>>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. 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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 and AWS. >>Welcome back to the cubes live coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 I'm Lisa Martin and I have with me a cube alumni back, please. Welcome Scott Mullins, the worldwide financial services business development leader at AWS. Scott. Welcome back. Great to have you joining us, >>Lisa. It's great to be back on the cube and to be visiting with you today from virtual re-invent 2020. >>Yes. Reinventing reinvent. The last show that I got to host in-person for the cube was reinvent last year. And here we have this three week virtual event that started last week. So lots more even going on. I think I even saw a hundred thousand or so registered, so massive event, lots of news. So walk us through some of the highlights that have been announced at reinvent this year and some of the things that you're seeing the most interest from customers in. >>Well, I think one of the big highlights is 500,000 registrants that are reinvented 50,000 attendees last year to reinvent or 50,000 or so to 500,000 re registered for the event. So that's, that's, that's worth talking about in its own. Right. But I think, you know, one of the things, and you mentioned this, you know, more re-invent three weeks, uh, this year, as opposed to the four days that we normally spend in Las Vegas together, physically, when you do, when you do it digitally, you have the ability to actually include more things and more leaders talking about things. And so when we think about the announcements that are having impacts, uh, with financial services customers specifically I'd point to a couple of things and, you know, they're obviously gonna mention Andy's keynote, but there's going to be some things that you might go wait a minute. >>I didn't even see that announcement. Uh, and then maybe I could point you and the viewers to some other, other, um, keynotes or some other sessions that were announced. So obviously I think, uh, first and foremost in Andy's keynote, uh, hybrid, uh, was something that was a very, uh, big focus for him and I for a very long time, we've had the messaging of the right tool for the right job when it comes to any of your services. I think you could alter that today to say it's the right tool for the right job at the right time and in the right place. That makes sense for you and especially for financial institutions. Um, you could look at the announcements around containers, the announcements around Amazon EKS, distro, Amazon EKS, anywhere, and then also Amazon ECS anywhere, which allows our customers to actually, uh, put AWS container technology anywhere they would like to put it. >>You could look also at the additions of the one you and two you form factors to outposts. So no longer do you have to do the, the, the large for you, uh, foreign factor for outposts, smaller outposts for smaller spaces, uh, that particular will play well in the financial service industry. You may not have necessarily as much room for a full cabinet. You could also look from the hybrid perspective in the announcement we made, um, around red hat OpenShift on AWS, all of are giving customers the ability to choose how they actually want to deploy, um, and pursue a hybrid. I'd also point to some announcements we made around management and governance in the financial services, industry governance, uh, is a very important topic. Uh, we announced the management and government lens for the AWS well architected, um, uh, program, uh, that is focused on breath practices for evolving governance for the cloud. >>It has recommended combination of AWS services integrations with our partner network and vetted reference architectures and guidance for addressing regulatory obligations as well. I'd also point to some things we made around audits. I was specifically in Steve Smith's, um, session today, he talked about AWS audit manager. That's a new tool for continually assessing areas and environments for controls or risk compliance. That includes prebuilt compliance frameworks for things like PCI DSS and GDPR, uh, two things that are very important in the financial services industry and last, but certainly not least I'd point to the announcement around the AWS audit Academy. This is training for auditors to actually be able to audit clouds from an agnostic perspective. Any cloud, not specifically AWS that's tree, uh, digital training to do that. And then also an instructor led course specifically on how to audit AWS. So some very key announcements, both from the standpoint of services, uh, as well as additional layers of helping customers in the financial services industry in regulated industries actually use our services. >>So typical, re-invent typical in a lot of news, a lot of announcements, the 500,000 Mark in terms of registering. I hadn't heard that. That's amazing. Let's talk that this has been an Andy. Jassy had an exclusive with John furrier just a couple of weeks ago before. I think it was last week, actually. And we've been talking about this acceleration of digital business transformation because of COVID we've been talking about it, the entire pandemic on the virtual cube, talking about how companies it's really about right now, surviving and thriving to be able to go forward and companies that haven't accelerated are probably in some trouble. Talk to me about how AWS has been working with your financial services customers to help them pivot and move to the cloud faster, really to not just help them survive now, but thrive in the long-term. >>Yeah. Immediately when COVID hit and it hit at different times in different, in different parts of the world. Immediately when COVID hit, we saw the conversation that we were having turning from, Hey, what's my digital strategy to immediately, what are my digital capabilities? And what that really means is what do I have the ability to do tomorrow? Because tomorrow is going to really matter. I don't have necessarily the time to plan for the next several quarters or the next several years, what can I do tomorrow to, um, really, uh, support my, my own workforce and support my own customers and the obligations I have as a financial institution. The first thing we saw people do was to try and make sure that those who financial services work can work. You can look at the adoption of Amazon workspaces, as well as our, uh, Amazon connect, uh, call centers as a service. >>As two examples there at the RBL bank in India was able to move to Amazon workspaces in just 10 days to enable its teams to actually work remotely from home. When they couldn't come into the office, you can look at Barclays. Barclays is actually a presenter at re-invent this year. They'll have a session on how they use Amazon connect, which again is our call center as a service offering to enable 25,000 contacts and our agents to work from home when they can no longer work out of the, out of their traditional contact center. The second thing we saw a financial institutions joining was making sure that customer engagements could still be meaningful when digital was the only option, um, specifically here in the U S you could look at the work that each of us did with FinTech companies like biz two X or fins Zack, or BlueVine Stripe and cabbage in support of the care act in the U S you might remember that the cares act, um, hasn't provisions for funding for small businesses. >>This small business administration had a program called the paycheck protection program, and those organizations were active in providing funding, uh, to small businesses. Uh, through that program. I'll give you an example of cabbage cabbage had previously not been an SBA lender, um, but they were able to, in two weeks build a fully automated system for small businesses to access PPP funding using Amazon text track, to extract information from documentation that those folks submitted to get alone. That reduced approval times from multiple days to about a median of four hours to actually get approval, to get funding through the PPP program. And then just four months cabbage became the second largest PPP lender. They lent over $7 billion in funding, which was twice the amount of funding that they went last year in 2019 loans. So we were happy to support organizations like cabbage and those other FinTech companies, as they help small businesses in the U S get access to funding, uh, during this critical time. >>And as we know, as you said, critical time, but really life or death for a lot of businesses. And as we continue to go through these ways, but it's interesting that you talked about that the speed of facilitation that during such unprecedented times, AWS and this massive machine was able to continue moving at full speed ahead and helping those customers to pivot. You talked about the cloud connect. I had a conversation with a guest on the queue last week about that. And, and I now think about if I have to call in a contact center and that person might be from home. So, you know, we're fortunate that the cloud computing technology and people like you and AWS, or are able to power that because it's, it's literally essential, which is probably one of the words of the year, but being able to keep the machinery going and innovate at the same time has been, make or break for a lot of businesses. >>Absolutely. And you, you look at, you know, kind of one of the last year is that I'll point to is, um, financial institutions. Uh, anti-virus, we're were very much focused on making sure that that cannot fail, that they scaled. And so you can look at the work we did with, uh, with the, with FINRA FINRA is the primary capital markets regulator here in the U S and on a daily basis frame or processes about 400 billion market events on every night to do surveillance on our markets, that when COVID hit, we had unprecedented volume and volatility in the market. And FINRA was, was, um, looking at processing, uh, anywhere from two to three times, their normal daily market volumes that's anywhere from 800 billion market events to 1.2 trillion a night. And if you look at how they were able to scale, they're actually able to scale up compute resources in AWS. We're on a nightly basis. They're able to automatically turn on and off up to a hundred thousand compute nodes in a single day. That automatic ability to scale is, is the power you're talking about. Being able to actually turn things up when you needed it and turn things down when you, when you don't need it based on the volumes. >>Well, and that's going to be something key going forward. As we know that there will be one thing I think that I always say we can count on right now is uncertainty and continued uncertainty, but we've also seen I'm calling them COVID catalysts. You know, the, what you talked about with cabbage, for example, and how that business pivoted quickly, because of the power of cloud computing and emerging technologies, what are some of the things that you think as we go into 2021 in the financial services arena, what are some of the big tech trends that you think were maybe born during COVID that are going to be critical going forward? >>Well, you know, you, you, you had Melanie Frank from capital one on cube a couple of days ago, and she was talking about, you know, their shift to cloud and what that's really enabled, and it, and she kind of sums it up nicely. She says, look, we want to give our customers experience that are real time, and that are intelligent. And you just can't do that with legacy technology. That's sitting in, you know, kind of a legacy data center. And so I think that's going to be kind of the, the, the all encompassing statement for what's happening in the financial services industry. As I mentioned, you know, organizations overnight said, okay, wait a minute, let's take that strategy. And then let's put it aside. Let's talk about capabilities. What can we do? And I think, you know, necessity is the mother of invention. Um, and when you're faced with limitations and challenges, like we all have been faced with around the world and not just in the financial services industry, it, it breeds, um, invention and the, and the desire and the need to actually meet those challenges head on, in very engineered of ways. >>And I think you're going to see more invention and specifically more invention from the established players in the financial services industry. Cloud use is not just experimental on the edges anymore. You're going to see more organizations coming out of COVID. Um, having had those experiences where they actually stood up a context center and scaled it. And, and just a matter of a few days to, to thousands of agents, you're going to find, um, organizations saying, wait a minute, we, we can do remote work. We could, we have access to things like Amazon workspaces. So I think you're, you're gonna, you're going to see that, uh, be a, be a trend. I think you're also gonna see, um, w what Lori beer said in the keynote with Andy, you know, she, she made a very, very astute statement, and I don't know if people caught it, cause it's kind of neat in the middle of her conversation. >>She said, look, we're trying to infuse analytics into everything that we do at JP Morgan. I think you're going to see more and more financial institutions looking to do that, to actually leverage the power of analytics, to power everything we do as a financial institution. So I think those, those are a couple of things that you're going to see. Um, and then, you know, looking, uh, you know, kind of around the corner, I think you're going to continue to see more re-invention within the industry. And what I mean by that is you've seen many financial institutions over the last week, uh, with, uh, re-invent making announcements, you saw bank and we towel saying, Hey, look, we are completely transforming ourselves with AWS. Uh, just a few weeks before we even saw standard charter, the same thing HSBC said, the same thing, global payments earlier in the year said the same thing. And you're going to see more and more organizations coming out and talking about these strategic decisions to reinvent everything that they do to make the financial systems of the world work. And so we're really pleased to be partnering with those organizations to make those transformations possible. We're seeing a lot of invention within the industry, and we're very pleased to be a part of the reinvention of the financial systems around the world. >>It's interesting to hear that you, you see, even the JP Morgan, some of those legacy, big houses are going to be really pivoting. They have to, to be competitive and to be able to utilize analytics, to deliver those real-time services. Because as we all know, as consumers, our patients is wearing thin these days, but I agree with you. I think there's a lot of opportunity there that innovation is exciting and there will have to be reinvention of entire industries, but I think there's a lot of silver linings there. Scott. I wish we had more time, cause I know we could keep talking, but thank you for sharing your insights on this reinvented reinvent this year. >>I appreciate it. Thank you, Lisa. It's always a pleasure to be on the cube. >>Chris Scott Mullins, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 2020.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, covering the Upgrade 2020, the NTT research summit, presented by NTT research. >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBEs, coverage of Upgrade 2020. Of course, it's NTT's Global Research Summit. Really excited, we're going to be able to dig into healthcare, the health system of course, something that's been, top of mind for everyone around the globe this year, so happy to welcome you to the program. First time guest Mary Edwards. She is the president of provider at NTT DATA Services. Mary, welcome to the program, saying thanks so much for joining us. >> Hi, Stu. Glad to be here. >> All right. So why don't we start, as I tee it up. We're going to be talking about health care there, just a little bit of your background, your group inside of NTT DATA Services. >> Sure. So I've been at NTT DATA Services for a year, just about a year on the knows. Really glad to be here. I've been healthcare, all of my career over 30 years. At first in the Blues, in underwriting actuarial and strategy, then hop to consulting. I was a partner with Accenture for 20, well, yeah, I think 22 years, I was at Accenture. and then, I was leading a commercial markets portion of a platform as a service company for a couple of years, and then NTT called and I was really impressed with what I learned about NTT and delighted to join the firm as the president of provider. >> Well, Mary, I've got a little bit of background in some of the health I love, I go to innovation conferences, and they're like, "We have the opportunity to really transform markets, but it's so tough to make change." Well, you've been there for a year, and the last year, there's been a force in function to change the advent of telehealth and telemedicine. I've done plenty of interviews, and heck, me and my family have been to doctors, using those services, which, at the beginning of this year, I wouldn't have thought was possible. Some of these might be long term changes in impact on what's happening, but bring us inside, your customers, what are some of the pressing challenges they're facing? And it's been a little bit this, there obviously, are huge challenges, but there's also been an opportunity to make some rapid changes. >> Great question. Well, first of all, there's no place I'd rather be right now, than serving the health systems across the US, and certainly we have impact globally. It's dynamic time, lots of change, and as you say, with change comes opportunity. But also, it's a time of deep fragility, and a time when these clients really need help, not just from NTT, but from a variety of partners. And I know, I feel and my team feels, that it's a privilege to work in supporting them, through this very difficult time. And when I say difficult time, I mean, think about it, even before the pandemic, Chartists research was talking about the fact that likely 25% of rural hospitals would fail. Fast forward only a couple of months from that, research being published and across the industry, outpatient revenues are down 11% year over year, inpatient revenue down as well, labor expenses up by nearly 18%. And so there's a lot of pressures on the industry right now. And that's what I mean by just a very significant time to be in the industry and position to help. There's a huge recovery, that needs to happen from what our clients have experienced. First and foremost, top line. We've got to get the revenue back into the hospitals. The CARES Act funding doesn't last forever, and certainly, brings with it some obligations. So bringing in that top line growth, virtual health, which you mentioned, is a big part of that strategy. At the same time, they've got to deal with all the new delivery models or working models, work from anywhere is something that all businesses have to face, and incredibly, an incredible challenge for our health systems. Because of course, it's not just about how we do our individual work, but the interactions that they have to have in conducting the work that they do. So care from anywhere and work from anywhere, are huge concerns of our health system clients now. And you have to do that in industrialized ways, because you don't know where you're working day to day, you have to be able to have fast switching, right? Because we're not in control of where we work. Cities and states are telling us, what we have to do on a day in day out basis. There's a huge concept - >> Human. >> Oh, go ahead. Sure. >> Yeah, no, I just say, as you say, obviously, healthcare is rightly so a heavily regulated industry. So bring us inside a little bit, what are some of those opportunities, some of those innovations that providers are being able to take advantage? And have we opened the gates a little bit to help things move a little bit faster here in 2020, due to necessity? >> Yeah. Well, virtual care, you mentioned that earlier, has exploded. There's a lot of dialogue right now in the industry about whether that's forever. It will never go back to the low single digits that it was prior to the pandemic. I mean, prior to the pandemic health systems were happy if they could get to 10%. Overnight, virtual care went to 40%, 50%, increase overnight, and just continue to grow. CEOs across the industry prior to the pandemic, were really focused on digital front door strategies, the ability to enable consumers to enter the healthcare system, digitally and virtually. And so probably for the 18 months before the pandemic, most large system CEOs that I talked to, were working on those strategies. They're doubling down on those strategies, because the industry is reshaping around that digital future state. The cost pressures that we're seeing in health care, at the same time, require that they think about new operating and delivery models, certainly the industry will restructure, based on what we've gone through and continue to experience. And that will mean certainly changes in consolidation in the healthcare industry, right? As certainly certain systems will fail, right. Can't support what's happening around the economics of the industry. But also within our delivery and operations, there will be and we're already seeing a trend toward more pervasive outsourcing, moving offshore, taking particularly back office functions, whether it's IT or business processes, and looking for the help that can drive down the cost structure, better automate, and innovate on those processes and delivery models, and accelerate their journey to the digital future state of health. >> So Mary, help us understand NTT DATA Services, and NTT broader, what are the solutions? How are you helping your customers with everything we've discussed here? >> Sure, well, you can't enable those digital front door strategies unless you do things like get your applications to the cloud. You've got to be able to open up your environment to trade, if I say it that way, right? To exchange more broadly, even within your own ecosystem, within your own walls, the ability to connect doctors with doctors that before the pandemic didn't have a need to connect in the same way becomes important. So at NTT, we do everything, journey to the cloud. Certainly the security that's so important to those journey and also the digital future of health care. RPA, the introduction of bots and AI to workflows and operations in order to reduce cost. In my division in provider, we worked for nearly the last year on something we call, nucleus for healthcare, which is that digital front door enabled by digital foundation and which delivers through pre-selected capabilities scheduling, through virtual care visits to care coordination and payment, all integrated across the digital fabric, in order to accelerate the industry and certainly our health system partners achievement of that digital front door vision and the full digital future for healthcare. >> I love you talked about RPA automation, has been one of the top things we've been hearing this year. It's just a top sea level priority. We love coming to events like this, a lot of discussion of research looking a little bit forward down the road. What are some of the items here at Upgrade 2020, you want to make sure our audience get a little peek into? >> Yeah, well, you talk about automation, and I said a moment ago about offshore, we're thinking about no shore, right? So when you think about the application of automation and advanced analytics AI into business processes, it's not about moving business processes to a lower cost geography, it's about automating, and enabling through bots and whatnot, the ability to not have hands touch it, and really conserving your resources for the more complex things that have to happen. So I love that concept of no shoring, and really using technology to position humans for their best possible work, solving the harder problems that we face as an industry. I think about innovations in patient monitoring, and what we can take in terms of IoT, from other industries. And for instance, at NTT, we've been doing smart city with the city of Las Vegas, for a couple of years now. And we've got lots of AI around movement, heat, light, the physical context of things. You think about how you move that into healthcare. And it's certainly about patient observation, and creating safe spaces, where doctors and nurses don't have to travel in and out of rooms when there's a high contagion rate, but it's also about using AI, not just to watch the room, but to allow AI to alert when there's something very significant happening, what kind of movement in the bed, what does that infer in terms of what's happening in the patient's room, and alerting on that basis versus a visual monitor, if you will. There are other innovations. Oh, go ahead, Stu. >> Oh, no, so sorry, I thought you had said, please finish. >> Well, I was just about to say there are other innovations that we're working on, that are really about patient well being, patient companion. I think about the work we're doing at NTT disruption around something called Jibo, which is a robotics, very cool little guy who we've had some experience using it in our children's hospitals, right. It becomes like a really a companion of sorts. There are lots of applications for that kind of technology, especially in a pandemic time, when most of our patients are isolated and craving some human interaction and these capabilities can be like that, they can be companions, and they can provide the social interaction that really lead to health and well being. >> Well, so many important topics. Mary, thank you so much for joining us. Great to hear your automation, robotics in the people, at the center, of course, of what we look at in healthcare. Great to talk to you. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. Bye bye. >> Stay tuned for more coverage from Upgrade 2020. I'm Stu Miniman, thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE covering HPE DISCOVER VIRTUAL EXPERIENCE. Brought to you by HPE. >> Welcome to theCUBE coverage of HPE DISCOVER 2020, the virtual event this year. I'm Lisa Martin, and I have a couple of women from HPE joining me next first time on theCUBE. Very pleased to welcome Jas Sood, the US VP of Sales, Commercial and SLED at HPE, and Sandy Ono, the VP of Marketing Strategy at HPE. Ladies great to have you on the program. >> Thanks for having us. >> Wow, excited. >> So we want to talk about customers, what's going on. The SMB market is one that has been near journal. A lot of folks hearts the last few months, we're hearing so much, even in our local neighborhood about small and medium local businesses, really being challenged as COVID has just disrupted everything. What are some of the things Jas, we'll start with you that you're seeing in today's SMB market? >> Yeah, so I think the SME market is dynamic. And you got a lot of really, really small customers. You have the medium-sized businesses and so forth. So there is a wide range of what customers are feeling today. I think on the one spectrum, just thinking about, how are they going to stay open as a viable business, given the current economic condition? Whereas others are trying to figure out, now that we are in more of a remote working environment, how do they support their employees? How do they make sure that there's remote connectivity that we're able to communicate? Obviously, we're all using the same sort of bandwidth. How do we make that work? I'm also thinking about, there was still a lot of exchange of data going through the remote workplace. And so, how do we make sure that information coming back is secure and so forth? So, one of the things that we're trying to do is just make sure that we're there for our customers, let them know that, "Hey, we just want to hear you. "We want to be there for you." And be able to provide many, many options, which I'm sure we'll talk about here in a couple of minutes. But Sandy, what's your take? >> Certainly, Jas, I echo everything you're saying. I think revenue and cash flow is very much on top of everybody's mind, and just 75% of SMEs revenues have been disrupted. And when you think about that, really, how do you not just move to the new normal, but a lot of businesses are going to have to go through some change. Now, change really first is how do we contain costs? Look at the cost things we need to get done to service customers, have a supply chain, how can infrastructure an IT help with that to contain costs? And then, second, how do you find new revenue streams? The world is much more virtual today than it was yesterday. How do we evolve our businesses in order to actually find new revenue streams? I think is very much on that people signed. >> That's an interesting one, Sandy, that you bring up new revenue streams. Jas, let me ask you as the leader of Sales for Commercial and SLED in the US, how are you finding new revenue streams, knowing that as Sandy said, 75% of SMBs are dramatically affected by COVID, what are you doing? What do you think, even working with your channel partners to open up some new revenue opportunities? >> Yeah, that's right. I mean, channel partners are a key part of our strategy. To go to market strategy first. So we work with them on a daily basis trying to think about, "Hey, how could we really help? "How can we really be out there to provide certain options for customer?" So, one of the few things in terms of helping SMB customers to continue the revenue stream is to provide really lucrative financing options as well. So currently, we have many offers that they don't have to pay until the end of this calendar year, which is the end of our fiscal year. So being able to really think out of the box to say, how could we come together and really be able to help when there is a certain sort of cash flow shortfall right now. I think the other thing too is there are certain industries within SMBs that actually have higher demand right now, healthcare customers, some financial services customers as well. I mean, those are areas that as people in the community that we rely on heavily these days. So, again, being able to be there for those customers to help them think through ways that we can help them to monetize their businesses a little bit more proactively today is also an area where we're trying to help. >> And Jas, how has your role as an executive sponsor in a lot of accounts, how is it changing? >> Very interesting question. And it's more actually often conversation now that we've all been at home. It's not really a, "Hey, can we talk about this project?" Or, "Can we talk about what you have kind of coming up "and how can I help," but it's just more around just a general conversation. So I've had so many conversations with customers just to say, "Hey, how are you guys coping? "How are you dealing with being able to... "Are you able to work remotely? "First of all." I mean, I think we all have that capability, but really to have all your employee base, being able to do that, what impacts does that have on their business long term, short term? And I think that's just opened up just a general, how's it going conversation, we share best practices, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. We're trying to figure that out as well. We are all at home as well. And so it really creates more of a personal conversation. I think the main thing that we want to make sure is that we're just there for our customers. We realize that it's a trying time right now, and cash flow might be tight, and that's okay. Because, eventually, we're going to come back as the United States, as the economy and things are going to come back in, we just want to make sure that we're there for our customer base, whenever that time comes for them. >> That personal vision is so important. Is there I'm a marketer you're a marketer. And for a long time, we've been talking about personalization and how effective those marketing tactics can be when they can really deliver a message to a perspective buyer that hits exactly, "That's what I'm looking for." Even more, as Jas was saying, now it's even more important, not just your SMB customers, to get personal with them, but to allow them to have that experience with their customers. Sandy, how have you changed your marketing mix or even your marketing messaging in light of this new need for a different type of personal touch, that's only virtual? >> It's a great question. Two things are from how you talk to your customer-based perspective. And it's true for Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and it's true for all of our customers out there. Really it has to be authentic to the point where we can't just be selling the thing anymore. Everybody is not only cash-strapped, time-strapped. But they're also looking for a genuine connection to something that they need. So to be much more articulate around the problems we solve, the solutions that are readily deployable, how can we help in these moments has been much more forefront and the marketing messages and just the way we talk with our customers. The other thing is from a marketing mix perspective. We're going to the same thing everybody else is right? I was just thinking the other day, probably half of our typical marketing investment is in physical events, just like Discover was a year ago. And really having to rethink what that is now, how do you stay connected with customers? What does a virtual event have to be? What is a meetup now in a Zoom. Getting really comfortable with that. And these technologies that can help us, but still maintaining those customer touchpoints. And particularly, as we think about... Everybody's thinking about new revenue streams, how do you get to the newer customers that don't know you yet? What are the points of personalization, interconnectedness, the ongoing ways you can stay in touch via digital, all become much more forefront as we think about conical the new normal? And along those lines engagement, is so key. You brought a Discover being for how many years before this year physical event, and the cute covers many physical events a year. And so it's very... Everyone's trying to figure out how do we actually engage our customers and our prospects as vendors and maintain their engagement? Because now you're not just in an audience with a phone and email and phone calls as distractions, you're at home, you're sharing bandwidth. You've maybe have kids at home. There's more distractions. So Sandy, what are some of the things that HPE is doing at DISCOVER 2020, the VIRTUAL EXPERIENCE to engage folks and maintain that engagement? >> Oh yeah, for sure. I mean, talk about getting ourselves an order of being very, I guess I'll use the worst snackable, a lack of anything else. We are used to being in a room, talking about the problems we solve, and the solution we have in for an hour. Discover what you're going to find is 15 minutes, that's all people have in a virtual world is 15 minutes. What used to be two, three hours in terms of a keynote, is much more targeted. And we're doing a lot more on demand. I would say that, if one of the things that we're really trying to do, particularly with this fund and across the board, is, how do you stay connected? And it's not just about one way delivery of content, but it's really that interaction plan. Are people talking to our chat agents? What are they chatting about? How do we get them to the next phase? What are all the different ways you can light up in a digital way that helps people follow up? Again, they're going to come in and out experience something. And this is the world of digital is not a one conversation. It's kind of a... It's like a dating game. You got to keep going. To keep the conversation going just the read of me. >> That two-way conversation, is... I'm glad that you brought that up. Because Jas, so many events, every event probably is a big opportunity for every vendor to close some big deals. There's just something about that face-to-face connection where execs can sit down with customers or whatnot. We can't do that this year. So what are some of the ways that your team and through your channel is doing what Sandy was talking about and doing that really, that dialogue, that interactive conversation through just video conferencing? >> Yeah, well, the neat thing about it is that we've still been able to keep some of those personable tracks through Discover. So we have like the CIO Summit, so that'll be an area of open dialogue. It's sort of an invite-only type of thing event. We will be having customer round table specific to many different topics. I'm hosting a couple of those myself. And so it's an intimate group of 12 to 15 customers doing the same thing on the partner side and having our senior executives being there with us to host it. So I think just the neat thing about it is even though it's virtual and to Sandy's point in trying to keep some of the keynotes and of that nature at a shorter timeframes so that we keep attention and make it succinct. I think at the same time, we're able to still chip the small group environment where we're able to have open dialogue. And I think one of the great things about being able to do that now is, there's so much that customers can learn from one another. We talked about us really sharing with them. I mean, customers are a little bit more open to talking to one another as well, and figuring out, "Hey, what are you doing? "Is this working?" "This is sort of issue that we have, "how are you handling that?" So, I think just in our environment now there's a little bit more opportunity, an openness to share. And the good thing about being virtual is, you can do more of that. 'Cause, as Sandy mentioned, some of that too, the sessions are on demand. So a little bit on your own time also based on your own schedule. So I think having the variety of both will be key and successful. >> Yeah, having that mix of those intimate conversations that can help really HPE, from a revenue perspective, close big deals, as well as allowing folks with 70 cents. Give me some... It's like crazy, right? That snackable digestible content on my time, probably one of the things that we're hearing on theCUBE, the last a couple of months of everything being virtual is that so many events are getting even more and more and more attendees because people don't have to travel and budgets and that sort of thing. But I got to ask you a question, Sandy, as a marketer, how do you measure engagement? Typically they think of like badge stands at a booth or downloads is as this pivot was done so quickly, and I accolade HPE for being able to do that. That's hard thing to do. How are you as a marketer... What are you looking to do to measure success for this event? >> It's a great question. We look at success in kind of three ways. Obviously is the reach, how many folks we can bring in this is the first time we're doing this so global, which is quite fascinating to kind of see it come to life. Really being able to address the global audience, the customers, the partners, and our employee base that we're going to be able to reach. Second is relevance. We're thinking about, are we talking about the right things that are going to resonate with our customers? How are they reacting to that? There's so many mechanisms. We are going to get feedback from social to the way they engage with us. They're going to vote by their clicks. That's the end of the day. They're going to tell us what they're interested in after we put the content out there, and we're going to soak that up as digital signals that come back. And then lastly, obviously just driving pipeline, this is a conversation. And hopefully an acceleration point, we in digital marketing have a lot of different ways that we're going to score engagement. We tend to think about it pretty simply. It's either a hot lead, a warm lead, or a cold lead. And it's a way to kind of almost think about engagement in a way of the speed of follow up. Is the customer ready to engage in the next step? Maybe they're super hot. Maybe they're just slightly warm. But we have kind of data science models that help us take all that data that we're going to sit on because it's digital, turn it into something that makes sense and then be able to hand over to like Jas's team, some of those signals. So our sales teams can actually the next steps. >> I like that. It's all about speed these days, right? >> Yeah. >> HPE, quickly to turn this event digital. We also knew that SMBs and customers are having to work quickly to start in place the right digital equipments to move forward. Last thing I want to leave you guys with, Jas, what are some of the things that are going on at Discover that you're excited about to engage with customers? >> Yeah, so I think just one, the virtual experience, I think, is going to be really cool. We have some cool entertainment type things going on as well. We'll give all that away, but I think that keeps it fun. I think it'll be unique experience. I'm really excited also about the different tracks that we have. So we actually do have a small, medium business track, a lot of on-demand sessions. So there's a lot of vertical sessions. There's a lot of industry sessions as well. So really to be able to go in there depending upon what your area of interest is and focus is, I think you're going to find something and it's really easy to navigate. I'm excited because I think there'll be more customers that can come having our state and local government customers be able to log on, and really get a sense for what's really happening in the industry with all of the cares act funding and so forth. So I think it'll be really exciting to be able to showcase tracks like that now that we have a virtual environment that we didn't get an opportunity to do for. So I think there's more that we have to offer and I'm really interested and excited about that. >> More without the... As ladies will know and appreciate that the mass of foot ache-- >> That's fine. >> From walking miles and miles and Las Vegas. (Jas and Sandy laughing). And next thing, Sandy, you're hosting a panel, I've discovered. Tell me a little bit about that. >> Yes, I am. Jas mentioned that we have a whole SMB track. So we're hosting a panel that's going to be just geared for the small-medium businesses. It's going to be on June 30th as we kind of continue of rolling thunder with DISCOVER VIRTUAL. It's with an analyst, couple of our SMB experts really talk a little bit deeper around the solutions that we have, the problems we're hoping to help people solve, and certainly have those on-demand sessions. I'll just add onto what Jas is saying. I'm really excited because, for the first time, particularly for our small-medium businesses, this is a no entry fee type of event. So there's no entry fee. We're actually giving $10 back to charity. So for our smaller businesses to be able to kind of consume this content and really see the demos, see the technology, really help shape what's the next step for them. I think what I'm excited about, that's all. >> Excellent, Sandy, Jas, thank you so much for joining me on theCUBE today. It was great talking to you both. >> Yeah, thank you so much. >> Thank you so much, cool. >> I appreciate it. >> Our pleasure, looking forward to seeing the impact. Well, for my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Coverage at HPE DISCOVER the VIRTUAL EXPERIENCE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a cube conversation. >> Everyone welcome to this cube conversation here in the Palo Alto cube studios. I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE, with a great guest here, Shanthi Vigneshwaran, who is with the Office of Strategic programs in the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research within the US Food and Drug Administration, FDA, is the Informatica Intelligent Disrupter of the Year award. Congratulations, Shanthi welcome to this cube conversation. Thanks for joining me. >> Thank you for having me. >> Congratulations on being the Informatica Intelligent Disrupter of the year award. Tell us more about the organization. I see FDA everyone's probably concerned these days making sure things going faster and faster, more complex, more things are happening. Tell us about your organization and what you work on. >> FDA is huge, our organization is Center for Drug Evaluation research. And its core mission is to promote public health by ensuring the availability of safety and effective drugs. For example any drugs you go and buy it in the pharmacy today, Our administration helps in trying to approve them and make sure it's so in term of quality and integrity of the marketed products in the industry. My office is specifically Office of strategic programs whose mission is to transform the drug regulatory operations with the customer focus through analytics and informatics. They work towards the advancement for the CDERs public health mission. >> What are some of the objectives that you guys have? What are some things you guys have as your core top objectives of the CDER, the drug research group? >> The core objectives is we wanted to make sure that we are promoting a safe use of the marketed drugs. We want to make sure there's the availability of the drugs that are going to the patients are effective. And also the quality of the drugs that are being marketed are able to protect public health. >> What are some of the challenges that you guys have to take in managing the pharmaceutical safety, because I can only imagine certainly now that supply chains, tracing, monitoring, drug efficacy, safety, all these things are happening. What are some of the challenges in doing all this? >> In our office there are challenges in three different areas. One is the drug regulation challenges because as drugs are being more advanced and as there are more increasingly complex products, and there are challenging in the development area of the drugs, we wanted to make sure here we have a regulation that supports any advancement in science and technology. The other thing is also Congress is actually given new authorities and roles for the FDA to act. For example the Drug Quality and Security Act, which means any drug that's they want to track and trace all the drugs that goes to the public is they know who are the distributors, who are the manufacturers. Then you have the 21st Century Cures Act, and also the CARES Act package which was recently assigned, which also has a lot of the OTC drug regulatory modernization. Then there's also the area of globalization because just as disease don't have any borders, Product safety and quality are no longer on one country. It's basically a lot of the drugs that are being manufactured are overseas and as a result we wanted to make sure there are 300 US ports. And we want to make sure the FDA regulated shipments are coming through correctly to proper venues and everything is done correctly. Those are some the challenges we have to deal with. >> So much going on a lot of moving purchase as people say, there's always drug shortages, always demand, knowing that and tracking it. I can only imagine the world you're living in because you got to be innovative, got to be fast, got to be cutting edge, got to get the quality right. Data is super critical. And can you share take a minute to explain some of the data challenges you have to address and how you did that. Because I mean I could almost just my mind's blown just thinking about how you live it every day. Can you just share some of those challenges that you had to address and how did you do? >> Some of the key challenges we actually see is we have roughly 170,000 regulatory submissions per year. There are roughly 88,000 firm registration and product listing that comes to us, and then there are more than 2 million adverse event reports. So with all these data submissions and organization as such as us we need it, we have multiple systems where this data is acquired and each has its own criteria for validating the data. Adding to it are internal and external stakeholders also want certain rules and the way the data is being identified. So we wanted to make sure there is a robust MDM framework to make sure to cleanse and enrich and standardize the data. So that it basically make sure the trust and the availability and the consistent of the data, is being supplied to published to the CDER regulatory data users. >> You guys are dealing with- >> Otherwise like it's almost to give them a 360 degree view of the drug development lifecycle. Through each of the different phases, both pre market which is before the drug hits the market, and then after it hits the market. We still want to make sure the data we receive still supports a regulatory review and decision making process. >> Yeah, and you got to deliver a consumer product to get people at the right time. All these things have to happen, and you can see it clearly the impacts everyday life. I got to ask you that the database question 'cause the database geek inside of me is just going okay. I can only imagine the silos and the different systems and the codes, because data silos is big document. We've been reporting on this on theCUBE for a long time around, making data available automation. All these things have to happen if there's data availability. Can you just take one more minute talk about some of the challenges there because you got to break down the silos at the same time you really can't replace them. >> That's true. What we did was we did leave it more of us I mean, step back like seven years ago, when we did the data management. We had like a lot of silo systems as well. And we wanted to look at we wanted to establish a, we knew we wanted to establish a master data management. So we took a little bit more of a strategic vision. And so what we ended up saying is identifying what are the key areas of the domain that will give us some kind of a relationship. What are the key areas that will give us the 360 degree lifecycle? So that's what we did. We identified the domains. And then we took a step back and said and then we looked at what is the first domain we wanted to tackle. Because we know what are these domains are going to be. And then we were like, okay, let's take a step back and say which is the domain we do it first that will give us the most return on investment, which will make people actually look at it and say, hey, this makes sense. This data is good. So that's what we ended up looking at. We looked at it as at both ends. One is from a end user perspective. Which is the one they get the benefit out of and also from a data silo perspective which is the one data domains that are common, where there's duplication that we can consolidate. >> So that's good. You did the work up front. That's critical knowing what you want to do and get out of it. What were some of the benefits you guys got out of it. From an IT standpoint, how does that translate to the business benefits? And what was achieved? >> I think the benefits we got from the IT standpoint was a lot of the deduplication was not theirs. Which basically means like a lot of the legacy systems and all of the manual data quality work we had to do we automated it. We had bots, we also had other automation process that we actually put into work with Informatica, that actually helped us to make sure it's the cost of it actually went for us considerably. For example it used to take us three days to process submissions. Now it takes us less than 24 hours to do it, for the users to see the data. So it was a little bit more, we saw the, we wanted to look at what are the low hanging fruits where it's labor intensive and how can we improve it. That's how we acted there. >> What are some of the things that you're experiencing? I mean, like, we look back at what it was before, where it is now? Is it more agility, you more responsive to the changes? Was it an aspirin? Was it a complete transformation? Was some pain reduced? Can you share just some color commentary on kind of before the way it was before and then what you're experiencing now? >> So for us, I think before, we didn't know where the for us, I mean, I wouldn't say we didn't know it, when we have the data, we looked at product and it was just product. We looked at manufactured they were all in separate silos. But when we did the MDM domain, we were able to look at the relationship. And it was very interesting to see the relationship because we now are able to say is. for example, if there is a drug shortage during due to hurricane, with the data we have, we can narrow down and say, Hey, this area is going to be affected which means these are the manufacturing facilities in that area , that are going to be not be able to function or impacted by it. We can get to the place where the hurricane tracks we use the National Weather Service data, but it helps us to narrow down some of the challenges and we can able to predict where the next risk is going to be. >> And then before the old model, there was either a blind spot or you were ad hoc, probably right? Probably didn't have that with you. >> Yeah, before you were either blind or you're doing in a more of a reactionary not proactively. Now we are able to do a little bit more proactively. And even with I mean drug shortages and drug supply chain are the biggest benefit we saw with this model. Because, for us the drug supply chain means linking the pre and post market phases that lets us know if there's a trigger and the adverse events, we actually can go back to the pre market side and see where the traceability is who's at that truck. What are all the different things that was going on. >> This is one of the common threats I see in innovation where people look at the business model and data and look at it as a competitive advantage, in this case proactivity on using data to make decisions before things happen, less reactivity. So that increases time. I mean, that would probably you're saying, and you get there faster, if you can see it, understand it, and impact the workflows involved. This is a major part of the data innovation that's going on and you starting to see new kinds of data whereas has come out. So again, starting to see a real new changeover to scaling up this kind of concept almost foundationally. What's your thoughts just as someone who's a practitioner in the industry as you start to get this kind of feelings and seeing the benefits? What's next, what do you see happening because you haven't success. How do you scale it? What how do you guys look at that? >> I think our next is we have the domains and we actually have the practices that we work. We look at it as it's basically data always just changes. So we look at is like what are some of the ways that we can improve the data? How can we take it to the next level. Because now they talk about power. They are also warehouse data lakes. So we want to see is how can we take these domains and get that relationship or get that linkages when there is a bigger set of data that's available for us. What can we use that and it actually we think there are other use cases we wanted to explore and see what is the benefit that we can get a little bit more on the predictability to do like post market surveillance or like to look at like safety signals and other things to see what are the quick things that we can use for the business operations. >> It's really a lot more fun. You're in there using the data. You're seeing the benefits and real. This is what clouds all about the data clouds here. It's scaling. Super fun to talk about and excited. When you see the impacts in real time, not waiting for later. So congratulations. You guys have been selected and you receive recognition from Informatica as the 2020, Intelligent Disrupter of the year. congratulations. What does that mean for your organization? >> I think we were super excited about it. But one thing I can say is when we embarked on this work, like seven years ago, or so, problem was like we were trying to identify and develop new scientific methods to improve the quality of our drugs to get that 360 degree view of the drug development lifecycle. The program today enables FDA CDER to capture all the granular details of data we need for the regulatory data. It helps us to support the informed decisions that we have to make in real time sometimes or and also to make sure when there's an emergency, we are able to respond with a quick look at the data to say like, hey this is what we need to do. It also helps the teams. It recognizes all the hard work. And the hours we put into establishing the program and it helped to build the awareness within FDA and also with the industry of our political master data management is. >> It's a great reward to see the fruits of the labor and good decision making I'm sure it was a lot of hard work. For folks out there watching, who are also kind of grinding away in some cases, some cases moving faster. You guys are epitome of a supply chain that's super critical. And speed is critical. Quality is critical. A lot of days critical. A lot of businesses are starting to feel this as part of an integrated data strategy. And I'm a big proponent. I think you guys have have a great example of this. What advice would you have for other practitioners because you got data scientists, but yet data engineers now who are trying to architect and create scale, and programmability, and automation, and you got the scientists in the the front lines coming together and they all feed into applications. So it's kind of a new things go on. Your advice to folks out there, on how to do this, how to do it right, the learnings, share. >> I think the key thing I, at least for my learning experience was, it's not within one year you're going to accomplish it, It's kind of we have to be very patient. And it's a long road. If you make mistakes, you will have to go back and reassess. Even with us, with all the work we did, we almost went back a couple of the domains because we thought like, hey, there are additional use cases how this can be helpful. There are additional, for example, we went with the supply chain, but then now we go back and look at it and say like, hy, there may be other things that we can use with the supply chain not just with this data, can we expand it? How can we look at the study data or other information so that's what we try to do. It's not like you're done with MDM and that is it. Your domain is complete. It's almost like you look at it and it creates a web and you need to look at each domain and you want to come back to it and see how it is you have to go. But the starting point is you need to establish what are your key domains. That will actually drive your vision for the next four or five years. You can't just do bottom up, it's more of like a top down approach. >> That's great. That's great the insight. And again, it's never done. I mean, it's data is coming. It's not going away. It's going to be integrated. It's going to be shared. You got to scale it up. A lot of hard work. >> Yeah. >> Shanthi thank you so much for the insight. Congratulations on your receiving the Disrupter of the Year Award winner for Informatica. congratulations. Intelligence >> Yeah, thank you very much for having me. Thank you. >> Thank you for sharing, Shanthi Vigneshswaran is here, Office of Strategic programs at the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research with the US FDA. Thanks for joining us, I'm John Furrier for theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

(lively music) >> Hello, and welcome to a special CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto studios of theCUBE, I am John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media and also the co-host of theCUBE. We are here with Blake Morgan, who is the futurist, author, speaker, around the concept of customer experience, and has a great new book out called, More is More. Blake, Welcome to theCUBE Conversation. >> Thank you John. >> Thanks for coming in. So I love that it is a hard cover book, the book is great, it feels good, the pages, it's a really good read, but it's got a lot of meaty topics in there. So let's just jump in, what's the motivation for the book? Why the book? Why More is More? >> So I have been in the contact center space for over 10 years and basically everyone under the sun is a customer and we all know what it feels like to have a bad customer experience. Have you had a bad customer experience ever? >> John: Oh yes. >> Yeah, right. >> So there is no shortage of work to be done in this space. I think now it's a great time to be in customer experience because there is more awareness about what it actually means. So, I wrote the book to basically provide some kind of definition and to really help people understand, What is customer experience?. Is it customer service? No, it's not. So what does it mean? How can businesses improve customer experience and what do they need to know to get started? >> How about the evolution? Because you know digital has really changed the game. You are seeing cloud computing, machine learning, AI techniques, bots certainly. I mean Twitter came out over ten years ago. I remember when Comcast Cares came out, you know that was a revolution. It was this one guy who decided to be on Twitter. We saw that beginning of that, that trend, where you can now serve and touch folks with customer service and experience, but then again, the blinds between customer experience and customer experience is blurring. Now those multiple channels, do you send them a Snapchat? Do you Instagram? All kinds of new things are emerging, so how do you define, as a frame, the customer experience in this new context? >> Yeah, you're right, there are so many channels. It's really overwhelming for a lot of businesses. So I think it is important to really cut out the noise to think about, Who are you as a business?, and Who is your customer?. What does your customer need? And I really encourage businesses to make their life harder to make it easier on the customer, because in so many situations, companies make it easier on themselves and make it harder on their customers. For example, say you do tweet a company, they might tell you, Hey, now you need to call us and repeat yourself or Now you need to send us an email. Well that's not easy for me as the customer. So it's really all about making customers' lives easier and better. That's the name of the game. >> So what was the findings in the book, when you did the research for the book, what was the core problem that companies are facing? Was it understanding customer experience? Was it the re imagining of customer experience? Was it just a strategic imperative? What was the problem that you uncovered that was the core to this new customer experience equation? >> So a lot of people equate customer experience with customer service and that's a big problem because for most companies, customer service is a cost center. It's not a revenue generating arm of the business. It's not exciting, it's not a money maker, it's not marketing or sales, and so that is really what people think of, when they think of customer experience. But the book is based on this DO MORE framework and DO MORE is basically represents as an acronym. Each piece of the six piece framework represents a different piece of where customer experience lives. So the first D is design something special. The second, I'm not going to read you every, I'm not going to bore you every single word, but the second is about loving your employees, so that is a part of it too. So culture, modernizing with technology, obsessing over your customers, having a culture of customer centricity and embracing innovation and disruption. So these are all varying pieces of DO MORE, which really helps companies understand, it's not simply something that sits in the contact center. For example, let's say you've got your laptop here, and you love your laptop, but your experience of the laptop is not only shaped by, say you have to contact the call center, it is also shaped by how that laptop was built and how about those people who built the laptop. Were they fighting at work with each other? Did they like their jobs? Did they like their boss? Honestly, that's going to impact your experience. >> Yeah, was it a sweat shop. >> Was it a sweat shop? There you go. >> I mean there's all kind of issues about social good too kind of comes into it with that. >> It actually does, I write a lot about social good in my book and some really great CEOs today get that social good is important, like the CEO of Patagonia or Marc Benioff. I mean you can just rattle off so many examples of stuff that he's doing, whether it is equal pay for woman, or his huge house in Hawaii where he's housed monks, to help them when one of the monks had cancer actually. Salesforce is constantly doing good for it's employees and for the community at large. >> Take me through your view on how executives should think about customer experience with all the digital transformation, because a lot of business models are shifting, you are seeing mobile apps, changing the financial services market, because now the app is the teller. So you have three kinds of companies out there, you've got the customer service oriented company, like a Zappos, or you've got a tech company like Google, but they are all about product innovation. Then you've got companies like Apple and others, that are like the big brand and culture personalities, so you've got these three different kind of companies as an example, each one might have a different view on customer experience. How do you tie, how does an executive figure out how to match the more into their DNA? >> That's a fantastic question. I think it's important to have somebody accountable to it, whether it's a Chief Customer Officer or your CMO, because the CEO is ultimately responsible, however, the CEO has their hand in so many things, it's not scalable for them to be so involved on a granular level, on customer centric metrics and so on and so forth throughout the organization. So I would encourage a company to actually hire somebody who is accountable, who creates even tiger teams across the organization with these customer centric metrics in mind, so everybody is working together and they know their job, no matter if they are HR or finance or marketing or customer service, that their metrics, their performance metrics, are tied back to the customer satisfaction. >> I know you do a lot of talks and you do a lot of speeches out there and events, what's the common question that you get? I mean what are people really struggling with or what are they interested in, what are some of the things that you are hearing when you are out on the road giving talks? >> I think it's hard to actually put some of these practices, I think it's actually hard to put some of these ideas into practice. For example, I recently gave a talk at a large technology company down here in San Jose and I presented some pretty wild ideas about actually the energy for influencing change. So how do we keep that high level of stamina with our employees when it's just quite hard to sometimes even keep up. I remember I gave this speech, I talked about a lot of very eccentric ideas about self-management, like when you are a worker you need to take care of yourself because the corporation is never going to give you a pass to let's say, rest, or do what you need to do to feel good, to be good at work. I noticed some of the people in the audience were all texting each other and afterwards someone came up to me and said, you know we are all texting each other because you say these things and the speech was purchased by the leader of the company, however, when it comes to actually working here, that is not really the vibe here, that's not the culture. So I think that a lot of, even the best companies today, still struggle every single day with some of these ideas, because when you DO MORE, when you work harder than others, it's tiring, it can take it's toll on employees. So how do you keep people fresh? >> So fatigue is a huge issue. >> Fatigue, yes. It is an issue. >> So how do they solve that? Because again, that is an experience and the employees itself represent brands. >> Yeah. >> So what are some of the solutions for that? >> Yeah so it's normal that people in these big companies feel fatigued when they are working harder for the customer, but it is really important for people to just manage themselves because no one is going to give you permission to take ten minutes to go for a walk, take ten minutes to go meditate, so it's really about management providing the room for employees to breathe and also modeling it as an example, if leaders just worked 24/7, it's all about the grind, the grind, the grind, that's not a healthy culture, so they need to push their people, but also give them some kind of safety that they can take care of themselves as well. >> So talk about the book target. Who is the ideal candidate for the book? Who are you writing the book for? What do you hope to accomplish for the reader and the outcome? >> So I write for Forbes and Harvard Business Review and Hemispheres Magazine, I have a lot of different types of readers because customer experience really affects everybody in business. So it could be the CMO, it could be the Chief Customer Officer, it could be the CEO, in fact the CEO of 1-800-Flowers wrote the foreword for my book, Chris McCann. So this book is really relevant for a wide variety of people who are interested in making their company more competitive. >> That's a great point, so let's trill down on that, customer experience just doesn't end in a department, we've seen this in IT, information technology, it's a department that becomes now pervasive with cloud computing, you see social media out there, so customer experience has multiple touch points, hence the broad appeal, how should someone think about being the customer experience champion? Because you always have the champions that kind of drives the change, so you've got change agents and you have kind of to me, the pre-existing management in place, what's the human role in this? Because remember, you have machines out there, you have bots, and all those machine learning technology out there, it's important that the human piece is integral to this, right? I mean what's your view on the role of the person? >> Yeah I'm not anti-technology, I'm not anti-bot, I am excited about the Amazon Go cashier-less stores, Amazon Go stores, but I do feel that technology can help us without totally replacing us. I think that we need thoughtful people in charge of these technologies to lead us, to make smart decisions, but you can't just let the technology go. I think that can be really scary. We've definitely seen so many TV shows about this, you can't blink without seeing another TV show about robots taking over the world. >> So it's a concern. What's the biggest thing you've learned from the book? What was the key learnings for you, personally, when you wrote this book? >> Well, writing a book, there is a lot of learning. I actually had my daughter, I was pregnant while I wrote this book and so I think for me to be totally candid, it was a lesson in patience and working through that period for me being pregnant. So I was like giving birth to the book and an actual baby. To be totally truthful, that was my learning. >> You got a lot more than the book. >> Blake: Laughing >> Well, congratulations, how old is the baby? >> She's sixteen months. >> Congratulations, awesome. >> Thank you. >> Well thanks for coming in and sharing about More is More, Blake Morgan, futurist author on the customer experience, More is More, it's theCUBE Conversation and really an impactful thought because customer experience transcends not just a department, it really is a mindset, it's about culture, it's about a lot of things, and it's certainly in the digital revolution, it's really going to be fundamental. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. >> Blake: Thanks so much. >> Appreciate it. I am John Furrier here in the Palo Alto studios for CUBE Conversation, thanks for watching. (lively music)

>> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at PagerDuty Summit in Downtown San Francisco. Actually, out on the wharf. It's called Pier 27, never been here before. Pretty cool venue between Pier 39 and the Bay Bridge. We're excited to have a very seasoned Silicon Valley veteran, Nick Mehta. He's the CEO of Gainsight, but look at his LinkedIn profile. He's been on startups, he's been at venture capital companies and now we hear you might may be growing a little unicorn thingy out of your head after that last round. (Nick laughs) >> I don't know about unicorn-- >> Nick, great to see you. >> But a gray hair, for sure. Seasoned, I think just means gray hair, so. >> Absolutely. >> That's growing in my head for sure. >> For people who aren't familiar with Gainsight, give them the basic overview. >> Sure, Jeff. At Gainsight, we really believe that almost every business model is shifting to ones where customers have more power. Therefore, you can't afford to just sell a customer and move on, and for a long time, businesses, the vendors had all the power. You sell a software product or hardware, you sell a device, and once the customer has it, it's up to them whether they get value. Gainsight, we're trying to help enable a shift to this concept we call customer success, where companies have to own whether or not their customers are getting value, whether they're getting the outcomes they want, whether they're using the stuff they buy, and we build a software product, a SAS application, that helps companies make sure everyone in your company is orienting your customers towards getting more value, and in the process, get them to stay with you longer, spend more money with you, and become bigger fans of your company. >> Right, I imagine a lot of people might confuse it with CRN. >> Right. >> Customer relation management and there's a big 60 storey building going up. >> I've seen the building, and we love those guys. Think of us as an adjacent product to what you might do with a Salesforce automation product like salesforce.com. We actually integrate very tightly with Salesforce, as an example, they're an investor in Gainsight. As you're managing sales with your Salesforce, you're managing your support team, you're managing other systems. How do you manage your customers and make sure they're getting value, make sure they're going to stay with you and grow over time? That's what Gainsight does. >> It's really interesting, 'cause people have been talking about the 360 degree view of the customer forever, but that's the challenge you guys went directly after with your application. >> Yeah, it's funny. That's right. I think, for a long time, people were trying to solve 360 view of the customer, but what they were really solving was 360 view of the deal, 'cause it was all about the sale, and the sale is important, it's still very important, right? It was about marketing leads and who I'm selling to and who has power and those are all really important things but now if you think about a world where the customer has power, you've got to look at 360 view of the customer. Are they getting the outcomes they're looking for? Are they adopting and using what they bought? Are they having a good experience? It's a totally different pivot on the world. It's about the customer, not the deal. >> It's interesting too to parallel that with just SAS and Cloud, because when you have a SAS relationship with a client and an ongoing subscription revenue model, you have to keep delivering value, you have to make sure they're going to pay you next month and the month after and the month after. It's not just a sell it and walk away. >> That's exactly right, Jeff. As you know, first of all, it's way cheaper to keep and grow an existing customer than to go get a new one, and because of that, the SAS business model depends on actual high retention rates. People talk about gross retention rate, basically, "Are you keeping the customers you've got?" And then also your net retention rate, are they spending more money with you over time? And the most successful SAS companies, the highest valued ones, are keeping their customers and getting them to spend more money, so that's one of the most important value drivers in SAS. >> I'm curious, when you guys deploy into a new company, a new customer, what are some of the early a-has that you just see over and over and over again that they just miss before they had this view? >> Totally, so number one is almost every company feels today like they're reactive. They find out about things but very late. A customer leaving them, somebody unhappy, a missed sales opportunity, so number one is just getting your organization to be more proactive. Number two, how do you get everyone in the company aligned around the customer? You might have somebody that cares about that one customer, but that customer is talking to support, they're working with your services team, they're going through training. How do you get everyone aligned around the customer and really have a good view across your whole organization so they're all marching for that? Number three, the third a-ha, is how do you scale that? You might have 100 customers, you might have 1,000, you might have a million. How do you scale the right approach with the right customer, whether it's a human outreach or whether it's a fully digital experience, which we can do both, of course. >> What about, there's customers that are in your sales book as a company, but then there's individuals, right, that you're interacting with. >> That's right. >> And in a big company to (mumbling) a relationship, it's not just two companies. It's thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people that are interacting at a bunch of different levels. >> I'm so glad you said that. >> How do you integrate that in? >> Yeah, totally, it's funny, because if you have a big customer and somebody says, "Is your big customer happy or not?" There's no one answer to that question. There might be one part that loves you, another part that doesn't like you, one part that's rolling out, one part that's using some new stuff, one part that's not using anything, and so you have to be able to break up that company in a lot of little pieces, we call those relationships, and then measure each of those differently and be able to drive each of those forward. So, you're totally right. It's not about one company, it's about a lot of little customers within that big customer. >> Right, now you bought into Cloud early in. I think you were actually at a VC firm looking at Cloud and obviously you're at Gainsight and SAS Application. As you look forward, you just got off a panel, what's next? Where do you see the next big evolution or revolution, if you will, in the way IT services and software are delivered? >> Totally, I think the biggest thing that's happening right now is that Cloud is just a delivery vehicle, I think everyone knows that. SAS is kind of table stakes. Mainstream companies are saying, how do I reinvent my core business by shifting to these business models that are digitally enabled? People call that digital transformation. That's what this panel we just did was all about. That's happening not just in Silicon Valley, that's happening in manufacturers and retailers and financial services companies. When they do that, they're rethinking everything about what they do, how they manage product development, how they actually sell, and also the customer experience, which is where we come in. We think the biggest thing is kind of obvious, it's digital transformation. Underneath that, you can leverage all kinds of new technologies whether it's artificial intelligence, machine learning, bots. But the transformation of mainstream businesses is happening at a rapid speed right now. >> I want to get one last point before we let you go, the impact of social, direct social back to these big companies. My favorite one is Comcast Cares. Every time my internet goes down, I jump on and I tweet-- >> Nick: Oh my God. >> Give my internet back! >> I feel for those Comcast Cares social people. They deal with a lot of mean words. >> No, this is not Xfinity Cares, this is Comcast Cares. But it's a really interesting paradox for companies, because people can reach out directly in kind of a semi public forum, which it wasn't, you know, just calling the 1800 number. How are they integrating that into this customer relationship management? >> Oh my God, we talk about the fact that customers have more power and they have bigger voices. One customer has a much bigger voice than they ever did, and so you have this amazing opportunity to either create a great advocate who could bring you new customers and new sales, or create all these detractors. I think that that public voicing of customer experience has made CEOs much more aware of why it matters. Before, a customer has a bad experience, they type up a letter and mail it to some office that nobody ever reads, and now, this CEO is seeing on her or his Facebook or Twitter feed or LinkedIn the customer upset, and I think that's making them much more aware of customer experience being really important. >> Right, right, and are you seeing, it's interesting to me, there's some senior executives, Michael Dell, Beth Comstock, just picked two out of the hat, that are super active on social-- >> Nick: Oh my gosh, yeah. >> Directly engaging with their community. There's other big companies, which I won't name, where people don't even have a LinkedIn account-- >> That's right. >> Much less a Twitter account. Is there a direct correlation that you're seeing between embracing a direct engagement with your community versus, "Eh, I don't want to say anything bad," which I think, it's either or the other. >> Yeah, I empathize with the fear, because I think people worry about saying something bad, so I get it. I think it's definitely misguided and kind of backwards. You can't stick your head in the sand anymore. Take somebody like Marc Benioff, who's so great at this, and he's on Twitter, he's advocating for causes. He's taking, maybe, controversial stands in some cases, but he's putting himself out there and he cares about his customers. Same thing with Michael Dell, same thing with Beth Comstock. There's so many great CEOs out there, so honestly, at this point, if you're not out there, you look like you have something to hide, right? (laughter) Which is not good. >> Which is not good. Alright, Nick, thanks for taking-- >> Thanks so much, Jeff. >> A few minutes, and congratulations. I saw you were a Top 50 SAS CEO of 2017, and continued success at Gainsight. >> I don't know how I made that list, but I felt honored, so thank you so much. >> Absolutely. >> I really appreciate it. >> We'll see you next time. He's Nick Mehta, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from PagerDuty Summit 2017. Thanks for watching.

(electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Austin, Texas, it's The Cube. Covering South By Southwest 2017. Brought to you by Intel. Now, here's John Furrier. >> Hey, welcome back, everyone, we're here live in Austin, Texas, for South By Southwest Cube coverage at the Intel AI Lounge, #IntelAI if you're watching, put it out on Twitter. I'm John Furrier of Silicon Angle for the Cube. Our next guest is Alison Yu who's with Cloudera. And in the news today, although they won't comment on it. It's great to see you, social media manager at Cloudera. >> Yes, it's nice to see you as well. >> Great to see you. So, Cloudera has a strategic relationship with Intel. You guys have a strategic investment, Intel, and you guys partner up, so it's well-known in the industry. But what's going on here is interesting, AI for social good is our theme. >> Alison: Yes. >> Cloudera has always been a pay-it-forward company. And I've known the founders, Mike Olson and Amr Awadallah. >> Really all about the community and paying it forward. So Alison, talk about what you guys are working on. Because you're involved in a panel, but also Cloudera Cares. And you guys have teamed up with Thorn, doing some interesting things. >> Alison: Yeah (laughing). >> Take it away! >> Sure, thanks. Thanks for the great intro. So I'll give you a little bit of a brief introduction to Cloudera Cares. Cloudera Cares was founded roughly about three years ago. It was really an employee-driven and -led effort. I kind of stepped into the role and ended up being a little bit more of the leader just by the way it worked out. So we've really gone from, going from, you know, we're just doing soup kitchens and everything else, to strategic partnerships, donating software, professional service hours, things along those lines. >> Which has been very exciting to see our nonprofit partnerships grow in that way. So it really went from almost grass-root efforts to an organized organization now. And we start stepping up our strategic partnerships about a year and a half ago. We started with DataKind, is our initial one. About two years ago, we initiated that. Then we a year ago, about in September, we finalized our donation of an enterprise data hub to Thorn, which if you're not aware of they're all about using technology and innovation to stop child-trafficking. So last year, around September or so, we announced the partnership and we donated professional service hours. And then in October, we went with them to Grace Hopper, which is obviously the largest Women in Tech Conference in North America. And we hosted a hackathon and we helped mentor women entering into the tech workforce, and trying to come up with some really cool innovative solutions for them to track and see what's going on with the dark web, so we had quite a few interesting ideas coming out of that. >> Okay, awesome. We had Frederico Gomez Suarez on, who was the technical advisor. >> Alison: Yeah. >> A Microsoft employee, but he's volunteering at Thorn, and this is interesting because this is not just donating to the soup kitchens and what not. >> Alison: Yeah. >> You're starting to see a community approach to philanthropy that's coding RENN. >> Yeah. >> Hackathons turning into community galvanizing communities, and actually taking it to the next level. >> Yeah. So, I think one of the things we realize is tech, while it's so great, we have actually introduced a lot of new problems. So, I don't know if everyone's aware, but in the '80s and '90s, child exploitation had almost completely died. They had almost resolved the issue. With the introduction of technology and the Internet, it opened up a lot more ways for people to go ahead and exploit children, arrange things, in the dark web. So we're trying to figure out a way to use technology to combat a problem that technology kind of created as well, but not only solving it, but rescuing people. >> It's a classic security problem, the surface area has increased for this kind of thing. But big data, which is where you guys were founded on in the cloud era that we live in. >> Alison: Yeah. >> Pun intended. (laughing) Using the machine learning now you start with some scale now involved. >> Yes, exactly, and that's what we're really hoping, so we're partnering with Intel in the National Center of Missing Exploited Children. We're actually kicking off a virtual hackathon tomorrow, and our hope is we can figure out some different innovative ways that AI can be applied to scraping data and finding children. A lot of times we'll see there's not a lot of clues, but for example, if we can upload, if there can be a tool that can upload three or four different angles of a child's face when they go missing, maybe what happens is someone posts a picture on Instagram or Twitter that has a geo tag and this kid is in the background. That would be an amazing way of using AI and machine learning-- >> Yeah. >> Alison: To find a child, right. >> Well, I'll give you guy a plug for Cloudera. And I'll reference Dr. Naveen Rao, who's the GM of Intel's AI group, was on earlier. And he was talking about how there's a lot of storage available, not a lot of compute. Now, Cloudera, you guys have really pioneered the data lake, data hub concept where storage is critical. >> Yeah. >> Now, you got this compute power and machine learning, that's kind of where it comes together. Did I get that right? >> Yeah, and I think it's great that with the partnership with Intel we're able to integrate our technology directly into the hardware, which makes it so much more efficient. You're able to compute massive amounts of data in a very short amount of time, and really come up with real results. And with this partnership, specifically with Thorn and NCMEC, we're seeing that it's real impact for thousands of people last year, I think. In the 2016 impact report, Thorn said they identified over 6,000 trafficking victims, of which over 2,000 were children. Right, so that tool that they use is actually built on Cloudera. So, it's great seeing our technology put into place. >> Yeah, that's awesome. I was talking to an Intel person the other day, they have 72 cores now on a processor, on the high-end Xeons. Let's get down to some other things that you're working on. What are you doing here at the show? Do you have things that you're doing? You have a panel? >> Yeah, so at the show, at South by Southwest, we're kicking off a virtual hackathon tomorrow at our Austin offices for South by Southwest. Everyone's welcome to come. I just did the liquor order, so yes, everyone please come. (laughing) >> You just came from Austin's office, you're just coming there. >> Yeah, exactly. So we've-- >> Unlimited Red Bull, pizza, food. (laughing) >> Well, we'll be doing lots and lots tomorrow, but we're kicking that off, we have representatives from Thorn, NCMEC, Google, Intel, all on site to answer questions. That's kind of our kickoff of this month-long virtual hackathon. You don't need to be in Austin to participate, but that is one of the things that we are kicking off. >> And then on Sunday, actually here at the Intel AI Lounge we're doing a panel on AI for Good, and using artificial intelligence to solve problems. >> And we'll be broadcasting that live here on The Cube. So, folks, SiliconAngle.tv will carry that. Alison, talk about the trend that, you weren't here when we were talking about how there's now a new counterculture developing in a good way around community and social change. How real is the trend that you're starting to see these hackathons evolve from what used to be recruiting sessions to people just jamming together to meet each other. Now, you're starting to see the next level of formation where people are organizing collectively-- >> Yeah. >> To impact real issues. >> Yeah. >> Is this a real trend or where is that trend, can you speak to that? >> Sure, so from what I've seen from the hackathons what we've been seeing before was it's very company-specific. Only one company wanted to do it, and they would kind of silo themselves, right? Now, we're kind of seeing this coming together of companies that are generally competitors, but they see a great social cause and they decide that they want to band together, regardless of their differences in technology, product, et cetera, for a common good. And, so. >> Like a Thorn. >> For Thorn, you'll see a lot of competitors, so you'll see Facebook and Twitter or Google and Amazon, right? >> John: Yeah. >> And we'll see all these different competitors come together, lend their workforce to us, and have them code for one great project. >> So, you see it as a real trend. >> I do see it as a trend. I saw Thorn last year did a great one with Facebook and on-site with Facebook. This year as we started to introduce this hackathon, we decided that we wanted to do a hackathon series versus just a one-off hackathon. So we're seeing people being able to share code, contribute, work on top of other code, right, and it's very much a sharing community, so we're very excited for that. >> All right, so I got to ask you what's they culture like at Cloudera these days, as you guys prepare to go public? What's the vibe internally of the company, obviously Mike Olson, the founder, is still around, Amr's around. You guys have been growing really fast. Got your new space. What's the vibe like in Cloudera now? >> Honestly, the culture at Cloudera hasn't really changed. So, when I joined three years ago we were much smaller than we are now. But I think one thing that we're really excited about is everyone's still so collaborative, and everyone makes sure to help one another out. So, I think our common goal is really more along the lines of we're one team, and let's put out the best product we can. >> Awesome. So, what's South by Southwest mean to you this year? If you had to kind of zoom out and say, okay. What's the theme? We heard Robert Scoble earlier say it's a VR theme. We hear at Intel it's AI. So, there's a plethora of different touchpoints here. What do you see? >> Yeah, so I actually went to the opening keynote this morning, which was great. There was an introduction, and then I don't know if you realized, but Cory Booker was on as well, which is great. >> John: Yep. >> But I think a lot of what we had seen was they called out on stage that artificial intelligence is something that will be a trend for the next year. And I think that's very exciting that Intel really hit the nail on the head with the AI Lounge, right? >> Cory Booker, I'm a big fan. He's from my neighborhood, went to the same school I went to, that my family. So in Northern Valley, Old Tappan. Cory, if you're watching, retweet us, hashtag #IntelAI. So AI's there. >> AI is definitely there. >> No doubt, it's on stage. >> Yes, but I think we're also seeing a very large, just community around how can we make our community better versus let's try to go in these different silos, and just be hyper-aware of what's only in front of us, right? So, we're seeing a lot more from the community as well, just being interested in things that are not immediately in front of us, the wider, either nation, global, et cetera. So, I think that's very exciting people are stepping out of just their own little bubbles, right? And looking and having more compassion for other people, and figuring out how they can give back. >> And, of course, open source at the center of all the innovation as always. (laughing) >> I would like to think so, right? >> It is! I would testify. Machine learning is just a great example, how that's now going up into the cloud. We started to see that really being part of all the apps coming out, which is great because you guys are in the big data business. >> Alison: Yeah. >> Okay, Alison, thanks so much for taking the time. Real quick plug for your panel on Sunday here. >> Yeah. >> What are you going to talk about? >> So we're going to be talking a lot about AI for good. We're really going to be talking about the NCMEC, Thorn, Google, Intel, Cloudera partnership. How we've been able to do that, and a lot of what we're going to also concentrate on is how the everyday tech worker can really get involved and give back and contribute. I think there is generally a misconception of if there's not a program at my company, how do I give back? >> John: Yeah. >> And I think Cloudera's a shining example of how a few employees can really enact a lot of change. We went from grassroots, just a few employees, to a global program pretty quickly, so. >> And it's organically grown, which is the formula for success versus some sort of structured company program (laughing). >> Exactly, so we definitely gone from soup kitchen to strategic partnerships, and being able to donate our own time, our engineers' times, and obviously our software, so. >> Thanks for taking the time to come on our Cube. It's getting crowded in here. It's rocking the house, the house is rocking here at the Intel AI Lounge. If you're watching, check out the hashtag #IntelAI or South by Southwest. I'm John Furrie. I'll be back with more after this short break. (electronic music)