>>Hello, brilliant cloud community and welcome back to AWS Reinvent, where we are live all day every day. From the show floor here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm Savannah Peterson, joined by my beautiful cohost Lisa Martin here on the cube. Lisa, you're smiling. You're radiating Day three. You would think it was day one. How you doing? >>Amazing. I can't believe the energy that has been maintained omni show floor since Monday night at 4:00 PM >>I know. And I, I kind of thought today we might see some folks trickling out. It is packed as our, as our guests and I were, we were all just talking about right before the segment, almost two packed, which is a really great sign for aws. It is. We're >>Hearing worth of 55,000 people here. And of course we only get a, a little snapshot of which literally >>This corner, >>We don't get to see anything else around the strip that's going on. So it's massive. Yeah, >>It is a very massive, I'm super excited. We've got two guests from Infosys with us on this last segment from this stage today. David and Anant, welcome to the show. How you doing? >>Awesome. >>You're both smiling and I am really excited. We have our first prop of the show and it's a pretty flashy, sexy prop. Anant, what's going on here? >>Oh, so this is something that we are very proud of. Last year we won one award, which was very special for us because it was our first award with aws and that was the industry partner of the year award. And on the back of that, this year we won three awards. And this is super awesome for us because all of them are very special. One was in collaboration, second was in design, and third was in sustainability. So we are very proud and we thank AWS and it's a fantastic partnership. Yeah. And >>Congratulations. Yes. I mean that's >>Huge. Yes, it's absolutely huge. And the second one is we are the launch partner for msk, which again is a very proud thing for us. So I think those are the two things that we wanted to talk about. >>How many awards are you gonna win next year then? >>Do you want to target more than three? >>So we keep going up probably fine, >>Right? I >>Love, >>That's the odd numbers. 1, 3, 5, 7, 10. There you go. >>Yeah, >>I think you, we got that question last year and we said we get two and we ended up overdelivering with three. So who >>Knows? Hey, nothing. Nothing wrong with the setting the bar low and clearing it and I mean, not setting it low, setting it with one and clearing it with three is pretty fantastic. Yes, yes. We talk about it as an ego thing sometimes with awards and it feels great for internal culture. But David, what does it mean on the partnership side to win awards like that? So >>What's really important for us with our partners is to make sure that we're achieving their goals and when, when their goals are achieved in our partnership, it's just the byproduct that we're achieving our own with our clients. The awards are a great representation of that to see, you know, again, being recognized three in three different categories really shows that we've had success with AWS and in turn, you know, know and not, I can attest to it, we've been very successful with the partnership on our side. >>Yeah. And I bet it's really exciting for the team. Just speaking for energy, are your >>Team sponsor? Absolutely. There's celebration, you know, there's been a few cocktails being raised >>In Las Vegas >>Cocktail. Oh, >>I wouldn't mind one right now to be really be really honest. Let's dig into the, into the product a little bit. Infosys Cobalt, what's the scooping on? >>Yeah, so first of all, we were the first ones to actually launch a cloud brand called Cobalt. Right? We are the first ones in the world. In fact, one of our competitor followed us soon after. So essentially what we did was we brought all our cloud offerings into one brand called Cobalt. It becomes very clear to our customers on what our proposition is. It is very consistent to the market in terms of what our narrative is. And it's little easy for our customers to understand what we bring to the table. So is not one product or one platform. It's a set of services, solutions and platforms that we bring to accelerate customers journey where they're leveraging cloud. So that's what Cobalt is. >>Awesome. Everyone wants to do everything faster. Yes. And Booth was packed. I walked by earlier, it was absolutely buzzing. Yes. >>Yeah. Nobody wants to do it, you know, wants less data slower. Yes. Always more faster. More faster. And we're living in this explosion unlike anything, this swarm of data, unlike anything that we've ever seen before. Yes. Every company, regardless of industry, has to be a data company. Yes. But they have to be able to work with the right partners. Absolutely. To extract, to first of all, harness all that data. Yes. Extract insights in real time. Yes. Because of course, on the consumer side, we're not patient anymore. Yes. We expect a personalized, real time custom experience. Absolutely. How do you work with AWS to help deliver that and how do the partners help deliver that as well? >>Well, I'll start with on the partner side of it. You walk through the hallways here or down the aisles, you see partners like MongoDB, snowflake, data Bricks and and such. They're all attest their commitment and their strong partnership with aws. And coincidentally, they're also very good partners of our own. And as a result, what >>Big happy family here at AWS when you >>Met? Yes, and this, this is something that I'm, I'm calling coining the phrase sub ecosystems. These are partnerships where one is successful with each other and then the three come together and we go together with an integrated solution. And it's really taking off. It's something that's really powerful. The, the fun thing about, you know, reinvent here is it's just that we're having amazing discussions with our clients and aws, but we're also having it with the other partners here about how we can all work together. So, and data analytics is a big one. Security is another hot one. This is huge. >>Yeah. Optimization. >>The absolutely. And I, and Ruba was saying this, right? Ruba said like she was giving example of a marathon or Marathon is not a single man or a single woman sport. Right? So similarly cloud journey is a team's sort of, you know, team journey. Yeah. So that's why partners play a big role in that and that's exactly what we are trying to do. >>So you guys get to see a lot of different companies across a lot of different industries. We've, we're living in very interesting times. How do you see the cloud evolving? >>Oh yeah. So, so what we did when we launched Cobalt in 2020, we have now evolved our story, we call it Cobalt 2.0. And essentially what we want to do was to focus on industry clouds. So it's not just about taking a workload and doing it from point A to point B or moving data to cloud or getting out of data centers, but also being very specific to the industry that this specific customer belongs to. Right? So for example, if you go to banking, they would say, we want to better our security posture. If you go to a retailer, they want to basically have smart stores. If we go to a manufacturing customer, they want to have a smart factory. So we want to make sure that there are specific industry blueprints and specific reference architectures that we bring and start delivering outcomes. So we have, we call it something called, >>I know you're hot on business outcomes. Yes, yes. >>So we call it something called the link of life forces. So there are six technologies, cloud, data Edge, iot, 5g, and ai. They will come together to deliver business outcomes. So that's where we are heading with Cobalt 2.0. And that's essentially what we want to do with our customers. >>That's a lot to think about. Yes. And yeah, go for it. >>David. I just say from a partnering perspective, you know, prior to cloud we were talking about transactional type businesses where if you ask a technology company who their partner is, is generally a reseller where they're just basically taking one product and selling it to their, their client. What's happened with cloud now, it's not about the transaction up front, it's about the, the actual, you know, the consumption of the technology and the bringing together all of these to form an outcome. It changes the model dramatically. And, and quite honestly, you know, the global system integrators like emphasis are in a great position cuz we can pull that together to the benefit our of our partners put our own secret sauce around it and take these solutions to market and drive consumption. Cuz that's what the cloud's all about. >>Absolutely. Right. How are you helping customers really treat cloud as a strategic focus? You know, we, we often hear companies talk about we're we're cloud first. Well, not everything belongs in the cloud. So then we hear companies start talking about being cloud smart. Yes. How are you helping? And so we'll go with that. How are you helping enterprises really become cloud smart and where is the partner angle? So we'll start with you and then we'll bring the partner angle in. >>Sure. Oh yeah, big time. I think one of the things that we have been educating our customers is cloud is not about cost takeout. So cloud is about innovation, cloud is about growth. And I'll give two examples. One of one of the beauty products companies, they wanted to set up their shop in us and they said that, you know, we don't have time to basically buy the infrastructure, implement an er p platform and you know, or roll it out, test it, and go into production. We don't have so much time, time to market is very important for us. And they embarked on the cloud journey. So expanding into new market cloud can play a big role. That is one of the ways to expand and, you know, grow your business. Similarly, there is another company that they, they wanted to get into retail banking, right? And they didn't have years to launch a product. So they actually use AWS and it's a joint infos and AWS customer, a pretty big bank. They launched into, they launched retail banking and they did it in less than six months. So I think these are some of the examples of, wow, it's Snap Cloud not being cost takeout, but it's about innovation and growth. So that's what we are trying to tell >>Customers. Big impacts, big impact. >>Absolutely. And that's where the, the Cobalt assets come into play as well. We, you know, as as not mentioned, we have literally thousand of these industries specific, and they're derived in, in a lot of cases in, in, in partnership with the, the companies you see down the, the aisles here and, and aws. And it accelerates the, the, the deployments and ensures a accessible adoption more so than before. You know, we, we have clients that are coming to us now that used to buy, run their own procurement. You know, they, they would have literally, there was one bank that came to us with a over a hundred, >>The amount of work. Yeah. >>A list of a hundred products. Some they bought directly from a, a vendor, some they went through a distributor, something went through a, a seller and such. And they're, they're, now they're looking at this in a completely different way. And they're looking to rationalize those, those technologies, again, look for companies that will contract for a business outcome and leverage the cloud and get to that next era. And it's, it's a, it's a fun time. We're really excited. >>I can imagine you, you're really a part of the transformation process for a lot of these companies. Absolutely. And when we were chatting before we went live, you talked about your passion for business outcomes. Can you give us a couple examples of customers or business outcomes that really get you and the team excited? Same thing to you, David, after. Yeah, >>Well, absolutely. Even our contractual structures are now moving into business outcomes. So we are getting paid by the outcomes that we are delivering, right? So one of the insurance customers that we have, we actually get paid by the number of claims that we process, right? Similarly, there is a healthcare customer where we actually get paid by the number of customers that we cater to from a Medicare and Medicaid standpoint, right? >>Tangible results versus >>Projected forecast. Successful process of >>Claims. That's interesting. Exactly. Yeah. I love reality. Yeah, reality. What a novel idea. Yeah. >>One of the great examples you hear about airplane engines now that the model is you don't buy the engine. You basically pay for the hours that it's used and the maintenance and the downtime so that they, you take the risk away. You know, you put that in the context of a traditional business, you're taking away the risk of owning the individual asset, the maintenance, any, any of the issues, the bug fixes. And again, you're, you're partnering with a company like Emphasis will take on that based upon our knowledge and based upon our vast experience, we can confidently contract in that way that, you know, years ago that wasn't possible. >>It's kind of a sharing economy at scale style. >>Exactly. Absolutely. >>Yeah. Which is really exciting. So we have a new challenge here on the cube this year at ve We are looking for your 32nd Instagram real sizzle sound bite, your hot take your thought leadership on the, the biggest theme or most important thing coming out of this year's show. David, we'll start with you. We've been starting with it on, I'm to go to you. We're making eye contact right now, so you're in the hot seat. >>Well, let's, I I think there's a lot of time given to sustainability on the stage this week, and I think that, you know, every, every CEO that we talk to is bringing that up as a major priority and that's a very important element for us as a company and as a service >>Provider. I mean, you're obviously award-winning and the sustainability department. Exactly. >>Yes. Nice little plug there. You know, and I, I think the other things that have come up, we saw a lot about data analytics this week. You know, I think new offerings from aws, but also new partnerships that we're gonna take advantage of. And, and again, security has been a hot topic. >>Absolutely. And not, what's your hot take? >>Yeah. I think one, one very exciting thing for partners like us is the, the reimagining that is being done by rhu for the partners, right? The AWS marketplace. I think that is a big, big thing that I took out. Of course, sustainability is huge. Like Adam said, the fastest way to become sustainable is to move to cloud, right? So rather than overthinking and over-engineering this whole topic, just take your workloads and move it to cloud and you'll be sustainable. Right. So I think that's the second one. And third is of course cyber security. Zscaler, Palo Alto, CrowdStrike. These are some of the big companies that are at the event here. And we have been partnering with them many more. I'm just calling out three names, but many more. I think cyber security is the next one. So I think these are three on top of my mind. >>Just, just a few things you casually think about. That was great, great responses from both of you and David, such a pleasure to have you both with us. We hope to have you back again. You're doing such exciting things. I'm sure that everything we talked about is gonna be a hot topic for many years to come as, as people navigate the future, as well as continue their business transformations. It is always a joy to sit next to you on stage. Likewise. Thank you. And thank all of you wherever you're tuning in from. For joining us here at AWS Reinvent Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, with Lisa Martin. I'm Savannah Peterson. And for the last time today, this is the cube, the leader in high tech coverage.

>>Hello, and welcome to the cubes. Continuous coverage of AWS reinvent 2021. I'm Dave Nicholson, and we're running an incredible event this year. One of the most important technology events. It's a hybrid event with two live stages. Two sets here in Las Vegas. Two studios we've interviewed more than a hundred guests and two distinguished guests that I have here from emphasis today have joined us. Thank you very much. Uh, Mr., who's the executive vice president of Infosys cobalt. And we'll talk about what that is exactly in a moment along with David Wilson, Wilson, I'm sorry, senior vice president and head of global alliances in the partner ecosystem for Infosys gentlemen. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you very much. So let's cut right to the chase cobalt. And when you tell your family that you're executive vice-president of cobalt, do they just smile and immediately nod? Like they know what it is? Absolutely. >>In fact, uh, in fact it is so exciting for us, uh, what we did at Infosys, just to define cobalt in one sentence, it is a set of services, solutions, and products that we are bringing together to solve, you know, accelerate our customer's journey or what we call as the customer's digital journey. So in slough, everybody talking about Kala cloud in a different way, with different narratives, different value proposition we had in forces. And by the way, we were the first ones in the world to combine all of this and the one brand called cobalt. So that's essentially what cobalt is. So anything and everything that we do in cloud, it's all under this brand called cobalt and that's Infosys cobalt. >>So does, does Infosys cobalt include a combination of bespoke solutions, cheering for people as well as packaged standardized things? How do you, how do you strike a balance because you can't have a one size fits all? Uh, what does that look like? How do you segregate those? >>Yes. Great question. So, so essentially what you are done with a cobalt is a delicate cobalt. In two ways. One is there are customers who want a solutions to solve technology problems. It could be getting out of data centers, it could be migrating workloads to cloud. It could be analytics on cloud ERP on cloud daddy's mainframe modernization, and, you know, getting off mainframes. And at the same time, there are industry verticals like financial services, retail manufacturing, and of course, life sciences, and many more who want to understand what are the business solutions and what are the solutions that we have for solving their business problems. So essentially cobalt is a bespoke solutions. It has products, it has platforms, and we have brought all of this together and we take it to our customers. So essentially these are industry blueprints. These are reference architectures. So we have 250 industry blueprints and around 25,000, that's it that we can actually take to our customers to help their digital journey. >>So, David, I imagine that key to the success of cobalt is, uh, uh, the idea of partnerships, talk about the alliances, uh, uh, that, uh, that you're involved with specifically the way that cobalt interacts with the AWS yes. >>Universe. Absolutely. So the, you know, as we designed our cobalt strategy, the partners are a major component of this. They contribute to it. They're part of the design. And ultimately when we go to the clients with these solutions, these assets, uh, our partners, components are baked right into the solution. In the case of AWS, we've been so successful with it that we recognize this week, uh, as their industry solutions partner of the year. Congratulations. Yeah. So I was joking. We should bring our trophy and put it in between, but we emphasis is invested heavily in developing the, the partner ecosystem, you know, gone are the days where our clients are, uh, putting out an RFP and purchasing individual piece parts, and then, you know, searching at NSI. They're looking for a business outcomes and, uh, uh, emphasis along with our cobalt strategy is able to work with partners like AWS and go there and sell an outcome and accelerate the whole. >>Well, you mentioned RFPs. Uh, what is your, uh, what is your go-to market strategy look like in terms of engaging with those end user clients? Um, is it in partnership with AWS? Is it led by Infosys bringing in AWS where appropriate some mix of the two? What does that look like in this world of cooperation and petition that we're in, >>It's actually a mix of two. So essentially the way we go to market is that there are solutions that Infosys has built on AWS that we will take to our customers. There are solutions that you have built, which are cloud neutral, and those are some things that we take to the customers. And the third one, which is very important is co-creating solutions for our customers along with AWS. So our go to market is a combination of all of them, and that's what makes it exciting. >>So a non-test running cobalt, you're, you're responsible for alliances. You guys are probably in contact a lot with one another. All of these crazy new things are announced at AWS. I'm sure you get a little bit of a preview of it. It's not a complete, it's not a complete surprise when you arrive, but you've gotta be screaming for teams and solutions to leverage some of the coolest stuff within cobalt. How does that, how does that conversation go? >>Yeah, so David David and I work very closely, right? In fact, uh, uh, the way, the way we do things is our go to market cannot be complete without partners. So similarly my strategy and our strategy and global cannot be complete without David. So we actually worked together to identify, in fact, we have been visiting a lot of boots. We got to create, we've gone to a lot of great ideas. We want to see how we can bring them into the cobalt framework and bundle some of that as part of our solutions. So we keep looking at those, we'll look at the announcements that were made and we'll solve, you know, identify many more sales motions that we can take to the, >>So David talk about some of the things you've seen here at re-invent this week that are specifically relevant for cobalt and emphasis customer. >>Well, what's some of the most exciting discussions we've been having is with, uh, not only, uh, AWS themselves about the, the announcements and the way in which we can leverage them, leverage them and go to market. But, uh, AWS has built out their own partner ecosystem, uh, that we then interact with. So we've had some exciting conversations with AWS's ISV partners, their, uh, their other solution providers about how we can bring this together and go to market together. You know, when, when an example, we had a lot of discussions this week was about, uh, how we're doing it, right? The mainframe services, uh, that were announced and how we can support them in building out our industry specific assets. So, you know, taking a kernel of what AWS provides and then wrapping our secret sauce around it, in partnership with other companies and then take into our clients, you know, that's what we're, I, it, the good part is we can quickly go from a discussion to a, go to market, a dialogue with our direct clients who are also here, which have been in real-time having those discussions. >>So emphasis a non has been a trusted advisor for clients predating the Dawn of cloud, if you will. Uh, and I'm sure that certain slices of your revenue don't wanna make this too uncomfortable. A question certain slices of your revenue are still dependent upon all of that. 80% of it. That's still on prem. How do you manage that? You're, you're laser focused on cobalt and you've got alliances. Um, everybody's looking towards the cloud. How do you balance that with the very real needs of Infosys as a business? Aren't you in the same boat as your customers, in terms of transformation? >>Well, you know, I, I would, I'm sorry, >>My eyes go back and forth. See, I told you it was gonna be easy for us to have a conversation. Yeah. Jump into >>W when you, when you look at the different partners out there, we have a discussion about being asset heavy asset light emphasis. Um, we, we grew up through application management, uh, and now as we're seeing these transformations go forward, the last thing we wanted to be is a server huggers. Uh, we're ready to accelerate these transformations as fast as possible. And, uh, you know, partners like AWS are recognizing that, uh, a non steam can go in there and be the disruptor to actually accelerate those transformation. >>Absolutely. In fact, involved when we spoke to some of the AWS executives, uh, we want to be the challenger, right? Because we don't carry any baggage. Uh, we clearly believe, as Gartner says that a cloud is going to be the, for business innovation, and we want to drive innovation and transformation for our customers. So essentially we want to make this relationship with AWS much bigger and better. We want to be the partners with our clients to drive business innovation with industry segments, industry clouds, solutions that drive opening, new markets, building better products and solutions, helping get better customer intimacy and those kinds of things. And so that's essentially what our thought processes with, uh, what we want to do. >>It's been mentioned a few times here that, uh, somewhere around 80 to 85% of it spend is still on premises. It's not in the cloud yet. So despite how large, we all think the AWS AWS universe has become so far, we're really just at the beginning stages. But what are you seeing in terms of clients hesitancy towards cloud at this point, has that changed over the last couple of years? Uh, what are the inhibiting factors that you see? What are the accelerants that you see at this stage of the game? >>Well, in fact, in fact, COVID unfortunately Colbert, uh, while it was all a very bad thing, but it actually helped accelerate customer's journey to cloud. Uh, in fact, uh, the, we have several customers who used to say that, you know, everybody has to come to office to work. Nobody can work remotely because there are security constraints that is, there will be impacted the security posture, but to when we hit March, 2020, and everybody had to work remote, it's the same set of customers who decided to go to cloud and started limited him to part of cloud. So I would say COVID in short has accelerated customers knowledge about cloud. They are no longer worried about security. They're no longer worried about, uh, latency and bandwidth. I think I don't see any major hesitancy at this point of time. Uh, but the trend that we're seeing towards cloud is cloud is going to be used more for innovation. And it's not just going to be about, take my data center and moving to cloud, right? So it's not going to be just those tactical reasons. Uh, and that's exactly what we did. We actually came out with a report, which says, moving from cloud chaos to cloud clarity, and it talks about all these facets of what are those strengths that customer should look for. So that's essentially what we use. >>So I imagine cobalt one of the kind of main ideas behind it is to remove friction associated with that move to cloud, to the extent that you can not be reinventing the wheel every single time you're engaging a customer. Is that, is that a fair statement? >>In fact, you know, many customers of ours, in fact, almost all of them are saying, we do not want to reinvent the wheel. So how can you help us? So what we have done as part of cobalt is to bring these reference architectures, right? So for example, if a financial services customer wants to fight fraud, fraud analytics is a reference architecture that we have. Uh, if the telco customer wants to implement 5g, we have a framework and a reference architecture for OSS BSS on cloud. Uh, if there is licenses customer who wants to basically look at drug discovery, we have an architecture for that. So we want to make it more and more in a inference architecture based without reinventing the wheel and bring the best practices from other customers to drive those scenarios. So that's essentially what we do. >>So cobalt underway, you've been recognized for a performance to this point. It's a lot of pressure for 2022. So what are you going to, what do you, what, what, what are you going to slap on the desk in 2022? When we get back together, >>We do plan to up bookends by this time next year, to, to able to pre >>It is perfectly acceptable by the way, to share both the 20, 21 and 2022 award on stage, because we have to make up for 2019 when we weren't here physically. >>But to build off of, with a, knotless saying about the, uh, you know, what's going on in the last 18 to 24 months, you know, we're seeing clients now that we have one that, uh, came to us with a 114 list of products that they bought from various partners, either directly through distributors and such and saying, listen, we no longer want to be in the procurement function. You know, we want to take these hundred and 14 products. We recognize we're going to get it down to 30 or 40 of the key ones, obviously a shifting a lot of that to cloud. And we were able to leverage emphasis cobalt to actually accelerate that and incorporate our partner components to help that shift. So I think next year, I think that will be a major theme that you're seeing clients recognize that the, the way in which they procure and they develop their it platform will be much different. And emphasis with the design we put in place will be in a key position to, to support them at that. Well, >>We recorded this. I'm not sure if you realized we were actually recording this, so we're going to go, we can go back and review this tape next year and we'll see. And I hope to see you then, David, thank you so much for joining us here at the cube and for the cube here in our continuous coverage at AWS reinvent 2021 live in Las Vegas. I'm Dave Nicholson saying stay tuned because there's always more on the cube. And I'd like to remind you that we are your leader in hybrid tech event coverage.

>> Hi, I'm Lisa Martin with theCUBE, on the ground at Google for the sixth annual CloudNOW Top Women in Cloud Awards. And we're very excited to be joined by one of the winners this year, Caroline Wong, the Vice President of Security Strategy at Cobalt.io. Welcome to theCUBE, Caroline. >> Thank you for having me. >> It's great to have you here for many reasons, and we know that we're both dog lovers and they're not going to let us talk about dogs for the whole time, but I love that. So, you have previously been at eBay, Zinga, Symantec. Were you a STEM kid from grade school, and always interested in IT? Or is this something that you sort of zig-zagged career-wise, and made this career that you have now? >> So when I was 16 years old, my dad asked me what I wanted to study in college. And I told him Dance or Psychology. >> Wow, that's a different from >> It's different because I was like well, "What do I like? What do I enjoy doing?" And he said you're going to study Engineering, and you're going to do it at the best school that you could get into. And I studied Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley. I really struggled with the curriculum, but I'm so glad that I do have a formal background in technology. I ended up in Cyber Security pretty randomly, to be honest. I did an IT project management internship at eBay, and when I graduated, I asked my manager if I could work for them full time. And they said there was a hiring freeze in IT, but they had an open position in Information Security. Which at the time, I didn't know what that even meant. The night before my interview, I looked up Information Security on Wikipedia and I memorized the definition. >> (laughter) You know, that just speaks to, and look what you're doing now. You didn't know, and there's probably many other people who are in the same situation, whether they're 16 and wanting to major in Dance or whatnot. I love that, that you were confident enough in yourself, probably in your education to, "let me try that out". When you were studying though, at UC Berkeley, you said there were some challenges there. This brings me back to my own days of studying Physics, which I wasn't good at. What were some of the things that surprised you? For the good? >> Sure, so I'll tell you a story about one of my Electrical Engineering lab courses. Of course, I make friends with the one other student in the class who's like, not quite sure what's going on. And we have teams of three, and so we have to find someone who really knows how to do it. So, what happens is, one of my colleagues fetches the materials for our lab assignment. My other colleague does the lab, and I write the report. And at the time, I'm a little bit embarrassed that I can't do all three. But after all, it is about team work and it turns out, what has helped me tremendously in my career has been my ability to write and to work well with others, and to communicate both verbally and in written form what's going on technically. >> That's outstanding. Just great advice again for others that it's not just about understanding engineering. There's other components that are really critical and will help you be successful. So in addition to the award that you're getting today from CloudNOW, you've been recognized as an Influencer by Women in IT Security, and as a One to Watch Women of Influence. You've also had a lot of publications. So I'm curious, what inspires you to be involved in the community and share your expertise? Not just your education in Engineering and what you're doing with cyber security, but also your path to success? >> Yeah, so for me, I'll contrast it with my sister. She's a Kaiser Pediatrician. And she's known for her whole life that she wanted to be a doctor, and she just went for it. And she was like, here's my target, and I'm just going to make it. I have always been very, sort of go with the flow, like what's right in front of me and what's an interesting problem to solve and how can I just put my whole self into it and apply what I know and try and learn something new. And I've approached my entire career that way. Not really knowing what was going to happen next, but sort of, looking around, trying to see, "Okay, "what does the industry need right now "and how can I apply my skills to try and add value?" >> I love that, that's great. My brother was the same way. Wanted to be a pilot from the time he was probably eight. And there's me, zig-zagging along. But I think that's also, it speaks to, if you have enough confidence in yourself and try things, you can be successful. So I love that. So tell us about your role at Cobalt.io and app security and what you're doing there. >> Yeah so, Cobalt, we provide application security services for cloud companies. Specifically, we provide on-demand manual penetration testing for web apps, mobile apps, and APIs. So we're really trying to help organizations to secure their applications. As a consumer of cloud applications, as a person who works for a company that works with so many different cloud companies, it's critical that security be in place. Because right now, it's not like, any organization, certainly no technology organization, works in a vacuum. Just like a car sources parts from many different organizations, every software, every cloud company sources from many different places. And at each step along that supply chain, you want to make sure that security has been built in. >> Outstanding. Tell me a little bit about your team there, and some of the key elements, to you, for managing a diverse team of folks at Cobalt. >> So we started four years ago. We actually have four Danish founders and so it's really interesting to be in Silicon Valley but have a little bit of a different culture. As a mom of a toddler and expecting in May, it was really important to me to find a job where I really liked the people, and I really respected them, where they liked and respected me, and where I felt I could make a big impact. And what's great about working with this team is, I feel like all of the people I work with actually have a life outside of work. I feel like, in Silicon Valley, so many people work for companies and it's like, that's all they do. And I respect that. If you're super passionate about something and you want to make your whole life about it, fantastic. But my colleagues are extremely brilliant and great at what they do, and then they do other stuff as well. >> It's refreshing to hear that because being in Silicon Valley can take so much time and effort but to be able to have a little bit of balance there, I think, you probably see an impact in productivity? >> Oh, definitely. I mean, people come into our office and they're like, wow people are happy, people seem well rested, people seem really focused and like they're hardworking, and they're excited about what they do, but they're not so stressed out. They're not burning out. People aren't needing to take emergency medical leave because of severe anxiety. So these are just things that I think really benefits the company and also our customers. >> Oh, definitely from a customer perspective. So, tell us a little bit about what winning this Top Women in Cloud Award means to you? >> So I'm just thrilled and totally surprised. For me to have an opportunity to share my story, and to also attend an event like this and be inspired by other women's stories, I mean, I think the mission of CloudNOW is so incredibly important. I don't think there's anything so special about any of the women that won awards tonight. And what I mean by that is, we're not extraordinary, we didn't necessarily overcome any crazy challenges or barriers. I want young women, and people of all types, to know that this is possible. And I think by sharing our stories and how different we are, and how we came from all sorts of different places, I think that can really be inspiring, for the next generation. And that's exactly what technology needs. We need a strong and diverse pipeline if we're going to continue innovating and continue creating. >> That's brilliant advice and I couldn't agree more. I think that some of the stories that we're going to hear from some of the fellow winners such as yourselves show that some really doing groundbreaking work, but others who just persevered, who had an interest in something and followed through with it. And learned along the way, made mistakes, had the opportunity to fail, learn from that, and continue going forward. I personally find that very inspiring. So, Caroline thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE and sharing your story. Best of luck with your new addition. >> Thank you. >> And your dogs, as well as congratulations, again, on the award. >> Thank you so much. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin on the ground at Google for the CloudNOW Top Women in Cloud Awards event. Bye for now. (techno music)

(bright, upbeat music playing) >> Hello, Brilliant Cloud community and welcome back to AWS re:Invent, where we are live all day everyday from the show floor, here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm Savannah Peterson joined by my beautiful co-host, Lisa Martin here on theCUBE. Lisa, you're smiling, you're radiating, day three, you would think it was day one. How you doing? >> Amazing. I can't believe the energy that has been maintained >> It's been a theme. on this show floor, since Monday night at 4:00 pm. >> I know, and I kind of thought today we might see some folks trickling out. It is packed, as our guests and I were, we were all just talking about, right before the segment, almost too packed which is a really great sign for AWS. >> It is. We're hearing north of 55,000 people here. And of course, we only get a little snapshot of what's at the Venetian. >> Literally this corner, yeah. We don't get to see anything else around The Strip, that's going on, so it's massive. >> Yeah, it is very massive. I'm super excited. We've got two guests from Infosys with us on this last segment from this stage today. David and Anant, welcome to the show. How you doing? >> Awesome. >> You're both smiling and I am really excited. We have our first prop of the show, (David and Anant laughing) and it's a pretty flashy, sexy prop. Anant, what's going on here? >> Oh, so this is something that we are very proud of. Last year we won one award, which was very special for us because it was our first award with AWS, and that was, "The Industry Partner of The Year Award." And on the back of that, this year we won three awards and this is super awesome for us, because all of them are very special. One was in collaboration, second was in design, and third was in sustainability. So we are very proud, and we thank AWS, and it's a fantastic partnership. >> Yeah, congratulations. >> Anant: Yes. I mean that's huge. >> Yes, it's absolutely huge. And the second one is, we are the Launch Partner for MSK, which again is a very proud thing for us. So I think those are the two things that we wanted to talk about. >> How many awards are you going to win next year then? (all laughing) >> We want to target more than three. (Savannah chuckles) >> Keep it going up. >> Probably five, right? >> So it's the odd numbers, one, three, five, seven, ten. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> Savannah: There you go. >> I think we got that question last year and we said we'd get two, and we ended up over-delivering with three, so who knows? >> Hey, nothing wrong with setting the bar low and clearing it. And I mean, not setting it low, setting it with one and clearing it with three is pretty fantastic. We talk about it as an ego thing sometimes with awards and it feels great for internal culture, but David, what does it mean on the partnership side to win awards like that? >> So what's really important for us with our partners is to make sure that we're achieving their goals, and when their goals are achieved in our partnership it's just the byproduct that we're achieving our own with our clients. The awards are a great representation of that to see, you know, again, being recognized in three different categories really shows that we've had success with AWS, and in turn, you know, Anant and I can attest to it. We've been very successful at the partnership on our side. >> Yeah, and I bet it's really exciting for the team. Just speaking for Energy (indistinct) >> And there's celebration, you know, there's been a few cocktails being raised... >> Has there? In Las Vegas? >> David: I know. Cocktails? >> Lisa Martin: Shocking! I'm shocked! >> Lisa Martin: I know! (all laughing) I wouldn't mind one right now to be really, really honest. Let's dig into the product a little bit. Infosys Cobalt. What's the scoop, Anant? >> Yeah, so first of all, we were the first ones to actually launch a Cloud brand called Cobalt, right? We were the first ones in the world. In fact, one of our competitor followed us soon after. So essentially what we did was we brought all our Cloud offerings into one brand called Cobalt. It becomes very clear to our customers on what our proposition is. It is very consistent to the market in terms of what our narrative is. And it's a little easy for our customers to understand what we bring to the table. So Cobalt is not one product or what one platform it's a set of services, solutions and platforms that we bring to accelerate customer's journey where they're leveraging Cloud. So that's what Cobalt is. >> Awesome, everyone wants to do everything faster. >> Yes. >> Lisa Martin: Yeah. >> And the booth was packed. I walked by earlier, it was absolutely buzzing. >> Yes. >> Yeah. Nobody wants to do, you know, wants less data slower. >> Anant: Yes. (Savannah laughs) >> It's always more faster. >> Anant: More faster. And we're living in this explosion unlike anything this swarm of data unlike anything that we've ever seen before. Every company, regardless of industry has to be a data company. >> Anant: Yes. But they have to be able to work with the right partners to extract, to first of all harness all that data, extract insights in real time, because of course on the consumer side we're not patient anymore. >> Anant: Yes. We expect a personalized, realtime, custom experience. >> Anant: Absolutely. >> How do you work with AWS to help deliver that and how do the partners help deliver that as well? >> Well I'll start with on the partner side of it. You walk through the hallways here or down the aisles you see partners like MongoDB, Snowflake, Databricks and such, they're all attesting their commitment and their strong partnership with AWS, and coincidentally they're also very good partners of our own. And as a result... >> Savannah: One big happy family here at AWS when you met. >> And this is something that I'm calling, coining the phrase sub-ecosystems. These are partnerships where one is successful with each other, and then the three come together, and we go together with an integrated solution. And it's really taking off. It's something that's really powerful. The fun thing about re:Invent here is isn't just that we're having amazing discussions with our clients and AWS, but we're also having with the other partners here about how we can all work together so... And data analytics is a big one, security is another hot one-- >> Lisa Martin: Security is huge. >> Savannah: Yeah. Cost optimization from the start. >> Absolutely. And Ruba was saying this, right? Ruba said, like she was giving example of a marathoner. Marathon is not a single man or a single woman sport, right? So similarly Cloud journey is a team's, sort of you know, team journey, so that's why partners play a big role in that and that's exactly what we are trying to do. >> So you guys get to see a lot of different companies across a lot of different industries. We're living in very interesting times, how do you see the Cloud evolving? >> Oh, yeah. So what we did when we launched Cobalt in 2020 we have now evolved our story. We call it Cobalt 2.0. And essentially what we wanted to do was to focus on industry Clouds. So it's not just about taking a workload and moving it from point A to point B or moving data to Cloud or getting out of data centers, but it's also being very specific to the industry that this specific customer belongs to, right? So for example, if we go to banking they would say we want to better our security posture. If we go to a retailer they want to basically have smart stores. If we go to a manufacturing customer they want to have a smart factory. So we want to make sure that there are specific industry blueprints and specific reference architectures that we bring and start delivering outcomes. So we call it something called... >> Savannah: I know you're hot on business outcomes. >> Yes. >> Savannah: Yes. So we call it something called the link of life forces. So there are six technologies; Cloud, Data, Edge, IOT, 5G, and AI. They will come together to deliver business outcomes. So that's where we are heading with Cobalt 2.0, And that's essentially what we want to do with our customers. >> Savannah: It's a lot to think about. >> Yes. >> David: Yes. >> And, yeah, go for it David. >> I was just saying from a partnering perspective, you know prior to Cloud, we were talking about transactional type businesses where if you ask a technology company who their partner is its generally a reseller where they're just basically taking one product and selling it to their client. What's happened with cloud now it's not about the transaction upfront it's about the actual, you know, the consumption of the technology and the bringing together all of these to form an outcome, it changes the model dramatically, and quite honestly, the global system integrators like Infosys are in great position because we can pull that together to the benefit of our partners, put our own secret sauce around it and take these solutions to market and drive consumption because that's what the Cloud's all about. >> Right. Well, how are you helping customers really treat Cloud as a strategic focus? You know we often hear companies talk about we're Cloud first. Well not everything belongs in the Cloud. So then we hear companies start talking about being Cloud smart. >> Anant: Yes. How are you helping, and so we'll go with that. How are you helping enterprises really become Cloud smart and where is the partner angle? So we'll start with you and then we'll bring the partner angle in. >> Oh yeah, big time. I think one of the things that we have been educating our customers is Cloud is not about cost takeout. So Cloud is about innovation, Cloud is about growth. And I'll give two examples. One of the beauty products companies they wanted to set up their shop in US and they said that, you know, "we don't have time to basically buy the infrastructure, implement an ERP platform, and you know, or roll it out, test it and go into production. We don't have so much time. Time to market is very important for us." And they embarked on the Cloud journey. So expanding into new market, Cloud can play a big role. That is one of the ways to expand and you know, grow your business. Similarly, there is another company that they wanted to go into retail banking, right? And they didn't have years to launch a product. So they actually use AWS and it's a joint Infosys and AWS customer. A pretty big bank. They launched retail banking and they did it in less than six months. So I think these are some of the examples of cloud not being cost takeout but it's about innovation and growth. So that's what we are trying to tell customers. >> Savannah: Big impacts. >> Big impact. Yes, absolutely. >> And that's where the Cobalt assets come into play as well. You know, as Anant mentioned, we have literally thousands of these industries specific and they're derived in a lot of cases in partnership with the companies you see down the aisles here, and AWS. And it accelerates the deployments and ensures a successful adoption, more so than before. You know, we have clients that are coming to us now that used to buy, run their own procurement. You know they would have... Literally there was one bank that came to us with a over a hundred products >> The amount of work. I'm just seeing it... >> A list of a hundred products. Some they bought directly from a vendor, some they went through a distributor, some they went through a reseller and such, >> Savannah: It's so ad-hoc. And they're looking at this in a completely different way and they're looking to rationalize those technologies, again, look for companies that will contract for a business outcome and leverage the cloud and get to that next era, and it's a fun time. We're really excited. >> I can imagine you're really a part of the transformation process for a lot of these companies. >> Anant: Absolutely. Anant when we were chatting before we went live you talked about your passion for business outcomes. Can you give us a couple examples of customers or business outcomes that really get you and the team excited? Same thing to you David, after. >> Well, absolutely. Even our contractual structures are now moving into business outcomes. So we are getting paid by the outcomes that we are delivering, right? So, one of the insurance customers that we have we actually get paid by the number of claims that we process, right? Similarly there is a healthcare customer where we actually get paid by the number of customers that we cater to from a Medicare and Medicaid standpoint, right? >> Savannah: Tangible results processed and projected-- >> Successful process of claims. >> Interesting. >> Anant: Exactly. >> Yeah. (indistinct) reality. >> Yeah, reality, (chuckles) What a novel idea. >> Yeah. (Savannah and Lisa chuckle) >> One of the great examples you hear about airplane engines now that the model is you don't buy the engine, you basically pay for the hours that it's used, and the maintenance and the downtime, so that you take the risk away. You know, you put that in the context of the traditional business. You're taking away the risk of owning the individual asset, the maintenance, any of the issues, the bug fixes. And again, you're partnering with a company like Infosys, we'll take on that based upon our knowledge and based upon our vast experience we can confidently contract in that way that, you know, years ago that wasn't possible. >> Savannah: It's kind of a sharing economy at scale style. >> David: Exactly. >> Anant: Absolutely. >> Yeah, which is really exciting. So we have a new challenge here on theCUBE this year at re:Invent. We are looking for your 32nd Instagram real sizzle soundbite. Your hot take, your thought leadership on the biggest theme or most important thing coming out of this year's show. David, we'll start with you. We've been starting with Anant, so I'm going to go to you. We're making eye contact right now so you're in the hot seat. (all laugh) >> Well, I think there was a lot of time given to sustainability on the stage this week, and I think that, you know, every CEO that we talk to is bringing that up as a major priority and that's a very important element for us as a company and as a service provider. >> Savannah: I mean, you're obviously award winning in the sustainability department. >> Exactly. Nice little plug there. >> Yeah. >> You know, and I think the other things that have come up we saw a lot about data analytics this week. You know, I think new offerings from AWS but also new partnerships that we're going to take advantage of. And again, security has been a hot topic. >> Absolutely. Anant, what's your hot take? >> Yeah. I think one very exciting thing for partners like us is the re-imagining that is being done by Ruba for the partners, right? The AWS marketplace. I think that is a big, big thing that I took out. Of course, sustainability is huge. Like Adam said, the fastest way to become sustainable is to move to Cloud, right? So rather than overthinking and over-engineering this whole topic just take your workloads and move it to Cloud and you'll be sustainable, right? So I think that's the second one. And third is of course cybersecurity. Zscaler, Palo Alto, CrowdStrike, these are some of the big companies that are at the event here, and we have been partnering with them. Many more. I'm just calling out three names, but many more. I think cybersecurity is the next one. So I think these are three on top of my mind. >> Just a few things you casually think about. That was great. Great responses from both of you Anant, David, such a pleasure to have you both with us. We hope to have you back again. You're doing such exciting things. I'm sure that everything we talked about is going to be a hot topic for many years to come as people navigate the future as well as continue their business transformations. It is always a joy to sit next to you on stage my dear. >> Likewise. And thank all of you, wherever you're tuning in from, for joining us here at AWS re:Invent live from Las Vegas, Nevada. With Lisa Martin, I'm Savannah Peterson, and for the last time today, this is theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (bright, upbeat music playing)

>>the Cube presents H p E discover 2022. Brought to you by H P E. >>Okay, we're back at HPD. Discovered 2022 This is Day Three. We're kind of in the mid point of day three. John Furry and Dave Volonte Wall to wall coverage. I think there are 14th hp slash hp Discover we've sort of documented the history of the company over the last decade. Plus, I'm not a is here is executive vice president at Infosys and Cejudo. Sankaran Kutty is the CEO and vice president of Infosys. Infosys doing some amazing work in the field with clients. Guys, Thanks for coming on the Cube. Thank >>you for the opportunity. >>Yeah, absolutely so. Digital transformation. It's all the buzz word kind of pre pandemic. It was sort of Yeah, you know, we'll get there a lot of lip service to it. Some Some started the journey and then, of course, pandemic. If you weren't digital business, you are out of business. What are the trends that you're seeing now that we're exiting the isolation economy? >>Yeah, um, again, as you rightly called out pre pandemic, it was all about using sort of you know innovation at scale as one of the levers for digital transformation. But if you look at now, post Pandemic, one of the things that we see it's a big trend is at a broad level, right? Digital transformation is not about cost. Take out. Uh, it's all about growth, right? So essentially, uh, like, uh, what we hear from most of the CEO s and most of the customers and most of the executives in the tech company, Digital transformation should be used for business growth. And essentially, it means three things that we see three trends in that space. One is how can you build better products and solutions as part of your transformation strategy? How can you basically use digital transformation to expand into new markets and new new territories and new regions? And the third is, how can you better the experience for your customers? Right. So I think that is broadly what we see as, uh, some other things. And essentially, if you have better customer experience, they will buy more. If you expand into new markets, your revenue will increase. If you actually build better products and solutions, consumers will buy it right, so It's basically like a sort of an economy that goes hand in hand. So I would say the trend is clearly going towards business growth than anything else when it comes to the, >>you know, follow up on that. We had I d. C on yesterday and they were sharing with some of their high level numbers. We've looked at this and and and it seems like I t spending is pretty consistent despite the fact that, for example, you know, the to see the consumer businesses sort of tanking right now. Are you seeing any pullback or any evidence that people are pulling the reins back on the digital transformation Or they just going because if they don't keep keep moving fast, they're gonna fall behind. What are you seeing there? Absolutely. >>In fact, you know what? What we call them as the secular headwinds, right? I mean, if you look at the headwinds here, we see digital transformation is in the minds of everybody, every customer, right. So while there are budget constraints, where are all these macro tailwinds as we call with respect to inflation, with respect to what's happening with Russia and Ukraine with respect to everything that's happening with respect to supply chain right. I think we see some of those tail headwinds. But essentially, digital transformation is not stopping. Everybody is going after that because essentially they want to be relevant in the market. And if they want to be relevant in the market, they have to transform. And if they have to transform, they have to adopt digital transformation. >>Basically, there's no hiding anymore. You know, hiding and you can't hide the projects and give lip service because there's evidence of what the consequences are. And it can be quantified. Yes, you go out of business, you lose money. You mentioned some of the the cost takeouts growth is yes. So I got given the trends and the headwinds and the tail winds. What are you guys seeing as the pattern of companies that came out of the pandemic with growth? And what's going on with that growth driver? What are the elements that are powering companies to grow? Is that machine learning? Is that cloud scales and integration? What are some of the key areas that's given that extra up into the right? >>Yes, I I would say there are six technologies that are defining how growth is being enabled, right? So I think we call it as cloud ai edge five g, Iot and of course, everything to do with a And so these are six technologies that are powering digital transformation. And, uh, one of the things that we are saying is more and more customers are now coming and saying that we want to use these six technologies to drive business outcomes. Uh, for example, uh, we have a very large oil and gas customer of ours who says that, you know, we want to basically use cloud as a lever to Dr Decarbonization. E S G is such a big initiative for everybody in the SGS in the minds of everybody. So their outcome of using technology is to drive decarbonization. And they don't make sure that, you know, they achieve the goals of E. S G. Right There is another customer of ours in the retail space. They are saying we want to use cloud to drive experience for our employees. So I would say that you know, there is pretty much, you know, all these drivers which are helping not just growing their business, but also bettering the experience and meeting some of the organisation goals that they have set up with respect to cloud. So I would say Cloud is playing a big role in every digital transformation initiative of the company. >>How do you spend your time? What's the role of the CEO inside of a large organisation like Infosys? >>So, um, one is in terms of bringing in an outside in view of how technology is making an impact to our customers. And I'm looking at How do we actually start liberating some of these technologies in building solutions, you know, which can actually drive value for our customers? That's one of the focus areas. You know what I do? Um, And if you look at some of the trends, you know what we have seen in the past years as well as what we're seeing now? Uh, there's been a huge spend around cloud which is happening with our customers and predominantly around the cloud Native application development, leveraging some of the services. What's available from the cloud providers like eh? I am l in Hyoty. Um, and and there's also a new trend. You know what we are seeing off late now, which is, um, in terms of improving the experience overall experience liberating some of the technologies, like technologies like block, block, chain as well as we are, we are right, and and this is actually creating new set of solutions. Um, new demands, you know, for our customers in terms of leveraging technologies like matadors leveraging technologies like factory photo. Um, and these are all opportunities for us to build solutions, you know, which can, you know, improve the time to market for our customers in terms of adopting some of these things. Because there has been a huge focus on the improved end user experience or improve experience improved, uh, productivity of, uh, employees, you know, which is which has been a focus. Uh, post pandemic. Right? You know, it has been something which is happening pre pandemic, but it's been accelerated Post pandemic. So this is giving an opportunity for for my role right now in terms of liberating these technologies, building solutions, building value propositions, taking it to our customers, working with partners and then trying to see how we can have this tightly integrated with partners like HP E in this case, and then take it jointly to the market and and find out you know, what's what's the best we can actually give back to our customers? >>You know, you guys have been we've been following you guys for for a long, long time. You've seen many cycles, uh, in the industry. Um, and what's interesting to get your reaction to what we're seeing? A lot of acceleration points, whether it's cloud needed applications. But one is the software business is no longer there. It's open source now, but cloud scale integrations, new hybrid environment kind of brings and changes the game, so there's definitely software plentiful. You guys are doing a lot of stuff with the software. How are customers integrated? Because seeing more and more customers participating in the open source community uh, so what? Red hat's done. They're transforming the open shift. So as cloud native applications come in and get scale and open source software, cloud scale performance and integrations are big. You guys agree with that? >>Absolutely. Absolutely. So if you if you look at it, um, right from the way we can't socialise those solutions, um, open source is something What we have embedded big way right into the solution. Footprint. What we have one is, uh, the ability for us to scale the second is the ability for us to bring in a level of portability, right? And the third is, uh, ensuring that there is absolutely no locking into something. What we're building. We're seeing this this being resonated by our customers to because one is they want to build a child and scalable applications. Uh, it's something where the whole, I would say, the whole dependency on the large software stacks. Uh, you know, the large software providers is likely diminishing now, right? Uh, it's all about how can I simplify my application portfolio Liberating some of the open source technologies. Um, how can I deploy them on a multi cloud world liberating open standards so that I'm not locked into any of these providers? Um, how can I build cloud native applications, which can actually enable portability? And how can I work with providers who doesn't have a lock in, you know, into their solutions, >>And security is gonna be embedded in everything. Absolutely. >>So security is, uh, emperor, right from, uh, design phase. Right? You know, we call it a secure by design And that's something What? We drive for our customers right from our solutions as well as for developing their own solutions >>as opposed to secure by bolt on after the fact. What is the cobalt go to market strategy? How does that affect or how you do business within the HP ecosystem? Absolutely. >>I think you know what we did in, uh, in 2000 and 20. We were the first ones, uh, to come out with an integrated cloud brand called Cobalt. So essentially, our thought process was to make sure that, you know, we talk one consistent language with the customer. There is a consistent narrative. There is a consistent value proposition that we take right. So, essentially, if you look at the Cobalt gold market, it is based on three pillars. The first pillar is all about technology solutions. Getting out of data centres migrating were close to cloud E r. P on Cloud Cloud, Native Development, legacy modernisation. So we'll continue to do that because that's the most important pillar. And that's where our bread and butter businesses right. The second pillar is, uh, more and more customers are asking industry cloud. So what are you specifically doing for my industry. So, for example, if you look at banking, uh, they would say we are focused on Modernising our payment systems. We want to reduce the financial risk that we have because of anti money laundering and those kind of solutions that they're expecting. They want to better the security portion. And of course, they want to improve the experience, right? So they are asking for each of these imperatives that we have in banking. What are some of those specific industry solutions that you are bringing to the table? Right. So that's the second pillar of our global go to market. And the third pillar of our go to market as soon as I was saying is looking at what we call us Horizon three offerings, whether it is metal wars, whether it is 13.0, whether it is looking at something else that will come in the future. And how do we build those solutions which can become mainstream the next 18 to 24 months? So that's essentially the global >>market. That's interesting. Okay, so take the banking example where you've got a core app, it's probably on Prem, and it's not gonna have somebody shoved into the cloud necessarily. But they have to do things like anti money, money laundering and know your ky. See? How are they handling that? Are they building micro services? Are you building for them microservices layers around that that actually might be in the cloud or cloud Native on Prem and Greenway. How is that? How are customers Modernising? >>Absolutely brilliant question. In fact, what we have done is, uh, as part of cobalt, we have something called a reference. Architecture are basically a blueprint. So if you go to a bank and you're engaging a banking executive, uh, the language that we speak with them is not about, uh, private cloud or public cloud or AWS or HP or zero, right? I mean, we talk the language that they understand, which is the banking language. So we take this reference architecture, and we say here is what your core architecture should look like. And, as you rightly called out, there is K. I see there is retail banking. There is anti money laundering. There is security experience. Uh, there are some kpi s and those kind of things banking a PSR open banking as we call, How do we actually bring our solutions, which we have built on open source and something that are specific to cloud and something that our cloud neutral and that's what we take them. So we built this array of solutions around each of those reference architectures that we take to our customers. >>Final question for you guys. How are you guys leveraging the H, P E and new Green Lake and all the new stuff they got here to accelerate the customers journey to edge the cloud? >>So I would say it on three areas right now. This is one is Obviously we are working very closely with HP in terms of taking out solutions jointly to the market and, um, leveraging the whole green late model and providing what I call it as a hyper scale of like experience for our customers in a hybrid, multi cloud world. That's the first thing. The second thing is Onion talked about the cobalt, right? It's an important, I would say, an offering from, uh, you know and offering around cloud from our side. So what we've done is we've closely integrated the assets. You know what I was referring to what we have in our cobalt, uh, under other Kobold umbrella very closely with the HP ecosystem, right? You know, it can be tools like the Emphasis Polly Cloud Platform or the Emphasis pollinate platform very tightly integrated with the HP stack, so that we could actually offer the value proposition right across the value chain. The thought of you know we have actually taken the industry period, like what again mentioned right in terms of rather than talking about a public cloud or a private cloud solution or an edge computing solution. We actually talk about what exactly are the problem statements? What is there in manufacturing today? Or it's there in financial industries today? Or or it's in a bank today or whatever it's relevant to the industry. That's an industry people. So we talk right from an industry problem and and and and and and build that industry, industry people solutions, leveraging the assets, what we have in the and the framework that we have within the couple, plus the integrated solutions. What we bring along with HB. That's that's Those are the three things, what we do along with >>it and that that industry pieces do. There's a whole data layer emerging those industries learning cos they're building their own clouds. Look, working with companies like you because they want to monetise. That's a big part of their digital strategy, guys. Thanks so much for coming on the cue. Thank you. Appreciate your time. Thank >>you. Thank you very much. Really appreciate. >>Thank you. Thank you for watching John and I will be back. John Ferrier, Development at HPD Discovered 2022. You're watching the queue? >>Yeah. >>Mm.

>>Yeah, yeah. Okay. Welcome back, everyone to the cubes. Coverage of reinvent 20 twenty-one Jon, your host of the Cube. We're here. Live in person for a real event. It's a hybrid event is a live stream of action to cube sets here, wall to wall coverage dot com. And, of course, you don't need to check the coverage out. And Amazon has got their own live event site. Go check out all the action. Stewart, See two of Micro Focus, the company That was part of the big announcement involving the mainframe modernization that Adam announced on stage and his first keynote CEO. And under the covers Micro Focus powering a lot of that functionality. Stuart, thanks for coming on. The break it down with >>Thanks. >>So what does the announcement? I mean that that Adam gave the i b. M. I mean the mainframe announcement that I've known for the main frame, but he had the mainframe modernization program. What's that all about? >>I think I'd like to think of this is the next evolution of the main frame for those customers that have been running on the main thing for 40 years. They had their business on it. Where do they go next? What does the future? What does the future hold? And this is all part of the announcement yesterday is this is the journey that many, many customers are going to decide to go on. >>So it's all about the relationship between A. W S and micro Focus. Obviously, Um, yeah. I was talking about migration for the Oracle, and a lot of our customers have these main friends that are in the classic data centers. And he told me personally when I interviewed him that the main part of that data center mindset that people are chipping away at now they want to move them out and keep some functionality, but for the most part, migrated out eventually. Yeah, This is where you guys are involved. Take us through why that's important. >>I think it's the next level of agility that it is actually delivered for many customers. They need to move a hell of a lot faster than they currently are. Let's face it, the world is changing at pace. The applications support these customers need to also a change of pace. What a W s does give this market and momentum which is, Where do we go next? Where do we take customers where workloads have been running the business? Where? How are they going to run the business in five years time? How they're gonna run their business in 10. >>Well, congratulations on microphone. Big part of the announcement. Specifically explained to me, Micro focuses role in the announcement with a W S. What's the relationship? >>I think they're too old to call it out. Actually, we've been working with A W S for many, many years. This isn't something that radically new. We've been engaging with them for literally 10 years, at least. But the key elements Microphone provides technology That's an enabler to facilitate delivering the service as well as the competency partner to help customers actually accelerate their journey to take advantage of it. >>So we're bundling micro focus into that capability. Is it software that you guys have? What's going on the covers? >>I think it's software. It's capability. It's expertise. It's everything that a customer might need to help and be successful. Our job is to a W S H A W s job to make sure the customer is absolutely satisfied. >>Give me an example of a customer mainframe. I'm a bank. I've been using the main frame and just squeaked Time to get my back up before I turned the light in the morning. It's just working. It's coming. It's pumping it all cylinders, my cobalt program or just quit. What do I do? How do you help me? >>Well, I think there are two reasons why you can give us a call Is number one? Yeah, You need to move your business of pace. So what's going to run your business going forward? So you need to understand your applications. Number two, the cost profile of your existing infrastructure is going to be incredibly expensive. So what you wanna do is essentially make the change accelerate the change delivered at a much lower cost. >>So it looks like the application. So the software Okay, what's the app? And then create a replica of digital twin? I'm just trying to visualized. Now I see what you mean. What happens because, I mean, you know what? That is A big deal with that animal for a long time. What happens next is a container eyes. That application, >>the customer determines how far they want to go if they would like the application to run in the cloud exactly as is so it supports their customers exactly as they expect today. We can do that. On the other hand, if they need to enhance the experience for their customers if they need to take it into a completely different environment. If they do want to contain, arise if they want to take it into new levels of service. If they do want to leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning, then again they can determine the journey. Micro focus is that essentially support them. Do that first step, which is get the applications ready to be delivered into cloud as fast as possible. >>Congratulations. Relationship. I guess I've got to ask you a question. Which on my mind is that Okay? It's the death of the mainframe. Long live the mainframe. You know the expression, uh, mainframe dying. I'm gonna hang around for a while. The dinosaurs are out there. >>I think it is. We like to position there is an evolution. We don't think the main friends gonna die. There will be customers who want to stay there, and we respect their choices. But on the other hand, this is a way to truly accelerate the future of mainstream applications. >>You know, student, I talked to a lot of success and C E O. S. And they tell me the same thing when they moved into the cloud. White hardcore is pretty much the main or critical laps to get the edges first moved into the cloud. And then they come and they start chipping away at the main, the main core and then slowly move it out because they don't want to get in there and disrupt so disruptions. A huge concerns. How does this new, um, modernization Tranz, uh, migration program for the mainframe ensure that disruption doesn't happen? What? I'm sure that's on their mind >>as well. I think what you're describing is what's the cut over when you're running on the main street today? You wanna run on the main from tomorrow, You know, if that's the case, or do you want to run the main from today and you want to run the cloud tomorrow? Essentially, the cut over is the same. The process is fairly separate from the mainframe itself. You obviously bringing applications off. We're getting them ready to go tested, you know, regulated. So it's been approved securities all in place, and then essentially, it's literally a switch cut. We literally have customers that turn off the main frame and, you know, they're already running in the cloud, and then we don't even have some that photographs of them shipping mainframe out the door. >>So I've got to ask, Is there a party at that point? You know, some people do >>that. It's certainly true. Remember that people are also going along for this journey, and they're not, You know, it's a big moment for them. >>You know, I hate the sound of today's my birthday. So I have to say this, Um, I remember when I was breaking into the business in my twenties. I never I never program punch cards, But remember pointing at the mainstream guys are seeing those old relics. I guess that's what I would be today. But the young guns coming into the industry, they want containers. They want micro services. They want cloud and see what's going on here. I mean, some really cool stuff happening. >>Uh, they want to take advantage of all the stuff that is there and every single announcement has been made today and yesterday on the days ahead. All of those great capabilities if you can get them into the core of your business. And so the key is to actually take us running your business today, enhance it and improve it and take it forward. I >>think I think the key points great insight on your part about this cut over because people know what that means. It's a project plan. Cut it over, get set up. And I think that's the hard part. How hard is that? On the cloud side, In terms of staging, can you share some timetables with me? Just kind of Give me a feel for order of magnitude Mainframe. Assuming, pumping it snap I'm using. I really can't shut it down, but I want to put it on. How much time to prepare to get into the cloud? Um, roughly just order of magnitude. Most >>customers, they tend to face these things they're not trying to. If you're a really big bank, you are not gonna do that overnight. That isn't gonna come as a surprise. But what we're gonna do is we're gonna take it in chunks and typically 12 to 15 months, which is the biggest step of the journey, which is going from mainframe to cloud. The next generation is going to be modernizing those applications, and it's going to be much short timeframes. Then you're getting into months, weeks, days >>after that. Is there any category that you see that are more susceptible to migration? You mentioned banks. I know some banks that they will never going to touch the mainstream because it's just so critical that the migration longer is there. Other areas of your insurance is a big market mainframe. Is the verticals that kind of like a more converting than others? >>Well, yes. But actually, I take it back. One of the reasons are these applications absolutely critical to these businesses. If they are, that's the reason why they're still running where they are, because they're really truly valuable. They are the business, so you're you're taking the business into new framework. So in that context actually tends to be financial services insurance, as you say, but also government, For example, the federal government, state and local as well as you move into retail. And it's surprising how often as you go into some of the other verticals where some of these mainframe applications are still existing. >>I hate to ask a question, because I don't know. So I want to ask, Um, and you can see it's a dumb question. If you think it is. Just tell me, Are there still cobalt programmers out there? >>There are to be clear. Actually, it's not a problem. You can train a new guy and literally weeks. If the issue is, yeah, actually use the mainstream itself, the mainstream experience about how it works as getting rarer. And so the key element is, how can how can you take the new young guns, give them, give them the application and see what they can do? This is a mechanism to do that. >>Great, Great announcement. Congratulations. I was really impressed at the moment. I'm actually surprised to see Adam kind of focus on that. But again, in the spirit of the traditional, uh, reinvent jazzy before Adam and he did the same thing with Oracle and all the other kind of big the legacy old guard they call them Technologies maintains one. You guys are part of that. So congratulations. Final word. Your take on the event so far. What's been the feedback on the announcement? Share some color commentary on what the feedback for you guys >>were. Actually, since the announcement, we've had some great customer conversations. I mean, there are a lot of businesses that really do want to make this change. We're kind of there to help them. And that's really the next step, which is what needs to happen to make that a reality. >>Amazon may not like me saying it, but I think there's some cases where you keep them in there and you don't touch. It works there. You keep it unless you wanna move. But if you want to move it, people, sometimes we want to move faster. And just there >>even a W s respects customer choice. The purpose is to meet the demand for the customer. And if the customer to sounds great, if they want to move off, we're there to help >>with the mainframe. Long live the main friends. The Cube coverage here in Las Vegas. I'm John. I love the mainframe Thirty-seven terminal. When I worked at the back in the eighties getting myself, um, thanks for coming in. And I appreciate it. Okay. Coverage here in Las Vegas. The Cube. You're watching the leader in global tech event coverage? I'm your host. Thanks for watching. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, mhm, yeah.

(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. We're here live in Las Vegas for an in-person event. Of course, it's a hybrid event, virtual online. Many people online. A lot of people here on the event, a lot of action. cloud going next generation, mainframe transformation, more analytics, more chips, everything's faster and cheaper and getting better and better in the cloud. We've got the great coverage. We've got two great guests. We got Justin Hooper vice president of Global Operations Infrastructure Ingram Micro and JP Perot, EVP of Telecom Media and Technology and AWS executive sponsor for Atos. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, glad to be here. >> So what is it about the conference so far? Pretty good, like a lot of people here? >> Super exciting. >> 27,000 people showing up. >> It's amazing. >> Real people not workers. >> Yeah, it feels almost normal. >> Yeah I can't believe the turnout. >> Got a great topic, you guys working together you got mainframe, you got analytics, transformation. Let's get into it. Let's start by introducing what you guys do, your company, and why you are here. JP, we'll start with you. >> Yeah, I can start. Okay, so yeah, so I'm leading, you know, in Atos all the cloud business and telecom media technology, Atos is a big company is a service and technology company, 11 billion Euro business, and we are leading all the transformation to cloud and also, all what is related to hybrid cloud transformation. Also with security. We are number two in the world in terms of security and cybersecurity. We have developed for so long lasting relationship with AWS. We have been an advanced technology partner of AWS for now many years, since 2013. And we have developed a specific program, you know, regarding manufacturing transformation and mega trends. So this is why we are super excited to be here with you Justin today, thank you, by the way having Ingram Micro with us, Justin. >> I appreciate it, it's good talking to you. Good to be here. >> And I'm Justin Hooper, I work for a Ingram Micro. I run their Global Infrastructure and IT operations. Ingram Micro is one of the world's largest technology suppliers, technology solutions, and cloud platform and services. >> Well, great for the intro. Thanks for that set up, a lot of action going on. You guys have recently purchased, you guys got the transformation in the cloud. What is the movement to the cloud? Take us through the current situation. >> Yeah, we see, a big acceleration and especially due to COVID situation. We have seen acceleration of transformation to cloud. There is a lot to do, a lot to do because many business critical application, which have not been transformed. And also, especially all the applications which are sitting on top of mainframe that is why executive discussion we are with Ingram at the moment is how we can help Ingram with some of the applications that are on mainframe to transform and design the future. >> Justin, take us through the transformation that they're helping you with, what's the key challenge? What problem are they solving? Take us through the specifics. >> Yeah, it's interesting because I'm actually a lover of the mainframe, I think most of the people at AWS would think, the mainframes, didn`t they put the rockets on the moon. That's old technology, but mainframes are still fantastic platforms. We, have great success, great resiliency with Atos . We are on the most modern chips, but there are a lot of restrictions. You know, you really have to size your mainframe for your peak workloads. You don't have the ability to separate segments, scale horizontally, and then there are really nuanced. Like it's hard to get resources that know mainframes, to be honest with you, it is just, there's a people issue there industry-wide, and we're not different than any other company and compete for resources, both on the system side and on the programming side. And we really want to look at how we can make a massive leave, if we're going to leave the mainframe, how do we start a journey where we can end up really being able to take advantage of horizontal scalability, the ability to have a utility compute model where we're really paying as we go, because that is the opposite how the mainframe model works today. >> Talk about the refactor 'cause I know I've covered a lot of mainframe stuff with IBM in the past and how banks are still using it. Everyone is they're real applications. They're mission critical. How are they integrating into the digital transformation. Containers, kubernetes are hot right now. You're starting to see a lot more integration. How do your customers and how do you guys see refactoring happening? I can see the integration, but that as the refactoring come in. >> There's really what we've learned with our partnership is there are really a couple of ways to do the refactoring. You can convert your old Cobalt code to something else like Java. And there are tools and companies out there that do that. Or you can really build a plan where you can effectively emulate your mainframe on commodity computing and through a relatively deep analysis with Atos, the recommendation that we're looking at is that ability to first get off of the hardware, get off of that reliance on the platform, but not jump all the way to modify your code to Java. There's not a lot of value in going from Cobalt to Java, for example, if you're not making improvements in your programs, adding business capabilities. So the journey starts with get off the hardware, but then it allows you to go and say, we are going to break up those complex programs. We are going to separate the data differently. And once you do that, you can start to take advantage of containers and start to separate yourself even more and really get into the cloud. But, there are ways to piece your way through that. >> You know that's really good insight, JP, I'd love to get your reaction on this too, because what Justin's getting at is what we hear a lot from experienced CIOs of large companies that have a lot of existing stuff. And the theme is and the word they use is you don't want to touch the white hot core. Meaning it's so mission critical that if you mangle it too hard, touch it too hard a lot of bad things happen. So this idea of push things out to the cloud that around the edges, and then work your way slowly in is a risk management and practical approach. >> Not exactly, you said it right, its exactly a risk management So, and Justin explain it different factors, which come to the end point in terms of decision there is one issue regarding competencies, because their lack of competency in the markets. There is what kind of business critical apps you have. There is a transformation as such, you know, as Justin explain you can record, or you can move, you know, to a different platform. So, each time it's a program, it's a program and analysis that we do with our customer advising the customer about, hey, based on your critical application, what is the right journey, what is the right transformation to do the right risk management? >> Justin you're taking the hot core I saw you nodding your head. You're like, yeah, what's your take on that? >> Well, yeah, I agree with you. And that fear, uncertainty and doubt it's kept people on the mainframe for a really long time. The technology has caught up and the expertise where just as JP said, you've got to be really careful in the way you plan it, and you've got to make sure that you can always get back. And so the approach that we're looking at taking is, you're able to accommodate more risk if there's an easy roll back plan, and some of the new new technologies and processes are going to allow that, so, you know, if I screw this up, I get to go find a job someplace else. So I'm aware of the white hot core, but I am confident it can be done. >> Yeah, and then technology, if you don't have to kill the old to bring in the new, you can do both, and I like your approach. I think that's a success path that people are talking about it's well documented. But at the end of the day, we're back in distributed computing, I mean, I want to get this at the end, but I want to give you guys some time to think about it. As cloud becomes everywhere as Adam Selipsky talks about, it's not just about mainframes, this it's a distributed computing paradigm. So we're going to come back to that, but let's get into the SAP Redshift `cause I think that's something that you guys are working on I think that's worth calling out here. Analytics is huge, tell us what's going on there, how you guys are working together on that. >> Yeah, so we have designed a high level of competency around SAP, and especially the migration and the SAP Redshift. So we have designed this program also with AWS and is something we are discussing at the moment also with Ingram. So we see an acceleration of this trajectory. It has been also highly pushed by SAP as well. And also we are one of the strongest partner of SAP and we see many many customers engage into this transformation at the moment. >> The cloud really gives you a lot of advantages when you're doing migration, especially around a pre-existing software, like SAP was pretty big, complex mission critical So you can throw compute at it, a lot of cool capabilities. >> Yeah, that's true, but you need, you still need to configure a lot of things as well, because it's, you need to customize and you have to really fine tune, you know, what is it, what is going to be available to the customer needs and to what you need in your company as well. >> Okay, lets get back to what Justin was saying about emulation, I mean, I can run SAP (laughs) on Amazon. I mean, we've talked about it, I wrote a story about this prior to the event called Superclouds. You can build these super applications that combine things that you never would have thought was possible. SAP running on Amazon or Ford can come to Redshift when you need it, so you have a lot more flexibility. This is now the new normal. >> Correct. >> Correct. Or Justin maybe you want also to comment on that, you know? >> You know, the great thing about being on Redshift is we pick that as a platform for our data warehouse a number of years ago, and there were basically analytics capabilities, but what we're seeing a lot here at re:Invent is as Amazon is catching up with their out of the box ML and AI capabilities in Redshift. So it feels good that we pick the platform that they're growing the capabilities in right, as we're advancing out of more of the traditional analytics and trying to go to that machine learning. And one of the things that we work at the Atos on is migrating off of SAPBW and saying, maybe we don't need that as a data and reporting platform, if we're solid with Redshift and we certainly don't need both. So we're working with them to look at the case to move all the way to Redshift, and then we can run our analytics and build the ML in that. >> And you know, that was a big theme in the keynote. This purpose-built capabilities, it's almost like having, you know, if you're building a building, you got iron steel girders made for you. You got this now better value in the platform to build on. This brings up the notion of distributed computing. >> JP: Yeah. >> In a way there's the same game, different generation. I mean, isn't it? You've got to integrate this still transformations inflection points, this is current. I feel like this now more than ever is a time where you can actually roll it all together with a little help from your friends or if Amazon's got somebody, you know, who want to reinvent the wheel. What's your reaction to that? 'Cause we've seen the movie before, when it's hard. Now, it seems easier, maybe its not. >> Yeah, we see three layers co-existing in more more. We see that, see application on data will be spread over three dimensions there will be edge computing there will be private cloud and there will be public cloud. And we see more more pressure in the direction that many customers are saying, hey, where should I put my data? This spot will go on and be processed at the edge, this spot will be process in the public cloud. There is also one of the capability where we in Atos we are able to advise customers about what is the best way to process your data if you have a lot of latency, you can process at the edge. You know, there's less equipment, you can process the public cloud. So, we see this coexistence of model. >> Justin what's your take on this distributed computing throwback concept, because look at the rise of companies like Snowflake. Where'd they come from? They're on Amazon, they pick the cloud. Now they're on going to other clouds. You can build a supercloud. You can actually build this out now faster. What's your take? >> Yeah, I, my take is that it's a pendulum and it swings back and forth, and like you said, there was client server and then everything was web-based. And a lot of things look a lot like the mainframe, put everything in the cloud and then attached to it. And then all of a sudden, you know what? We need edge computing, pull some stuff back out of the cloud and put it where we need it. So, it's going to continue to evolve. What I have noticed that I like more is, the major home one swings and statements like I want to get out of the data center business and go to the cloud, I hear those less. And people are realizing there's there's hybrid. There's purpose build computing like you said, and we need to make sure that we're putting our data where it needs to be, putting our compute where it needs to be. And that's going to change on our customer base and evolving technologies 5G is changing the whole world around edge computing. So I'm enjoying the ride, I'm glad I'm in technology because I get to move with the ebbs and flows, but I don't think we're ever going to land. I think it's going to keep moving. >> Yeah that's a totally fair point where it's fun as a technologist, but you're right. If you're operating with cloud, it doesn't matter if you're on premises or edge or public cloud, it's the same thing (laughs). >> Justin: Yeah. >> It's just pick your, pick, your use case. >> Justin: Right, your use case- >> I want a low latency at the edge. I'm not going to move my data, send it to cloud. Of course, we're going to leave it there. >> Yeah. >> If you're on premise before- >> We've already move workloads back and forth. And a lot of companies are doing that too, you know? >> I think that's what they're getting at when they talk about cloud everywhere. I think that's their way of saying, okay, hybrid is real. They won't ever say multicloud though. (all laughing) Not yet. (all laughing) >> Won't hear that here. >> All right, quick summary. What do you guys do? And what's the future hold for the relationship. You guys got a good thing going on? Take us through what's the future look like. >> Yeah, for me it's a big thank you for the partnership with Ingram. So we are extremely excited by what we can do for you. And in terms of advising your transformation and, you know, I hope that you get the right service and the right advice, you know, from Atos. >> Yeah, it's been great. We, we've appreciated. We've been, we started as a mainframe customer and now they're helping to advise on how we could get off the mainframe. I mean really cannibalizing one of the other areas there in the spirit of evolving and partnership, and you guys are bringing a ton of expertise and the way you guys attack the account and we centralized through our account team is very helpful. You're very aware of what's going on on all sides of the business. >> Well, congratulations. >> That's a big part of the theme, the keynote today on, on ad about mainframe transmission. But at the end of the day, it's about modern infrastructure, modern application development. >> Justin: Absolutely. >> Getting out, having set the table for the next generation. >> JP: Yeah. >> Thanks for coming on theCUBE and you guys want to get a quick plug in real quick for the company talk about Atos and Ingram. Give a quick plug for what you guys are working on. >> Sorry- >> Give a quick plug about what you`re working on. Give a quick commercial one minute about the company. >> One minute. >> Yeah. >> At Atos we're really transforming or leading the industry in terms of secured transformation to cloud security will be more and more important as data is everything about where is the value. So we are really making sure that our customers, they get to maximize, they can maximize the value around data transformation to cloud in a secured way. >> Justin, JP, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate the insights. Don't touch the hot core and make, take your time. Have a good time, you're watching theCUBE, the official broadcasting of AWS re:Invent leader in tech coverage, theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering comm vault. Go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. >>Welcome to the cube Lisa Martin, the stupid a man live on day one of Combalt go 19 we're in Colorado this year and we're excited to welcome to the Cape for the first time we have Matt Shai, VP of strategic pricing at Combalt. Matt, welcome. Thanks for having me here. So lots of news coming out yesterday and today. You know in the last student, I've had a number of conversations today already about just how much evolution has happened with Convault in this calendar year alone and list came in, you know when Sanjay took over con ball, you've got to upgrade your sales force. We've seen the sales leadership changes, I said enhance your marketing. We've seen new routes to market partner focus expansion into, you know, really expanding the Tamworth Hedvig acquisition. Talk to us a little bit about from a pricing perspective, a strategic perspective. What are you guys doing? What's new this year that you guys are really saying, Hey, we're listening to our customers, we're listening to our partners. >>So there's two parts to it. The first is really just making things simpler and easier for everybody. So we started that journey last year. Sanjay came in and said keep it going, so we need to continue to go to market simplification, make it easier for people. So we've tried to do that as much as possible. We're going to continue to do that. Whether it's packaging related pricing related, make it quicker for customers and partners to get access to the software. The second part to that is when we release new products like activate, we've talked a lot about activate over the last couple of days. We have new packaging for that, which is exciting, but we need to make sure that's accessible. So making that easy for our partners to get to it, cross selling and upselling, that kind of thing for everybody to have access to. So that's really the direction that we've gotten from Sanjay and as we get into the future, it's continuing that with things like vague and metallic and and all that. >>Anything particular about activate a, you know, what differentiates, how that pricing package versus how come might've done to that stuff in the back. It's the granularity of it is what it is. So come fall. One of the great things that we can do here is we can be flexible and Sanjay talked a lot about that in his main stage presentation this morning. And we can give a customer the ability to do what they want, when they want and how they want. So they've purchased from comm vault in the past. Likely they have different routes that they bought from and activate gives them the ability to buy in that same manner. So it's granular, it gives them the ability to get software when they need it, the type of software they need, but in the manner they want to buy it as well. So that's the exciting parts of it. >>So we had a chat with Rob earlier talking about metallic and your how, how that sass product was put together. Well customers have a lot of experience now with, with sass. So tell us from a pricing and packaging standpoint, your involvement and what customers they're going to see when it comes to metallic. Yes, we're directly involved with the pricing. We wanted to make sure that it aligns with everything we stand for as a pricing organization at con vault. And I'm excited about it because we've never really had a straight SAS product that's like go to the website, get the price, download it, good to go. Right. It's exciting. I'm, I'm, I can't wait to have it out there. I can't wait for customers to go get it and download it. The booth has been really, really slammed today from what I've heard. So I'm excited about the pricing. >>All right. And there's a couple of different pricing models depending on how they're doing. Maybe you could walk us through that. Yeah, sure. So you have three different options that you can buy. Each one gives you a different use case. So you have backup endpoint, mailbox, all that O three 65 different things you can buy. They all start at one particular price point and they're tiered. So the bigger you get, the more of a discount you get. The other cool thing that we can do here, because we do different use cases, which is sometimes different than competitors, is that you get a family discount with Convault. So if you buy one and you get to a high enough level, you can go into another one and into another one and get that same discount. So we're really trying to get customers to use as much as they can, get them accessible and we hope they like it. >>Where were customers in terms of when this was being conceived? You know, just not just metallic from a product and a technology perspective, but from a consumption subscription perspective where they actively, I would imagine certain customers like maybe part of an advisory board helping you guys determine this is kind of a new direction for calm ball, where they talked to us about the influence that some of these key customers had and really enabling this pricing to be so transparent. >>We had, it was, it wasn't even just customers. There was a lot of people who had influence into that. So industry, influencers, financial and flood, a lot of people had a lot of influence and a lot of input into how we do it because obviously everybody has a way that they like to buy. Customers had a big input cause as we started this, one of the first things we came through was how do we make sure that the packaging looks good. And that was one of the first core deliverables cause everything sort of runs off that. Make sure that it looks right, make sure it's accessible to customers and easy. So that was one of the first things we did was go out surveys, customer surveys, input data points, all that really started the process. And Matt metallic is 100% through the channels. So tell us a little bit about how that works for a SAS offering. >>Yeah. So through the channel for us is going to be fantastic because we want to make sure that our partners can sell it to folks. That was one of the biggest things our customers came back with was we like to buy through our, our partner. Like, we don't have to go do all bunch of different things, so great, you should go out and buy from your partner. They have access to it. It's easy to understand. It's easy to price, easy to package, and there really shouldn't be a whole lot of worrying about it from a customer standpoint. Quicken, painless. Yeah. And the other thing I understand if it's core, it's by capacity. If it's the O three 65 for endpoint on, it's based on your number of users. There's that piece in there that if I have my own cloud storage, I can leverage that. >>So is that just a different pricing, cause I didn't see that piece on the website. How does that impact thing? Yeah, so it really is about flexibility. Like if you want to use ours, you can and that's fine. If you have your own and you want to go use that, that's fine too. Like we're not really, we don't want to lock anybody into something that they may not need or want. So if you already have a contract with one of the cloud providers, you're free to go and use that. And we're not gonna worry about it. If you want to go do it through us and that's great, we'll, we'll work with you on that. So metallic focused on the mid market, but combo has a really good percentage of revenue that comes from a large global enterprise accounts. You guys had made some leadership changes there, new initiatives on these large global enterprises and some that are going to be fulfilled and delivered exclusively through I think global systems integrators. >>We do have a GSI program that from a, from a strategic perspective, knowing so much business comes through the channel for those really large enterprise accounts. What's that strategic pricing conversation concept all about? Yes, so that one's a little bit different. That's, we have so many different things that we do. We have metallic, we have Hedvig obviously that we just acquired. We have Comvalt complete and all the different things we do. So from an enterprise standpoint, it's how do we get the right go to market for them, which is potentially a systems integrator if they, if they go that route. Larger partners, potentially. Some of our Alliance partners are key to that as well. And then there's the, how do we make it easy for them to buy all that technology in one so that they don't have to have five different things that they're buying from comm vault. >>So that is the roadmap discussion. So how do we get from here to there and make sure that they have easy access to that. So that's part of the conversation we're having now. But it's the first thing that's on my mind every morning and my team works on it every day. So as we, as we integrate Hedvig, as Metalla comes into market, obviously we have appliances and different routes there. Those all have to be easy. So if you're a customer and you want to buy five of them, it's like quick and painless for you to buy all five. And it's a, it's an easy model for an enterprise. So that's how we like that to go. How does it work with, say, let's look at the Hedvig acquisition as an example. They come and bring in customers. They announced the acquisition in September, it's closed. You're already working on integrations touches a little bit about from a strategic perspective when, when there's an acquisition, there's customers that are on certain, you know they've got certain contracts. >>How do you take all of that past experience from the incoming company and start kind of massaging those pricing, pricing, the structure to now fit and be delivered through a combo? Yeah, it's a great question. That's one of the things that we're starting to work on now, which is how do we take all those different price points and packaging and work them in? We've done a little bit of it, so we've integrated what had vague guys into our portfolio in terms of it's there through con vaults, so there they're the same BS, the same support. They'll say maintenance the same everything in that respect, which is great. They're going to align to combat and that way, but really the next step is going to be exactly what you said, which is how do we put those two together so we don't want to keep them apart. >>We don't want to. You can buy Hedvig and then you can buy combo all. We want them to be the same and so the longterm vision for that will be to do that. We haven't gotten there yet. That's the next plan with Hedvig integration is to take those customers and say, how did you buy it? What did you like, what didn't you like? And then we can take that feedback and really use it to package up a solution. I'm curious how the changes in the public cloud have been impacting your line of work. You know, for example, we watched the AWS marketplace and they have more and more customers buying through them. Last year they came out with the, I forget what they call it, just like the private buying so that you can, even if you have a special arrangement, you can still buy it through the AWS marketplace. >>Is that, are you seeing that as a trend or customer's interest in that is Combalt looking down that path? Yeah, they're interested in it and certainly will enable people to go do it. It hasn't been a huge focus yet in terms of price. Right? Because a lot of the things that we have that are priced are already aligned to how they should be in the cloud. So when we sell something like a VM for example, it's kind of aligned to how they buy it anyway. So we haven't seen a huge change in how people would do that. It's more as we get more into the cloud and multi-cloud with Sanjay's vision, we'll start to see some more go to market perspectives that are like that. And the routes to market will change a little bit, but we're set up for it already from a pricing standpoint. So it's not going to be a big change. >>So as we look at the momentum that Combalt carries into their fourth annual go with how much leadership change, we talked about that the routes to market and things, what are some of you think the bar has been set? Like, all right, we've got to figure this out. For example, the, the, the simplification of the Hedvig combat structure. Is there kind of an expectation that as fast as there no iterating and delivering on technology, you've gotta be able to do the same from a pricing standpoint. Yep. >>Everything you won't need to do on technology. I need to be just as fast on pricing. Yeah, there's definitely that expectation and that's a great expectation. I mean, we can't have the technology lag, we can't have the pricing like it has to be, it has to go at the same time. And that's, so we're, we're tight with all the folks who were doing that had big integration, making sure that we're aligned to it. There's absolutely that expectation. But I loved that expectation because what we have to get it out at the same time and that's great. >>It does. Will it? Well, it, it makes things interesting and exciting. The customers are demanding this transparency because if we think about it in our consumer lives, we have transparency. I mean, think about buying a car these days as the consumer, you're so empowered with whatever you want to buy. And there's this expectation, right as as an it buyer that they have the same type of transparency and the same type of simplified pricing structure. So you've got to be able to deliver to meet that too, right? >>We do. And there's no black box anymore. Like when I first started doing this a long time ago, it was like here's a product, here's a black box, here's, you'll buy it from your partner that's gone. Like they need to know exactly what goes into that. So transparency, we talk a lot about it from a pricing standpoint. It used to be like, don't talk about pricing, right? Cause that nobody knew. We should really know what happens in there. Everybody knows what happens in there now and they should, I mean it's their money. So we need to make sure that they understand how they're spending it, why they should be spending it with one vendor versus another, and then what's going to be good for them in the longterm. So we talk a lot about that from a strategy standpoint. >>Well that's actually something that could be a competitive differentiator for cobalt. Right? Compare if there are others who are saying, you know, secret sauce, talk to sales. That can be with how quickly things change. A new these days, that transparency can be a real game changer in the customer's experience. >>It can be. And one of the, so I came from a background of competitive intelligence when I did, I worked at a firm for a long time and CII and so I was told by my boss at the time, he said, don't be the department of Rob, Rob. He's a department of facts, right? And so as a pricing person, it's the department of facts. I'll tell you as a customer, this is good, this is coming, this is where we are now. All that stuff. And it's up to you to make a decision. Like it's, you know, it's there, the facts are there. The pricing we think is structured in a way that helps you and support you, but you're free to make a decision. I don't want to force anything on you. And so that's for me and my group, that's where our transparency kind of lives. As we know customers have to buy. We know they have options. They're not always going to choose Convolt. We'd like them to, but they're not going to, and we just try to make that as easy as possible and make it a painless problem. Make it a painless solution. >>Right. Easy and painless. I'll take it now. Thank you for joining Stu and me and talking to us about what you're doing and how quickly things are iterating all the way from the technologies to the pricing structure. We appreciate your time. Thanks for having me. All right. Firstly, men and men, I N Lisa Martin, and you're watching the cube vault go in 19.

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host Stu Miniman. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a Cube Conversation here in our Boston area studio. Happy to welcome to our program a first time guest, Larry Biagini, who is the Chief Technology Evangelist at Zscaler. Also had a long career at GE. Your last position there you were the Chief Technology Officer. Larry thanks so much for joining me, pleasure to me you. >> Thanks for having us. All right so you know before we get into some of your background at GE tell us a little bit... Zscaler, we've got some familiarity with the team. We've had some of the executives, many of the customers on our program. Tell us what part you do at Zscaler. >> So when I left GE after about 26 years, I was a Zscaler customer. Very early Zscaler customer at GE. And one of the things that intrigued me about GE and one of the things about Zscaler I learned with working with them is that they're vision for security and my vision for security and agility of organizations going forward were an easy match. That made a transition very simple, I was gone from GE for four weeks, that was my retirement before I got recruited into Zscaler and the reason it was a good match is I had big company experience. I had a very good network of people that are operating in large companies and Zscaler needed those connections. But we also had a product that was mature but we had a message that we had to get across to these folks. So it was a message that was real to me, a message that mattered to what Zscaler need to put out there, and that's why I'm the Chief Technology Evangelist. I spend my time with customers, with prospects. Just understanding what they're going through. Using my experience at GE and my experience with other customers to help them through that, and that's the role that I play. >> Yeah I know my time when I worked on the vendor side working with customers being in briefing centers working with them were some of the most gratifying for me. Cause it was you know helping them through what they were working on. Bring a C.E.O. in -- you no longer work for GE but give us a little bit of the background as to you know what gave you some of the skills and some of the scars to help customers that are now going through these journeys. >> The story really starts when I was asked to become the Chief Risk Officer for IT for GE. I was the CIO of the largest business at the time. But GE was going through a transformation or wanted to go through a transformation. They recognized that digital was an opportunity for them and could also be a threat, but at the same time security was not enabling the organization it was sort of disabling it. It was in the way. Now I had no security background at the time it was mostly in architecture and applications. I'd run the data centers but I was very familiar with security and what it was supposed to do and what it actually was doing. So one of the first things we looked at is why we were doing what we were doing. And the reality is ten years ago it made sense doing what we were doing which was protecting the network because everything was in the network. The users were in the network, the data was in the network, The applications were in the network and if you protect the network by definition or by default you're protecting everything else. But when we started seeing behaviors that's not the way people were acting. There was more and more traffic going directly to internet. Whether it be for personal use or for business use more and more business use. The mobile workforce and I just don't mean mobile devices the workforce itself was mobile, where we were out in the field. That's where you make money, it's when you're with customers, when you're selling. So this notion of protecting the network allows you to protect apps, users, and data actually is a fallacy. But we continue to do it because that was the problem we had to solve ten, fifteen years ago. The problem changed with the introduction of cloud, with the introduction of mobility. With end users getting much much smarter about how they can use technology without actually needing IT. You know we used to say that everybody's their own CIO at this point. They have their own devices they have their own networks, they have their own apps. Our job is still to secure them but not get in the way of them. >> Yeah we know back in the old days it was physical things that I could wrap my arms around and if I could lock a door, or you know build the moat as we talked about in the industry, that was great but the surface area just keeps increasing. Cloud pushed it that way. Edge is pushing it you know order of magnitudes even more. So it's interesting I think you know when we talked about cloud adoption, security was originally "Oh it's a reason why I might not go to the cloud," and then it was like "Wait, its a new opportunity for it." To be honest digital transformations I haven't heard as much discussion about thee challenges and opportunity's of security there so maybe you can help expand on that a bit. >> So I think what Zscaler does and the notion that I had that made it an easy fit was I always believed or not always believed after I took that role I believed that there had to be something between the user and whereever they wanted to go and we had to put as many services as we could in that. Now we originally thought we could build that ourselves. We couldn't. We didn't have the footprint, we didn't have the scale, even though were a large company at the time. But I always thought that tying a user and a application to a location was a big mistake. And so when I think about digital transformation what I'm really thinking about is safely attaining speed in order to do business in today's world. So you talked about devices. I'd argue that even five years ago most larger organizations could not tell the devices on their network yet we were trying to protect that. Right? They knew the ones they knew about but they didn't know the Raspberry Pi that was plugged in by an engineering guy. Or they didn't know that somebody just put a new machine on the factory floor and it happened to have an IP address. So we were actually kidding ourselves into what we were doing. So I think the cloud actually opened up the eyes of not only the business but opened up the eyes of the IT and security folks that the way -- you can't control the network anymore because you don't own the network -- I'd argue that you haven't for a long time -- and because of that things had to change. I also think that it became -- and I've seen this in my four years with Zscaler -- four years ago security was sort of black and white. Now that the dialogue has changed and more about risk what's really important to my company. The fact of matter is have to admit to my board that I can't protect everything. But I need to protect certain things but you have to tell me what those things are. I can mitigate that risk. I can't do everything to everybody and so I think that's the discussion people are having now. And when in five years ago people would say "Oh Amazon, Azure, GCP, I want to see their security practices, this, that, and the other thing." Now they can't stop things from moving there. They're less concerned about the security practices because they get an attestation of those and things like that. They're more concerned about how their organizations are migrating stuff. Are they migrating the right data? Do they have the right controls around it? So I think the mindset of the CISOs has changed a bit I think the roles of CIO, the CTO, and the CISO have changed. Where the CISO is more risk-averse, The CTO is actually learning how to tie things together rather than build them. And the CIO is focused on data and business opportunities. >> Yeah, Larry maybe you can bring us inside one of the customers or you know a sample of what you're hearing from customers because so many of the things you said really resonate absolutely five years ago was like Cloud, let me get your SLA and let me read trough all of it, and hey can you adjust this for me? Amazon says no. Okay wait I need to adjust to this, but the mantra I hear from my friends in security is security is everyone's responsibility and it is a practice and therefore it needs to be embedded in there not some product or thing that gets bolted on at the end. So how are they coming to that? Is it the CISO? Organizationally, where do these conversations start and fit? >> So every organization is different, so what I'll give you is a sort of combined view of a large organization. Probably two or three large organizations. The first step is adopting the internet as your corporate network. Once you come to that realization that the internet is your corporate network and will continue to be so, then the things that you do change dramatically. And the opportunities that you have change dramatically: from a cost perspective, from a service-delivery perspective, and from an end-user satisfaction perspective. >> So let me ask that for a second, because I have you know, some peers and friends that work at big companies and it feels like there's the corporate network and then I've got my device on the other thing that I use, the public network. Is this embracing the just, "it's there," or do I still have those two separate networks? >> I think where it's going and where the more progressive companies that I deal with are, is that rather than having a corporate network supporting everything, the corporate network will actually shrink. The...only supporting what it needs to support, and will become a destination just like an AWS, or an Azure or GCP. So if you have a corporate network today that's big and wide and flat, it has users, apps, data in it, and your data centers, my view and dealing with, again, some more of the progressive companies is that corporate network will shift to just a data-center network. And it will have no users on it but users will be able to get to it. So you turn yourself into an AWS. Some people call that Hybrid Computing. I call it Hybrid Networking. But the reality is most organizations, large organizations are going to have a hard time getting rid of their data centers in the near future. So they're going to have to be part of this game. And rather than try to extend the current model to wrap around AWS and Azure and the cloud providers, why not change your model what you do control to actually act like that. So my world has the internet as a corporate network, the corporate network as a subset of the internet, no users on the corporate network, all users untrusted on the internet. That's where I think this whole thing goes and that's where the customers that I talk to are headed. >> Okay one of the biggest challenges when you talk about this transformation is usually some of the organizational dynamics there. Maybe walk us through...you talked about we understand everyone's different you know we've seen the CISO greatly elevated to where their role fits into it but you know corporate structure and the average sysadmin and the like, what are they getting rid of, what are they learning, or is it new people coming in? >> The cultural -- I don't want to say "push back" -- but the cultural challenges are real. You know if you've been in this industry... ...I've been in this industry for forty years. You gain certain expertise and you like to get promoted on that expertise, get recognized for that expertise and it's comfortable to deal in that area. So just think if you're a network admin. You know Cisco equipment. You know it really well. You know your Cisco rep really well. And all of this stuff is second nature to you. Now you're asked to tie it, put up a connection between yourself and AWS, a VPC because you're going to move applications out there. And really, you're not a network guy anymore. You are a design guy to help move applications to the cloud. And it's an uncomfortable space to be in. So you can sort of, there's a couple options. You could say, this too shall pass. (And it won't.) That's I think, a losing proposition. I think you can move to a network provider and say, "Look, I'm still a network guy I can do networking." Or you're going to have to find a way to take the skills that you have and the mindset that you have and work in this new environment. Now that's not easy to do and one of the things that some of the large organizations I deal with are doing is they're bringing in people who grew up in this area and they're trying to seed the education of their own people. Because they're good people right? They know the culture, they know the business. They just don't have the skills that they need today so going to training's not going to help them. Doing it by example with people who've done it before is very important. >> All right how about outcomes? Is there anything you can share from your GE experiences or some of the customers you're working through as to kind that high level of what this means now you know is there a success finish line? Or is it a continuing journey? >> I think the success finish line is actually doing what you're supposed to do for the organization without actually anybody knowing it. Not being in the way. So from my perspective its end users or be they customers, suppliers, internal people, being able to do their job in a frictionless manner but you being able to do your job and the security side is protecting them and the network side, it's making sure they're getting the best user experience out there. And the CIO side is that they're using the best tools for the job. That's it for me. I'm tired, and I have been tired and I don't think it's right for the people that we provide technology or technology solutions to choose our technology as a last technology of choice. But they'd really like to use something else? We should give them that flexibility if it meets the risk appetite of the organization. So to me it's end user satisfaction is the most important thing because that allows you to do your job. Dissatisfied users will always find a way around whatever you put in their way. And that's not good for them, not good for the organization. So that's it for me. >> Great you've been now with Zscaler for four years, tell what's changed in the landscape. Security? You said to board-level discussion absolutely, something we hear, comment I've made is it went from kind of top of mind, bottom of budget, to, you know, no, this is something that actually you're not going to put it off for another quarter or year, you're going to take care of it now. >> So I actually think it's kind of counter-intuitive, what changed...is that I believe that five years ago, security was top of mind and there was a boatload of money thrown at it and that money got spent but nobody was able to prove that they were any more secure than the next guy. The metrics weren't there. I mean if you can't define what your network is, how can you stand in front of your board and say my network is... And so I think there's been a questioning of, are we spending enough on security but not only enough, are we spending it the right areas? Because what we've been doing sort of doesn't make me feel any better. You know, sure we meet our regulatory requirements but that's compliance, that's not security. So I think people are actually questioning, are we doing the right things for the business that we're in today versus the business that we were in in the past? And do we have the right conversation going with the board? Versus a red-yellow-green chart about here's how we think we're secure. And I think that's made a big difference. And I also think the discussion around where information resides and how important that information is and then ultimately how well you mitigate any risk to it, is the most relevant conversation that happens today. It's not, I'm not going to ignore ransomware and things like that but its not "Oh my God I'm getting attacked a million times a day." It's "Do I have something that's of value to somebody else and it will kill me as an organization or hurt me drastically if I lose it." And if I don't know where it is I'm probably going to lose it. Either deliberately or by mistake. So do I have those right controls in place? >> Yeah I'd love to get your commentary, there are certain companies out there that they have the message, you know, security's broken, we need a do-over, you know, the latest- -and-greatest software-defined cloud-based something or other isn't going to solve it, but you know, you've been in this space for decades, so you know where are we as a industry with security today, you feel that we're making progress? Sounds like it. >> I do feel that we're making progress. I think as an industry we recognize that the problem exists, and the problem that exists today is different from the problem that is existed seven, eight, ten, even fifteen years ago, that's number one. Number two is the competitive landscape of companies out that are huge today versus the companies that were huge ten years ago. It's a much different landscape. And these are all what I would call digital companies. They found a way to use information. You know things like Airbnb. It's an information business is all it is. And it's not a Marriott, it's not a Hilton, but it's a competitor to those guys. And I think that's a realization that business are having and that's filtering down into the IT organizations. You know ,we see a lot of companies -- which I don't necessarily agree with -- hiring Chief Digital Officers in addition to Chief Information Officers. And I see that as a bifurcation of the CIO as a back-room office guy and the CDO now is customer-facing. I think this whole thing has to be customer-facing and take advantage of the tools that are out there whether you provide them or whether you get them from somebody else, in a secure and safe enough manner that your business feels comfortable operating. So that's what's changed, I don't think it's...even the hardcore security guys, you know, we've had a lot of breaches in the past. Every one of those breaches, everyone had a firewall, everyone had a proxy. Everybody had all the tools that everybody else had and nobody could prevent those breaches. I think the fact of the matter is you want to prevent the harm of a breach occurring versus spending all your time making sure your breach doesn't occur. So I think that's a different mindset. >> Larry, I want to give you the final word. We've been going through this series of the digial cloud transformation, give us your final take away. >> So I don't like digital transformation as a word I think it's been overused. I think businesses are changing and adapting to what the opportunities and risks are today. With that, the whole organization has to face into that and say "This is where we can win, this is where we have to be good enough, and this is what's dragging us down." And they have to address all of them. I think in order to do that, one thing that an IT organization has to do is head-on, face its legacy debt. You can't play in this world with legacy debt. And if you don't start now, five years from now you're still going to be complaining about it. It's like that old, you know, Chinese proverb, when was the best time to plant a tree? One hundred years ago. When's the second best time? Today. If you don't address your legacy with your board head-on, your business will lose. That's number one. Number two is, don't go it alone. Get the talent who's done this before. This is not moving from, you know, from Cobalt, to C, to C++. This isn't an incremental change. Fundamentally the way that the cloud works in a way that your corporate network will work once its the internet, is fundamentally different than anything we've done before. Take advantage of people who've done it. Use that to seed your organization's growth. And then finally, there's no stopping this train. There's nothing that's going to happen cataclysmically that's going to stop this. On the other hand don't throw out the baby with the bath water, because most organizations as I said earlier are still going to have legacy applications in their data center. Just make them look as if they're modern applications, and it's a win for everybody. >> Larry Biagini, thank you so much for sharing all of your history and your customers' journeys. >> Thanks for having me. >> All right and thank you as always for watching theCUBE, I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching.

>> Live, from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies, and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back, live CUBE coverage here in Las Vegas with Dell Technology World 2019. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Dave, winding down three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We've got two senior executives from Dell Technologies here with us, Greg Bowen, Senior Vice President, CTO of Office of the CIO Dell Technologies and Garry Wiseman, Senior Vice President, office of the CIO. Guys, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thank you. >> Great to be here. >> So, we had Howard on, we had the CFO Tom Sweet on, digital experience is a big part of it. On the news announcements, a lot of Cloud stuff, but also a lot of, you know, workplace, workforce, human resource kind of vibe around Client Edge, digital technologies, unified workspaces, all pointing to the benefits of what Cloud and data can do, ultimately at the end of the day, that's what drive great value in apps, but also, user experience. I mean, people are workin', they're mobile, this is one of the core themes of the show. You guys have a digital, Dell Digital Way kind of mission. What is that about, tell us about that, 'cause you're doing it in internally, you're not even dog footing, you're building it out in real time, rolling it out, take us through the digital, the Dell Digital Way. >> Yeah, so the Dell Digital Way. If you guys ever Google digital transformation, good luck. The first six or seven results are all paid. Someone's trying to sell you the story on digital transformation. We're out there and you know, we're doing it all ourselves. We go to market with the IT transformation, workforce transformation, security and application transformation. A lot of people are choosing to do those one or two at a time. We're trying to do it all at the same time. So we had to develop a way that will allow us to accelerate our path through that, and we call it the Dell Digital Way. It's really a people process and technology transformation that allows us to change our underlying culture, really the way we interact with the business. Start with the business and the User first, and then work backwards from that. So the people part, it's really taking things from big functional silos that have a lot of matrix overlays, and creating small balance teams that own their code. On process, it's taking very large programs that are just generating risk all the way up and breaking those down into small deliverables where you have very low risk. And then on the technology side, this is where we are drinking our own champagne. We're actually employing our reference architecture from VMware and Pivotal all the way through the DM, Dell EMC technologies in our own data centers, So we can operate as a multi Cloud environment as well. >> So it's not just an announcement from the top saying, okay, just go digital. We're hearing from some of the insiders in the hallways here at the conference, it's hardcore. It's training, agile training, and this is not just you know, talk, talk, talk. You guys are actually getting it done with the training. How important has that been? Because at the end of the day, everyone's has all these kind of, they talk the talk, but might not walk the walk. >> It's training and getting the people right. At the end of the day, we have to change 10,000 hearts and minds in order to transform. And that means you have to touch those people, and you have to actually train them to operate in the new world. If you don't do that, you can put all the technology you want into the environment, if they don't know how to use it, it does you no good. So we're starting with getting our people up skilled, getting them trained. We're taking program managers, putting them through full stack developer training. We've got our first 60 that are going to be graduating this summer. And then we're training the rest of them on the Pivotal Way. So that's really about starting with that customer and working backwards, user centered design. >> How do people get the, how do, how do companies get the people's side right? Because you know, we all kind of work the big companies, you guys are a lot bigger. Now that Dell Technologies, where head of the old world was oh, let's reorganize, it's not working. You reorganize as a matrix organization. You know what agile teams, a lot of kind of HR issues that if someone might be great on one team, not great on another, and so it's really about the attraction of talent, retaining talent, knowing when someone's a fit. Is this ad hoc? How you guys get that right? Because that seems to be a big part of it. Because you got to be agile. You don't be doing reorders after the fact Oh, we didn't post the numbers. We weren't successful. Let's reorder, which means failure. So how do you guys get that right? >> I think it's partly skills assessment going in, right? You actually know which people are right for which skills and there's really key, three key skills in this. There's a product manager, the product designer and engineering. And then there's a lot of people that come into the balanced team after the fact. So it's really understanding where your teams are today, and then getting and finding paths for them in the future. I don't know if you have any. >> Well, I also have to say, obviously, being a company that presents itself as one that's modern, from a development standpoint, our infrastructure a place where really the next generation of developer or product manager or designer wants to come and work because they can see how we're really, you know, operating in this, this digital age, is another key thing for us to make sure that as we, as we recruit folks, particularly as we look at college hires, you know, they're looking for those types of places to come to work. And so part of it's the workplace we'd make sure that we have a modern looking workspace, we have, you know, open seating areas, we have lots of collaboration spaces for people to get together in. And then, of course, with the technologies, we're very lucky to have such a rich set of technologies available within the company itself. So we have, you know, the Pivotal methodology we use, but we have Pivotal Cloud Foundry, which is a great way for people to go and build applications and run them in the Cloud. We actually have all of the the things from a security standpoint that help us make sure that our customer data is secure. And so we can give them that insight as we bring them in, if we're trying to recruit people like, you know, the college hires as well as other industry folks that we're trying to track, that we're in this, this big motion and we have scale. Right, that's the, that's the one big difference. >> South of the playbook then is the playbook to get this right as core team. Get that core fabric of the, whatever the objective is, product engineering, and then put tuning people through. And cross pollinating based upon what the situation might be. I need a little Cloud, I need a little bit of hyper convergence. So you kind of, it's kind of like a combined workout. It's kind of like sports. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, I think you know, as Howard had mentioned previously, on some the other sessions, with such a large organization, there are people who are going to be, you know, really game for the change and really want to, you know, shift towards this new way of working. There are folks that are curious, and then there's a small percentage that may decide that this is not a journey they want to be a part of. And so it's really as we go through those, those motions of saying, here are the plans of where we want to go. Who are the people that are going to opt in? And who do we want to help you to move forward from a skills perspective? >> So a couple of challenges that I, that I see, I wonder if you could help us understand how you address, you've got the business, users, apps, and then the tech comes last. Okay, makes sense. But you've got, I'm sure there are a lot of similarities across, how big is Dallas? Like hundreds of thousands of people? Lot of similarities, but there's also some unique requirements. So how do you deal with that? You try to find the overlaps and say, Okay 60%, you know, nail it, and the others, you know, maybe we build snowflakes or maybe we just burned some bridges. How do you guys address those dissimilarities? >> So the good news is, the frameworks that we're building, and the decentralization of decision making allows you to address some of those dissimilarities. We've got applications that have built ground up Cloud native, they're a green field, they've started in the Cloud, they started on PCF. And they are perfectly, really prepared for this journey. We have other applications that have been sitting in the data center for decades, right? And, and everything in between. We found that we can create technology pipelines that can actually get all those applications to production the same way. So there's one thing out of the way, the building process of writing software and deploying it to production standardized. The next step is when you decentralize decision making and you get the product teams to own their code, you get better decisions. So it's about creating a framework that allows you to handle the variety of challenges and use cases that are thrown at you. >> Okay, so you're also a 35 year old company, you got, there's all this technical debt hanging around. How do you deal with that? Maybe you could give some examples of situations where you said, Okay, this part of the portfolio, we're going to leave alone, maybe some old cobalt mainframe. You're not that old, (laughing) Oracle database, and we're not going to touch that. But, but how do you deal with that technical debt challenge? >> Yeah. >> Well, you know, the way we've looked at it is really, where's the need for us to move fast? Because when you look at digital transformation, it's really about making sure that yes, we're customer centric, we have high quality, but also that we can move quickly with the new expected speeds of business. And so we've looked at it in the respect that a lot of the customer facing type of environment, so dell.com, or our b2b site for customers, or anything that's service facing, those are the ones that we want to make sure we focus on iterating quickly versus, you know, the order management system per se. So the order management system, you know, it's, it's an area that we're working on from a transformation standpoint, but it's not as critical to be able to move as quick there to keep up with customer features that they're expecting in this digital age. And so we we look at it from a portfolio standpoint, and again, from an outcome perspective, and where do we want to have an impact with the customers or the employees will feel most immediately? And so that's how we prioritize things in the question. >> Another question, John, I like to ask guys like you, you mentioned drinking your own champagne before, but, well, a lot of times, you know, the product guys are coming to you with, you know, things that are in beta perhaps, champagnes not quite ready yet. (laughing) >> That's want to be champagne, you know. >> So you, I'm sure, have a lot of people trying to hey, try this out, you guys are busy. You're trying to, you know, drive, you know, company value. What role do you play in that regard? In terms of beta testing? You know, do people love you, do they hate you? You like, you tell on them? How does that all work? >> We should be our first and best customer, and actually our hardest one. So, you know, we've actually taken some of the container technology and run it through its paces. And early revs of that just wasn't ready for us. But we did put it into a non production environment and started working on okay, how can we utilize this, for maybe non production workloads, some of the DevOps stuff, we're just needing, say, runners in a container to move code from point A to point B, so we can start flexing it, and exercising it and give feedback where, you know what, it's not going to really handle some of our production workloads. But here's what you need to do. So we want to be the first and hardest customer. >> Yeah, I was going to say it's not always a negative in that, yes, we might encounter issues. So we've we've adopted PCF, the Pivotal Cloud Foundry a lot over the last year and applications. And yes, we discovered things that either it couldn't do, or other issues with, and the fact that we have that close relationship with the product team, we can actually ask for new features that they will actually then go ahead and develop for us in order to support our business. >> I presume there's such a large portfolio, you have to be somewhat selective, right? You can't just take every new product, okay. And so how do you measure the value? What are the key metrics that you're trying to lever? >> Yeah, so when we went and did this, we built a business case, right? Because it's a sizable investment. And we look at adoption of behaviors. So are you adopting the methodology, the Agile pivotal methodology? Are you adopting test driven development, then how does that impact our key performance indicators? Are we reducing user incidents and production incidents? Are we getting stories from the business into production faster? Or is the velocity picking up? And then all of those outcomes lead to the business outcomes. Are we reducing our total spend? Are we becoming more technology focused, more development focused, then say program management focused, so we have a nice cascade of adoption of behaviors key performance indicator changes, and then actually business metric outcomes. >> You guys make it sound so easy. >> Right, Greg and Garry, thanks for spending the time. I know you guys have a hard stop. But I want to get you know, one last, a couple quick questions in. One of the things we're hearing is integration, that part of the whole Dell transformation, a lot of glue layer in the past, lot of SI like work being done in IT. How is that going for you guys? How is the heavy lifting of rolling out consistent infrastructure been? And what kind of experiences is that throwing off for you guys, for the end users? >> So I mean, I'd say, although I've only been at the company for the last couple years, you know, I'm a Dell Technologies employee, not necessarily from, from either business before, but from what I've observed, and from what I've seen so far, integration is actually going very well from a systems perspective for both the companies coming together at scale. We have a North Star. So we have a strategy to make sure that where we have multiple systems we want to end up with, with a single system. We're working towards that over the years. And likewise with the infrastructure. We have data centers that we're using, you know, now across different locations, from both the entities as they came together, that we're continuing to optimize and modernize using the latest Dell technology. So, from my perspective, as someone that came into the company a couple years ago, it's very impressive at how well-- >> That, that's where the efficiencies are going to be right there too, right? >> Yes, it's amazing the same of the same, the sales tools as we're integrating those, and making sure that we have tools where the salespeople can sell the whole portfolio across Dell Technologies is another great thing. >> IT guy told me one time, he says "we're in business when we're out of business". >> Correct. Meaning, you've got that heavy lifting out of the way and shifting to the higher value, you know, capabilities with AI, machine learning, do much more higher crafted things. You guys see it the same way. Not that you're out of business, but you know what I'm saying, when you're invisible, it's good, right? >> Our job is to enable the business ultimately, and if no one knows we're there, that's when it's actually working the best. >> Alright guys, thanks so much real quick, go down the line. What is the, take your IT hats off, take your CIO hats off, put your tech hat on, industry participant observer. What is the most important stories being told here at Dell technology? What's the big takeaway? What's the most important stories? >> Yeah, for me, I also own our AI capabilities and Dell digital. So for us, it's just that, that huge amount of data that's being created on a daily basis, and using technology to do something with it. And I think, you know, you have to be ready and prepared for that. So for me, that's one of the biggest takeaways. >> Garry. >> I would simply say that, you know, the dream, I'll be able to run workloads in, whether it's your own infrastructure, or multiple Clouds that are out there and manage it in a single place. That's one of my big takeaways now that we've, we've released that with the, the Dell Cloud. >> Operational seamlessness and then using data to have specialism in apps in every industry that's unique. Tailor is horizontally scalable, but vertically specialized, very, it's like a whole new world. >> Yeah, very exciting. >> Guys, Congratulations, exciting news. We've been talking about this for three years on theCUBE. A more seems like more. You can see some visibility out there, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Cube coverage here with Dave Vallante, I'm John Furrier. Stay with more day three coverage, two sets here in Las Vegas at Dell technology. We'll be right back.

[upbeat funk music] >> [Female Announcer] From our studios In the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto California This is a Cube Conversation! >> Welcome to the Cube Studios for another Cube Conversation, where we go in depth with thought leaders driving business outcomes with technology. I'm your host, Peter Burris. When we have considered solving storage-related challenges, we found ourselves worrying about things like, how far does the device sit from the server? What kinds of wiring we were going to utilize, what kind of protocol was gonna run over that wiring. These are very physical concerns that were largely driven by the nature of the devices we were using. In a digital business that's using data as an asset, we can't think about storage the same way. We can't approach storage challenges the same way, we need a new mindset to help us better understand how to approach these storage issues, so that we're better serving the business outcomes and not just the device characteristics. Now to have that conversation about this new data services approach, we've got David Floyer, CTO and co-founder of Wikibon and my colleague, here on the Cube with us today. David, welcome to the Cube. >> Many thanks, yes. >> So David, I said upfront that we need a new mindset. Now I know you agree with us, but explain what that new mindset is. >> Yes, I completely agree that that new mindset is required. And it starts with, you want to be able to deal with data, wherever it's gonna be. We are in a hybrid world, a hybrid cloud world. Your own clouds, other public clouds, partner clouds, all of these need to be integrated and data is at the core of it. So that the requirement then is to have rather than think about each individual piece, is to think about services, which are going to be applied to that data and can be applied, not only to the data in one place, but across all of that data. And there isn't such a thing as just one set of services. There're going to be multiple sets of these services available. >> But hope we will see some degree of conversion so- >> Absolutely, yeah, there'll be the same ... >> Lexicon and conceptual, et cetera. >> Yeah, there'll be the same levels of things that are needed within each of these architectures, but there'll be different emphasis on different areas. If you've got a very, very high performance requirement, and recovery, speed of recovery is absolutely paramount with complex databases, then you're going to be thinking about, you know, oracle, cloud per customer as a way of being able to do that sort of thing. If you're wanting to manage containers in an area where it's stateless, then you've got a different set of priorities and requirements that you're gonna put together. >> But you wanna come instead of services. >> Yes. Let me give you an example. So I was talking to a CIO not too long ago, a client, guy I've worked with a lot and I was talking about the development world, and made the observation that you could build really rotten applications in Cobalt but you could also build really rotten applications with Containers. And he totally agreed and the observation he made to me was, you know, what microservices really is, it's an approach to solving a problem, that then suggest new technologies like in Containers, as opposed to being the product that you use to create the new applications. And so in many respects I think it's analogous to notion of data services. We need to look at the way we administer data as a set of services that create outcomes for the business, as opposed to, that are then translated into individual devices. So let's jump into this notion of what those services look like. It seems though we can list off a couple of them. >> Sure, yeah so we must have data reduction techniques. So you must have deduplication, compression, type of techniques and you want apply that across as big an amount of data as you can. The more data you apply those, the higher the levels of compression and deduplication you can get. So that's clearly, you've got those sort of sets of services across there. You must backup and restore data in another place and be able to restore it quickly and easily. There's that again is a service. How quickly, how integrated that recovery, again that's gonna be a variable. >> That's a differentiation in the service. >> Different, exactly. You're gonna need data protection in general. End to end protection of one sort or another. For example, you need end to end encryption across there. It's not longer good enough to say, this bit's been encrypted and then this bit's encrypted. It's gotta be an end to end, from one location to another location, seamlessly provided, that sort of data protection. >> Well let me press on that 'cause I think it's a really important point and it's, you know, the notion that weakest link determines the strength of the chain, right? >> Yeah, yep. >> What you just described says, if you have encryption here and you don't have encryption there, but because of the nature of digital you can start bringing that data together, guess what? The weakest link determines the protection of the old world data. >> The protection of the, absolutely, yes. And then you need services like snapshots, like other services which provide much better usage of that data. One of the great things about Flash and has brought this about is that, you can take a copy of that in real time and use that for a totally different purpose and have that being changed in a different way, so there are some really significantly great improvements you can have with services like snapshots. And then you need some other services which are becoming even more important in my opinion. The advent of bad actors in the world has really brought about the requirement for things like air gaps. To have your data with the metadata all in one place, and completely separated from everything else. There are such things as called logical air gaps, I think as long as they're real, in the real sense that the two paths can't interfere with each other, those are gonna be services which become very, very important indeed. >> And that's generally as an example of a general class of security data service is gonna be required. >> Correct, yes. So ultimately what we're describing is, we're describing a new mindset that says, that a storage administrator has to think about the services that the applications and the business requires and then seek out technologies that can provide those services at the price point, with the degree power consumption, in the space, or the environmentals, or with the type of maintenance and services, really the support that are required, based on the physical location, the degree to which it's under the control, et cetera. Is that kinda how we're thinking about this? >> I think absolutely and again, if there're gonna be multiple of these around in the market place, one size is not gonna fit all. If you're wanting super fast response time at an edge and if you don't get that response in time, it's gonna be no use whatsoever, you're gonna have a different architecture, a different way of doing it, than if you need to be a hundred percent certain that every bit is captured in a financial sort of environment. >> But from the service standpoint you wanna be able to look at that specific solution in a common way across policies and capabilities. >> Correct, correct. >> David Floyer! Once again thanks again for being on the Cube and talking about this important issue and thank you for joining us again. I'm Peter Burris, see you next time. [upbeat funk music]

>> Live from Time Square in New York City, it's theCUBE, covering IBM's Change the Game, Winning with AI. (theCUBE theme music) Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello everybody, welcome back to theCUBE's special presentation. We're covering IBM's announcement. Changing the Game, Winning with AI is the theme of IBM. And IBM has these customer meet-ups, analyst meet-ups, partner meet-ups and they do this in conjunction with Strata every year. And theCUBE has been there covering 'em. I'm Dave Vellante with us is James Wade, who's the Director of Application Hosting at Guidewell, and Hemanth Manda, who's the Director of Platform Offerings at IBM. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Hemanth, let's start with you. Platform offerings. A lot of platforms inside of IBM. What do you mean platform offerings? Which one are you responsible for? >> Yeah, so IBM's data and analytics portfolio is pretty wide. It's close to six billion dollar business. And we have hundred plus products. What we are trying to do, is we're trying to basically build a platform through IBM Cloud Private for Data. Bring capabilities that cuts across our portfolio and build upon it. We also make it open. Support multiple clouds and support other partners who wants to run on the platform. So that's what I'm leading. >> Okay, great and we'll come back and talk about that. But James, tell us more about Guidewell. Where are you guys based? What'd you do and what's your role? >> Guidewell is the largest insurer in the sate of Florida. We have about six and a half million members. We also do about 38, 39% of the government processing for MediCare, MediCaid claims. Very large payer. We've also recently moved in over the provider space. We actually have clinics throughout the state of Florida where our members can go in and actually get services there. So we're actually morphing as a company, away from just an insurance company, really to a healthcare company. Very exciting time to be there. We've doubled in size in the last six years from a six billion dollar company to a, I mean from an eight billion dollar company to an 18 billion dollar company. >> So both health insurer and provider, bringing those two worlds together. And the thinking there is just more efficient, you'd be able to drive efficiencies obviously out of your business, right? >> Yup, yes. I mean, the ultimate goal for us is just to have better health outcomes for our members. And the way you deliver that is, one, you do the insurance right, you do it well. You make sure that their processed and handled properly, that they're getting all the services that they need. But two, from a provider space, how do you take the information that you have about your members and use them in a provider space to make sure they're getting the right prescriptions at the right time, for the right situations that they're having, whatever's going on in their life. >> And keeping cost down. I mean, there's a lot of finger pointing in the industry. If you bring those two areas together, you know, now they got a single throat to choke, >> That's right, we get that too. (laughing) >> Buck stops with you. Okay, and you're responsible for the entire application portfolio across the insurance and the clinical side? >> Yes, I have, you know, be it both sides, we have Guidewell as the holding company, we have multiple companies underneath it. So all of those companies roll up into a single kind of IT infrastructure. And I manage that for them, for the entire company. >> Okay. Talk about the big drivers in you business. Obviously on the insurance side, it's the claims system is the life blood, the agency system to deal with, the channel. And now of course, you've got the clinical thing to worry about, but so, talk about sort of the drivers of your business and what's changing. >> Right, I mean, the biggest change we've had, obviously in last few years, has been the Affordable Care Act. It changed the way that, you know, from a group policy where if you're a big corporation and you work for a big corporation, that company actually buys insurance for you and provides it to their employees. Well now the individual market has grown significantly. We're still a group policy insurance company, don't get me wrong, we have a great portfolio of companies that we work with, but we also now sell directly to individuals. So they're in the consumer space directly. And that's just a different way of interacting with folks. You have to have sales sites. You have to have websites that are up, where folks can come and browse your products. You have to interface with government websites. Like CMS has their site where they set up and you're able to buy products through that. So it's really changed our marketing and sales channels completely. And on the back side, the volume of growth, I mean, with the new individual insurance market we've grown in size significantly in our number of members. And that's really stressed our IT systems, it's stressed our database environment. And it's really stressed our ability to kind of analyze the thing that we're doing. And make sure that we're processing claims efficiently and making sure that the members are getting what they expect from us. So, the velocity and change in size has really stressed us. >> Yeah, so you got the Affordable Care Act and some uncertainties around that, the regulations around that. You've got things like EMR and meaningful use that you got to worry about. So a lot of complexity in the application portfolio. And Hemanth, I imagine this is not a unique discussion that you have with some of your insurance clients and healthcare folks, although, you guys are a little different in that you're bringing those two worlds together. But your thoughts on what you're seeing the marketplace. >> Yeah, so I mean, this is not unique because the data is exploding and there are multiple data sources spread across multiple clouds. So in terms of trying to get a sense of where the data is, how to actually start leveraging it, how to govern it, how to analyze it, is a problem that is across all industry verticals. And especially as we are going through digital transformation right, trying to leverage and monetize your data becomes even more important. So. >> Yeah, so, well let's talk a little bit about the data. So your data, like a lot of companies, you must have a lot of data silos. And we have said on theCUBE a lot, that the innovation engine in the future is data. Applying machine intelligence to that data. Using cloud models, whether that cloud is in a private cloud or a public cloud or now even at the edge. But having a cloud-like experience for scale and agility is critical. So, that seems to be the innovation, whereas, last 20, 30 years the innovation has been you know kind of Moore's Law and being able to get the latest and greatest systems, so I can get data out of my data warehouse faster. So change in the innovation engine driven by data what are you seeing James? >> I mean, absolutely. Again, we go back to the mission of the company. It's to provide better health outcomes for our members, right. And IT, and using the data that we collect more effectively and efficiently, allows us to do that. I mean we, if you take, you know, across the board, you may have four or five doctors that you're working with and they've prescribed multiple things to you, but they're not talking. They have no idea what your other doctor is doing with you, unless you tell 'em and a lot of people forget. So just as an example, we would know as the payer, what you've been prescribed, what you've been using for multiple years. If we see something, using AI, machine learning, that you've just been prescribed is going to have a detrimental impact to something else that you're doing, we can alert you. We can send you SMS messages, we can send you emails, we could alert your doctors. Just to say, hey this could be a problem and it could cause a prescription collision and you can end up in the hospital or worse. And that's just one example of the things that we look at everyday to try to better the outcome for our members. But, you know, that's just the first layer. What else can you do with that? Are there predictive medicines? Are there things we could alert your doctors to, that we're seeing from other places, or populations, that kind of match, you know, your current, you know, kind of what you look like, what you do, what you think, what you're using. All the information we have about you, can we predict health outcomes down the future and let your doctors know? So, exciting time to be in this industry. >> Let's talk about the application architecture to support that outcome, because you know, you're not starting from a green field. You probably got some Cobalt running and it works, you can't mess with that stuff. And traditionally you built, especially in a regulated industry, you're building applications that are hardened. And as I said you have this data silo that really, you know, it's like, it works, don't touch it. How much of a challenge is it for you to enter this sort of new era? And how are you getting there? I'd like to understand, IBM's role as well. >> Well we, it's very challenging, number one. You have your, I don't want to call it legacy 'cause that makes it sound bad, but you do have kind of your legacy environments where we're collecting the information. It's kind of like the silos that have gathered the information, the sales information, the claims information, that type of stuff. But those may not be the best systems currently, to actually do the processing and the data analysis and having the machine learning run against it. So we have, you know, really complex ETL, you know, moving data from our kind of legacy environments in to these newer open source models that you guys support with, you know, IBM Cloud Private for Data. But basically, moving into these open source areas where we can kind of focus our tools on it and learn from that data. So that, you know, having your legacy environment and moving it to the new environment where you can do this processing, has been a challenge. I mean the velocity of change in the new environment, the types of databases that are out there Hadoop and then the products that you guys have that run through the information, that's one of the bigger challenges that we have. Our company is very supportive of IT, they give us plenty of budget, they give us plenty of resources. But even with all of the support that we get, the velocity of change in the new environment, in the AI space and the machine learning, is very difficult to keep up with. >> Yeah and you can't just stop doing what your doing in the existing environment, you still got to make changes to it. You got regulatory, you got hippo stuff that you've got to deal with. So you can't just freeze your code there. So, are things like containers and, you know, cloud native techniques coming into play? >> Absolutely, absolutely. We're developing all, you know, we kind of drew a line in the sand, our CIO about two years ago, line in the sand, everything that we develop now is in our cloud-first strategy. That doesn't necessarily mean it's going to go into the external cloud. We have an internal cloud that we have. And we have a very large power environment at Guidewell. Our mainframe is still sort of a cloud-like infrastructure. So, we developed it to be cloud native, cloud-first. And then if it, you know, more than likely stays in our four walls, but there's also the option that we can move it out. Move it to various clouds that are out there. As an IBM Cloud, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, any of those clouds. So we're developing with a cloud-first strategy all of the new things. Now, like you said, the legacy side, we have to maintain. I mean, still the majority of our business is processing claims for our members, right, and that's still in that kind of legacy environment. Runs on a mainframe in the power environment today. So we have to keep it up and running as well. >> How large of organization are you, head count wise? >> We have about 2,100 IT people at Guidewell. Probably a 17,000 person organization. So there is a significant percentage of the population of our employees that are IT directly. >> I was at a, right 'cause it is a IT heavy business, always has been. I was at a conference recently and they threw out a stat that the average organization has eight clouds. And I said, "we're like a 60 person company "and we have eight clouds." I mean you must have 8,000 clouds. (laughing) Imagine when you through in the SAS and so forth. But, you mentioned a number of other clouds. You mentioned IBM Cloud and some others. So, it's a multi-cloud world. >> Yes, yes. >> Okay, so I'm interested in how IBM is approaching that, right. You're not just saying, okay, IBM Cloud or nothing, I think, you know. And cloud is defined on-prem, off-prem, maybe now at the edge, your thoughts. >> Yeah, so, absolutely, I think that is our strategy. We would like to support all the clouds out there, we don't want to discriminate one versus the other. We do have our own public cloud, but what our strategy is, to support our products and platforms on any cloud. For example, IBM Cloud Private for Data, it can run in the data center, it can provide the benefits of the cloud within your firewall. But if you want to deploy it on any other public cloud infrastructures, such as Amazon or Red Hat OpenStack, we do support it. We are also looking to expand that support to Microsoft and Google in the future. So we are going forward with the multi-cloud strategy. Also, if you look at IBM's strength, right, we have significant on-premise business, right, that's our strength. So we want to basically start with enterprise-out. So by focusing on private cloud, and making sure that customers can actually move their offerings and products to private cloud, we are essentially providing a path for our customers and clients to move cloud, embrace cloud. So that's been our approach. >> So James, I'm interested in how you guys look at cloud-first. When you say cloud-first, first of all, I'm hearing, it's not about where it goes, it's about the experience. So we're going to bring the cloud model to the data, wherever the data lives. It's in the public cloud, of course it's cloud. If we bring it on-prem, we want a cloud-like experience. How do you guys looks at that cloud-like experience? Is it utility pricing, is it defined in sort of agility terms? Maybe you could elaborate. >> Actually, we're trying to go with the agility piece first, right. The hardest thing right now is to keep up with the pace that customers demand. I mean, you know, my boss Paul Stallings always talks about, you know, consumer-grade is now the industrial strength. Now you go home at night, your network at home is very fast to your PC. Your phone, you just hit an app, you always expect it to work. Well, we have to be able to provide that same level of support and reliability in the applications we're deploying inside of our infrastructure. So, to do that, you have to be fast, you have to be agile. And our cloud-first being, how do you get things to market faster, right. So you can build service faster build out your networks faster and build you databases faster. Already have like defined sizes, click a button and it's there. On-demand infrastructure, much like they do in the public loud, We want to have that internally. But second, and our finance department would tell you, is that, you know, most important is the utility piece. So once you can define these individuals modules that you can hit a button and immediately spin up and instantiate, you should be able to figure out what that cost the company. How do you define what a server cost? Total cost of ownership through the lifetime that server is for the company. Because if we can lower thar cost, if we can do these things very well, automate 'em, get the data where it needs to be, spin up quickly, we can reduce our administrative cost and then pass those savings right back to our members. You know, if we can find a way to save your grandmother $20 a month off her health insurance, that can make a lot of difference in a person's life, right. Just by cutting our cost on the IT side, we can deliver savings back to the company. And that's very key to us. >> And in terms of sort of what goes where, I guess it's a function of the physics, right, if there's latencies involved, the economics, which you mentioned are critical obviously in your business. And I guess the laws, you know, the edicts of the government-- >> Yes and the various contracts that you sign with companies. I mean, there's some companies that we deal with it in the state of Florida that want their data to stay in that sate of Florida. Well if you move it out to a various cloud provider, you don't know which data center that it's in. So you have to go, there's the laws and regulations based on your contracts. But you're exactly right. It's what have you signed up for, what've you agreed to, what are your member comfortable with as to where the data can actually go? >> How does IBM help Guidewell and other companies sort of mange through that complexity? >> Yeah, absolutely. So I think, in addition to what James mentioned, right, it's also about agility. Because for example, if you look at insurance applications, there's a specific time period where you probably would expect 10x of load, right. So you should be able to easily scale up and down. And also, as you're changing your business model, if you have new laws, or if you want to go after new businesses, you should be able to easily embrace that, right. So cloud provides sort of flexibility and elasticity and also the agility. So that's one. The other thing that you mentioned around regulation, especially in healthcare and also too with financial services industry. So what we're trying to do is, on our platform, we would like to actually have industry-specific accelerators. We've been working with fortune 500 companies for the last 30, 40 years. So we've gained a depth of knowledge that we currently have within our company. So we want to basically start exposing the accelerators. And this is on our roadmap and will be available fairly quickly. So that's one approach we're taking. The other approach we're taking is, we're also working with our business partners and technology partners because we do believe, in today's world, you cannot go after an opportunity all by yourself. You need to build an ecosystem and that's what we're doing. We're trying to work with, basically, specialty vendors who might be focused on that particular vertical, who can bring the depth in knowledge that we might not be having. And work with them and team up, so that they can build their solutions on top of the platform. So that's another approach that we're taking. >> So I got to ask you, I always ask this question of customers. Why IBM? >> I mean, this, you guys have been a part of our business for so long. You have very detailed sales guys that are embed really with our IT folks. You understand our systems. You understand what we do, when we do it, why we do it. You understand our business cycle. IBM really invests in their customers and understanding what they're doing, what they need to be done. And quite honestly, you guys bring some ideas to the table we haven't even thought of. You have such a breadth of understanding, and you're dealing with so many other companies, you'll see things out there that could be a nugget that we could use. And IBM's never shied of bringing that to us. Just a history and a legacy of really bringing innovative solutions to us to really help our business. And very companies out there really get to know a company's business, as well as IBM does. >> Hemanth I'll give you the last word. We got Change the Game, Winning with AI tonight You go to IBM.com/winwithAI and register there. I just did, I'm part of the analyst program. So, Hemanth, last word for you. >> Yeah, so, I think the world is changing really fast and unless enterprises embrace cloud and embrace artificial intelligence and cloud base their data to monetize new business models, it very hard to compete. Like, digital transformation is impacting every industry vertical, including IBM. So, I think going after this opportunistically is critical. And IBM Cloud Private for Data, the platform provides this. And please join us today, it's going to be a great event. And I look forward to meeting you guys, thank you. >> Awesome, and definitely agree. It's all about your digital meets data, applying machine intelligence, machine learning, AI, to that data. Being able to run it in a cloud-like model so you can scale, you can be fast. That's the innovation sandwich for the future. It's not just about the speed of the processor, or the size of the disk drive, or the flash or whatever is. It's really about that combination. theCUBE bringing you all the intelligence we can find. You're watching CUBE NYC. We'll be right back right after this short break. (theCUBE theme music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Washington D.C. It's Cube Conversations, with John Furrier. >> Hello there, welcome to the special Cube Conversation, I'm John Furrier with the Cube here in Washington D.C. at the headquarters of Amazon Web Services Public Sector, here in Arlington, Virginia, right around the corner from D.C. Our next guest is Robert Groat, with the Executive Vice President of Technology at Smartronix, a service provider in Cloud and an IT. Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you John. >> So we're in D.C. and the Cube's getting the lay of the land, so much innovation happening around Cloud and disruption, you got one group going, scratching their heads, wondering what's happening, some groups saying what happened, and you got people making it happen, right? >> Exactly. >> What's the big "ah-ha" moment people might not know looking into D.C. now? What is the real trend? What are the people that are making it, what are they doing? Is it the Cloud, is it mobile, is it data-driven? >> Yeah, I think it's all of those components, but I think one of the things that you're really seeing is that the Cloud is enabling these organizations, these traditional organizations, to really transform in the way that they deliver and consume IT services. IT services have been a mess in this town for a long time, the contracting process has been a mess, some of the things that happened, some of the smaller organizations have had a chance to be really innovative and take a leadership role in delivering services to the community and not just the large beltway bandits that we've seen in the past. So I think some of the "ah-ha" moments are probably around, you know, we've been working, Smartronix has been working with the public sector and Cloud since 2009, so really one of the early pioneers, and we used to run across all of these issues where security was the blocker, and it would take a long time to convince people that the security in the Cloud really was what it needed to be. Now we're seeing, in terms of an "ah-ha" moment, we're seeing that security is the enabler, we're seeing that these organizations are really embracing the fact that you can do things in the Cloud from the security perspective that you could never do before. And I think that you've got this kind of next generation of managed service provider that embraces those tenants of how to manage services and manage security services and it's really disrupting the way that the Federal Government's done business in the past. >> You know, we were at the Public Sector Summit last June, and we were commeters, the first time the Cube was at an event, which we had been to other ones before that, but it was very clear to me that we're in a no-excuses government at this point, cause there's a lot of forcing functions. You have one, connected social media, and everyone's like hey, why can't I do that over there? It's like the old iPhone moment on the enterprise. Why can't I bring me iPhone to work? You know, years ago, right? >> Exactly. >> Now you have security looking down the barrel, and IOT happening, and you don't have a thing, so you have Swiss cheese called malware, attacking every hole, every corner of the network potentially is compromised. >> Exactly. >> So security is forcing, and we're at cyberwar. >> We are! >> You can't deny that, so why isn't the Congress emergency funding for more security, or is it happening? >> Well, they need to be, but if you look at, if you look at the way traditional data centers are built and on-premise infrastructure is built, you had a variety of contractors coming in, each kind of doing their own thing, you had this heterogeneous infrastructure that was all built and kind of tangled together, and there wasn't this great way of being able to look at Cloud services or be able to look at a Greenfield environment, and have everything that's happening in that environment aware to you. And that's really what the Cloud is enabling. You're actually. >> You mean program the whole infrastructure? >> Programmable infrastructure, exactly. You're actually, every single thing that happens in a Cloud environment ends up being an API call. Each one of those API calls ends up being logged, and when you have every event that's happening in your environment, you don't have that in a traditional data center. When you have every event that's happening in that environment, and you can apply some of these new primatives that AWS is providing around machine learning and AI, now you're using those to attack those vectors that you're talking about, to protect critical infrastructure, really in ways that you couldn't do before, and you can actually, with this programmable infrastructure, you can actually really look at being able to respond to events, and have autonomic response and remediation of these events. So when something happens, you've programmatically defined how you're going to respond to those events, and it's repeatable. >> Yeah, one of the things I'll share with you, I did an interview with, I think it was the CTO or the CSO of Fortinet, which is a security vendor, >> Mhmm. >> And we were talking, and we were totally geeking out, he was like the complexity of the Cloud actually is an advantage in the security, and I said what do you mean by that? He goes, most of the hackers will focus the main payload of their vector on one particular item, and that's where all their energy, if they have to hunt too far, they kind of give up.6 >> It's just like on the battlefield. The surface area of attack matters, and when you have such a wide, vast surface area of attack, there's no way for them to. >> So you agree with that? >> 100% agree with that. >> How is that, how do I turn that complexity, obviously there's a main range of tools to make the Cloud easier, but complexity of scale, how do I turn that as an IT person or a manager, or an executive, into a security advantage? What do I do? >> So the security advantage is that every time you build a rule, every time you think about compliance and maintaining compliance for your organization, you're actually starting to build knowledge and a new capability. That can be applied programmatically now, across your entire set of enclaves that you use for managing infrastructure, so when we develop one thing as a manage service provider, to make sure we're meeting some kind of compliance mandate, that now can be shared across all of our clients in the space, and this can start to really help create that protective ops infrastructure. >> So you scale more observation space to get more data, that gives you also an advantage. >> It does, it does. And then when you can actually take that data and use it to train to understand where these advance persistent threats are, you can then really start to do things, that this was the province of really large organizations, only in the past. And now AWS has democratized that ability to use these tools around artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve security. >> Robert, you can't go back five years without hearing, are you kidding me, that Cloud is insecure. Turns out, Cloud is becoming a better security paradigm than building on site because of human error or other force majors or any kind of other acts. >> That's exactly right. Anybody who's looking at it from a security perspective and thinks that they can have the same kind of security that, you know, a multi-billion dollar company like AWS can provide, they're mistaken. And the main thing around that is, they don't have transparency to every event happening in that environment, and that's what you get when you start to utilize Cloud services. >> Yeah, I think Verizon was the first company that notified me that this might be the trend. I think this was like a 2011 time-frame. Don't discount a multi-tenant Cloud. >> Exactly. >> Like okay, and they realized and have been tracking that like okay, so big trends in technology, tailwinds and headwinds. What trends are tailwinds for the growth, and what are the headwinds, what's the blockers? >> Well the tailwinds is the fact that I think everybody's kind of not resigned to the fact, but they're seeing the Cloud first as probably a strategy that they should take. And, you know, we've seen the government be laggards in the past with adopting new technology, I think what they're seeing now, especially in the Department of Defense, and then some of the Federal organizations that we're working with, they're actually seeing that perhaps their adversaries are having a competitive advantage by moving into the Cloud, maybe they should look at the competitive advantages that they should have moving into the Cloud infrastructure. Not just security, but the ability to be innovative and agile and deliver services much faster than they've ever been able to deliver them before. >> Well we had a different approach and automated actual code bases so that you can actually deploy services and automatically code them up with glue instantly, so it's interesting. >> That is one of the fundamental things, that when you start looking at infrastructure's code, and you look at things that you can make repeatable in these environments, then look at how many times the government's probably built out a particular enterprise software staff, whether it's Share-A-Plan or >> Authentication. >> It all gets repeated, once that gets cauterized and done right with the right subject-matter experts, then you can start to create service catalogs that these organizations can use and rapidly deploy things in a repeatable and manageable fashion. >> This is an open-source ethos. >> It is. >> We're on the shoulders of others, why replicate something that's already a service, throw it in a service catalog, make it a micro-service, make it an API. >> And that culture's finally transformed in the Federal Government, that didn't used to be the culture, right? >> People must be like, finally! >> It used to be, I have to have my arms wrapped around this, I have to be able to understand everything that's happening, and you would always hear some of these larger organizations say, you know, I don't want to have vendor lock-in. Even now sometimes, you'll see it a little bit. I don't want go with, maybe AWS, because I'll have vendor lock-in, yet for dozens of years, they've been locked into proprietary databases to commercial enterprise platforms, these behemoth software things that AWS again has helped to democratize by providing these primitives and allowing people to build things backed on open-source. >> You're speaking our language, we talk about this all the time, the lock-in, there's always a lock-in spec somewhere, if it's good, the issue is proprietary software and switching costs. >> Yes. >> And choice, right? So that the dimensions to evaluate for customers that we've seen that's successful is, okay, I don't mind lock-in if it's a damn good solution, I'm going to lock that in. >> Right. >> But I have choice. This is going to be interesting, right? So the multi-cloud conversation that is going on around the DOD is interesting, we've been reporting and out in the field, we've been getting the data coming in, saying hey, this DOD kind of overture is interesting, because now if they take the same route as the CIA, we're talking about massive infiltration of Amazon Web Services across the government, because that CIA's kicking ass and taking names with Amazon. >> Mhmm. >> Now you've got the DOD looking down potentially a single-cloud option, other vendors are crying foul calling, we need spec in policy, which is a hijack model of putting in multi-cloud requirement. What's your thoughts on that? Should it be requirement or should we jump off? >> Well, for one, when you have innovators in a space and they take a lead in the space, you're going to get, that's a forcing function for other companies to compete, and that's not a bad thing, it really isn't. And a lot of these organizations, there might be reasons that are very valid reasons for them to consider multi-cloud, or even consider what they have within their own on-premise infrastructure. You've got, you know, tens and tens of years of legacy technical debt in your data center, there's not a reason to pull everything into the Cloud environment, there might be reasons to just let that die a slow death and sunset that. >> Got the mainframe. >> And, like the mainframe stuff, for them to look at even migrating mainframe capabilities into the Cloud, it's a lot of rewrite, it's a lot of things that need to happen. And maybe there's ways that you can extend that on-premise environment, breathe a little bit of life into the on-premise environment, while you're building out your new infrastructure. And that's probably the right path to take. >> And some people choose to have Cobalt code running banks right now, and just because they have that process. >> And it's working, and you know, they'll inevitably come to the time that they have to do that migration. >> Great commentary, great to have you on, great to chat about the technology trends. Smartronix, what are you guys doing, how do you guys fit into this trend, take a minute to talk about what you guys do, and your opportunity. >> Sure, Smartronix is about a 20-year-old company, we talk about some of our competitors will talk about being born in the Cloud, we were actually pretty much born in the enterprise, we helped the Marine Core establish their network operation security command, 20 some years ago, we were first to kind of lead virtualization technologies to help the forward-deployed forces move in and create kind of these tactical data centers, mobile data centers that can move into theater, so it's always kind of been on the forefront of network operations and cybersecurity, and innovative solutions, innovative use of technology, in government. >> The battle field's an instant case of how to deploy. >> Absolutely. >> You need wireless. >> Austere environments, you know, low-power, they used to bring trucks in to be able to set up their mobile data center, and we actually using virtualization technology back in 2004, you know. >> You got to push the envelope. >> You have to. >> Your job is to push the envelope. >> And that's really where I think Smartronix has done a really good job, is that we've helped these large organizations that are in very secure and highly-regulated compliance-driven environments, and utilize technology in innovative ways. More securely, and more optimally in these environments. So when we had a chance in 2009, to do a solution for President Obama at the time, they introduced the Recovery Act, they needed a website to track 750 billion dollars worth of funding. We came in with a pretty innovative solution. They said they had 10 weeks to build this, you're not going to do that in a data center environment. We came in with a solution that said on day one, we're going to utilize Amazon Web Services capabilities, we're going to build out the test endeavor while we build out the data center environment, and we're going to make your deadline by October 1st. And that was really the jumpstart of what we did. >> Do you meet your deadline? >> We absolutely did. >> What was that other website that you didn't actually get the deadline done, they had to bring in? >> Yeah, the healthcare. >> Oh, the Obama. >> So this one was recovery.gov, a very well-documented success, it ended up being the very first cloud-first initiative for the Federal Government. The very first government property running on public Cloud infrastructure, and then from there we migrated to >> Well, he doesn't get the credit he deserves on open government. >> He doesn't. >> He opened up data sets, he changed the game. >> He did, and again, that was, I think when you look at historically, when you look back at the CTOs and CIOs of the Federal Government at that time, they were really trying to look to see how commercial technologies could be applied in the government, how you could get that agility and innovation, and speed of business of commercial and do that in the Federal Government. And I think we embraced that at Smartronix pretty early on, and we were kind of on the leading edge sometimes of delivering this kind of abilities and services. >> Literally. So, you guys are the right group to call for IT to get modernized, because this is is problem. No one can hide anymore, there's no more excuses. And again, this is the lack of innovation. If you've been sitting around not innovating, now there's cyberwars attacking, you got cybersecurity, IT needs to transform, they got to do it like really fast. >> You got all of these competing pressures, security, you've got time, you've got cost, you've got capabilities, all of those things competing. You need to have a trusted advisor, a partner, to get you through that. What Smartronix has created, we call it our four pillars, and these are very simple pillars, but it's really really required for really looking at Cloud services strategy. You have to help the organization define what the business outcomes are that they want in these environments, help them think through what the roadmap and strategy is to get there, and then when you go to the second pillar, which is design, there's unique ways to design things to make it cloud-native, to utilize cloud-native services that also, when you get to the implementation and migration point, you're building these in a programmatic way that makes it easier to operate and manage, and that's the fourth pillar. So if you can get these organizations to think from strategy all the way through to run, all the way through to operations management, you're going to have the more effective organization and better services in your environment. >> Robert Groat, Executive Vice President of Technology at Smartronix, thanks for spending that time with me. >> Thanks, John. >> I'm John Furrier with the Cube, in Washington D.C., actually in Arlington, Virginia at Amazon Web Services Public Sector headquarters, thanks for watching. (bright music)