> Mm-hm. >> And we want to exploit that data and generate new sources of value out of that data, and that's one of the predicates of digital business, but at the same time we also want to protect those attributes of data-- >> Mm-hm. >> That are our IP, our enterprise's distinction. As we move forward with software, how do we reconcile that tension between more openness and generating a community that's capable of improving things, while at the same time ensuring that we've got good control over our IP where it actually does create a business differentiation? >> Now, that's right, and you're right, data's king. So, you know, the software can do, you know, a set of things, but most of the time it's operating on a set of that data, and that data's where the true value that you can unlock comes from. Our policy, from an IBM perspective, has always been that, you know, your data is yours, and to your point, this IP that you may want to protect, and we try to give you the tools to do that, and so a lot of our philosophy, within the cloud in particular, is around things like Bring Your Own Key, where you have control of the keys that encrypt that data that's in the cloud. In fact, we would like to be totally out of that loop, quite frankly, and have it be something that is controlled by our clients, and that they can, you know, get the value they're looking for, and so we'll never have a situation where one of our services is, you know, using or acting on data that is really, you know, not ours to use, and so that's been a fundamental premise of the cloud as we go forward, and again, we continue to provide a set of tools that really let you manage that, and to your point, you know, not everything gets managed at the same level. Some things are highly protected, and therefore have, you know, layers and layers of security policy around them, and there's other examples where, you know, you're relatively able to make that open through a set of APIs, for example, and let everybody have access it. From our perspective, though, that's really a client choice, and so for us it's about giving the right tools so that they can do the job they need to do. >> February 2019, San Francisco, IBM's taking over San Francisco with the IBM THINK show. What types of conversations are you looking forward to having with customers? What excites you about the 2019 version? >> Yeah, so I mean it's a great venue. It is absolutely, you know, something that I look forward to every year. I know my team looks forward to it, as well. I mean, the amount of interaction we get with clients... I mean, it's really all about the client stories, so you know, what are they able to do, in my case, with our cloud services. What can I learn about what they've done, and how, you know, can we then leverage that to make our services better, and so, you know, to me it's all about, you know, what you can learn from others, and it's a great form to be able to do that and there's a lot of great things that, you know, you can dive deep on. You get access to a lot of the IBM technical experts, so I have all of my, you know, fellows and distinguished engineers there, you know, on hand, and just great conversations. There's always great insights that you get from it, highly recommend it. >> Don Bolia, IBM general manager of cloud developer services, thanks very much for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Once again, we'll be back from IBM Innovation Day here at Thomas J. Watson Research Center in York Town Heights, talk to you soon. (techy music)

(exciting music) >> Announcer: From New York it's The Cube. Covering Blockchain Week. Now here's John Furrier. >> Hello everyone, welcome back this is The Cube. I'm John Furrier your co-host here. Host here in New York City for Consensus 2018 part of Blockchain Week, New York And we have Mimi Delam who is also the Co-Founder of the Crypto Rally Project. We just had your partner on welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you so very much for having me here. I'm really grateful. So yeah lovely to see you in New York. >> Great to see you and I love the project we just heard the details about the Crypto Rally. >> That's correct. >> So what's your take on it. I mean it's exciting, what's your role? >> I mean besides being super exciting for us it's a very new way of us making a huge impact and a difference in the Blockchain world for the people who are around here taking it to another level through the media. And the sponsorships. I mean my role personally is that I'm a co-founder from the very nice team of the girls. Gaile, Agne and and me and a couple more people involved. We are very happy to take it to another level. We want people to have just a way of life so we're trying to make it. >> I love the excitement of the project and you guys have a great team but I love the international perspective. You guys were in London. And you came from Lithuania. >> Exactly. >> And London so it's going to start in London or Lithuania? Where's the rally going to start? >> Okay I'll tell you all in the details. So we started, I mean me, myself I lived for many years in London and our founder Agne been living there for many years as well, we started our Crypto Rally in Lithuania in July it's going to take place and then afterwards we're taking it to Dubai. The rest of the world countries who are very happy to take the country, sorry, we're very happy to take the place in the Cryptos and we're going to travel all around the world with this inception. It's like Formula One it starts from one place right now it's all around the world. >> And what's the goal to have fun? Educate people on Crypto? What's the objective? >> Objective is of course to educate the people for them to be a part of the Blockchain and a part of the something which is coming up new. We want to make sure that people are aware of the new world because it's very clear the fourth industrial revolution is coming, 3.0 life is totally different we cannot be living the same way any more. And of course we want to have fun. >> All right now what's it like in Lithuania right now? What's the culture for the Blockchain? Are people, must be exciting, what's the vibe? >> I'll tell you Lithuania is extremely educated and very high tech and fast moving so for us it's very important to make the spirit, the small country but it's very easy to communicate and make everything ready. We are very well known in the blocked in world and we want to take it to another level. Of course as I mentioned we're going to the different countries, we're bringing the concept over there. We're very happy to host in a different places. So that's our aim, just to the spread the world. >> Maybe you can help us bring The Cube to Lithuania? We need some hosts. >> We definitely would love to do that. >> Well you're a natural host and great mission. I love what you're doing. What's it like here in New York for you? What's your observation? What are you seeing? Do you like the content? Have you met some cool people? What's it like explain for people who aren't here? >> Okay. >> What's it like? >> So Consensus itself is one of the most exclusive, unique opportunities to be a part in the event. There are so many fascinating people. Very educated and forward thinkers, like mind blowing ideas just around the places. There are so many people. It's impossible to even get a track of it. I'm very excited to be in New York because to be a part of this event makes a huge difference and I'm just fascinated about every single day what is going on it's a whole week of events, whole week of the communication and meetings non-stop. And then. >> Social too. >> It's very social and people are very happy to hear about Crypto Rally. >> What's your favorite thing here in the event? What's, what do you like the best? What was your number one thing? >> I mean I like to be interviewed by you. (laughs) >> Oh, ticket. >> Bingo there it is, The Cube number one. Thank you for saying that. >> Thank you so much. >> Besides The Cube interview? (laughs) What session? The people, parties, was there any special moment so far that you think is a highlight besides The Cube interview? >> I mean to be honest I really do enjoy the after parties where the people are becoming more open because the first part, bit of the day is a lot of business going on. >> Yep. >> And then afterwards you're going to the more personal relationships and then becoming a little bit of the friendly. And obviously this is exactly what we want to replicate in the Crypto Rally if that makes sense. >> Yeah. >> Because we want to have four days events to start from, meet the people hang out with them, have a good business interaction with them and educate each other. That's what I love about after, afternoon parties over here. >> Yeah it's good. >> Because you know about. >> You want to meet people's soul, get to know who they are. >> Exactly, exactly it's nice to have a good connection and connectivity. >> Yeah. >> People have a great energy here and it's like the brightest minds are meeting here. Which is beautiful. >> Love your energy Mimi, love to have you on. What URL can we get the information at for the Crypto Rally? >> All right so guys right now you have to go to www.Cryptorally2018.com, #CryptoRally2018 or @Cryptorally2018. Please join us and tweet or telegram and all around the social media we're happy to be. >> How can someone get involved? How do sponsors get involved? How do people get involved in the project? >> I mean you have to apply for it. We are taking as well, we are taking it through the application process because we want to build a very community based first Crypto Rally. The, I mean just go on the website, reach us out, we're very happy to talk with everybody right now we want to have a community. We want to bring it to another level and I mean. >> Of course. >> I mean that's how it works right? >> We support you. We'll be a media sponsor, a media supporter. Thank you for coming on. >> Thank you so very much. >> Nice to see you. >> For having me. >> You're very welcome >> Really thank you very much. >> You're welcome, great energy great voice, love the new talent coming into the New York scene, bringing the global perspective here. Really exciting ecosystem that's developing, great tight knit community here in The Cube. Mimi you're part of it, you guys are doing great work. Love your mission. I'm John Furrier on the ground here in the open. Here in New York City at the Hilton in Mid-Town Manhattan for Consensus 2018. More coverage after this break, thanks for watching. (exciting music)

>> Narrator: Live from Chicago Illinois, it's theCUBE! Covering VeammOn 2018. Brought to you by Veamm. >> Welcome back to VeammOn 2018 everybody, and you're watching theCUBE. The leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. This is day one of our coverage of VeammOn, the second year theCUBE has been here. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Stu Miniman. Zeb Ahmed is here, he's the Senior Offering Manager for VMWare, with the IBM Cloud, at IBM of course. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, good to see you Zeb. >> Thank you for having me, very excited to be here. >> Yeah so IBM, Cloud, big part of our business. Obviously VMWare, you've been there for a long time. Partnerships with Veamm. Lay it all out for us, what's going on at IBM, IBM Cloud. >> Yeah so we started the VMWare partnership a couple years ago, and our goal was really to build a practice run VMWare which was automated, take it to the next level essentially, not just be a me too player, what everybody else was doing out there, but rather, make the transition from on premises to the Cloud much easier for those VMWare customers. So we've automated a lot of things on the VMWare platform, you can deploy the inverse stack, in a matter of minutes, instead of days and months. So it's a much easier transition, we also work with a lot of partners, such as Veamm, but customers was using on premises, and we've allowed them to have those capabilities in the Cloud as well, in a very automated fashion. >> Quickly if I remember, I think you guys were first doing something with VMWare in the Cloud, you're kind of a year ahead of most. I mean-- >> Stu: It was a few months ahead, they were the first big partner out there with the VMWare Cloud basically. We got, put in Cloud air and everything. >> But in terms of shipping, actually, you guys-- >> We were the first ones, yeah. So we were the first ones to market with Cloud foundation stack right? Yeah and then the other vendors followed as well, but yeah that's been doing great, right? And again, it's fully automated, matter of minutes you can deploy the whole stack, a lot of value add there. >> Yeah Zeb, maybe help set the picture for us a little bit. 'Cause we talk about this multi-cloud world, IBM owns a lot of applications, IBM partners with a lot, where does IBM see themselves playing in this multi-cloud, multi-app world? >> Great question, I think I, so I refer to it two T's. So the first one being the transition, and then the transformation. So the transition is really where the challenge has been for those customers, the barrier to entry, how do these customers actually make that move seamless to the Cloud, especially the space that IBM is in on the enterprise side, these applications are legacy, very very complicated design, a lot of dependencies, so that was a challenge that we tried to solve for. And I think we're at a state now where we've not only solved for that, we've also, I don't know if you guys have seen HCX that we had with VMWare recently, which was a great migration tool, and helps customer on board Cloud, and adapt to Cloud much much faster. And then also build that ecosystem partner network. So all those tools, that we were using on premises like Veamm, right? Making those available in the Cloud for those customers, and it has been great, and also in the transformation side, right? So not only just move them to the Cloud, but also help them leverage, and go up the stack. So micro-services, blockchain, Watson, containers, all those things are available to our customers. >> I think that's a key point that I wanted to highlight is, people often say, how does IBM compete with some of the big Cloud players? You're not just infrastructure as a service, you've got a giant SAS portfolio, you mentioned Watson so, talk about your strategy in that regard. >> Yeah I mean so, the enterprise customer, typical customer, whether it's financial industry or whether health care or transportation et cetera, nobody is just looking for a partner where they can just move the infrastructure too. They're looking for the next state, they're looking to transform the business, they're trying to utilize all those new capabilities that exist in the Cloud today. And IBM has sought for that exactly because not only just use, move your infrastructure and workloads, but now you can consume all those additional gallywads, in the Cloud like Watson, make it for a more intelligent solution in the end. >> Right, so that's a key differentiator. There's only a couple of companies that have that, well I guess you guys, Oracle, Microsoft obviously has the applications, and IBM talks a lot about the cognitive piece, am I correct you can only get Watson in the IBM Cloud, is that still the case, or are you now have it on prem? >> No no, Watson can be consumed using an API. So it's a PAS platform, and if somebody wanted to consume Watson for the on premises workloads and wanted to bring that intelligence for that on premises environment they can do that. >> Dave: Are you seeing more demand for that? >> Oh yes. >> Or is it primarily in the Cloud? >> We've got huge traction in the healthcare space especially, there's a lot of financial customers that are onboarding that as well. So Watson's doing great in that regard. >> Sort of privacy reasons and-- >> Zeb: That's right. >> Zeb one of the things we've been watching with Veamm for the last few years is how do they penetrate deeper into the enterprise. Of course IBM has a strong position in the enterprise, help connect for us how the Veamm and IBM partnerships go together. >> So I think this was a very easy answer for a lot of our customers, because Veamm has a lot of penetration on the on premises workloads, especially on the back-up and business continuity space. So when we looked at the partners and the products that existed in the space, we really looked at the market space, what the customers were consuming. Veamm had a huge market share, and like I said previously, we wanted to solve for those problems and we wanted to keep the tools at the same tool set that they were using today on the premises, so this was very seamless for us, and it is seamless for the customers, to move to IBM Cloud and leverage those same tools exactly. >> So talk about choice because, I can imagine you're getting a call from Ed Walsh, "Hey, how about using my data protection software instead of Veamm?". How do you manage that? >> Zeb: It is tough, right? It is obviously tough, IBM also has a huge portfolio of products, right? In the end the decision was or it really came down to, what is it the customers are looking for? When it came to the back-up space, especially on the VMWare platform, The answer was there, a lot of the VMWare customers use Veamm. In addition to that, Veamm also checks a lot of other boxes for us. So, not only does VMWare stack, but also, I don't know if it's been announced yet or not, but AIX is something of beta that they're launching, at this event, so that is huge for IBM. >> Dave: Really? >> Oh yes, they're also in the bare metal space, so a consolidated view of all your back-ups, all your bare metal, for AIX, for virtualized platform. >> So the power guys will be happy. >> For those that aren't as familiar anymore, I mean remember AIX back in the day, but this is second week in a row I'm talking about AIX. It was Nutanix last week, and it's Veamm today. How much AIX is there still out in the wild? >> There's quite a bit, I mean IBM, if you guys know the background, right? When software was acquired it was a bare metal shop. So with that a lot of the power stuff came as well. So we have a huge power practice in IBM. >> Right, and well it's still, I remember the Steve Mills charts, which showed the availability of AIX versus, the only more available platform was the mainframe, and then with AIX, and then, and you had all that other stuff that everybody else buys but, it's a volume market so it kind of makes sense though. People will pay up for that. And still, a huge install base, now growing, and Nutanix has a relationship with the power guys, so maybe that's where sort of factored in, right? But Linux, of course, is the hot space, right? I mean sure you see it's powering the web. >> Well I'm a VMWare guy, so (laughs). >> There's Linux sitting on top of some of that. >> That's right, of course, of course. >> You've got Linux of mainframe, right? Okay, alright so, talk a little bit more about what you're seeing from the VMWare customer base, how it's synergistic and not just sort of a one way trip into a hotel California. >> Yeah, so a typical VMWare customer that we're seeing who's on premises today are looking to IBM Cloud, or actually take a leap into the Cloud, especially on the enterprise base, these customers want to transform. I mean, there has been a lot of questions for them, especially the customer base IBM focused on, questions around security, compliance, business continuity and data protection and such. So these customers not only want to just make the leap into the Cloud, but they also want to solve for some of these challenges, and also go up to stack like I was mentioning. So, we're seeing a huge push for containers, for those customers that are moving to VMWare, they want to build up the stack, on the PAS layer, and also want to leverage Watson and services like that. >> Yeah, could you expand on that a little more, things like are you working with PKS, the solution with VMWare and Pivotal, and the Kubernetes stuff, or? >> Yes, Kubernetes, Dockers, we also give the customers ability to do their own stuff, go up the stack. I mean, in the end, you know, they can consume us from an IS standpoint and build their PAS on top, or we can, they can use our own, so Kubernetes, Dockers, et cetera. >> What's the story, Stu, with Cloud foundry these days? There was a big push early on, and I fell like I can, I'm not as close as you are, but there seems to be a, I don't want to say a pull back, but maybe less enthusiasm, what's the lay of the land? >> Sure, I mean IBM was one of the earliest bloomix, I believe, and with IBM Cloud, IBM has a few different offerings, I didn't see as big of a push from IBM at the Cloud foundry summit I was at last month, but IBM, like most of the Cloud providers are giving customers choice. >> Zeb: That's right. >> So I guess the question is what-- >> And heavy in Open Source, I mean I'm seeing IBM heavy push, I'm wondering server-less, if you've got any commentary there. We've been looking at like Open Whisk and some of the pieces there. >> Yeah Open Whisk is there, there's, server-less is a thing that a lot of these customers, back to your own original question, a lot of these customers are looking for those types of services, and they're all available in the catalog. >> It's still pretty early, that hasn't overtaken the discussions of the (mumbles) and the (mumbles) stuff in your world has it? >> It hasn't, but I think the enterprise customers who are looking to move to Cloud, they are thinking about those things. So these are some of the check boxes that need to be checked for them for the future growth, et cetera. >> So you've got VMWare's obviously visualization strategy, you've got containers coming, I remember when we had Pat Gelsinger on theCUBE several years ago, when containers were, docker was rocketing, and everybody was like oh docker's going to kill VMWare. And Pat's response was, "Look, we've got the best containers in the world. We're going to embrace containers". They're like, oh sure. But that's exactly what happened. What's IBM's point of view on it? >> Yeah, here's the thing, we want to give them the option to do whatever they want to do. We're seeing a lot of traction on the micro-services side, on the containerization, but I think it's going hand in hand, a lot of the customers are using VMWare platform still, yet they're also leveraging some of these other micro-services and containers, so I think Pat's right on. I think originally what was people were talking about getting rid of the IS layer of VMWare and just going containers completely. Our take is, give the customers all the functionality and the ability to do whatever they want to do, we are seeing it's more of a mix at the moment. >> And we had Edouard Bugnion on recently, found of, one of the founders of VMWare, and he was talking about the challenges in the data center at scale. And in particular when you introduce virtualization and you reduce some of the hardware resources, how do you deliver predictable, high-performance, at scale, and some of the challenges there. That's even on prem. Now introduce Cloud, and you've got distance and latency and other physics so, what's the discussion like with customers around how to architect the ideal Cloud, on prem, hybrid. >> It's a great question, because that is a question I get asked all the time, because in the enterprise base like I said, these customers in a lot of cases have a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy, so network becomes a key part of that discussion. For us, the answer is very simple. We've laid down the fiber of (mumbles) across all these data centers, so when you're talking about latency, and data transfer, and those types of speeds, or having a multi-cloud strategy across the globe, it's a very simple and easy conversation because not only do we make all that information available to our customers, far as what latency they expect from which data center to another one across the globe, but also it's all private, and it's all secure, and it makes for a very good multi-cloud story. >> I don't know if you saw Jenny Remmetti's talk at IBM Think, but she used the term, a lot of people tongue in cheek, but I kind of like it, "incumbent disruptors". I mean look if you're IBM and you've got the client base that IBM has, you better come up with a term like that because that's exactly what you're trying to help your customers do. So, my question is, where does the Cloud and your offering with VMWare fit into the incumbent disruptive scenario? >> Yeah, so VMWare like I said earlier, we didn't want to be a me too player with VMWare. Not only did we want to have a good story with VMWare because obviously VMWare is a huge market share when it comes to virtualization, but on top of that, we wanted to be more futuristic, and solve for those, some of those questions and concerns that the enterprise customer had. So, tight integration on the enterprise base, on the micro-services, containerization, Watson is a huge part of the VMWare platform, you can seamlessly integrate into Watson and really have intelligent decision making on the VMWare platform. So, we wanted to ensure that we were helping our enterprise customers move to Cloud, yet also solve for the future problems. >> So the incumbent piece, both VMWare and IBM, right, incumbent customers, the disruptor would be I guess Cloud, all the new Cloud services, certainly the machine intelligence cognitive, et cetera, components is the disruptive capability, now it's up to you to figure out, okay, how do you apply all that, presumably IBM and your partners can help. >> Yeah and here's the thing, you mentioned earlier, IBM is one of the only companies in the world that can have an end-to-end, not just infrastructure, but also services wrapped around it. So if you're a customer who's not only looking to move to the Cloud but also have services wrapped around, to go end-to-end, IBM is the company to do that for you. >> Dave: Well that's interesting. Okay, I got to ask him Stu. So we had, we were at Dell Technologies World a couple weeks ago, and we had Jeff Clark on, and we asked him, we said, "Look, companies like IBM, HPE, sort of, IBM selling off its X86 division, and HPE splitting, Dell did the opposite. The mega merger". And his comment was, "Well I don't see how you can do end-to-end without both ends". Now, his definition of end is obviously different to your end definition, and I have to ask you, what do you mean by end-to-end? Is the client sort of just a commodity, we can get that anywhere, it's not really an integration challenge? >> So when I'm saying end-to-end what I'm talking about is a enterprise customer looking to move to the Cloud, solve for the future problems, essentially re-invent themselves, transform their business, leverage the new applications, micro-services that are there, but also have services wrapped around it, right? Somebody who's there to help them end-to-end, whether it's just doing migrations for example, right, from on premises to the Cloud, but also help them onboard and guide them on what is there in the Cloud, or the micro-services, or our PAS layer, and how they can transform really. >> So that to me Stu is, Zeb's talking about not a hardware view, of end-to-end, but a, maybe a systems and a software view of end-to-end, in the Cloud services. Alright, Zeb, thank you very much for, do you have one more? You good? Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Guys, thank you very much, appreciate it. >> Appreciate it. Alright, keep it right there buddy, Stu and I will be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from VeeamOn 2018, in Chi-town, we'll be right back. (electronic music)

brought to you by Red Hat well welcome back everyone this two cubes exclusive coverage here in San Francisco California for Red Hat summit 20:18 I'm John Ferreira co-host of the cube with my analyst co-host this week John Troy year co-founder of The Reckoning advisory services and our next guest is Arvind Krishna who's the senior vice president of hybrid cloud at IBM Reese and director of IBM Research welcome back to the cube good to see you hey John and John Wade you guys just kick it confuse get to John's here great to have you on because you guys are doing some deals with Red Hat obviously the leader at open source you guys are one of them as well contributing to Linux it's well documented the IBM has three books on your role relationship to Linux so yeah check check but you guys are doing a lot of work with cloud in a way that you know frankly is very specific to IBM but also has a large industry impact not like the classic cloud so I want to get who tie the knot here and put that together so first I got to ask you take a minute to talk about why you're here with red hat what's the update with IBM with Red Hat yeah great John thanks and thanks for giving me the time I'm going to talk about it in two steps one I'm going to talk about a few common Tenace between IBM and Red Hat and then I'll go from there to the specific news so for the context we both believe in Linux I think that's easy to state we both believe in containers I think that's the next thing to state and we'll come back and talk about containers because this is a world containers are linked to Linux containers are linked to these technologies called kubernetes containers are linked to how you make workloads portable across many different environments both private and public then I go on from there to say and we both believe in hybrid hybrid meaning that people want the ability to run their workload wherever they want beat on a private cloud beat on a public cloud and do it without having to rewrite everything as you go across okay so let's just average those are the market needs so then you come back and say an IBM as a great portfolio of middleware names like WebSphere and db2 and I can go on and on and rather has a great footprint of Linux in the enterprise so now you say we got the market need of hybrid we got these two things which between them of tens of millions maybe hundreds of millions of endpoints how do you make that need get fulfilled by this and that's what we just announced here so we announced that IBM middleware will run containerized on RedHat containers on Red Hat Enterprise Linux in addition we said IBM cloud private which is the ability to bring all of the IBM middleware in a sort of a cloud friendly form right you click and you install it keeps itself up it doesn't go down it's elastic in a set of technologies we call IBM cloud private running in turn on Red Hat open shift container service on Red Hat Linux so now for the first time if you say I want private I want public I want to go here I want to go there you have a complete certified stack that is complete I think I can say we are unique in the industry and giving you this this and this is where this is kind of where the fruit comes on the tree off the tree for you guys you know we've been good following you guys for years you know every where's the cloud strategy and first well it's not like you don't have a cloud strategy you have cloud products right so you have to deliver the goods you've got the system replays the market need we all knows the hybrid cloud multi-cloud choice cetera et cetera right you take Red Hat's footprint your capabilities your combined install base is foundational right so and nothing needs to change there's no lifting shift there's no rip and replace you can it's out there it's foundational now on top of it is where the action is that's what we're that's what were you kind of getting at right that's correct so so we can go into somebody there running let's say a massive online banking application or the running a reservation system is using technologies from Asus using Linux underneath and today it's all a bunch of piece parts you have a huge complex stuff it's all hard wired and rigidly nailed down to the floor in a few places and I can say hey I'll take the application I don't have to rewrite the application I can containerize it I can put it here and that same app now begins to work but in a way that's a lot more fluid in elastic well by the way I want to do a bit more work I want to expose a bit of it up as micro-services I want search Samia you can go do that you want to fully make it microservices enable to be able to make it as little components and digestible you can do that so you can take it in sort of bite-sized chunks and go from one to the other at the pace that you want and that's game-changing yeah that's what I really like about this announcement it really brings the best of breed together right you did you know there's a lot of talk about containers and legacy and we you know we've been talking about what goes where and do you have to break everything up like you were just saying but the the announcement today you know WebSphere the this the you know a battle-tested huge enterprise scale component db2 those things containerized and also in a framework like with IBM we either with IBM Microsoft things or others right that's um that's a huge endorsement for open shipped as a platform absolutely it is and look we would be remiss if we didn't talk a little bit I mean we use the word containers and containers a lot yes you're right containers is a really really important technology but what containers enable is much more than prior attempts such as vm's and all have done containers really allow you to say hey I saw the security problem I solved the patching problem the restart problem all those problems that lie around the operations of a typical enterprise can get solved with containers VM sold a lot about isolating the infrastructure but they didn't solve as John was saying the top half of the stack and that's I think the huge power here yeah I want to just double click on that because I think the containers thing is instrument because you know first of all being in the media and loving what we do we're kind of a new kind of media company but traditional media has been throwing IBM under the bus and saying oh you know old guard and all these things but here's the thing you don't have to change anything you could containers you can essentially wrap it up and then bring a micro-services architecture into it so you can actually leverage at cloud scale so what interests me is is that you can move instantly value proposition wise pre-existing market cloud if I if you will with operational capabilities and this is where I like the cloud private so I want to kind of go with the ever second if I have a need to take what I have an IBM when it's WebSphere now I got developers I got installed base I'd have to put a migration plan away I containerize it thank you very much I do some cloud native stuff but I want to make it private my use case is very specific maybe it's confidential maybe it's like a government region whatever I can create a cloud operations is that right I can cloud apply it and run it absolutely correct so when you look at about private to go down that path we said well private allows you to run on your private infrastructure but I want all these abilities you just described John I want to be able to do micro services I want to be able to scale up and down I want to be able to say operations happen automatically so it gives you all that but in the private without having to go all the way to the public so if you cared a lot about you're in a regulated industry because you went down government or confidential data or you say this data is so sensitive I don't really I'm not going to take the risk of it being anywhere else it absolutely gives you that ability to go do that and and that is what we brought to our private to the market for and then you combine it with open shift and now you get the powers of both together so you guys essentially have brought to the table the years of effort with bluemix all that good stuff going on you can bring any he'd actually run this in any industry vertical pretty much right absolutely so if you look at what what the past has been for the entire industry it has been a lot about constructing a public cloud not just to us but us and our competition and a public cloud has certain capabilities and it has certain elasticity it has a global footprint but it does not have a footprint that's in every zip code or in every town or in every city that song ought to happen to the public cloud so we say it's a hybrid world meaning that you're going to run some bulk loads on a public cloud and like to run some bulk loads on a private and I'd like to have the ability that I don't have to pre decide which is where and that is what the containers the micro services the open ship that combination all gives you to say you don't need to pre decide you fucker you rewrite the workload on to this and then you can decide where it runs well I was having this conversation with some folks at and recent Amazon Web Services conference to say well if you go to cloud operations then the on-prem is essentially the edge it's not necessary then the definition of on-premise really doesn't even exist so if you have cloud operations in a way what is the data center then it's just a connected tissue that's right it's the infrastructure which you set up and then at that point the software manages the data center as opposed to anything else and that's kind of being the goal that we are all being wanted it sounds like this is visibility into IBM's essentially execution plan from day one we've been seeing in connecting the dots having the ability to take either pre-existing resources foundational things like red hat or whatnot in the enterprise not throwing it away building on top of it and having a new operating model with software with elastic scale horizontally scalable synchronous all those good things enabling micro search with kubernetes and containers now for the first time I could roll out new software development life cycles in a cloud native environment without foregoing legacy infrastructure and investment absolutely and one more element and if you want to insert some public cloud services into the environment beat in private or in public you can go do that for example you want to insert a couple of AI services into your middle of your application you can go do that so the environment allows you to do what he described and these additions we're talking about people for a second though the the titles that we haven't mentioned CIO you know business leader business unit leaders how are they looking at the digital transformation and business transformation in your client base as you go out and talk to us so let's take a hypothetical back and every bank today is looking about at simple questions how do i improve my customer experience and everyone in this a customer experience really do mean digital customer experience to make it very tangible and what they mean by that is how I get my end customer engaged with me through an app the apps probably on a device like this some smartphone we won't say what it is and and so how do you do that and so they say well well you were to check your balance you obviously want to maybe look at your credit card you want to do all those things the same things we do today so that application exists there is not much point in rewriting it you might do the UI up but it's an app that exists then you say but I also want to give you information that's useful to you in the context of what you're doing I want to say you can get a 10 second not a not a 30-day load but a ten-second law I want to make it offer to you in the middle of you browsing credit cards all those are new customer this thinks are hot where do you construct those apps how do you mix and match it how do you use all the capabilities along with the data you got to go do that and what we are trying to now say here is a platform that you can go all that do all that on right to that complete lifecycle you mentioned the development lifecycle but I got to add to the the data lifecycle as well as here is the versioning here are my area models all those things built in into one platform and scales are huge the new competitive advantage you guys are enabling that so I got to ask you on the question on on multi cloud I'll see as people start building out the cloud on pram and with public cloud the things you're laying out I can see that going on for a while a lot of work being done there we seeing that wiki bond had a true private cloud before I thought was truly telling a lot of growth they're still not going away public cloud certainly has grown the numbers are clear however the word multi clouds being kicked around I think it's more of a future state obviously but people have multiple clouds will have relationships with multiple clouds no one's gonna have one Klaus not a winner-take-all game winner take most but you're gonna have multiple clouds what does multi-cloud mean to you guys in your architecture because is that moving workloads in real time based upon spot pricing indexes or is that just co-locating on clouds and saying I got this SAP on that cloud that app on that cloud control plane did these are architectural questions it's the thing hell is multi cloud so these are today and then there is a tomorrow and then there is a long future state right so let's take today let's check IBM we're on Salesforce we're on service now we're on workday we're on SuccessFactors well all these are different clouds we run our own public cloud we run our own private cloud and we have traditional data center and we might have some of the other clouds also through apps that we bought that we don't even know okay so let's just toss I think every one of our clients is like this so multi cloud is here today I begin with that first simple statement and I need to connect the data and it comes connect when things go away the next step I think people nobody's gonna have only one even public cloud I think the big public clouds most people are gonna have to if not more that's today and tomorrow your channel partners have clouds by the way your global s lies all have clouds there's a cloud for crying out loud right so then you go into the aspirational state and that may be the one he said where people do spot pricing but even if I stay back from spot pricing and completely dynamic and of worrying about network and I'm worrying about video reach I just back up on to but I may decide it I have this app I run it on private well but I don't have all the infrastructures I want to bust it today and I've very robust it to I got to decide which public and how do I go there and that's a problem of today and we're doing that and that is why I think multi-cloud is here now not some pointed problem the problem statement there is latency managing you know service level agreements between clouds and so on and so forth governance where does my data go because there may be regulate regulate through reasons to decide where the data can flow and all the great point about the cloud I never thought about that way it's a good good illustration I would also say that I see the same argument of database world not everyone has db2 that everyone has Oracle number one has databases are everywhere you have databases part of IOT devices now so like no one makes a decision on the database similar was proud you're seeing a similar dynamic it's the glue layer that to me interest me as you how do you bring them together so holistically looking at the 20 mile stare in the future what is the integration strategy long term if you look at a distributed system or an operating system there has to be an architectural guiding principle for absolute integration you know well that's 30 years now in the making so we can say networking everybody had their own networking standards and the let's say the 80s though it probably goes back to the 70s right yeah an SN a tcp/ip you had NetBIOS TechNet deck that go on and on and in the end is tcp/ip that one out as the glue others by the way survived but in pockets and then tcp/ip was the glue then you can fast forward 15 years beyond that an HTTP became the glue we call that the internet then you can fast forward you can say now how to make applications portable and I would turn around and tell you that containers on linux with kubernetes as orchestration is that glue layer now in order to make it so just like in tcp/ip it wasn't enough to say tcp/ip you needed routing tables you needed DNS you needed name repositories you needed all those things similarly you need all those here I've called those catalogs and automation so that's the glue layer that makes all of this work this is important I love this conversation because I've been ranting on this in the queue for years you're nailed it a new stack is development DNS this is olden Internet infrastructure cloud infrastructure at the global scale is seeing things like Network effect okay we see blockchain in token economics like databases multiple database on structured data a new plethora of new things are happening that are building on top of say HTTP correct and this is the new opportunity this is the new the new platform which is emerging and it's going to enable businesses to operate you said at scale to be very digital to be very nimble application life cycles are not always going to be months they're gonna come down to days and this is what gets enabled so I want you to give your opinion personal or IBM or whatever perspective because I think you nailed the glue layer on cue and a stalker and these this new glue layer that and you made reference system things like HTTP and TCP which changed the industry landscape wealth creation new up new new brands emerged companies we've never heard of emerged out of this and we're all using them today we expect a new set of brands are gonna emerge new technologies and emerge in your expert opinion how gigantic is this swarm of new innovation gonna be just because you've seen many ways before in your view your mind's eye what are you expecting wouldn't share your your insight into how big of a shift and wave is this is going to be and add some color to that I think that if I take a take a shorter and then a longer term view in the short term I think that we said that this is on the order of 100 billion dollars that's not just our estimate I think even Gartner estimated about the same number that'll be the amount of opportunity for new technologies in what we've been describing and that is I think short term if I go longer term I think as much as 1/2 but at least 1/4 of the complete ID market is going to shift onto these technologies so then the winners are those that make the shift and then bye-bye clusion the losers of those who don't make this shift faster Afghan and stop the market moves that's that's he was interesting we used to like look at certain segments going back years oh this companies reap platform Ising we platforming they're their operative lift and shift and all this stuff what you're talking about here is so game-changing because the industries Reap lat forming that's a company that's it's an industry that's right any and I think the the the Internet era of 1995 to put that point it's perhaps the easiest analogy to what is happening not the not the emergence of cloud not the emergence of all that I think that was small steps what we're talking about now is back to the 1995 statement every vertical is upgrading their stack across the board from e-commerce to whatever that's right it's completely modernizing correct around cloud what we call digital transformation in a sense yes what not a big fan of the word but I lied I understand what you mean great insight our thanks for coming on the Kuban Sharon because we even get to some of the other good stuff but IBM and Red Hat doing some great stuff obviously foundational I mean Red Hat Tier one first-class citizen in every single enterprise and software environment you know now saw open source runs the world you guys you guys are no stranger to Linux being the first billion dollar investment going back so you guys have a heritage there so congratulations on the relationships that go around about ninety nine nine yeah and and I love the strategy hybrid cloud here at IBM and right at this the cube bring you all the action here in San Francisco I'm John for John Troy you're more live covers stay with us here in the cube Willie right back