>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to this CUBE conversation here in the Palo Alto studios for theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, the host. We're here during this time where everyone's sheltering in place during the COVID-19 crisis. We're getting the interviews out and getting the stories that matter for you. It's theCUBE's mission just to share and extract the data from, signal from the noise, and share that with you. Of course the conversation here is about how the data analytics are being used. We have a great friend and CUBE alum, Bruno Kurtic, VP, founding VP of Product and Strategy for Sumo Logic, a leader in analytics. We've been following you guys, kind of going back I think many, many years, around big data, now with AI and machine learning. You guys are an industry leader. Bruno, thanks for spending the time to come on theCUBE, I know you're sheltering in place. Thanks for coming on. >> You're welcome, pleasure. >> Obviously with the crisis, the work at home has really highlighted the at-scale problem, right? We've been having many conversations on theCUBE of cybersecurity at scale, because now the endpoint protection business has been exploding, literally, a lot of pressure of malware. A convenient crime time for those hackers. You're starting to see cloud failure. Google had 18 hours of downtime. Azure's got some downtime. I think Amazon's the only one that haven't had any downtime. But everything is being at scale now, because the new work environment is actually putting pressure on the industry, not only just the financial pressure of people losing their jobs or the hiring freezes, but now the focus is staying in business and getting through this. But the pressure points of scale are starting to show. And working at home is one of them. Analytics has become a big part of it. Can you share your perspective of how people using analytics to get through this, because now the scale of the problem-solving is there with analytics. It's in charts on the virus, exponential curves, people want to know the impact of their business in all this. What's your view on this situation? >> Yeah. The world has changed so quickly. Analytics has always been important. But there are really two aspects of analytics that are important right now. A lot of our enterprises today, obviously, as you said, are switching to this sort of remote workforce. Everybody who was local is now remote, so, people are working from home. That is putting stress on the systems that support that working from home. It's putting stress on infrastructure, things like VPNs and networks and things like that because they're carrying more bits and bytes. It's putting stress on productivity tools, things like cloud provider tools, things like Office 365, and Google Drive, and Salesforce, and other things that are now being leveraged more and more as people are remote. Enterprises are leveraging analytics to optimize and to ensure that they can facilitate course of business, understand where their issues are, understand where their failures are, internal and external, route traffic appropriately to make sure that they can actually do the business they need. But that's only half of the problem. In fact, I think the other half of the problem is maybe even bigger. We as humans are no longer able to go out. We're not supposed to, and able to go shopping and doing things as we normally do, so all of these enterprises are not only working remotely, leveraging productivity tools and quote-unquote "digital technologies" to do work. They're also serving more customers through their digital properties. And so their sites, their apps, their retail stores online, and all of the digital aspects of enterprises today are under more load because consumers and customers are leveraging those channels more. People are getting groceries delivered at home, pharmaceuticals delivered at home. Everything is going through online systems rather than us going to Walgreens and other places to pick things up. Both of those aspects of scale and security are important. Analytics is important in both figuring out how do you serve your customers effectively, and how do you secure those sites. Because now that there's more load, there's more people, and it's a bigger honeypot. And then also, how do you actually do your own business to support that in a digital world? >> Bruno, that's a great point. I just want to reiterate that the role of data in all this is really fundamental and clear, the value that you can get out of the data. Now, you and I, we've had many conversations with you guys over the years. For all of us insiders, we all know this already. Data analytics, everyone's instrumenting their business. But now when you see real-life examples of death and destruction, I mean, I was reporting yesterday that leaked emails from the CDC in the United States showed that in January, they saw that people didn't have fevers with COVID-19. The system was lagging. There was no real-time notifications. This is our world. We've been living in this for this past decade, in the big data world. This is highlighting a global problem, that with notifications, with the right use of data, is a real game-changer. You couldn't get any more clear. I have to ask you, with all this kind of revelations, and I don't mean to be all gloom-and-doom, but that's the reality, highlights the fact that instrumenting and having the data analytics is a must-have. Can you share your reaction to that? >> Yeah, absolutely. You're right. Like you said, we are insiders here, and we've been espousing this world of what we internally in Sumo call the continuous intelligence, which essentially means to us and to our customers, that you collect and process all signals that are available to you as a business, as a government, as a whatever entity that is dealing with critical things. You need to process all of that data as quickly as you can. You need to mine it for insights. You need to, in an agile fashion, just like software development, you need to consume those insights, build them into your processes to improve, to react, to respond quickly, and then deliver better outcomes. The sooner you understand what the data is telling you, the sooner you can actually respond to whatever that data is telling you, and actually avoid bad outcomes, improve good outcomes, and overall, react to whatever is forcing you to react. >> I was just talking with Dave Vellante last week about this, my co-host, and also Jeff Frick, my general manager, who interviewed you in the past on theCUBE, about the transition and transformation that's happening. I want to just get your reaction to what we're seeing, and I wanted to get your thoughts on it. There's transitions and there's transformations. Yeah, we've been kind of in this data transition around analytics. You pointed out, as insiders, we've been pointing this out for years. But I think now there's more of a transformative component to this. I think it's becoming clear to everyone the role of data, and you've laid out some good things there. Now I want to ask you, on this transformation. Do you agree with it, and if you do, how does that change the roles? Because if I'm going to react to this as a business, whether small, medium, and large business, large enterprise or government, I now realize that the old world's over. I need to get to the new way. That means new roles, new responsibilities, new outcomes, new ways to measure. Can you share your thoughts on that? Do you agree with the transformation, and two, what are some of those new role changes? How should a business manager or technologist make that transformation? >> Yeah. If it was ever more clear, getting a switch, or a transformation as you say, from the old way we did business and we did technology to the new way, is only being highlighted by this crisis. If you are an enterprise, and you are trying to do everything yourself, running your own IT stacks and all of that, it is clear today that it is much more difficult to do that than if you were leveraging next generation technologies: clouds, SaaS, PaaS, and other things, because it is hard to get people even to work. I think if we have ever been in a place where this sort of transformation is a must, not a slow choice or an evolution, it is now. Because enterprises who have done that, who have done that already, are now at an advantage. I think this is a critical moment in time for us all as we all wake up to this new reality. It is not to say that enterprises are going to be switched over after this specific crisis, but what's going to happen, I believe, is that, I think the philosophies are going to change, enterprises are going to think of this as the new normal. They're going to think about, "Hey, if I don't have the data "about my business, about my customers, "about my infrastructure, about my systems, "I won't be able to respond to the next one." Because right now there's a lot of plugging the holes in the dam with fingers and toes, but we are going to need to be ready for this, because if you think about what this particular pandemic means, this isn't going to end in April or May. Because without a treatment, or without a vaccination, it's going to continue to resurface. Unless we eradicate the entire population of the virus, any new incident is going to start up like a small flare-up, and that is going to continue to bring us back into the situation. Over this time, we're going to have to continue to respond to this crisis as we are, and we need to plan for the future ones like this. That might not be a pandemic type of crisis. It could be a change in the business. It could be other types of world events, whatever it might be. But I think this is the time when enterprises are going to start adopting these types of procedures and technologies to be able to respond. >> It's interesting, Bruno, you bring up some good points. I think about all the conversations that I've had over the years with pros around "disaster recovery" and continuous operations. This is a different vector of what that means, because when you highlighted earlier, IT, it's not like a hurricane or a power outage. This is a different kind of disruption. We talked about scale. What are some of the things that you're seeing right now that businesses are being faced with, that you guys are seeing in the analytics, or use cases that have emerged from this new normal that is facing today's business with this crisis. What's changed? What is this new challenge? When you think about the business continuity and how continuous operations need to be sustained because, again, it's a different vector. It's not a blackout, it's not a hurricane. It's a different kind of disruption. It's one where the business needs to stay on more than ever. >> Yep. Correct. True. What's really interesting, and there are some relatively straightforward use cases that we're seeing. People are dealing with their authentication, VPN network issues, because everybody is low on bandwidth. Everybody is, all of these systems are at their breaking point because they're carrying more than they ever did. These are use cases that existed all along. The problem with the use cases that existed all along is that they've been slowly picking up and growing. This is the discontinuity right now. What's happened right now, all of a sudden you've got double, triple, quadruple the load, and you need to both scale up your infrastructure, scale up your monitoring, be much more vigilant about that monitoring, speed up your recovery because more is at stake, and all of those things. That's the generic use case that existed all along, but have not been in this disruptive type of operating environment. Second is, enterprises are now learning very quickly what they need to do in terms of scaling and monitoring their production, customer-facing infrastructure, what used to be in the data center, the three-tier world, adding a few notes to an application, to your website over time, worked. Right now everybody is realizing that this whole bent on building our microservices, building for scale, rearchitecting and all that stuff, so that you can respond to an instantaneous burst of traffic on your site. You want to capture that traffic, because it means revenue. If you don't capture it, you miss out on it, and then customers go elsewhere, and never come back, and all that stuff. A lot of the work loads are to ensure that the systems, the mission-critical systems, are up and running. It's all about monitoring real-time telemetry, accelerating root cause analysis across systems that are cloud systems, and so on. >> It's a great point. You actually were leading into my next question I wanted to ask you. You know, the old saying goes, "Preparation meets opportunity. Those are the lucky ones." Luck is never really there. You're prepared, and opportunity. Can you talk about those people that have been prepared, that are doing it right now, or who are actually getting through this? What does preparation look like? What's that opportunity? Who's not prepared? Who's hurting the most? Who's suffering, and what could they do differently? Are you seeing any patterns out there, that people, they did their work, they're cloud native, they're scaled out, or they have auto-scaling. What are some of the things where people were prepared, and could you describe that, and on the other side where people weren't prepared, and they're hurting. Can you describe those two environments? >> Sure. Yeah. You think about the spectrum of companies that are going through digital transformation. There are companies who are on the left side. I don't know whether I'm mirroring or not. Basically, on the left side are people who are just making that transformation and moving to serving customers digitally, and on the right side are the ones that are basically all in, already there, and have been building modern architectures to support that type of transformation. The ones that are already all the way on the right, companies like us, right? We've been in this business forever. We serve customers who are early adopters of digital, so we've had to deal with things like November 6th, primary elections, and all of our media and entertainment customers who were spiking. Or we have to deal with companies that do sporting events like World Cup or Super Bowl and things like that. We knew that our business was going to always demand of us to be able to respond to both scheduled and unscheduled disruptions, and we needed to build systems that can scale to that without many human interactions. And there are many of our customers, and companies who are in that position today, who are actually able to do business and are now thriving, because they are the ones capturing market share at this point in time. The people who are struggling are people who have not yet made it to that full transformation, people who, essentially, assume business as normal, who are maybe beginning that transformation, but don't have the know-how, or the architecture, or the technology yet to support it. Their customers are coming to them through their new digital channels, but those digital channels struggle. You'll see this, more often than not you're going to find these still running in a traditional data center than in the cloud. Sometimes they're running in the cloud where they've done just a regular lift-and-shift instead of rearchitecting and things like that. There's really a spectrum, and it's really funny and amazing how much it maps to the journey in digital transformation, and how this specific thing is essentially, what's happening right now, it looks like the business environment demands everybody to be fully digital, but not everybody is. Effectively, the ones that are not are struggling more than the ones that are. >> Yeah. Certainly, we're seeing with theCUBE, with the digital events happening on our side, all events are canceled, so they've got to move online. You can't just take a physical, old way of doing something, where there's content value, and moving it to digital. It's a whole different ball game. There's different roles, there's different responsibilities. It's a completely different set of things. That's putting pressure on all these teams, and that's just one use case. You're seeing it in IT, you're seeing it happen in marketing and sales, how people are doing business. This is going to be very, very key for these companies. The data will be, ultimately, the key. You guys are doing a great job. I do want to get to the news, and I want to get the plug in for Sumo Logic. I want to say congratulations to you guys. A press release went out today from Sumo Logic. You guys are offering free cloud-based data analytics to support work from home and online classroom environments. That's great news. Can you just share and give a plug for that, PSA? >> Sure! We basically have a lot of customers who, just like us, are now starting to work from home. As soon as this began, we got inbound demands saying, "Oh, could you get, do you have an application for this, "do you have some analytics for that, "things that support our work from home." We thought hey, why don't we just make this as a package, and actually build out-of-the-box solutions that can support people who have common working from home technologies that they used to use for 10% of their workforce, and now work for 100% of their workforce. Let's package those, let's push those out. Let's support educational institutions who are now struggling. I have two kids in here who are learning. Everything is online, right? We had to get another computer for them and all this stuff. They're younger, they're in fourth grade. They are doing this, I can see personally how the schools are struggling, how they're trying to learn this whole new model. They need to have their systems be reliable and resilient, and this is not just elementaries, but middle school, high schools, colleges have all expanded their on-premise teaching. So we said, "Okay. Let's do something to help the community "with what we do best." Which is, we can help them make sure that the things that they do, that they need to do for this remote workforce, remote learning, whatever it might be, is efficient, working, and secure. We packaged several bundles of these solutions and offered those for free for a while, so that both our customers, and non-customers, and educational institutions have something they can go and reach for when they are struggling to keep their systems up and running. >> Yeah, it's also a mindset change, too. They want comfort. They want to have a partner. I think that's great that you guys are doing for the community. Can you just give some color commentary on how this all went down? Did you guys have a huddle in your room, said, "Hey, this is a part of our business. "We could really package this up "and really push it out and help people." Is that how it all came together? Can you share some inside commentary on how this all went down and what happened? >> Yeah. Basically, we had a discussion, literally, I think, the first or the second day when we all were sent home. We got on our online meeting and sat down, and essentially learned about this inbound demand from our customers, and what they were looking to do. We were like, "Okay, why don't we, "why don't we just offer this? "Why don't we package it?" It was a cross-functional team that just sat there. It was a no-brainer. Nobody was agonizing over doing this for free or anything like that. We were just sitting there thinking, "What can we do? "Right now is the time for us to all "pull each other up and help each other. "It'll all sort itself out afterwards." >> You know, during the bubonic plague, Shakespeare wrote Macbeth during that time. You guys are being creative during this time, as the coronavirus, so props to you guys at Sumo Logic. Congratulations, and thanks for taking the time. Can you give some parting thoughts on it, for the folks who are working at home? Just some motivational inspiration from you guys? What's going to come next for you guys? >> Sure. And thank you for having me on this video. I would say that we have been making slow transition towards remote workforce as it is. In a lot of places around the world, it's not that easy to make it to an office. Traffic is getting worse, big centers are getting populated, real estate is getting more expensive, all of this stuff. I think, actually, this is an opportunity for enterprises, for companies, and for people to figure out how this is done. We can actually practice now. We're forced to practice. It might actually have positive impact on all industries. We are going to probably figure out how to travel less, probably figure out how to actually do this more effectively, the cost of doing business is going to go down, ability to actually find new jobs might broaden, because you might be able to actually find jobs at companies who never thought they could do this remotely, and now are willing to hire remote workforces and people. I think this is going to be all good for us in the end. Right now it feels painful, and everybody's scared, and all that stuff, but I think long term, both the transformation into digitally serving our customers and the transformation towards remote workforce is going to be good for business. >> Yeah. It takes a community, and we really appreciate the effort you guys make, making that free for people, the classrooms. Remember, Isaac Newton discovered gravity and calculus while sheltering in place. A lot of interesting, new things are going to happen. I appreciate it. >> Bruno: Absolutely. >> Bruno, thank you for taking the time and sharing your insights from your place, sheltering. I made a visit into the studio to get this interview and a variety of other interviews we're doing digitally here. Thanks for sharing. Appreciate your time. >> Thank you. Appreciate you as well. >> I'm John Furrier with theCUBE here. CUBE conversation with Bruno from Sumo Logic sharing his perspective on the COVID-19. The impact, the disruption and path to the future out of this, and the new normal that is going to change our lives. Thanks for watching.