(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and I have two guests here with me today to talk about the hybrid cloud, the multi-cloud trends, and specifically the complexity. While we know these trends provide agility and flexibility for customers, they also bring in complexity. And this session is going to focus on exploring that with RBI and HitachiVantara. Please welcome my guests, Adithya Sastry the SVP of Digital Solutions at HitachiVantara and Werner Mayer, head of group core IT and head of group data at RBI International. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thank you Lisa. Werner, nice to see you again. >> Great to see you both. >> And Werner, we're going to start with you. Talk about RBI. Tell the audience a little bit about what the business is and then we're going to get into your cloud transformation journey over the last couple of years. >> Yes, thank you. So Raiffeisen Bank International is international working banking groups. So our core markets are Central Eastern European, Central Eastern Europe and Austria. And we are serving around 50 million clients in this market. So we active in 13 markets. >> Got it. Talk to me, Werner about the cloud transformation journey that RBI has been on over the last couple of years and some of the complexities that you've experienced as you've launched it. >> Sure. Thank you for the question. So in 2020, we decided that we have to renew our IT strategy. And the aim of the strategy was to change the organization in a way that it can react and adapt fast to the future challenges. So one of the important pillars for us was that we are adapting fast also for new technologies. And this was core pillar in our strategy. So we're searching for technologies which are fit in to our HR transformation. And we found that the cloud and the public cloud environment fits to this venture. So we tested that. We are building up also the competent centers for that and also established the group cloud platform for that. Because our invoice to onboard our international group with the 13 units to this group cloud platform. So that means we have a lot to do to hardening the platforms in terms of security to put in. We have standard for that. We have to introduce large scale programs to train hundreds of engineers. We tested the approach, We convinced the top management and we implemented this, this program. So one of the highlights was, of course, also the the safeguarding of the Ukraine, let's say, banking environment. So we had to lift and shift the complete bank in three months. And it shows that let's say our platforms works. And let's say the approach is proven that we can scale it over the group. >> That's a big challenge. A lot of complexity especially with some of the global things going on. Adithya, these challenges are, are not unique to RBI. A lot of your customers are facing challenges with complexity around cloud management, cloud ops. What can you unpack was the real issue is here? >> Yeah, Lisa, absolutely. And you know, before I answer your question, I do want to, you know, just say a couple of things about Raiffeisen Bank. And you know, we've had the pleasure of working with them for about a year, a little bit more than a year now. And, and, and the way they approach the cloud transformation journey is - should be a template for a lot of the organizations in terms of the preparation in terms of understanding, you know. How other companies have done it and what are the pitfalls. What's worked, and really what's the recipe for their, you know, journey, right? Which is very unique because, you know, you look at you know, being present across 30 different countries within central and eastern Europe as Werner said. And the complexities of dealing with local regulations, GDPR and all these other issues that come with it, right? And not to mention the language variation from country to country. So, you know, phenomenal story there. The journey and the journey still goes, right Werner? It's not complete yet. But Lisa, to your question, you know. When we look at, you know, the complexities of this transformation, that most modern enterprises are going through. It's not very unique, right? What is unique for a Raiffeisen Bank is - has been the preparation. As you get into this journey of moving workloads to cloud, be it refactoring, modernizing, migrating, etc. One of the things that really is often overlooked is: "Are my applications and data workloads resilient on the cloud?" Meaning  how is the performance? Are they just running or are they performing with high availability to meet your customers goals? Is it scalable? And are my cost in line with what I projected when I moved prep. >> Because that's one of the areas we are seeing where you know, what enterprises projected from a cost savings to what they're realizing a year and a half into the journey is a pretty big delta, right? And, and, and a lot of it is dependent on are the cloud - are the applications and the workloads cloud, designed for the cloud? Or are they designed for on-prem which you just move to the cloud. >> So Werner, it sounds like what Adithya said is a compliment to, to you guys and the team at RBI in terms of this being a template for managing complexity. Give us, Werner, your perspective in terms of modern cloud ops. What's in? What's out? What is it that customers really need to be focusing on to be successful? >> Thanks for the compliment, Lisa. And I think this is a great relationship also in the journey. Topic is, is, is a - is a complex program where a lot of things have to fit together. But it was mentioning the resilience. The course, we call it finops, security operations and so on have to come together and have to work on spot. At the end, it's also, let's say, how we are able enabling our teams and how we are ramping out the skills of our teams to deal with these multidimensional, let's say environments. And this is something what we spend a lot of time in order to prepare, but also to bring up the people on a certain level that they can operate at. Because card guard handling is, is different than before. Because beforehand you have central operations team. They do everything for you. But in this world let's say we are also putting the responsibility of the run component of the absent to the - in the tribes and the application teams. And they have to do much more than before. On the other hand, we have first central rules. We have monitoring functions. We have support functions on that in order to best support them in their journey. So this is a hybrid between, let's say, what the teams have to do with the responsibility in the teams, but also with the central functions which are supporting them. And everything have to work together and goes hand in - right, to go hand-in-hand. >> Yeah. Yeah. And if, if I could just add Lisa really quick and and Werner hit the nail on the head, right? Because you cannot look at cloud operation the way we have traditionally looked at managed services. That's the key thing, right? You cannot, you know, traditional managed services you had L1, L2, L3 and then it goes into some sort of a vacuum and then all of a sudden somebody calls you at some point, right? >> Werner: Exactly. >> And it really has flipped, right? To, to Werner's point. And Werner hit that name on the head because you really have to understand. Bring an engineering led approach to make sure that the problems, you know, when you see an issue that you have some level of automation in terms of problem isolation. And then the problem is routed the right individual ie the application engineering team or the data engineering team for resolution in a rapid manner. Right? I think that the key - >> Yes. A very important point with that is said, yeah. So you cannot traditional transport let's say, the operation model what you have now into the cloud because this will not work, yeah. And finally at the end you will not benefit on the technology possibilities there. So super important point. My vision in the cloud and this is also something what we are working on is a sort of zero-ops environment, yeah? Because we're ultimately dealing with the automatization technologies and so on, you can that much - to much more compared to the traditional environment and the benefit of the cloud is: You can test it. You can give it feedback when it is not working, yeah? So it's a completely different operating model. What we try to establish in the cloud environment. >> So really what this seems like guys is is quite a delicate balance that you're solving for. Not the only delicate balance but Werner sticking with you. Talk to us about some of the challenges that you've had around cloud cost management in particular. Help us understand that. >> Thanks for the question. So in principle, we are doing very well on the cost side, surprisingly. And we also started the cloud journey that is said this is not the cost case. Because as I said before, let's say one of the pillars in the strategy strategy was the enablement of technology to the benefit of customer solutions to be adaptive, to be faster. But at the end it turned out that let's say with giving the responsibility of the operation to the dedicated team, they found they - they were working much closer to the cost, and let's say monitoring the cost, then we headed into traditional environments, yeah? I also saw some examples in the group where sort of gamification of the cost were going on. To say who can save more To say who can save more and make more much more out of that what you have in the cloud. And at the end we see that in minimum the cost are balance to the traditional environments in the data centers. But we also saw that let's say, the cost were brought down much more than before. So at the beginning we were relative conservative with the assumptions, yeah? But it turns out that we are really getting the benefit. The things are getting faster and also the costs are going down. And we see this in real cases. >> Yeah. And, and, and Lisa, if I could add something really quick, right? Because - There's been a mad rush to the cloud, right? Everybody kind of, it was, you know, the buzz the buzz was let's get to the cloud. We'll start to realize all these savings. And all of a sudden, everything kind of magically gets better, right? And what we have seen is also, you know, companies or customers or enterprises that have started this journey about 5, 6 years ago and are about, you know, a few years into it. What we are realizing is the cloud costs have increased significantly to what their projections were early on. And the way they're trying to address the cloud cost is by creating a FinOps organization that's looking at, you know, the cost of cloud from a structure standpoint and support as a reactive measure. Saying, "Hey if we move from Azure or one provider to another is there any benefit? If we move certain applications from the cloud back to on-prem, is there any benefit?" When in fact, one of the things that we have noticed really is: The problem needs to shift left to the engineering teams. Because if you are designing the applications and the systems the right way to begin with, then you can manage the data cost issues or the cost overruns, right? So you design for the cloud as opposed to designing and then looking at how do we optimize cloud. >> So Adithya, you talked about the RBI use case as really kind of a template but also some of the challenges with respect to hybrid and multi-cloud are kind of like a chicken and egg scenario. Talk to us kind of like overall about how Hitachi is really helping customers address these challenges and maximize the benefits to get the flexibility to get the agility so that they can deliver what their end user customers are expecting. >> Yeah, yeah. So, so one of the things we are doing, Lisa, when we work with customers, is really trying to understand, you know, look at their entire portfolio of applications, right? And, and look at what the intent of the applications is between customer facing, external customer, internal customer, high availability, production, etc., right? And then we go through a methodology called E3 which is envision, enable and execute. Which is really envision what the end stage should be regardless of what the environment is, right? And then we enable, which is really kind of go through a proof of value to move a few workloads, to modernize, rearchitect, replatform, etc. And look at the benefit of that application on its destination. If it's a cloud - if it's a cloud service provider or if it's another data center, whatever it may be, right? And finally, you know, once we've proven the value and the benefit and and say and kind of monetize the, you know realize the value of it from an agility, from a cost, from security and resilience, etc. Then we go through the execution, which was look we look at the entire portfolio, the entire landscape. And we go through a very disciplined manner working with our customers to roadmap it. And then we execute in a very deliberate manner where you can see value every 2-3 months. Because gone the days when you can do things as a science project that took 2-3 years, right? We, we - Everyone wants to see value, want to see - wants to see progress, and most importantly we want to see cost benefit and agility sooner than later. >> Those are incredibly important outcomes. You guys have done a great job explaining what you're doing together. This sounds like a great relationship. All right, so my last question to both of you is: "If I'm a customer and I'm planning a cloud transformation for my company, what are the two things you want me to remember and consider as I plan this? Werner, we'll start with you. >> I would pick up two things, yeah? The first one is: When you are organizing your company in HR way, then cloud is the HR technology for the HR transformation. Because HR teams needs HR technology. And the second important thing is, what I would say is: Cloud is a large scale and fast moving technology enabler to the company. So if your company is going forward to say: Technology is their enabler tool from a future business then cloud can support this journey. >> Excellent. I'm going to walk away with those. And Adithya, same question to you. I'm a, I'm a customer. I'm at an organization. I'm planning a cloud transformation. Top two things you want me to walk away with. >> Yeah. And I think Werner kind of actually touched on that in the second one, which is: it's not a tech, just an IT or a technology initiative. It is a business initiative, right? Because ultimately what you do from this cloud journey should drive, you know, should lead into business transformation or help your business grow top line or drive margin expansion, etc. So couple of things I would say, right? One is, you know, get Being and prioritize. Work with your business owners, with, you know with the cross-functional team not just the technology team. That's one. The second thing is: as the technology team or the IT team shepherds this journey, you know, keep everyone informed and engaged as you go through this journey. Because as you go through moving workloads modernizing workload, there is an impact to, you know receivables through omnichannel experiences the way customers interact and transact with you, right? And that comes with making making sure your businesses are aware your business stakeholders are aware. So in turn the end customers are aware. So you know, it's not a one and done from an engagement, it's a journey. And bring in the right experts. Talk to people who've done it, done this before, who have kind of stepped in all the pitfalls so you don't have to, right? That's the key. >> That's great advice. That's great advice for anything in life, I think. You talk about the collaboration, the importance of the business and the technology folks coming together. It really has to be - It's a delicate balance as we said before but it really has to be a holistic collaborative approach. Guys, thank you so much for joining me talking through what HitachiVantara and RBI are doing together. It sounds like you're well into this journey and it sounds like it's going quite well. We thank you so much for your insights and your perspectives. >> Thank you, Lisa. Werner, thank you again. >> Good stuff guys. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching our event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and I have two guests here with me today to talk about the hybrid cloud, the multi-cloud trends, and specifically the complexity. While we know these trends provide agility and flexibility for customers, they also bring in complexity. And this session is going to focus on exploring that with RBI and HitachiVantara. Please welcome my guests, Adithya Sastry the SVP of Digital Solutions at HitachiVantara and Werner Mayer, head of group core IT and head of group data at RBI International. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thank you Lisa. Werner, nice to see you again. >> Great to see you both. >> And Werner, we're going to start with you. Talk about RBI. Tell the audience a little bit about what the business is and then we're going to get into your cloud transformation journey over the last couple of years. >> Yes, thank you. So Raiffeisen Bank International is international working banking groups. So our core markets are Central Eastern European, Central Eastern Europe and Austria. And we are serving around 50 million clients in this market. So we active in 13 markets. >> Got it. Talk to me, Werner about the cloud transformation journey that RBI has been on over the last couple of years and some of the complexities that you've experienced as you've launched it. >> Sure. Thank you for the question. So in 2020, we decided that we have to renew our IT strategy. And the aim of the strategy was to change the organization in a way that it can react and adapt fast to the future challenges. So one of the important pillars for us was that we are adapting fast also for new technologies. And this was core pillar in our strategy. So we're searching for technologies which are fit in to our HR transformation. And we found that the cloud and the public cloud environment fits to this venture. So we tested that. We are building up also the competent centers for that and also established the group cloud platform for that. Because our invoice to onboard our international group with the 13 units to this group cloud platform. So that means we have a lot to do to hardening the platforms in terms of security to put in. We have standard for that. We have to introduce large scale programs to train hundreds of engineers. We tested the approach, We convinced the top management and we implemented this, this program. So one of the highlights was, of course, also the the safeguarding of the Ukraine, let's say, banking environment. So we had to lift and shift the complete bank in three months. And it shows that let's say our platforms works. And let's say the approach is proven that we can scale it over the group. >> That's a big challenge. A lot of complexity especially with some of the global things going on. Adithya, these challenges are, are not unique to RBI. A lot of your customers are facing challenges with complexity around cloud management, cloud ops. What can you unpack was the real issue is here? >> Yeah, Lisa, absolutely. And you know, before I answer your question, I do want to, you know, just say a couple of things about Raiffeisen Bank. And you know, we've had the pleasure of working with them for about a year, a little bit more than a year now. And, and, and the way they approach the cloud transformation journey is - should be a template for a lot of the organizations in terms of the preparation in terms of understanding, you know. How other companies have done it and what are the pitfalls. What's worked, and really what's the recipe for their, you know, journey, right? Which is very unique because, you know, you look at you know, being present across 30 different countries within central and eastern Europe as Werner said. And the complexities of dealing with local regulations, GDPR and all these other issues that come with it, right? And not to mention the language variation from country to country. So, you know, phenomenal story there. The journey and the journey still goes, right Werner? It's not complete yet. But Lisa, to your question, you know. When we look at, you know, the complexities of this transformation, that most modern enterprises are going through. It's not very unique, right? What is unique for a Raiffeisen Bank is - has been the preparation. But as you get into this journey of moving workloads to cloud, be it refactoring, modernizing, migrating, etc. One of the things that really is often overlooked is: "Are my applications applications and data workloads resilient on, on the, on the cloud?" Meaning are they - How is the performance? Are they just running or are they performing with high availability to meet your customers goals? Is it scalable? And are my cost in line with what I projected when I moved prep, right? Because that's one of the areas we are seeing where you know, what enterprises projected from a cost savings to what they're realizing a year and a half into the journey is a pretty big delta, right? And, and, and a lot of it is dependent on are the cloud - are the applications and the workloads cloud, designed for the cloud? Or are they designed for on-prem which you just move to the cloud. >> So Werner, it sounds like what Adithya said is a compliment to, to you guys and the team at RBI in terms of this being a template for managing complexity. Give us, Werner, your perspective in terms of modern cloud ops. What's in? What's out? What is it that customers really need to be focusing on to be successful? >> Thanks for the compliment, Lisa. And I think this is a great relationship also in the journey. Topic is, is, is a - is a complex program where a lot of things have to fit together. But it was mentioning the resilience. The course, we call it finops, security operations and so on have to come together and have to work on spot. At the end, it's also, let's say, how we are able enabling our teams and how we are ramping out the skills of our teams to deal with these multidimensional, let's say environments. And this is something what we spend a lot of time in order to prepare, but also to bring up the people on a certain level that they can operate at. Because card guard handling is, is different than before. Because beforehand you have central operations team. They do everything for you. But in this world let's say we are also putting the responsibility of the run component of the absent to the - in the tribes and the application teams. And they have to do much more than before. On the other hand, we have first central rules. We have monitoring functions. We have support functions on that in order to best support them in their journey. So this is a hybrid between, let's say, what the teams have to do with the responsibility in the teams, but also with the central functions which are supporting them. And everything have to work together and goes hand in - right, to go hand-in-hand. >> Yeah. Yeah. And if, if I could just add Lisa really quick and and Werner hit the nail on the head, right? Because you cannot look at cloud operation the way we have traditionally looked at managed services. That's the key thing, right? You cannot, you know, traditional managed services you had L1, L2, L3 and then it goes into some sort of a vacuum and then all of a sudden somebody calls you at some point, right? >> Werner: Exactly. >> And it really has flipped, right? To, to Werner's point. And Werner hit that name on the head because you really have to understand. Bring an engineering led approach to make sure that the problems, you know, when you see an issue that you have some level of automation in terms of problem isolation. And then the problem is routed the right individual ie the application engineering team or the data engineering team for resolution in a rapid manner. Right? I think that the key - >> Yes. A very important point with that is said, yeah. So you cannot traditional transport let's say, the operation model what you have now into the cloud because this will not work, yeah. And finally at the end you will not benefit on the technology possibilities there. So super important point. My vision in the cloud and this is also something what we are working on is a sort of zero-ops environment, yeah? Because we're ultimately dealing with the automatization technologies and so on, you can that much - to much more compared to the traditional environment and the benefit of the cloud is: You can test it. You can give it feedback when it is not working, yeah? So it's a completely different operating model. What we try to establish in the cloud environment. >> So really what this seems like guys is is quite a delicate balance that you're solving for. Not the only delicate balance but Werner sticking with you. Talk to us about some of the challenges that you've had around cloud cost management in particular. Help us understand that. >> Thanks for the question. So in principle, we are doing very well on the cost side, surprisingly. And we also started the cloud journey that is said this is not the cost case. Because as I said before, let's say one of the pillars in the strategy strategy was the enablement of technology to the benefit of customer solutions to be adaptive, to be faster. But at the end it turned out that let's say with giving the responsibility of the operation to the dedicated team, they found they - they were working much closer to the cost, and let's say monitoring the cost, then we headed into traditional environments, yeah? I also saw some examples in the group where sort of gamification of the cost were going on. To say who can save more To say who can save more and make more much more out of that what you have in the cloud. And at the end we see that in minimum the cost are balance to the traditional environments in the data centers. But we also saw that let's say, the cost were brought down much more than before. So at the beginning we were relative conservative with the assumptions, yeah? But it turns out that we are really getting the benefit. The things are getting faster and also the costs are going down. And we see this in real cases. >> Yeah. And, and, and Lisa, if I could add something really quick, right? Because - You know, there's been a mad rush to the cloud, right? Everybody kind of, it was, you know, the buzz the buzz was let's get to the cloud. We'll start to realize all these savings. And all of a sudden, everything kind of magically gets better, right? And what we have seen is also, you know, companies or customers or enterprises that have started this journey about 5, 6 years ago and are about, you know, a few years into it. What we are realizing is the cloud costs have increased significantly to what their projections were early on. And the way they're trying to address the cloud cost is by creating a FinOps organization that's looking at, you know, the cost of cloud from a structure standpoint and support as a reactive measure. Saying, "Hey if we move from Azure or one provider to another is there any benefit? If we move certain applications from the cloud back to on-prem, is there any benefit?" When in fact, one of the things that we have noticed really is: The problem needs to shift left to the engineering teams. Because if you are designing the applications and the systems the right way to begin with, then you can manage the data cost issues or the cost overruns, right? So you design for the cloud as opposed to designing and then looking at how do we optimize cloud. >> So Adithya, you talked about the RBI use case as really kind of a template but also some of the challenges with respect to hybrid and multi-cloud are kind of like a chicken and egg scenario. Talk to us kind of like overall about how Hitachi is really helping customers address these challenges and maximize the benefits to get the flexibility to get the agility so that they can deliver what their end user customers are expecting. >> Yeah, yeah. So, so one of the things we are doing, Lisa, when we work with customers, is really trying to understand, you know, look at their entire portfolio of applications, right? And, and look at what the intent of the applications is between customer facing, external customer, internal customer, high availability, production, etc., right? And then we go through a methodology called E3 which is envision, enable and execute. Which is really envision what the end stage should be regardless of what the environment is, right? And then we enable, which is really kind of go through a proof of value to move a few workloads, to modernize, rearchitect, replatform, etc. And look at the benefit of that application on its destination. If it's a cloud - if it's a cloud service provider or if it's another data center, whatever it may be, right? And finally, you know, once we've proven the value and the benefit and and say and kind of monetize the, you know realize the value of it from an agility, from a cost, from security and resilience, etc. Then we go through the execution, which was look we look at the entire portfolio, the entire landscape. And we go through a very disciplined manner working with our customers to roadmap it. And then we execute in a very deliberate manner where you can see value every 2-3 months. Because gone the days when you can do things as a science project that took 2-3 years, right? We, we - Everyone wants to see value, want to see - wants to see progress, and most importantly we want to see cost benefit and agility sooner than later. >> Those are incredibly important outcomes. You guys have done a great job explaining what you're doing together. This sounds like a great relationship. All right, so my last question to both of you is: "If I'm a customer and I'm planning a cloud transformation for my company, what are the two things you want me to remember and consider as I plan this? Werner, we'll start with you. >> I would pick up two things, yeah? The first one is: When you are organizing your company in HR way, then cloud is the HR technology for the HR transformation. Because HR teams needs HR technology. And the second important thing is, what I would say is: Cloud is a large scale and fast moving technology enabler to the company. So if your company is going forward to say: Technology is their enabler tool from a future business then cloud can support this journey. >> Excellent. I'm going to walk away with those. And Adithya, same question to you. I'm a, I'm a customer. I'm at an organization. I'm planning a cloud transformation. Top two things you want me to walk away with. >> Yeah. And I think Werner kind of actually touched on that in the second one, which is: it's not a tech, just an IT or a technology initiative. It is a business initiative, right? Because ultimately what you do from this cloud journey should drive, you know, should lead into business transformation or help your business grow top line or drive margin expansion, etc. So couple of things I would say, right? One is, you know, get Being and prioritize. Work with your business owners, with, you know with the cross-functional team not just the technology team. That's one. The second thing is: as the technology team or the IT team shepherds this journey, you know, keep everyone informed and engaged as you go through this journey. Because as you go through moving workloads modernizing workload, there is an impact to, you know receivables through omnichannel experiences the way customers interact and transact with you, right? And that comes with making making sure your businesses are aware your business stakeholders are aware. So in turn the end customers are aware. So you know, it's not a one and done from an engagement, it's a journey. And bring in the right experts. Talk to people who've done it, done this before, who have kind of stepped in all the pitfalls so you don't have to, right? That's the key. >> That's great advice. That's great advice for anything in life, I think. You talk about the collaboration, the importance of the business and the technology folks coming together. It really has to be - It's a delicate balance as we said before but it really has to be a holistic collaborative approach. Guys, thank you so much for joining me talking through what HitachiVantara and RBI are doing together. It sounds like you're well into this journey and it sounds like it's going quite well. We thank you so much for your insights and your perspectives. >> Thank you, Lisa. Werner, thank you again. >> Good stuff guys. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching our event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and I have two guests here with me today to talk about the hybrid cloud, the multi-cloud trends, and specifically the complexity. While we know these trends provide agility and flexibility for customers, they also bring in complexity. And this session is going to focus on exploring that with RBI and HitachiVantara. Please welcome my guests, Adithya Sastry the SVP of Digital Solutions at HitachiVantara and Werner Mayer, head of group core IT and head of group data at RBI International. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thank you Lisa. Werner, nice to see you again. >> Great to see you both. >> And Werner, we're going to start with you. Talk about RBI. Tell the audience a little bit about what the business is and then we're going to get into your cloud transformation journey over the last couple of years. >> Yes, thank you. So Raiffeisen Bank International is international working banking groups. So our core markets are Central Eastern European, Central Eastern Europe and Austria. And we are serving around 50 million clients in this market. So we active in 13 markets. >> Got it. Talk to me, Werner about the cloud transformation journey that RBI has been on over the last couple of years and some of the complexities that you've experienced as you've launched it. >> Sure. Thank you for the question. So in 2020, we decided that we have to renew our IT strategy. And the aim of the strategy was to change the organization in a way that it can react and adapt fast to the future challenges. So one of the important pillars for us was that we are adapting fast also for new technologies. And this was core pillar in our strategy. So we're searching for technologies which are fit in to our HR transformation. And we found that the cloud and the public cloud environment fits to this venture. So we tested that. We are building up also the competent centers for that and also established the group cloud platform for that. Because our invoice to onboard our international group with the 13 units to this group cloud platform. So that means we have a lot to do to hardening the platforms in terms of security to put in. We have standard for that. We have to introduce large scale programs to train hundreds of engineers. We tested the approach, We convinced the top management and we implemented this, this program. So one of the highlights was, of course, also the the safeguarding of the Ukraine, let's say, banking environment. So we had to lift and shift the complete bank in three months. And it shows that let's say our platforms works. And let's say the approach is proven that we can scale it over the group. >> That's a big challenge. A lot of complexity especially with some of the global things going on. Adithya, these challenges are, are not unique to RBI. A lot of your customers are facing challenges with complexity around cloud management, cloud ops. What can you unpack was the real issue is here? >> Yeah, Lisa, absolutely. And you know, before I answer your question, I do want to, you know, just say a couple of things about Raiffeisen Bank. And you know, we've had the pleasure of working with them for about a year, a little bit more than a year now. And, and, and the way they approach the cloud transformation journey is - should be a template for a lot of the organizations in terms of the preparation in terms of understanding, you know. How other companies have done it and what are the pitfalls. What's worked, and really what's the recipe for their, you know, journey, right? Which is very unique because, you know, you look at you know, being present across 30 different countries within central and eastern Europe as Werner said. And the complexities of dealing with local regulations, GDPR and all these other issues that come with it, right? And not to mention the language variation from country to country. So, you know, phenomenal story there. The journey and the journey still goes, right Werner? It's not complete yet. But Lisa, to your question, you know. When we look at, you know, the complexities of this transformation, that most modern enterprises are going through. It's not very unique, right? What is unique for a Raiffeisen Bank is - has been the preparation. But as you get into this journey of moving workloads to cloud, be it refactoring, modernizing, migrating, etc. One of the things that really is often overlooked is: "Are my applications applications and data workloads resilient on, on the, on the cloud?" Meaning are they - How is the performance? Are they just running or are they performing with high availability to meet your customers goals? Is it scalable? And are my cost in line with what I projected when I moved prep, right? Because that's one of the areas we are seeing where you know, what enterprises projected from a cost savings to what they're realizing a year and a half into the journey is a pretty big delta, right? And, and, and a lot of it is dependent on are the cloud - are the applications and the workloads cloud, designed for the cloud? Or are they designed for on-prem which you just move to the cloud. >> So Werner, it sounds like what Adithya said is a compliment to, to you guys and the team at RBI in terms of this being a template for managing complexity. Give us, Werner, your perspective in terms of modern cloud ops. What's in? What's out? What is it that customers really need to be focusing on to be successful? >> Thanks for the compliment, Lisa. And I think this is a great relationship also in the journey. Topic is, is, is a - is a complex program where a lot of things have to fit together. But it was mentioning the resilience. The course, we call it finops, security operations and so on have to come together and have to work on spot. At the end, it's also, let's say, how we are able enabling our teams and how we are ramping out the skills of our teams to deal with these multidimensional, let's say environments. And this is something what we spend a lot of time in order to prepare, but also to bring up the people on a certain level that they can operate at. Because card guard handling is, is different than before. Because beforehand you have central operations team. They do everything for you. But in this world let's say we are also putting the responsibility of the run component of the absent to the - in the tribes and the application teams. And they have to do much more than before. On the other hand, we have first central rules. We have monitoring functions. We have support functions on that in order to best support them in their journey. So this is a hybrid between, let's say, what the teams have to do with the responsibility in the teams, but also with the central functions which are supporting them. And everything have to work together and goes hand in - right, to go hand-in-hand. >> Yeah. Yeah. And if, if I could just add Lisa really quick and and Werner hit the nail on the head, right? Because you cannot look at cloud operation the way we have traditionally looked at managed services. That's the key thing, right? You cannot, you know, traditional managed services you had L1, L2, L3 and then it goes into some sort of a vacuum and then all of a sudden somebody calls you at some point, right? >> Werner: Exactly. >> And it really has flipped, right? To, to Werner's point. And Werner hit that name on the head because you really have to understand. Bring an engineering led approach to make sure that the problems, you know, when you see an issue that you have some level of automation in terms of problem isolation. And then the problem is routed the right individual ie the application engineering team or the data engineering team for resolution in a rapid manner. Right? I think that the key - >> Yes. A very important point with that is said, yeah. So you cannot traditional transport let's say, the operation model what you have now into the cloud because this will not work, yeah. And finally at the end you will not benefit on the technology possibilities there. So super important point. My vision in the cloud and this is also something what we are working on is a sort of zero-ops environment, yeah? Because we're ultimately dealing with the automatization technologies and so on, you can that much - to much more compared to the traditional environment and the benefit of the cloud is: You can test it. You can give it feedback when it is not working, yeah? So it's a completely different operating model. What we try to establish in the cloud environment. >> So really what this seems like guys is is quite a delicate balance that you're solving for. Not the only delicate balance but Werner sticking with you. Talk to us about some of the challenges that you've had around cloud cost management in particular. Help us understand that. >> Thanks for the question. So in principle, we are doing very well on the cost side, surprisingly. And we also started the cloud journey that is said this is not the cost case. Because as I said before, let's say one of the pillars in the strategy strategy was the enablement of technology to the benefit of customer solutions to be adaptive, to be faster. But at the end it turned out that let's say with giving the responsibility of the operation to the dedicated team, they found they - they were working much closer to the cost, and let's say monitoring the cost, then we headed into traditional environments, yeah? I also saw some examples in the group where sort of gamification of the cost were going on. To say who can save more To say who can save more and make more much more out of that what you have in the cloud. And at the end we see that in minimum the cost are balance to the traditional environments in the data centers. But we also saw that let's say, the cost were brought down much more than before. So at the beginning we were relative conservative with the assumptions, yeah? But it turns out that we are really getting the benefit. The things are getting faster and also the costs are going down. And we see this in real cases. >> Yeah. And, and, and Lisa, if I could add something really quick, right? Because - You know, there's been a mad rush to the cloud, right? Everybody kind of, it was, you know, the buzz the buzz was let's get to the cloud. We'll start to realize all these savings. And all of a sudden, everything kind of magically gets better, right? And what we have seen is also, you know, companies or customers or enterprises that have started this journey about 5, 6 years ago and are about, you know, a few years into it. What we are realizing is the cloud costs have increased significantly to what their projections were early on. And the way they're trying to address the cloud cost is by creating a FinOps organization that's looking at, you know, the cost of cloud from a structure standpoint and support as a reactive measure. Saying, "Hey if we move from Azure or one provider to another is there any benefit? If we move certain applications from the cloud back to on-prem, is there any benefit?" When in fact, one of the things that we have noticed really is: The problem needs to shift left to the engineering teams. Because if you are designing the applications and the systems the right way to begin with, then you can manage the data cost issues or the cost overruns, right? So you design for the cloud as opposed to designing and then looking at how do we optimize cloud. >> So Adithya, you talked about the RBI use case as really kind of a template but also some of the challenges with respect to hybrid and multi-cloud are kind of like a chicken and egg scenario. Talk to us kind of like overall about how Hitachi is really helping customers address these challenges and maximize the benefits to get the flexibility to get the agility so that they can deliver what their end user customers are expecting. >> Yeah, yeah. So, so one of the things we are doing, Lisa, when we work with customers, is really trying to understand, you know, look at their entire portfolio of applications, right? And, and look at what the intent of the applications is between customer facing, external customer, internal customer, high availability, production, etc., right? And then we go through a methodology called E3 which is envision, enable and execute. Which is really envision what the end stage should be regardless of what the environment is, right? And then we enable, which is really kind of go through a proof of value to move a few workloads, to modernize, rearchitect, replatform, etc. And look at the benefit of that application on its destination. If it's a cloud - if it's a cloud service provider or if it's another data center, whatever it may be, right? And finally, you know, once we've proven the value and the benefit and and say and kind of monetize the, you know realize the value of it from an agility, from a cost, from security and resilience, etc. Then we go through the execution, which was look we look at the entire portfolio, the entire landscape. And we go through a very disciplined manner working with our customers to roadmap it. And then we execute in a very deliberate manner where you can see value every 2-3 months. Because gone the days when you can do things as a science project that took 2-3 years, right? We, we - Everyone wants to see value, want to see - wants to see progress, and most importantly we want to see cost benefit and agility sooner than later. >> Those are incredibly important outcomes. You guys have done a great job explaining what you're doing together. This sounds like a great relationship. All right, so my last question to both of you is: "If I'm a customer and I'm planning a cloud transformation for my company, what are the two things you want me to remember and consider as I plan this? Werner, we'll start with you. >> I would pick up two things, yeah? The first one is: When you are organizing your company in HR way, then cloud is the HR technology for the HR transformation. Because HR teams needs HR technology. And the second important thing is, what I would say is: Cloud is a large scale and fast moving technology enabler to the company. So if your company is going forward to say: Technology is their enabler tool from a future business then cloud can support this journey. >> Excellent. I'm going to walk away with those. And Adithya, same question to you. I'm a, I'm a customer. I'm at an organization. I'm planning a cloud transformation. Top two things you want me to walk away with. >> Yeah. And I think Werner kind of actually touched on that in the second one, which is: it's not a tech, just an IT or a technology initiative. It is a business initiative, right? Because ultimately what you do from this cloud journey should drive, you know, should lead into business transformation or help your business grow top line or drive margin expansion, etc. So couple of things I would say, right? One is, you know, get Being and prioritize. Work with your business owners, with, you know with the cross-functional team not just the technology team. That's one. The second thing is: as the technology team or the IT team shepherds this journey, you know, keep everyone informed and engaged as you go through this journey. Because as you go through moving workloads modernizing workload, there is an impact to, you know receivables through omnichannel experiences the way customers interact and transact with you, right? And that comes with making making sure your businesses are aware your business stakeholders are aware. So in turn the end customers are aware. So you know, it's not a one and done from an engagement, it's a journey. And bring in the right experts. Talk to people who've done it, done this before, who have kind of stepped in all the pitfalls so you don't have to, right? That's the key. >> That's great advice. That's great advice for anything in life, I think. You talk about the collaboration, the importance of the business and the technology folks coming together. It really has to be - It's a delicate balance as we said before but it really has to be a holistic collaborative approach. Guys, thank you so much for joining me talking through what HitachiVantara and RBI are doing together. It sounds like you're well into this journey and it sounds like it's going quite well. We thank you so much for your insights and your perspectives. >> Thank you, Lisa. Werner, thank you again. >> Good stuff guys. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching our event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. (upbeat music)

>>Hello, and welcome to the cubes presentation of the AWS startup showcase. This is season two, episode four, the ongoing series covering exciting startups from the AWS ecosystem to talk about cyber security. I'm your host, John feer. And today we're excited to join by a Mediatel Walker, CEO of Quin security and sub IER, vice president of product management of sequence security gentlemen, thanks for joining us today on this showcase. >>Thank you, John PRAs. >>So the title of this session is continuous API protection life cycle to discover, detect, and defend security. APIs are part of it. They're hardened, everyone's using them, but they're they're target for malicious behavior. This is the focus of this segment. You guys are in the leading edge of this. What are the biggest challenges for organizations right now in assessing their security risks? Because you're seeing APIs all over the place in the news, just even this week, Twitter had a whistleblower come out from the security group, talking about their security plans, misleading the FTC on the bots and some of the malicious behavior inside the API interface of Twitter. This is really a mainstream Washington post is reporting on it. New York times, all the global outlets are talking about this story. This is the risk. I mean, yeah, this is what you guys do protect against this. >>Yeah, this is absolutely top of mind for a lot of security folks today. So obviously in the media and the type of attack that that is being discussed with this whistleblower coming out is called reputation bombing. This is not new. This has been going on since I would say at least eight to 10 years where the, the bad actors are using bots or automation and ultimately using APIs on these large social media platforms, whether it's Facebook, whether it's Twitter or some other social media platform and messing with the reputation system of those large platforms. And what I mean by that is they will do fake likes, fake commenting, fake retweeting in the case of Twitter. And what that means is that things that are, should not be very popular, all of a sudden become popular. That that way they're able to influence things like elections, shopping habits, personnel. >>We, we work with similar profile companies and we see this all the time. We, we mostly work on some of the secondary platforms like dating and other sort of social media platforms around music sharing and things like video sharing. And we see this all the time. These, these bots are bad. Actors are using bots, but ultimately it's an API problem. It's not just a bot problem. And that's what we've been trying to sort of preach to the world, which is your bot problem is subset of your API security challenges that you deal as an organization. >>You know, IMIA, we talked about this in the past on a previous conversation, but this really is front and center mainstream for the whole world to see around the challenges. All companies face, every CSO, every CIO, every board member organizations out there looking at this security posture that spans not just information technology, but physical and now social engineering. You have all kinds of new payloads of malicious behavior that are being compromised through, through things like APIs. This is not just about CSO, chief information security officer. This is chief security officer issues. What's your reaction >>Very much so I think the, this is a security problem, but it's also a reputation problem. In some cases, it's a data governance problem. We work with several companies which have very restrictive data governance and data regulations or data residency regulations there to conform to those regulations. And they have to look at that. It's not just a CSO problem anymore. In case of the, the news of the day to day, this is a platform problem. This goes all the way to the, that time CTO of Twitter. And now the CEO of Twitter, who was in charge of dealing with these problems. We see as just to give you an example, we, we work, we work with a similar sort of social media platform that allows Oop based login to their platform that is using tokens. You can sort of sign in with Facebook, sign in with Twitter, sign in with Google. These are API keys that are generated and trusted by these social media platforms. When we saw that Facebook leaked about 50 million of these login credentials or API keys, this was about three, four years ago. I wrote a blog about it. We saw a huge spike in those API keys being used to log to other social media platforms. So although one social platform might be taking care of its, you know, API or what problem, if something else gets reached somewhere else, it has a cascading impact on a variety of platforms. >>You know, that's a really interesting dynamic. And if you think about just the token piece that you mentioned, that's kind of under the coverage, that's a technology challenge, but also you get in the business logic. So let's go back and, and unpack that, okay, they discontinue the tokens. Now they're being reused here. In the case of Twitter, I was talking to an executive here in Silicon valley and they said, yeah, it's a cautionary tale, for sure. Although Twitter's a unique situation, but they abstract out the business value and say, Hey, they had an M and a deal on the table. And so if someone wants to unwind that deal, all I gotta say is, Hey, there's a bot problem. And now you have essentially new kinds of risk in the business have nothing to do with some sign the technology, okay. They got a security breach, but here with Twitter, you have an, an, an M and a deal, an acquisition that's being contested because of the, the APIs. So, so if you're in business, you gotta think to yourself, what am I risking with my API? So every organization should be assessing their security risks, tied to their APIs. This is a huge awakening for them. Where should they start? And that's the, that's the core question. Okay. You got my attention risks with the API. What do I do? >>So when I talked to you in my previous interview, the start is basically knowing what to, in most cases, you see these that are hitting the wire much. Every now there is a major in cases you'll find these APIs are targeted, that are not poorly protected. They're absolutely just not protected at all, which means the security team or any sort of team that is responsible for protecting these APIs are just completely unaware of these APIs being there in the first place. And this is where we talk about the shadow it or shadow API problem. Large enterprises have teams that are geo distributed, and this problem is escalated after the pandemic even more because now you have teams that are completely distributed. They do M and a. So they acquire new companies and have no visibility into their API or security practices. And so there are a lot of driving factors why these APIs are just not protected and, and just unknown even more to the security team. So the first step has to be discover your API attack surface, and then prioritize which APIs you wanna target in terms of runtime protection. >>Yeah. I wanna dig into that API kind of attack surface area management, runtime monitoring capability in a second, but so I wanna get you in here too, because we're talking about APIs, we're talking about attacks. What does an API attack look like? >>Yeah, that's a very good question, John, there are really two different forms of attacks of APIs, one type of attack, exploits, APIs that have known vulnerabilities or some form of vulnerabilities. For instance, APIs that may use a weak form of authentication or are really built with no authentication at all, or have some sort of vulnerability that makes them very good targets for an attacker to target. And the second form of attack is a more subtle one. It's called business logic abuse. It's, it's utilizing APIs in completely legitimate manner manners, but exploiting those APIs to exfiltrate information or key sensitive information that was probably not thought through by the developer or the designers or those APIs. And really when we do API protection, we really need to be able to handle both of those scenarios, protect against abuse of APIs, such as broken authentication, or broken object level authorization APIs with that problem, as well as protecting APIs from business logic abuse. And that's really how we, you know, differentiate against other vendors in this >>Market. So just what are the, those key differentiated ways to identify the, in the malicious intents with APIs? Can you, can you just summarize that real quick, the three ways? >>Sure. Yeah, absolutely. There are three key ways that we differentiate against our competition. One is in the, we have built out a, in the ability to actually detect such traffic. We have built out a very sophisticated threat intelligence network built over the entire lifetime of the company where we have very well curated information about malicious infrastructures, malicious operators around the world, including not just it address ranges, but also which infrastructures do they operate on and stuff like that, which actually helps a lot in, in many environments in especially B2C environments, that alone accounts for a lot of efficacy for us in detecting our weed out bad traffic. The second aspect is in analyzing the request that are coming in the API traffic that is coming in and from the request itself, being able to tell if there is credential abuse going on or credential stuffing going on or known patterns that the traffic is exhibiting, that looks like it is clearly trying to attack the attack, the APM. >>And the third one is, is really more sophisticated as they go farther and farther. It gets more sophisticated where sequence actually has a lot of machine learning models built in which actually profile the traffic that is coming in and separate. So the legitimate or learns the legitimate traffic from the anomalous or suspicious traffic. So as the traffic, as the API requests are coming in, it automatically can tell that this traffic does not look like legitimate traffic does not look like the traffic that this API typically gets and automatically uses that to figure out, okay, where is this traffic coming from? And automatically takes action to prevent that attack? >>You know, it's interesting APIs have been part of the goodness of cloud and cloud scale. And it reminds me of the old Andy Grove quote, founder of, in one of the founders of Intel, you know, let chaos, let, let the chaos happen, then reign it in it's APIs. You know, a lot of people have been creating them and you've got a lot of different stakeholders involved in creating them. And so now securing them and now manage them. So a lot of creation now you're starting to secure them and now you gotta manage 'em. This all is now big focus. As you pointed out, what are some of the dynamics that customers who have to deal with on the product side and, and organization, let, let chaos rain, and then rain in the chaos, as, as the saying goes, what, what do companies do? >>Yeah. Typically companies start off with like, like a mayor talked about earlier. Discovery is really the key thing to start with, like figuring out what your API attack surfaces and really getting your arms around that problem. And typically we are finding customers start that off from the security organization, the CSO organization to really go after that problem. And in some cases, in some customers, we even find like dedicated centers of excellence that are created for API security, which go after that problem to be able to get their arms around the whole API attack surface and the API protection problem statement. So that's where usually that problem starts to get addressed. >>I mean, organizations and your customers have to stop the attacks. A lot of different techniques, you know, run time. You mentioned that earlier, the surface area monitoring, what's the choice. What's the, where are, where are, where is everybody? Is everyone in the, in the boiling water, like the frog and boiling water or they do, they know it's happening? Like what did they do? What's their opportunity to get in >>Position? Yeah. So I, I think let's take a step back a little bit, right? What has happened is if you draw the cloud security market, if you will, right. Which is the journey to the cloud, the security of these applications or APIs at a container level, in terms of vulnerabilities and, and other things that market grew with the journey to the cloud, pretty much locked in lockstep. What has happened in the API side is the API space has kind of lacked behind the growth and explosion in the API space. So what that means is APIs are getting published way faster than the security teams are able to sort of control and secure them. APIs are getting published in environments that the security completely unaware of. We talked about in the past about the parameter, the parameter, as we know, it doesn't exist anymore. It used to be the case that you hit a CDN, you terminate your SSL, you stop your layer three and four DDoS. >>And then you go into the application and do the business logic. That parameter is just gone because it's now could be living in multi-cloud environment. It could be living in the on-prem environment, which is PubNet is friendly. And so security teams that are used to protecting apps, using a perimeter defense plus changes, it's gone. You need to figure out where your perimeter is. And therefore we sort of recommend an approach, which is have a uniform view across all your APIs, wherever they could be distributed and have a single point of control across those with a solution like sequence. And there are others also in this space, which is giving you that uniform view, which is first giving you that, you know, outside and looking view of what APIs to protect. And then let's, you sort of take the journey of securing the API life cycle. >>So I would say that every company now hear me out on this indulges me for a second. Every company in the world will be non perimeter based, except for maybe 5% because of maybe unique reason, proprietary lockdown, information, whatever. But for most, most companies, everyone will be in the cloud or some cloud native, non perimeter based security posture. So the question is, how does your platform fit into that trajectory? And specifically, why are you guys in the position in your mind to help customers solve this API problem? Because again, APIs have been the greatest thing about the cloud, right? Yeah. So the goodness is there because of APS. Now you gotta reign it in reign in the chaos. Yeah. What, what about your platform share? What is it, why is it win? Why should customers care about this? >>Absolutely. So if you think about it, you're right, the parameter doesn't exist. People have APIs deployed in multiple environments, multicloud hybrid, you name it sequence is uniquely positioned in a way that we can work with your environment. No matter what that environment is. We're the only player in this space that can protect your APIs purely as a SA solution or purely as an on-prem deployment. And that could be a SaaS platform. It doesn't need to be RackN, but we also support that and we could be a hybrid deployment. We have some deployments which are on your prem and the rest of this solution is in our SA. If you think about it, customers have secured their APIs with sequence with 15 minutes, you know, going live from zero to life and getting that protection instantaneously. We have customers that are processing a billion API calls per day, across variety of different cloud environments in sort of six different brands. And so that scale, that flexibility of where we can plug into your infrastructure or be completely off of your infrastructure is something unique to sequence that we offer that nobody else is offering >>Today. Okay. So I'll be, I'll be a naysayer. Yeah, look, it, we are perfectly coded APIs. We are the best in the business. We're locked down. Our APIs are as tight as a drum. Why do I need you? >>So that goes back to who's answer. Of course, >>Everyone's say that that's, that's great, but that's my argument. >>There are two types of API attacks. One is a tactic problem, which is exploiting a vulnerability in an API, right? So what you're saying is my APIs are secure. It does not have any vulnerability I've taken care of all vulnerabilities. The second type of attack that targets APIs is the business logic. Use this stuff in the news this week, which is the whistleblower problem, which is, if you think APIs that Twitter is publishing for users are perfectly secure. They are taking care of all the vulnerabilities and patching them when they find new ones. But it's the business logic of, you know, REWE liking or commenting that the bots are targeting, which they have no against. Right. And then none of the other social networks too. Yeah. So there are many examples. Uber wrote a program to impersonate users in different geo locations to find lifts, pricing, and driver information and passenger information, completely legitimate use of APIs for illegitimate, illegitimate purpose using bots. So you don't need bots by the way, don't, don't make this about bot versus not. Yeah. You can use APIs sort of for the, the purpose that they're not designed for sort of exploiting their business logic, either using a human interacting, a human farm, interacting with those APIs or a bot form targeting those APIs, I think. But that's the problem when you have, even when you've secured all your problem, all your APIs, you still have to worry about these of challenges. >>I think that's the big one. I think the business logic one, certainly the Twitter highlights that the Uber example is a good one. That is basically almost the, the backlash of having a simplistic API, which people design to. Right. Yeah. You know, as you point out, Twitter is very simple API, hardened, very strong security, but they're using it to maliciously manipulate what's inside. So in a way that perimeter's dead too. Right. So how do you stop that business logic? What's the, what's the solution what's the customer do about that? Because their goal is to create simple, scalable APIs. >>Yeah. I'll, I'll give you a little bit, and then I think Subaru should maybe go into a little bit of the depth of the problem, but what I think that the answer lies in what Subaru spoke earlier, which is our ML. AI is, is good at profiling plus split between the API users, are these legitimate users, humans versus bots. That's the first split we do. The split second split we do is even when these, these are classified users as bots, we will say there are some good bots that are necessary for the business and bad bots. So we are able to split this across three types of users, legitimate humans, good bots and bad bots. And just to give you an example of good bots is there are in the financial work, there are aggregators that are scraping your data and aggregating for end users to consume, right? Your, your, and other type of financial aggregators FinTech companies like MX. These are good bots and you wanna allow them to, you know, use your APIs, whereas you wanna stop the bad bots from using your APIs super, if you wanna add so, >>So good bots versus bad bots, that's the focus. Go ahead. Weigh in, weigh in on your thought on this >>Really breaks down into three key areas that we talk about here, sequence, right? One is you start by discovering all your APIs. How many APIs do I have in my environment that ly immediately highlight and say, Hey, you have, you know, 10,000 APIs. And that usually is an eye opener to many customers where they go, wow. I thought we had a 10th of that number. That usually is an eyeopener for them to, to at least know where they're at. The second thing is to tell them detection information. So discover, detect, and defend detect will tell them, Hey, your APIs are getting traffic from. So and so it addresses so and so infrastructure. So and so countries and so on that usually is another eye opener for them. They then get to see where their API traffic is coming from. Let's say, if you are a, if you're running a pizza delivery service out of California and your traffic is coming from Eastern Europe to go, wait a minute, nobody's trying, I'm not, I'm not, I don't deliver pizzas in Eastern Europe. Why am I getting traffic from that part of the world? So that sort of traffic immediately comes up and it will tell you that it is hitting your unauthenticated API. It is hitting your API. That has, that is vulnerable to a broken object level, that authorization, vulnerable be and so on. >>Yeah, I think, and >>Then comes the different aspect. Yeah. The different aspect is where you can take action and say, I wanna block certain types of traffic, or I wanna rate limit certain types of traffic. If, if you're seeing spikes there or you could maybe insert header so that it passes on to the end application and the application team can use that bit to essentially take a, a conscious response. And so, so the platform is very flexible in allowing them to take an action that suits their needs. >>Yeah. And I think this is the big trend. This is why I like what you guys are doing. One APIs we're built for the goodness of cloud. They're now the plumbing, you know, anytime you see plumbing involved, connection points, you know, that's pretty important. People are building it out and it has made the cloud what it is. Now, you got a security challenge. You gotta add more intelligence, more smarts to it. This is where I think platform versus tools matter. Can you guys just quickly share your thoughts on that? Cuz a lot of your customers and, and future customers have dealt with the sprawls of all these different tools. Right? I got a tool for this. I got a tool for that, but people are gravitating towards platforms, but how many platforms can a customer have? So again, this brings up the point point around how you guys are engaging with customers. Can you share your thoughts on tooling platforms? Your customers are constantly inundated with the same tsunami. Isn't new thing. Why, what, how should they look at this? >>Yeah, I mean, we don't wanna be, we don't wanna add to that alert fatigue problem that affects much of the cybersecurity industry by generating a whole bunch of alerts and so on. So what we do is we actually integrate very well with S IEM systems or so systems and allow customers to integrate the information that we are detecting or mitigating and feed them onto enterprise systems like a Splunk or a Datadog where they may have sophisticated processes built in to monitor, you know, spikes in anomalous traffic or actions that are taken by sequence. And that can be their dashboard where a whole bunch of alerting and reporting actually happens. So we play in the security ecosystem very well by integrating with other products and integrate very tightly with them, right outta the box. >>Okay. Mia, this is a wrap up now for the showcase. Really appreciate you guys sharing your awesome technology and very relevant product for your customers and where we are right now in this we call Supercloud or now multi-cloud or hybrid world of cloud. Share a, a little bit about the company, how people can get involved in your solution, how they can consume it and things they should know about, about sequence security. >>Yeah, we've been on this journey, an exciting journey it's been for, for about eight years. We have very large fortune 100 global 500 customers that use our platform on a daily basis. We have some amazing logos, both in Europe and, and, and in us customers are, this is basically not the shelf product customers not only use it, but depend on sequence. Several retailers. We are sitting in front of them handling, you know, black Friday, cyber, Monday, Christmas shopping, or any sort of holiday seasonality shopping. And we have handled that the journey starts by, by just simply looking at your API attack surface, just to a discover call with sequence, figure out where your APIs are posted work with you to prioritize how to protect them in a sort of a particular order and take the whole life cycle with sequence. This is, this is an exciting phase exciting sort of stage in the company's life. We just raised a very sort of large CDC round of funding in December from Menlo ventures. And we are excited to see, you know, what's next in, in, in the next, you know, 12 to 18 months. It certainly is the, you know, one of the top two or three items on the CSOs, you know, budget list for next year. So we are extremely busy, but we are looking for, for what the next 12 to 18 months are, are in store for us. >>Well, congratulations to all the success. So will you run the roadmap? You know, APIs are the plumbing. If you will, you know, they connection points, you know, you want to kind of keep 'em simple, as they say, keep the pipes dumb and make the intelligence around it. You seem to see more and more intelligence coming around, not just securing it, but does, where does this go in your mind? Where, where do we go beyond once we secure everything and manage it properly, APRs, aren't going away, they're only gonna get better and smarter. Where's the intelligence coming share a little bit. >>Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, there's not a dull moment in the space. As digital transformation happens to most enterprise systems, many applications are getting transformed. We are seeing an absolute explosion in the volume of APIs and the types of APIs as well. So the applications that were predominantly limited to data centers sort of deployments are now splintered across multiple different cloud environments are completely microservices based APIs, deep inside a Kubernetes cluster, for instance, and so on. So very exciting stuff in terms of proliferation of volume of APIs, as well as types of APIs, there's nature of APIs. And we are building very sophisticated machine learning models that can analyze traffic patterns of such APIs and automatically tell legitimate behavior from anomalous or suspicious behavior and so on. So very exciting sort of breadth of capabilities that we are looking at. >>Okay. I mean, yeah. I'll give you the final words since you're the CEO for the CSOs out there, the chief information security officers and the chief security officers, what do you want to tell them? If you could give them a quick shout out? What would you say to them? >>My shout out is just do an assessment with sequence. I think this is a repeating thing here, but really get to know your APIs first, before you decide what and where to protect them. That's the one simple thing I can mention for thes >>Am. Thank you so much for, for joining me today. Really appreciate it. >>Thank you. >>Thank you. Okay. That is the end of this segment of the eight of his startup showcase. Season two, episode four, I'm John for your host and we're here with sequin security. Thanks for watching.

>>All right. Let's kick things off. I'm Lisa Martin with Richard Hummel manager of threat intelligence at NetScout. We're going to be talking about the vertical industries where attackers really zeroed in for DDoSs attacks. Richard. This is some interesting findings in the second half of 20 21, 20 21. >>It is in it's unfortunate because I never liked to see individuals or organizations specifically targeted by DDoS attacks and often this kind of individualistic targeting isn't so individual. And what I mean by that is DDoS attacks. Almost always have some form of ripple effects. It collateral damage that extends far beyond who the adversary is going after. We've got an example of this. There's there's been a lot of reports recently about, uh, various void providers, um, starting in Eastern Europe and expanding even to north America and various other parts of the world that have reported this DDoS extortion campaign or crew or whoever it might be copycatting as our eval, which is a notable ransomware group that all those publicly no, no that they were successful. Well, these guys are, are copycatting that unfortunately they've been very successful in some of these attacks and some of the companies have gone on record saying that, look, this didn't just impact us. >>They didn't just take our services offline. None of our customers could make calls. They could not do the reputation damage alone. How many of you users or subscribers did they lose as a result of them not being able to meet phone calls, how much revenue loss during that time period that they're losing out on. I go back all the way back to last year, and we saw something similar with another DDoSs extortion campaign against the New Zealand stock exchange. It was down for almost four days. Just think about the sheer amount of revenue loss and just all of the things that domino effect from there, right? It's not just the exchange commission that had problems. It's not just them. It's all of the stockholders and anybody that couldn't make a trade. And so yes, adversaries absolutely single out organizations, but the damage that it causes to those around them can be astronomical. >>Right? The downstream effects are just go, as you said, the ripple effect just goes on and on. And on. One of the things that I found interesting in the second half of 2021 threat intelligence report was that telecommunications verticals, which are usually a popular target for attackers actually saw fewer attacks in second half. Why is that? What are your thoughts there? >>So I think a lot of this goes back to why we saw a decrease in the second half of the year. Yeah. That decrease is almost exclusively attributed to a decrease in DNS amplification in CLD, DNS being like the predominant, uh, the us attack factor for many, many years, uh, TCP attacks, these direct path attacks that we talked about in our last segment, where they are direct from button ads or they're source from high powered, we're seeing a rebalancing, the scales here. So we're seeing about equal parts of both of these kinds of attacks now versus the reflection amplification that the amplification stuff being predominant. Um, and so that's one of the reasons why we saw that decrease. And when we look at the telecommunications and wired it and wireless, um, these are your consumers. These are your gamers. These are just individuals sitting at home, minding their own business that are getting DDoS attack. >>Then we've talked about it on previous interviews that we've done, that gamers are predominantly the targets of DDoS attacks. And so if we're seeing a decrease in like the preferred method for these attacks to occur, naturally, we're going to see a decrease in some of the attacks against these consumers. But what's notable here in, in telecommunication is considered like this big umbrella, right? You have wired, you have wireless, you have mobile, you have satellite, you have all other telecommunications, which is where your work providers fall. Um, so most of them we saw decreases, but in wireless and all other telecommunications now wireless, remember this 5g advent, and then the other telecommunications with this digital extortion stuff against the void providers. Those are two areas where we saw increases wireless, saw 32% increase and all other telecommunications think void saw at 93% increase. And so we are seeing some increases here, but the higher kind of frequency or attack counts in the wired, um, in a mobile, those saw decreases. >>Let's talk about 5g where, you know, everybody is so excited about it. The adoption is coming. What's going to be the amplification implication of 5g in terms of feeling increased attacks, >>Just the sheer volume. I mean, when we start to introduce 5g, now we're talking about every single device that we have potentially having its own space on the internet. You may have high bandwidth, high throughput capacity. And so we're not talking about just in the home, right. 5g is going to be everywhere. So now just take all of your IOT devices that maybe either be isolated to your home network are now going to be across the entire globe, outside the home on 5g networks that have the capability to launch really fast, really, really potent attacks. And so just the, the footprint really of what we've got to think about from a security perspective and from a defense perspective, it's going to flip things on its head quite a bit, because you're going from here's everything that I'm going to secure inside. My let's just use the castle representation again, everything's inside the castle. >>I put my boundaries in place. I've got my firewalls. I've got my IDs is I've got my access control lists. So anything outside of my sphere or my domain is irrelevant because I don't care about it. Well, 5g is going to blast that away because not only do you not have it on prem anymore, everything starts to get its own direct connection to the internet. How do you secure 5g? Does your organization have that in practice? I mean, ISP is, are still rolling 5g out and are still trying to figure things out as they go, how much more do enterprises and others that are gonna be consumers of this need to figure out how we're going to secure against these. And so, yeah, it's gonna introduce a whole new realm of how we need to think about security, >>A whole new realm, lots to consider there. Another thing besides the wireless telecommunications that that report uncovered was that closely related related software and computer and manufacturing verticals also saw massive increases in attacks. Why talk to us about that? >>You know, I think it's a logical progression of attacks. Um, the last report we put out, we talked about the conduct of the supply chain and what we meant by that was how do we communicate? How do we talk to each other? How do we get into our work, uh, assets? We use a VPN, we use DNS servers. We use internet exchanges to resolve our websites, adversaries increase the tax against those. And that was kind of like the connectivity piece. Well, let's, let's take a step back. What do you need to be able to get online? You need a computer, you need software and you need the ability to store some of this data on your computer. So what we saw 606% increase in attacks against software publishers, 260 and 253% increases against computer manufacturing, computer storage manufacturing together. To me, these are the digital supply chain. >>These are the things that allow us to do what we need to do. And so it's almost like a natural progression. And we see this a lot with DDoS extortion. So take the Lazarus Paramatta guys. We talked about last time, you know, they've initially started against financial organizations going after banks. Then they moved to the stock markets and they moved to insurance brokerages accounts. They moved to travel exchanges, currency exchanges, and they started this domino effect that, you know what, let's go where the money is. Maybe we'll get a payday that didn't work so slowly. They started to expand. Eventually LBA started targeting anybody and everybody in every single industry in vertical. And so what we see here is kind of like a logical progression of, you know, what our, to the supply chain attacks didn't work. And there's a good reason for them because these devices that they're going after are usually very, very secure. And so DDoS attacks, they can absorb them. They can mitigate them that they just bounce off. So can we succeed by going a little bit more upstream or downstream? However you want to look at this by targeting the actual manufacturers themselves, the people who create the software, we need to be able to conduct our business. And so that's kind of the logical progression of what we're seeing here. >>So Richard, how can companies prepare, defend against the attacks against the digital supply chain? That's pretty critical >>Preparation. Preparation is the key. And if we follow best current or best industry practices, um, there's this 80 20 rule that a colleague of mine likes to use. If you do 80% of the recommended things, the best current practices, it solves 80% of your problem and not just for the DDoS problem, but also for things like ransomware, various other, it's really that 20% in there that you have to worry about. And that's going to be being aware, knowing the adversaries are actually going after software publishers who would have funk it. Right. Who would think that they're actually going after the manufacturer of the applications that I'm using to talk to you right now, Lisa, right. Yeah. And so these are the kinds of things that people just aren't always aware of. And so making sure that we're cognizant of the actual targets of these attacks, and then from there, figuring out is there is our business involved in any kind of, of the software publishing. >>Should we be concerned about that? And if not, what about where we're getting our software from? Do they have to worry about this? Is there a risk for them not being able to deliver something to us because they're under bombardment by detail sometimes. And so it's just being aware and taking steps to be able to handle prepare. And I will say it again. You must have some sort of DDoS protections in place. It's not when, or it's not, if it's when you're going to get attacked and everybody, even if you are not the direct target, there's collateral damage as we talked about in the last segment. >>Yep. It's a matter of, if not, when, and that's something that businesses of any size in any industry have to be prepared for, as you said, preparation is really number one. Richard, thank you for sharing some of the really interesting findings and the verticals that have saw massive increases in the second half of 2021. And we look forward to what you're going to uncover next. >>Absolutely. Thanks again for having me. It's been a pleasure. >>Likewise. We want to thank you for watching the program today. Remember all these videos are available@thecubedotnetandyoucancheckoutthenewsfromtodayonsiliconangledotcomandofcoursenetscout.com many thanks to NetScout for making this program possible and sponsoring the cube. This is Lisa Martin signing off. Thanks for watching and bye for now.

>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward for brought to you by UI path. >>Good morning. Welcome to the cubes coverage of UI path forward for day two. Live from the Bellagio in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Velante, Dave. We had a great action packed day yesterday. We're going to have another action packed day today. We've got the CEO coming on. We've got customers coming on, but there's been a lot in the news last 24 hours. Facebook, what are your thoughts? >>Yeah, so wall street journal today, headline Facebook hearing fuels call for rain in on big tech. All right, everybody's going after big tech. Uh, for those of you who missed it, 60 minutes had a, uh, an interview with the whistleblower. Her name is, uh, Francis Haugen. She's very credible, just a little background. I'll give you my take. I mean, she was hired to help set Facebook straight and protect privacy of individuals, of children. And I really feel like, again, she, she didn't come across as, as bitter or antagonistic, but, but I feel as though she feels betrayed, right, I think she was hired to do a job. They lured her in to say, Hey, this is again, just my take to say, Hey, we want your help in earnest to protect the privacy of our users, our citizens, et cetera. And I think she feels betrayed because she's now saying, listen, this is not cool. >>You hired us to do a job. We in earnest, went in and tried to solve this problem. And you guys kind of ignored it and you put profit ahead of safety. And I think that is the fundamental crux of this. Now she made a number of really good points in her hearing yesterday and I'll, and we'll try to summarize, I mean, there's a lot of putting advertising revenue ahead of children's safety and, and, and others. The examples they're using are during the 2020 election, they shut down any sort of negative conversations. They would be really proactive about that, but after the election, they turned it back on and you know, we all know what happened on January 6th. So there's sort of, you know, the senators are trying that night. Um, the second thing is she talked about Facebook as a wall garden, and she made the point yesterday at the congressional hearings that Google actually, you can data scientists, anybody can go download all the data that Google has on you. >>You and I can do that. Right? There's that website that we've gone to and you look at all the data Google has and you kind of freak out. Yeah, you can't do that with Facebook, right? It's all hidden. So it's kind of this big black box. I will say this it's interesting. The calls for breaking up big tech, Bernie Sanders tweeted something out yesterday said that, uh, mark Zuckerberg was worth, I don't know. I think 9 billion in 2007 or eight or nine, whatever it was. And he's worth 122 billion today, which of course is mostly tied up in Facebook stock, but still he's got incredible wealth. And then Bernie went on his red it's time to break up big tech. It's time to get people to pay their fair share, et cetera. I'm intrigued that the senators don't have as much vigilance around other industries, whether it's big pharma, food companies addicting children to sugar and the like, but that doesn't let Facebook. >>No, it doesn't, but, but you ha you bring up a good point. You and I were chatting about this yesterday. What the whistleblower is identifying is scary. It's dangerous. And the vast majority, I think of its users, don't understand it. They're not aware of it. Um, and why is big tech being maybe singled out and use as an example here, when, to your point, you know, the addiction to sugar and other things are, uh, have very serious implications. Why is big tech being singled out here as the poster child for what's going wrong? >>Well, and they're comparing it to big tobacco, which is the last thing you want to be compared to as big tobacco. But the, but the, but the comparison is, is valid in that her claim, the whistleblower's claim was that Facebook had data and research that it knew, it knows it's hurting, you know, you know, young people. And so what did it do? It created, you know, Instagram for kids, uh, or it had 600,000. She had another really interesting comment or maybe one of the senators did. Facebook said, look, we scan our records and you know, kids lie. And we, uh, we kicked 600,000 kids off the network recently who were underaged. And the point was made if you have 600,000 people on your network that are underage, you have to go kill. That's a problem. Right? So now the flip side of this, again, trying to be balanced is Facebook shut down Donald Trump and his nonsense, uh, and basically took him off the platform. >>They kind of thwarted all the hunter Biden stuff, right. So, you know, they did do some, they did. It's not like they didn't take any actions. Uh, and now they're up, you know, in front of the senators getting hammered. But I think the Zuckerberg brings a lot of this on himself because he put out an Instagram he's on his yacht, he's drinking, he's having fun. It's like he doesn't care. And he, you know, who knows, he probably doesn't. She also made the point that he owns an inordinate percentage and controls an inordinate percentage of the stock, I think 52% or 53%. So he can kind of do what he wants. And I guess, you know, coming back to public policy, there's a lot of narrative of, I get the billionaires and I get that, you know, the Mo I'm all for billionaires paying more taxes. >>But if you look at the tax policies that's coming out of the house of representatives, it really doesn't hit the billionaires the way billionaires can. We kind of know the way that they protect their wealth is they don't sell and they take out low interest loans that aren't taxed. And so if you look at the tax policies that are coming out, they're really not going after the billionaires. It's a lot of rhetoric. I like to deal in facts. And so I think, I think there's, there's a lot of disingenuous discourse going on right now at the same time, you know, Facebook, they gotta, they gotta figure it out. They have to really do a better job and become more transparent, or they are going to get broken up. And I think that's a big risk to the, to their franchise and maybe Zuckerberg doesn't care. Maybe he just wants to give it a, give it to the government, say, Hey, are you guys are on? It >>Happens. What do you think would happen with Amazon, Google, apple, some of the other big giants. >>That's a really good question. And I think if you look at the history of the us government, in terms of ant anti monopolistic practices, it spent decade plus going after IBM, you know, at the end of the day and at the same thing with Microsoft at the end of the day, and those are pretty big, you know, high profiles. And then you look at, at T and T the breakup of at T and T if you take IBM, IBM and Microsoft, they were slowed down by the U S government. No question I've in particular had his hands shackled, but it was ultimately their own mistakes that caused their problems. IBM misunderstood. The PC market. It gave its monopoly to Intel and Microsoft, Microsoft for its part. You know, it was hugging windows. They tried to do the windows phone to try to jam windows into everything. >>And then, you know, open source came and, you know, the world woke up and said, oh, there's this internet that's built on Linux. You know, that kind of moderated by at T and T was broken up. And then they were the baby bells, and then they all got absorbed. And now you have, you know, all this big, giant telcos and cable companies. So the history of the U S government in terms of adjudicating monopolistic behavior has not been great at the same time. You know, if companies are breaking the law, they have to be held accountable. I think in the case of Amazon and Google and apple, they, a lot of lawyers and they'll fight it. You look at what China's doing. They just cut right to the chase and they say, don't go to the, they don't litigate. They just say, this is what we're doing. >>Big tech, you can't do a, B and C. We're going to fund a bunch of small startups to go compete. So that's an interesting model. I was talking to John Chambers about this and he said, you know, he was flat out that the Western way is the right way. And I believe in, you know, democracy and so forth. But I think if, to answer your question, I think they'll, they'll slow it down in courts. And I think at some point somebody's going to figure out a way to disrupt these big companies. They always do, you know, >>You're right. They always do >>Right. I mean, you know, the other thing John Chambers points out is that he used to be at 1 28, working for Wang. There is no guarantee that the past is prologue that because you succeeded in the past, you're going to succeed in the future. So, so that's kind of the Facebook break up big tech. I'd like to see a little bit more discussion around, you know, things like food companies and the, like >>You bring up a great point about that, that they're equally harmful in different ways. And yet they're not getting the visibility that a Facebook is getting. And maybe that's because of the number of users that it has worldwide and how many people depend on it for communication, especially in the last 18 months when it was one of the few channels we had to connect and engage >>Well. And, and the whistleblower's point, Facebook puts out this marketing narrative that, Hey, look at all this good we're doing in reality. They're all about the, the, the advertising profits. But you know, I'm not sure what laws they're breaking. They're a public company. They're, they're, they have a responsibility to shareholders. So that's, you know, to be continued. The other big news is, and the headline is banks challenge, apple pay over fees for transactions, right? In 2014, when apple came up with apple pay, all the banks lined up, oh, they had FOMO. They didn't want to miss out on this. So they signed up. Now. They don't like the fact that they have to pay apple fees. They don't like the fact that apple introduced its own credit card. They don't like the fact that they have to pay fees on monthly recurring charges on your, you know, your iTunes. >>And so we talked about this and we talk about it a lot on the cube is that, that in, in, in, in his book, seeing digital David, Michelle, or the author talked about Silicon valley broadly defined. So he's including Seattle, Microsoft, but more so Amazon, et cetera, has a dual disruption agenda. They're not only trying to disrupt horizontally the technology industry, but they're also disrupting industry. We talked about this yesterday, apple and finances. The example here, Amazon, who was a bookseller got into cloud and is in grocery and is doing content. And you're seeing these a large companies, traverse industry value chains, which have historically been very insulated right from that type of competition. And it's all because of digital and data. So it's a very, pretty fascinating trends going on. >>Well, from a financial services perspective, we've been seeing the unbundling of the banks for a while. You know, the big guys with B of A's, those folks are clearly concerned about the smaller, well, I'll say the smaller FinTech disruptors for one, but, but the non FinTech folks, the apples of the world, for example, who aren't in that industry who are now to your point, disrupting horizontally and now going after individual specific industries, ultimately I think as consumers we want, whatever is going to make our lives easier. Um, do you ever, ever, I always kind of scratch my nose when somebody doesn't take apple pay, I'm like, you don't take apple pay so easy. It's so easy to make this easy for me. >>Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's going to be really interesting to see how this plays out. I, I do think, um, you know, it begs the question when will banks or Willbanks lose control of the payment systems. They seem to be doing that already with, with alternative forms of payment, uh, whether it's PayPal or Stripe or apple pay. And then crypto is, uh, with, with, with decentralized finance is a whole nother topic of disruption and innovation, >>Right? Well, these big legacy institutions, these organizations, and we've spoke with some of them yesterday, we're going to be speaking with some of them today. They need to be able to be agile, to transform. They have to have the right culture in order to do that. That's the big one. They have to be willing. I think an open to partner with the broader ecosystem to unlock more opportunities. If they want to be competitive and retain the trust of the clients that they've had for so long. >>I think every industry has a digital disruption scenario. We used to always use the, don't get Uber prized example Uber's coming on today, right? And, and there isn't an industry, whether it's manufacturing or retail or healthcare or, or government that isn't going to get disrupted by digital. And I think the unique piece of this is it's it's data, data, putting data at the core. That's what the big internet giants have done. That's what we're hearing. All these incumbents try to do is to put data. We heard this from Coca-Cola yesterday, we're putting data at the core of our company and what we're enabling through automation and other activities, uh, digital, you know, a company. And so, you know, can these, can these giants, these hundred plus year old giants compete? I think they can because they don't have to invent AI. They can work with companies like UI path and embed AI into their business and focused on, on what they do best. Now, of course, Google and Amazon and Facebook and Microsoft there may be going to have the best AI in the world. But I think ultimately all these companies are on a giant collision course, but the market is so huge that I think there's a lot of, >>There's a tremendous amount of opportunity. I think one of the things that was exciting about talking to one, the female CIO of Coca-Cola yesterday, a hundred plus old organization, and she came in with a very transformative, very different mindset. So when you see these, I always appreciate when I say legacy institutions like Coca-Cola or Merck who was on yesterday, blue cross blue shield who's on today, embracing change, cultural change going. We can't do things the way we used to do, because there are competitors in that review mirror who are smaller, they're more nimble, they're faster. They're going to be, they're going to take our customers away from us. We have to deliver this exceptional customer and employee experience. And Coca-Cola is a great example of one that really came in with CA brought in a disruptor in order to align digital with the CEO's thoughts and processes and organization. These are >>Highly capable companies. We heard from the head of finance at, at applied materials today. He was also coming on. I was quite, I mean, this is a applied materials is really strong company. They're talking about a 20 plus billion dollar company with $120 billion market cap. They supply semiconductor equipment and they're a critical component of the semiconductor supply chain. And we all know what's going on in semiconductors today with a huge shortage. So they're a really important company, but I was impressed with, uh, their finance leaders vision on how they're transforming the company. And it was not like, you know, 10 years out, these were not like aspirational goals. This is like 20, 19, 20, 22. Right. And, and really taking costs out of the business, driving new innovation. And, and it's, it was it's, it's refreshing to me Lisa, to see CFOs, you know, typically just bottom line finance focused on these industry transformations. Now, of course, at the end of the day, it's all about the bottom line, but they see technology as a way to get there. In fact, he put technology right in the middle of his stack. I want to ask him about that too. I actually want to challenge him a little bit on it because he had that big Hadoop elephant in the middle and this as an elephant in the room. And that picture, >>The strategy though, that applied materials had, it was very well thought out, but it was also to your point designed to create outcomes year upon year upon year. And I was looking at some of the notes. I took that in year one, alone, 274 automations in production. That's a lot, 150,000 in annual work hours automated 124 use cases they tackled in one year. >>So I want to, I want to poke at that a little bit too. And I, and I did yesterday with some guests. I feel like, well, let's see. So, um, I believe it was, uh, I forget what guests it was, but she said we don't put anything forward that doesn't hit the income statement. Do you remember that? Yes, it was Chevron because that was pushing her. I'm like, well, you're not firing people. Right. And we saw from IDC data today, only 13% of organizations are saying, or, or, or the organizations at 13% of the value was from reduction in force. And a lot of that was probably in plan anyway, and they just maybe accelerated it. So they're not getting rid of headcount, but they're counting hours saved. So that says to me, there's gotta be an normally or often CFOs say, well, it's that soft dollars because we're redeploying folks. But she said, no, it hits the income statement. So I don't, I want to push a little bit and see how they connect the dots, because if you're going to save hours, you're going to apply people to new work. And so either they're generating revenue or cutting costs somewhere. So, so there's another layer that I want to appeal to understand how that hits the income state. >>Let's talk about some of that IDC data. They announced a new white paper this morning sponsored by UI path. And I want to get your perspectives on some of the stats that they talked about. They were painting a positive picture, an optimistic picture. You know, we can't talk about automation without talking about the fear of job loss. They've been in a very optimistic picture for the actual gains over a few year period. What are your thoughts about that? Especially when we saw that stat 41% slowed hiring. >>Yeah. So, well, first of all, it's a sponsored study. So, you know, and of course the conferences, so it's going to be, be positive, but I will say this about IDC. IDC is a company I would put, you know, forest they're similar. They do sponsored research and they're credible. They don't, they, they have the answer to their audience, so they can't just out garbage. And so it has to be defensible. So I give them credit there that they won't just take whatever the vendor wants them to write and then write it. I've used to work there. And I, and I know the culture and there's a great deal of pride in being able to defend what you do. And if the answer doesn't come out, right, sorry, this is the answer. You know, you could pay a kill fee or I dunno how they handle it today. >>But, but, so my point is I think, and I know the people who did that study, many of them, and I think they're pretty credible. I, I thought by the way, you, to your 41% point. So the, the stat was 13% are gonna reduce head count, right? And then there were two in the middle and then 41% are gonna reduce or defer hiring in the future. And this to me, ties into the Erik Brynjolfsson and, and, and, uh, and, and McAfee work. Andy McAfee work from MIT who said, look, initially actually made back up. They said, look at machines, have always replaced humans. Historically this was in their book, the second machine age and what they said was, but for the first time in history, machines are replacing humans with cognitive functions. And this is sort of, we've never seen this before. It's okay. That's cool. >>And their, their research suggests that near term, this is going to be a negative economic impact, sorry, negative impact on jobs and salaries. And we've, we've generally seen this, the average salary, uh, up until recently has been flat in the United States for years and somewhere in the mid fifties. But longterm, their research shows that, and this is consistent. I think with IDC that it's going to help hiring, right? There's going to be a boost buddy, a net job creator. And there's a, there's a, there's a chasm you've got across, which is education training and skill skillsets, which Brynjolfsson and McAfee focused on things that humans can do that machines can't. And you have this long list and they revisited every year. Like they used to be robots. Couldn't walk upstairs. Well, you see robots upstairs all the time now, but it's empathy, it's creativity. It's things like that. >>Contact that humans are, are much better at than machines, uh, even, even negotiations. And, and so, so that's, those are skills. I don't know where you get those skills. Do you teach those and, you know, MBA class or, you know, there's these. So their point is there needs to be a new thought process around education, public policy, and the like, and, and look at it. You can't protect the past from the future, right? This is inevitable. And we've seen this in terms of economic activity around the world countries that try to protect, you know, a hundred percent employment and don't let competition, they tend to fall behind competitively. You know, the U S is, is not of that category. It's an open market. So I think this is inevitable. >>So a lot about upskilling yesterday, and the number of we talked with PWC about, for example, about what they're doing and a big focus on upscaling. And that was part of the IDC data that was shared this morning. For example, I'll share a stat. This was a survey of 518 people. 68% of upscaled workers had higher salaries than before. They also shared 57% of upskilled workers had higher roles and their enterprises then before. So some, again, two point it's a sponsored study, so it's going to be positive, but there, there was a lot of discussion of upskilling yesterday and the importance on that education, because to your point, we can't have one without the other. You can't give these people access to these tools and not educate them on how to use it and help them help themselves become more relevant to the organization. Get rid of the mundane tasks and be able to start focusing on more strategic business outcome, impacting processes. >>We talked yesterday about, um, I use the example of, of SAP. You, you couldn't have predicted SAP would have won the ERP wars in the early to mid 1990s, but if you could have figured out who was going to apply ERP to their businesses, you know what, you know, manufacturing companies and these global firms, you could have made a lot of money in the stock market by, by identifying those that were going to do that. And we used to say the same thing about big data, and the reason I'm bringing all this up is, you know, the conversations with PWC, Deloitte and others. This is a huge automation, a huge services opportunity. Now, I think the difference between this and the big data era, which is really driven by Hadoop is it was big data was so complicated and you had a lack of data scientists. >>So you had to hire these services firms to come in and fill those gaps. I think this is an enormous services opportunity with automation, but it's not because the software is hard to get to work. It's all around the organizational processes, rethinking those as people process technology, it's about the people in the process, whereas Hadoop and the big data era, it was all about the tech and they would celebrate, Hey, this stuff works great. There are very few companies really made it through that knothole to dominate as we've seen with the big internet giants. So you're seeing all these big services companies playing in this market because as I often say, they like to eat at the trough. I know it's kind of a pejorative, but it's true. So it's huge, huge market, but I'm more optimistic about the outcomes for a broader audience with automation than I was with, you know, big data slash Hadoop, because I think the software as much, as much more adoptable, easier to use, and you've got the cloud and it's just a whole different ball game. >>That's certainly what we heard yesterday from Chevron about the ease of use and that you should be able to see results and returns very quickly. And that's something too that UI path talks about. And a lot of their marketing materials, they have a 96, 90 7% retention rate. They've done a great job building their existing customers land and expand as we talked about yesterday, a great use case for that, but they've done so by making things easy, but hearing that articulated through the voice of their customers, fantastic validation. >>So, you know, the cube is like a little, it's like a interesting tip of the spirits, like a probe. And I will tell you when I, when we first started doing the cube and the early part of the last decade, there were three companies that stood out. It was Splunk service now and Tableau. And the reason they stood out is because they were able to get customers to talk about how great they were. And the light bulb went off for us. We were like, wow, these are three companies to watch. You know, I would tell all my wall street friends, Hey, watch these companies. Yeah. And now you see, you know, with Frank Slootman at snowflake, the war, the cat's out of the bag, everybody knows it's there. And they're expecting, you know, great things. The stock is so priced to perfection. You could argue, it's overpriced. >>The reason I'm bringing this up is in terms of customer loyalty and affinity and customer love. You're getting it here. Absolutely this ecosystem. And the reason I bring that up is because there's a lot of questions in the, in the event last night, it was walking around. I saw a couple of wall street guys who came up to me and said, Hey, I read your stuff. It was good. Let's, let's chat. And there's a lot of skepticism on, on wall street right now about this company. Right? And to me, that's, that's good news for you. Investors who want to do some research, because the words may be not out. You know, they, they, they gotta prove themselves here. And to me, the proof is in the customer and the lifetime value of that customer. So, you know, again, we don't give stock advice. We, we kind of give fundamental observations, but this stock, I think it's trading just about 50. >>Now. I don't think it's going to go to 30, unless the market just tanks. It could have some, you know, if that happens, okay, everything will go down. But I actually think, even though this is a richly priced stock, I think the future of this company is very bright. Obviously, if they continue to execute and we're going to hear from the CEO, right? People don't know Daniel, Denise, right? They're like, who is this guy? You know, he started this company and he's from Eastern Europe. And we know he's never have run a public company before, so they're not diving all in, you know? And so that to me is something that really pay attention to, >>And we can unpack that with him later today. And we've got some great customers on the program. You mentioned Uber's here. Spotify is here, applied materials. I feel like I'm announcing something on Saturday night. Live Uber's here. Spotify is here. All right, Dave, looking forward to a great action packed today. We're going to dig more into this and let's get going. Shall we let's do it. All right. For David Dante, I'm Lisa Martin. This is the cube live in Las Vegas. At the Bellagio. We are coming to you presenting UI path forward for come back right away. Our first guest comes up in just a second.

>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, it's the cube covering UI path forward for brought to you by, >>Hey, welcome to the cubes coverage of forward for UI path forward for live from the Bellagio in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with David. David's great to be back sitting at an anchor desk. >>Yeah, good to see. This is my first show. Since June, we were at mobile world Congress and I've been, I've been doing a number of shows where they'll they'll the host myself would be there with some guests as a pre-record to some simulive show, but this is real live awesome to be working with you again. So we did live last week at a DC public sector summit for AWS next week's cube con. So it's three in a row. So maybe it's a trend. It we'll see. >>Well, the thing that was really surprising was that we were in the keynote briefly this morning. It was standing room only. There are a lot of people at this conference. They think they were expecting about 2000. And to me it looked like there were at least out, if not more >>Funny leases, most companies, if not virtually all of them, except for a handful are canceling physical events. And because they're saying their customers aren't traveling, but I've talked to over a dozen customers here. I just got here yesterday afternoon. I've talked about 10 or 12 customers who are here. They're flying, they're traveling. And we're going to dig into a lot of that. Today. We have Uber coming on the program. We have applied materials coming on, blue cross blue shield. I'm really happy that UI path decided to, to put a number of customers on the cubes so we can test what we're hearing, you know, in the marketing. >>Well, one of the first things that they said in the keynote this morning was we want to hear from our customers, what are we doing? Right? What are we not doing enough of? What do you want more? They've got eight over 8,000 customers. You mentioned some of the ones that are going to be on the program this week, including Chevron and Merck who are on today. And 70% of their revenue comes from existing customers. This is a company that has, is really kind of a use case in land and expand. Yeah. >>And I think you're going to see this trend. You know what it's like with COVID it's day to day, month to month, quarter to quarter, you're trying to figure out, okay, what's the right model. Clearly hybrid is the, is the new abnormal, if you will. And I think we're going to see is, is you're going to have VIP events and this is kind of a VIP event. It's not, you know, 5,000 people, it's kind of 1500, 2000, but there are a lot of VIP customers here. Obviously the partners here. So what they did before the show is they had a partner summit. It was packed. You talk about standing room only. They had a healthcare summit, it was packed. And so they have these little VIP sections, little events within the event, and then they broadcast it out to a wider audience. And I think that's going to be the normal one. I think you're going to see CEO's in a room, maybe in a hotel and in wherever in Manhattan or, or San Francisco. And then they'll broadcast out to that wider audience. I think people are learning how to build better hybrid events, but by the way, this is all new. As I said, hybrid events, I meant virtual events. And now they're learning to learn how to build hybrid events. And that's a nother new process. >>It is, but it's also exciting to see the traction, the momentum that is here from, uh, you know, they, and they IPO at about what six months ago, you covered that your breaking analysis that you did right before the IPO and the breaking analysis that you did last last week, I believe really fascinating. Interesting acceleration is, is a theme. We're going to talk about the acceleration of automation and the momentum that the pandemic is driving. But this is a company that's accelerated everything. As you said on your breaking analysis, lightning in a bottle, this is a company that went global very quickly. We're seeing them as some of the leading companies. We can probably count on one hand who are actually coming back to these hybrid events and say, we want to be with our customers again and learn from you what you're doing, what's going on. And we've got a lot of news to share. >>Yeah, we've been covering UI path since 2015. And the piece we wrote back at IPO was, uh, you, you bypass long, strange trip to IPO and it, and it was strange. And that they kind of hung out as a software development shop for the better part of a decade. And then just listening and learning, writing code, they were kind of geeks writing code and loved it. And then they realized, wow, we have something here we can. And they, their uniqueness is they have a computer vision technology. They have the ability to sort of infer what a form looks like and then actually populated. And the thing that UI path did that was different was they made sound, sounds crazy. They made the product really simple to use, right? And we know simplicity works. We see that with best example in storage, storage, complicated business, pure storage, right? >>They pop it in. You kind of Veeam is another one. It just works. And so they, they created a freemium model that made it easy for departments to start small, you know, maybe for 15, 20, 20 $5,000, you could get a software robot and then it would do things like whatever it, it would pull data out of one spreadsheet, put it into another pull date out of one, SAS populated and people then realize, wow, I am saving a ton of time. I can do some other things. I'm more productive. And other people looking over her shoulder would say, Hey, what is that you're using? Can I get that? And then all of a sudden, like you said, lightning in a bottle and it exploded, not a conventional Silicon valley, you know, funded company, even though they got a lot of funding, they got, they raised close to a billion dollars before they went public. Um, and now they're public went public in April. The stock has been sort of trending downward for the last four or five months, a little bit off on sympathy, but you know, >>What do you think that is? They had such momentum going into it. They clearly have a lot of momentum here. 8,000 plus customers. They've got over 1200 customers with an ARR above a hundred thousand. Why do you think the stock is? >>So I think a couple of things, at least, I think first of all, the street doesn't fully understand this company. You know, Daniel DNAs has never been the CEO of a public company. He's not from Silicon valley. He's, you know, from, from, uh, Eastern Europe and they don't know him that well, uh, they've got, you know, the very, very capable, and so they're educating the streets. So there's a comfort level there. They're looking at their growth and they're inferring from their billings that their growth is, is declining. The new growth from new customers in particular. But there, the ARR is still growing at 60% annually. They also guided a little bit conservatively for the street. And the other thing is they've been profitable. I'm not if a cashflow basis. And then they guided that they would actually be, be somewhat unprofitable in the coming quarter. >>People didn't like that. They don't care about profits until you're somewhat profitable. And then you say, Hey, we're going to be a little less profitable, but of course they get events like this. So that I think it's just a matter of the street, getting to understand them. And I will say this, and you know, this, they're getting a lot of business from their existing customers. We saw this with snowflake, uh, Cleveland research, put out a note saying, oh, Snowflake's new customer growth is slowing. We published research from our friends at ETR that showed well, they're getting a lot of business from existing customers that sort of fat middle is really where they're starting to mind. And you can see this with UI path. The lifetime value of the customers is just growing and growing and growing. And so I'm not as concerned. The stocks, you know, we don't, we don't, we're not the stock advisors, but the stock is just over 50. >>Now it wasn't 90 at one point. So it's got a valuation of somewhere around 26 billion, which was closer to 50 billion. So who knows, maybe this is a buying opportunity. There's not a lot of data. So the technical analyst are saying, well, we really don't know where it's going to cook it down to 30. It could go, could go rock it up from here. I think the point Lisa is, this is a marathon. It's not a sprint, it's a long-term play. And these guys are the leaders. And they're, I think moving away from the pack. And the last thing is this concern about competition from Microsoft who bought a company last year to really in earnest, get into this business. And everybody's afraid of Microsoft. >>Well, one thing that we know that's growing considerably is the total addressable market pre pandemic. It was about 30 billion. It's now north of 60 billion. We've seen the pandemic accelerate a lot of things. Talk to me a little bit about automation as its role in digital transformation from your side. >>Yeah, I think, you know, this is again, it's a really good question because when you look at these total available market numbers, the way that companies virtually all companies, whether it's Dell or Cisco or UI path or anybody, they take data from like Gartner and IDC and they say, okay, these are the markets that we kind of play in, and this is how it's growing. What's really happening. Lisa's all these markets are converging because of digital. So to your question, it's a di what's a digital business. A digital business is a data business and they differentiate by the way in which they use data. And if you're not a digital business during the pandemic, you're out of business. So all of these markets, cloud machine intelligence, AI automation, orchestra, uh, container orchestration, container platforms, they're all coming together as one, it's all being built in as one. >>So 60 billion up from 30 billion, I think it could be a hundred billion. I think, you know, they threw out a stat today that 2% of processes are automated, uh, says to me that, I mean, anything digital is going to be automated. So that is hundreds of billions of dollars of, of market opportunity, right? And so there's no shortage of market opportunity for this company. And that's why, by the way, everybody's entering it. We saw SAP make some acquisitions. We S we see in for talking about it, uh, uh, Salesforce service now, and these SAS companies are all saying, Hey, we can own the automation piece within our stack, what UI path is doing. And the reason why I liked their strategy better is they're a specialist in automation horizontally across all these software stacks. And that's really why their Tam I think is, >>And that gives them quite a big differentiator that horizontal play >>It does. I think I see. So I don't see, I think there's a continuum and I think you got Microsoft over here with Azure and personal productivity in their cloud. And then you've got the pure plays, which are really focusing on a broader automation agenda. That's UI path, that's automation, anywhere I would put blue prism in that category, the blueprints, and by the way, is getting, getting acquired by Vista. And they're gonna merge them with Tipco company that, you know, quite a bit about, and that's an integration play. So that's kind of interesting. I would put them as more of a horizontal play. And then in the fat middle, you've got SAP and in four, and, and, you know, IBM's getting into the game, although they, I think they OEM from a lot of different companies and all those other companies I mentioned before, they're kind of the walled gardens. >>And so I think that UI path is less of a head-to-head competitor with Microsoft today anyway, than it is for instance, with automation anywhere. And it's, and it's growing faster than automation, anywhere from what we can tell. And it's, it's still leader in that horizontal play. You know, you never discount Microsoft, but I think just like for instance, Okta is a specialist in, in, in access identity, access management and privileged, privileged access management and access government, they compete with Microsoft's single sign on, right. But they're a horizontal play. So there's plenty of room for, for both in my view. Anyway, >>Some of the things that you can you think that we're going to hear, you know, seem to be at this inflection point where UI path wants to move away from being an RPA point solution to an enterprise automation platform they made, they made some announcements about vision a couple of years ago at the last in-person event. What are some of the things you think that are going to be announced in the next couple? >>That's a really good question. I'm glad you picked up on that because they started as a point tool essentially. And then they realized, wow, if we're really going to grow as a company, we have to expand that. So they made acquisite, they've been making acquisitions. One of the key acquisitions they made was a company called process gold. So it's funny when we've done previous, uh, RPA events, I've said RPA in its early days was kind of scripts paving the cow path, meaning you're taking existing processes of saying, okay, we're just going to automate them where UI path is headed in others is they're looking across the enterprise and how do we go end to end? How do we take a broader automation agenda and drive automation throughout the entire organization? And I think that's a lot of what we're going to hear from today. We heard that from executives, APAR co co Kaylon, and, um, and, and, and Ted Kumar talked about their engineering and their product vision. And I think you iPad test to show that that's actually what's happening with customers and they have the portfolio to deliver >>Well, those two executives that you just mentioned, and a lot of others are going to be on the program. The next couple of days jam packed. Dave, I'm looking forward to unpacking what UI path is doing. The acceleration in the automation markets. We're going to have a fun couple of days. >>Thanks for coming on here for David >>Lente. I'm Lisa Martin. We're going to be back live from Las Vegas at UI path forward for in just a minute.

>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, it's the cube covering UI path forward for brought to you by, >>Hey, welcome to the cubes coverage of forward for UI path forward for live from the Bellagio in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with David. David's great to be back sitting at an anchor desk. >>Yeah, good to see. This is my first show. Since June, we were at mobile world Congress and I've been, I've been doing a number of shows where they'll they'll the host myself would be there with some guests as a pre-record to some simulive show, but this is real live awesome to be working with you again. So we did live last week at a DC public sector summit for AWS next week's cube con. So it's three in a row. So maybe it's a trend. It we'll see. >>Well, the thing that was really surprising was that we were in the keynote briefly this morning. It was standing room only. There are a lot of people at this conference. They think they were expecting about 2000. And to me it looked like there were at least out, if not more >>Funny leases, most companies, if not virtually all of them, except for a handful are canceling physical events. And because they're saying their customers aren't traveling, but I've talked to over a dozen customers. I just got here yesterday afternoon. I've talked about 10 or 12 customers who are here. They're flying, they're traveling. And we're going to dig into a lot of that. Today. We have Uber coming on the program. We have applied materials coming on, blue cross blue shield. I'm really happy that you AIPAC decided to, to put a number of customers on the cubes so we can test what we're hearing, you know, in the marketing. >>Well, one of the first things that they said in the keynote this morning was we want to hear from our customers, what are we doing? Right? What are we not doing enough of? What do you want more? They've got eight over 8,000 customers. You mentioned some of the ones that are going to be on the program this week, including Chevron and Merck who are on today. And 70% of their revenue comes from existing customers. This is a company that has, is really kind of a use case in land and expand. Yeah. >>And I think you're going to see this trend. You know what it's like with COVID it's day to day, month to month, quarter to quarter, you're trying to figure out, okay, what's the right model. Clearly hybrid is the, is the new abnormal, if you will. And I think we're going to see is, is you're going to have VIP events. And this is kind of a VIP event. It's not, you know, 5,000 people, it's kind of 1500, 2000, but there are a lot of VIP customers here. Obviously the partners here. So what they did before the show is they had a partner summit. It was packed. You talked about standing room only. They had a healthcare summit, it was packed. And so they have these little VIP sections, little events within the event, and then they broadcast it out to a wider audience. And I think that's going to be the normal one. I think you're going to see CEO's in a room, maybe in a hotel and wherever in Manhattan or, or San Francisco. And then they'll broadcast out to that wider audience. I think people are learning how to build better hybrid events, but by the way, this is all new. As I said, hybrid events, I meant virtual events. And now they're learning to learn how to build hybrid events. And that's a whole nother new process. >>It is. But it's also exciting to see the traction, the momentum that is here from, you know, they and they IPO at about what six months ago, you covered that your breaking analysis that you did right before the IPO and the breaking analysis that you did last last week, I believe really fascinating. Interesting acceleration is a theme. We're going to talk about the acceleration of automation and the momentum that the pandemic is driving. But this is a company that's accelerated everything. As you said on your breaking analysis, lightning in a bottle, this is a company that went global very quickly. We're seeing them as some of the leading companies. We can probably count on one hand who are actually coming back to these hybrid events and say, we want to be with our customers again and learn from you what you're doing, what's going on. And we've got a lot of news to share. >>Yeah, we've been covering UI path since 2015. And the piece we wrote back at IPO was, uh, you, you bypass long, strange trip to IPO and it, and it was strange. And that they kind of hung out as a software development shop for the better part of a decade. And then just listening and learning, writing code, they were kind of gigs writing code and loved it. And then they realized, wow, we have something here we can. And they, their uniqueness is they have a computer vision technology. They have the ability to sort of infer what a form looks like and then actually populated. And the thing that UI path did that was different was they made it sound, sounds crazy. They made the product really simple to use, and we know simplicity works. We see that with best example in storage storage, a complicated business, pure storage, right? >>They pop it in. You kind of Veeam is another one. It just works. And so they, they created a freemium model. It made it easy for departments to start small, you know, maybe for 15, 20, 20 $5,000, you could get a software robot and then it would do things like whatever it, it would pull data out of one spreadsheet, put it into another pull date out of one, SAS populated and people then realize, wow, I am saving a ton of time. I can do some other things I'm more productive. And then other people looking over her shoulder would say, Hey, what is that you're using? Can I get that? And then all of a sudden, like you said, lightning in a bottle and it exploded, not a conventional Silicon valley, you know, funded company, even though they got a lot of funding, they got, they raised, I think, close to a billion dollars before they went public. Um, and now they're public went public in April. The stock has been sort of trending downward for the last four or five months, a little bit off on sympathy, but you know, >>What do you think that is? They had such momentum going into it. They clearly have a lot of momentum here. 8,000 plus customers. They've got over 1200 customers with an ARR above a hundred thousand. Why do you think the stock is? >>So I think a couple of things, at least, I think first of all, the street doesn't fully understand this company. You know, Daniel DNAs has never been the CEO of a public company. He's not from Silicon valley. He's, you know, from, from, uh, Eastern Europe and they don't know him that well, uh, they've got, you know, the very, very capable, and so they're educating the streets. So there's a comfort level there. They're looking at their growth and they're inferring from their billings that their growth is, is declining. The new growth from new customers in particular. But there, the ARR is still growing at 60% annually. They also guided a little bit conservatively for the street. And the other thing is they've been profitable. I'm not if a cashflow basis. And then they guided that they would actually be, be somewhat unprofitable in the coming quarter. >>People didn't like that. They don't care about profits until you're somewhat profitable. And then you say, Hey, we're going to be a little less profitable, but of course they get events like this. So that, that, I think it's just a matter of the street getting to understand them. And I will say this, and you know, this, they're getting a lot of business from their existing customers. We saw this with snowflake, uh, Cleveland research, put out a note saying, oh, Snowflake's new customer growth is slowing. We published research from our friends at ETR that showed well, they're getting a lot of business from existing customers that sort of fat middle is really where they're starting to mind. And you can see this with UI path. The lifetime value of the customers is just growing and growing and growing. And so I'm not as concerned. The stocks, you know, we don't, we don't, we're not the stock advisors, but the stock is just over 50. >>Now it wasn't 90 at one point. So it's got a valuation of somewhere around 26 billion, which was closer to 50 billion. So who knows, maybe this is a buying opportunity. There's not a lot of data. So the technical analyst are saying, well, we really don't know where it's going to cook it down to 30. It could go, could go rock it up from here. I think the point Lisa is, this is a marathon. It's not a sprint, it's a long-term play. And these guys are the leaders. And they're, I think moving away from the pack. And the last thing is this concern about competition from Microsoft who bought a company last year to really in earnest, get into this business. And everybody's afraid of Microsoft. >>Well, one thing that we know that's growing considerably is the total addressable market pre pandemic. It was about 30 billion. It's now north of 60 billion. We've seen the pandemic accelerate a lot of things. Talk to me a little bit about automation as its role in digital transformation from your side. >>Yeah, I think, you know, this is again, it's a really good question because when you look at these total available market numbers, the way that companies virtually all companies, whether it's Dell or Cisco or UI path or anybody, they take data from like Gartner and IDC and they say, okay, these are the markets that we kind of play in, and this is how it's growing. What's really happening leases. All these markets are converging because of digital. So to your question, it's a di what's a digital business. A digital business is a data business and they differentiate by the way in which they use data. And if you're not a digital business during the pandemic, you're out of business. So all of these markets, cloud machine intelligence, AI automation, orchestra, uh, container orchestration, container platforms, they're all coming together as one, it's all being built in as one. >>So 60 billion, you know, up from 30 billion, I think it could be a hundred billion. I think, you know, they threw out a stat today that 2% of processes are automated says to me that, I mean, anything digital is going to be automated. So that is hundreds of billions of dollars of, of market opportunity, right? And so there's no shortage of market opportunity for this company. And that's why, by the way, everybody's entering it. We saw SAP make some acquisitions. We S we see in for talking about it, uh, uh, Salesforce, uh, service now, and these SAS companies are all saying, Hey, we can own the automation piece within our stack, what UI path is doing. And the reason why I liked their strategy better is they're a specialist in automation horizontally across all these software stacks. And that's really why they're Tam, I think is, >>And that gives them quite a big differentiator that horizontal play >>It does. I think I see. So I don't see, I think there's a continuum and I think you got Microsoft over here with Azure and personal productivity in their cloud. And then you've got the pure plays, which are really focusing on a broader automation agenda. That's UI path, that's automation, anywhere I would put blue prism in that category blueprints. And by the way, he's getting, getting acquired by Vista, and they're gonna merge them with TIBCO company that, you know, quite a bit about, and that's an integration play. So that's kind of interesting. I would put them as more of a horizontal play. And then in the fat middle, you've got SAP and in four and, you know, IBM is getting to the game. Although they, I think they OEM from a lot of different companies and all those other companies I mentioned before, they're kind of the walled gardens. >>And so I think that UI path is less of a head-to-head competitor with, with Microsoft today anyway, than it is for instance, with automation anywhere. And it's, and it's growing faster than automation, anywhere from what we can tell. And it's, it's still a leader in that horizontal play. You know, you never discount Microsoft, but I think just like for instance, Okta is a specialist in, in, in access identity, access management and privileged, privileged access management and access government, they compete with Microsoft's single sign on, right. But they're a horizontal play. So there's plenty of room for, for both in my view. Anyway, >>Some of the things that you can you think that we're going to hear, you know, seem to be at this inflection point where UI path wants to move away from being an RPA point solution to an enterprise automation platform they made, they made some announcements about vision a couple of years ago at the last in-person event. What are some of the things you think that are going to be announced in the next couple? >>That's a really good question. I'm glad you picked up on that because they started as a point tool essentially. And then they realized, wow, if we're really going to grow as a company, we have to expand that. So they made acquisite, they've been making acquisitions. One of the key acquisitions they made was a company called process gold. So it's funny when we've done previous, uh, RPA events, I've said RPA in its early days was kind of scripts paving the cow path, meaning you're taking existing processes of saying, okay, we're just going to automate them where UI path is headed in others is they're looking across the enterprise and how do we go end to end? How do we take a broader automation agenda and drive automation throughout the entire organization? And I think that's a lot of what we're going to hear from today. We heard that from executives, APAR, co Kaylon, and, um, and, and, and Ted Coomer talked about their engineering and their product vision. And I think you iPad has to show that that's actually what's happening with customers and they have the portfolio to deliver >>Well, those two executives that you just mentioned, and a lot of others are going to be on the program. The next couple of days jam packed. Dave, I'm looking forward to unpacking what UI path is doing. The acceleration in the automation market. We're going to have a fun >>Couple of days. Thanks for coming on here for David >>Lante. I'm Lisa Martin. We're going to be back live from Las Vegas at UI path forward for in just a minute.

(upbeat music) >> (Narrator) From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. Soon we'll be back in person in real life, but this year again it's a virtual conference. I'm John Furrier, your host of the cube for more cube coverage. We've got a great guest here, Debbie Vavangas, Global Garage Lead for IBM Services. Global Garage, great program. Debbie, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> So, we've covered the Garage a lot on theCUBE in the past, and a success, everyone loves the Garage. Things are born in the Garage, entrepreneurship, innovation, has been kind of categorically known for, kind of, the Garage startup. >> Absolutely. >> But also, it's become known for, really, agility, which has been a cloud phenomenon, DevOps. Now we're seeing dev SecOps as a big trend this year with hybrid cloud. So, I've got to ask you, how is Garage doing with the pandemic? Obviously, I can almost imagine people at home kind of disrupted from the office, but maybe more creativity, maybe more energy online? What's going on with the Garage? How has your transformation journey been with COVID? >> Well, John, COVID has been the leveler for us all, right? There isn't a person who hasn't had some challenge or some complexity to And that includes our clients. And I'm incredibly proud to be able to say that IBM Garage, because it is so digitally native, when the COVID pandemic has struck around the world every single one of our Garages was able to switch to being virtual without fail, without a single days lost productivity. And that's hugely beneficial to clients who are on an incredibly time-sensitive journey. And so, we've seen as a result of COVID actually there are a huge acceleration in Garages, for two reasons. So, number one, from a virtualization perspective, actually it's much easier when everybodies together in the same space. So everybody's together virtually in the same space, and we've seen, you know, acceleration in our velocity, in our collaboration, because everybody is really learning how to work in that same space. But two, because of the pandemic, because of the pressure on our client's needs to make decisions fast, know not guess, really be focused on their outcomes, not just doing stuff, the Garage really plays to that objective for them. And so we've seen a huge rise, you know, we've gone from in 2019 to just a few hundred garages, to finishing 2020 with over two and a half thousand garages. And it being embedded across services and with the goal of being the primary way our clients experience it. So COVID has been a big accelerator. >> Sorry, Debbie, can you repeat the numbers again? I just want to capture that, I missed that. >> Sure, sure. >> I did a double take on the numbers. (Debbie laughs) >> So then, we finished 2019 with just under 300 garages, and we finished 2020 with just over two and a half thousand. So, we've had a huge growth, and it isn't just the number of garages, it's the range of garages and what we're serving with our clients, and how we're collaborating with our clients, and the topics we're unpacking that has really broadened. >> Yeah, I mean I covered, and we've reported on the Garage on theCUBE and also on www.siliconangle.com in the past things and through your news coverage, but that's amazing growth. I got to believe the tailwind from COVID and just the energy around it has energized you. I want to get your thoughts on that because, you know, what we've reported on in the past has been about design thinking, human-centered design, all of those beautiful things that come with cloud-scale, right? You know, you're moving faster, you're innovating, and so that's been kind of there. But what you're getting at with this growth is, and with COVID has proven, and again, we've been pointing this out, you're seeing the pattern, it's clear. Companies are either retrenching, okay, which is refactoring, redesigning, doing those things to kind of get ready to come out of COVID with a growth strategy, and you're seeing other companies build net new innovations. So, they're building new capabilities, because COVID's shown them, kind of pulled back the curtain if you will on where the action is. So, this means there's two threads going on. You've got, "Okay, I've got to transform my business, and I got to refactor', or 'Hey, we got net new business models'. These are kind of two different things and not mutually exclusive. What's your comment on that? >> And I think that my comment on it is that is the sweet spot that Garage comes into its own, right? You mentioned lots of things in there. You talked about design thinking, and agility, and, you know, these other buzzwords that are used all the time, and Garage of course is synonymous with those. Of course, Garage uses the best design thinking, and AGILE practices, and all of those things that absolutely call to what we do. DevOps, even through down to DesignOps. You know, we have the whole range depending on what the client objective is. But, I think what is really happening now is that innovation being something separate is no longer how to accelerate your outcomes, and your business outcomes. Regardless of whether that is in refactoring and modernizing your existing estate, or diversifying, creating new ecosystems, new platforms, new offerings. Regardless of what that is, you can't do it separate to your core business. I mean, it's a well known fact, John, right? Like 75% of transformation programs fail to deliver an impact to the business performance, right? And in the same period of time there's been huge cuts in innovation funding, and that's because for the same reason, because they don't deliver the impact to the business performance. And that's why Garage is unique, because it is entirely focused on the outcome, right? We're using user research, through design thinking of course, using agile to deliver it at speed, and all of those other things. But, it's focused on value, on benefits realization and driving to your outcome. And we do that by putting that innovation at the heart of your enterprise in order to drive that transformation, rather than it being something separate. >> Debbie, I saw you gave a talk called 'Innovation is Dead'. Obviously, that's a provocative title, that's an attention-getter. Tell me what you mean by that. Because it seems to be a setup. >> I mean, if the innovation is dead, >> Of course. was it with a question mark? Were you, kind of, trying to highlight that innovation is transformation? >> So, the full title was 'Innovation is dead and transformation is pointless'. And, of course, it's meant to be an eye-catching title so people show up and listen to my pitch rather than somebody else's. But, the reality is I mean it most sincerely, it's back to that stat. 75% of these transformation programs fail to deliver the impact, and I speculate that that is for a few reasons. Because, the idea itself wasn't a good one, or wasn't at the right time. Because, you were unable to understand what the measure of good looked like, and therefore just being able to create that path. And, in order to transform a company, you must transform the individuals within a company. And so that way of working becomes incredibly holistic. And it's those three things, that I think amongst the whole myriad of others, that are the primary reasons why those programs fail. And what Garage does, is it breaks that. By putting innovation at the heart of your enterprise, and by using data-driven value orchestration, that means that we don't guess where the value to be gained is, we know. It's no longer chucking ideas at the wall to see what sticks, it's meaningful research. This is my favorite quote from my dear friend, Courtney Noll, who says, "It's not about searching for the innovation needle in the proverbial haystack, it's using your research in order to de-risk your investment, and drive your innovation to enable your outcomes." And so, if you do innovation without a view to how it's going to yield your business outcomes, I agree, I fundamentally agree that it's pointless. >> Yeah, exactly. And, you know, of course we're on the writing side, we love titles like, 'Innovation is dead, long live innovation'. So, it's classic, you know, to get your attention. >> Exactly, exactly. And of course, what I really mean is that innovation is a separate entity. >> Totally. >> There's no longer relevance for a company to make sure they achieve their business outcomes. >> Well, this is what I wanted to just double-click on that with you on is that you look at transformation. You guys are essentially saying transformation meets innovation with the Garage philosophy, if I get that right. >> Yep >> And it's interesting, and we've experienced this here with theCUBE, we're theCUBE virtual, we're not at IBM Think, there is no physical game day like some of us normally do. >> Well, as you can see, I'm at my house. (Debbie laughs) And so, I was talking to a CEO and I said, "Hey, you guys are doing really, really good. We had to pivot with the cube", and he goes, "You guys did a good pivot yourself". He goes, "No, John, we did not pivot. We actually put our business on hold because of the pandemic. We actually created a line extension, so, technically, we're going to bring that business back when COVID has gone and come back to real life, so it's technically not a pivot, we're not pivoting our business, we've created new functionality." Through the innovations that they were doing. So, this is kind of like, this is the real deal here. Share your thoughts on that. >> To me, it's about people get so focused on the output that they lose track of the outcome, right? And so, be really clear on what you're doing, and why. And the outcomes can be really broad, so instead of saying, "We're all going to implement a new ERP, or build a new mobile app". That's not an outcome, right? What we should be saying is, "What we're trying to achieve is a 10 percent growth in net promoter score in China, right? In this group." Or whatever it is we were trying to achieve, right? Or, "We want to make a 25% reduction in our operating cost base by simplifying our estate". Whatever those outcomes are, that's the starting point, and then driving that to use as the vehicle for what is the right innovation, what is going to deliver that value, and fast, right? Garage delivers three to five times faster than other models and at a reduced delivery cost, and so it's all about that speed. Speed of decision, speed of insight, speed of culture and training, speed of new skills, and speed to outcomes. >> Well, Debbie, you did a great job, love what you're doing, and Garage has got a great model. Congratulations on the growth, love this intersection, or transformation meets innovation because innovation is transformation, and vice versa, this interplay going on there. >> Exactly. >> I think COVID has proven that. Let me dig into a little bit more about the garage, what's going on. How many practitioners do you guys have there now at IBM? You've got growth, are you adding more people in? Obviously, Virtual First, COVID, is there still centers of design? Take us through what's going on at Garage. >> Certainly, so like, I think I mentioned it right up front. Our goal is to make IBM Garage the primary way our clients experience us. We've proven in that it delivers higher value to our clients and they get a really rich and broad set of outcomes. And so, in order for us to deliver on that promise we have to be enabled across IBM to deliver to it, right? So, over the last 18 months or so we've had a whole range of training programs in Enable, we've had a whole badging and certification program, we have all the skills, and the pathways, and the career pathways to find. But Garage is for everybody, right? And so, it isn't about creating a select group that can do this across IBM. This is about making all of services capable. So, in 2020 we trained over 28,000 people, in all the different skills that are needed, from selling, to execution, to QA, to user research, whatever it is. And this year we're launching our Garage Skills Academy, which will take that across all of services and make it easily available. So, you know, we've got hundreds of thousands. >> And talk about the footprint on the global side, because, again, not to bring up global, but global is what is in your title. >> Yep. >> Companies need to be global, because now with virtual workforces you're seeing much more tapped creativity and ability to execute from global teams. How does that impact you? >> Well, so it's global in two perspectives, right? So, number one, we have Garages all around the world, right? It isn't just the market of, you know, our most developed nations in Americas and Europe, it is everywhere, we see it in all emerging markets. From Latin America, through to all parts of eastern Europe, which are really beginning to come into their own. So, we see all these different Garages at different scales and opportunities. So, definitely global from that image. But, what virtualization has also enabled is truly global teams. Because, it's really easy to go, "Oh, I need one of those. Okay, I need a supply chain expert, and I need an AI expert, and I need somebody who's got industry experience in whatever it is." And you can quickly gather them around the virtual table, you know, faster than you can in a physical table. But, we still leverage the global communities with those physical. >> It's an expert network. You have an expert network there at IBM. >> We have a huge network, yeah. And both within IBM, and of course a growing network of ecosystem partners that we continue to work with. >> Well, Debbie, I'm really excited. Congratulations on the growth. I'm looking forward to partnering with you on your ecosystem as that develops. I can almost imagine you must be getting a lot of outside IBM practitioners and experts coming in to collaborate in a social construct. >> Absolutely. >> It's a great program, thanks for sharing. >> My pleasure, it's been great to be here, thank you. >> Okay, IBM's Global Garage Lead, Debbie Vavangas, who's here on theCUBE with IBM Services. A phenomenon, it's a social construct that's helping companies with digital transformation. Intersecting, with innovation. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe, it's the >>Cube with digital coverage of IBM think 2020 >>one brought to you >>by IBM. Hello, welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual soon we'll be back in person in real life. But this year again it's a virtual conference. I'm john for your host of the cube for more cube coverage. You got a great guest here Debbie Viviendas Global garage lead for IBM Services Global garage great program. Ah Debbie, great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Thanks for having me. >>So we've covered the garage a lot on the cube in the past and the success, Everyone loves the garage things are born in the garage, entrepreneurship innovation has been kind of categorically known for kind of the garage start up um but also it's become um known for really agile agility and which has been a cloud phenomenon, devops and now we're seeing Deb sec apps as a big trend this year with hybrid cloud. So I gotta ask you, how is garage doing with the pandemic? I was I can almost imagine people at home kind of disrupted from the office, but maybe more creativity, maybe more energy online. What's going on with the garage? How has your transformation journey been with Covid? >>Well, don't I mean it's Covid has been the level of for us. All right, there isn't a person who hasn't had some challenge or some complexity to Yeah, and that includes our clients and I'm incredibly proud to be able to say that IBM garage because it is so digitally native. When the covid pandemic has struck around the world, every single one of our garages was able to switch to being virtual without fail without a single days lost productivity. And that I mean that's hugely beneficial to clients who are on an incredible time sensitive journey. And so we've seen as a result of Covid actually there are a huge acceleration in garages from two reasons. The number one from a virtualization perspective. Actually it's much easier when everybody's together in the same space, everybody's together virtually in the same space. And we've seen acceleration in our velocity and our collaboration because everybody is really learning how to work in that century. But to because of the pandemic, because of the pressure on our client's needs to make decisions fast. No, not guess really, be focused on their outcomes, not just doing stuff, the garage really plays to that objective for them. And so we've seen a huge rise. We've gone from 2019 to just a few 100 garages to finishing 2020 with over 2.5 1000 garages and being embedded across services and the goal of being the primary way our clients experiencing COVID has been a big accelerator. >>Sorry Debbie, can you repeat the numbers again? I just want to capture that. I missed that. >>Sure. Sure. So we finished >>training on the numbers. >>Yeah. So that we finished 2019 with just under 300 garages and we finished 2020 with just over 2.5 1000. So we've had a huge growth in the in the rain and it isn't just the number of garages, it's the range of garages and what we're what we're serving with our clients and how we're collaborating with our clients and the topics were unpacking. That is is really broadened. >>Yeah. I mean I I covered and we've reported on the garage on the Cuban also in silicon angle dot com. And the past thinks and through your your news coverage. That's amazing growth. Um I gotta believe the tailwind from Covid and just the energy around it has energized. You wanna get your thoughts on that because you know what we've reported the past, it's been about design, thinking human centered design, all those beautiful things that come with cloud, cloud scale, right? You know, you're moving faster, you're innovating. Um and so that's been kind of there, but what you're getting at with this growth is with and what Covid has proven. And again, we've been pointing this out, you're seeing the pattern, It's clear companies are either retrenching okay. Which is re factoring, redesigning, doing those things to kind of get ready to come out to cope with a growth strategy and you're seeing other companies um build net new innovations so they're building new capabilities because Covid shown them kind of pulled back the curtain if you will on where the action is. So this means there's two threads going on. You got okay, I got to transform my business and I gotta re factor and then, or hey, we got net new business models, these are kind of two different things and not mutually exclusive. What's your comment on that? >>Uh, and I think that my comment on is that is the sweet spot that garage comes into its own right. You mentioned lots of things in that, you talked about design thinking and agility and you know, these other buzzwords that are used all the time and garage of course is synonymous with those of course, you know, it's Gap uses the best design thinking and agile practices and all of those things that absolutely core to what we do, devops, even through down to design up, we have the whole range depending on what the client objective is, but I think what is really happening now is the innovation, you know, being something separate. It is no longer how to accelerate your outcomes and your business outcomes regardless of whether that is in re factoring and modernizing your existing estate or diversifying creating new ecosystems and new platforms and new offerings. Regardless of what that is, you can't do it separate to your, To your core business. I mean it's a well known fact John right, like 75 of transformation programmes failed to deliver an impact on the business performance. Right? And in the same period of time there's been huge cuts in innovation funding and that's because for the same reason because they don't deliver the impact of the business performance and that's why garage is unique because it is entirely focused on the outcome, right? But using user research through design thinking of course using agile to deliver it at speed and all of those other things, but it's focused on value, on benefits, realization and driving to your outcome. And we do that by putting that innovation at the heart of your enterprise in order to drive that transformation rather than it being something separate. >>Debbie, I saw you gave a talk uh called Innovation Is Dead. Um obviously that's a provocative title. That's an attention getter. Um tell me what you mean by that because it seems to be a setup. I mean many mentions dead. Was it with a question mark? What you're kind of trying to highlight that innovation is transformation? Or were you trying >>to do the full title? The full title was Innovation is Dead and transformation is pointless. And of course, it's meant to be an eye catching title. So people show up and listen to my pitch rather than somebody else's. But But the reality is I mean that most sincerely it's back to that step, 75 of these transformation programmes failed to deliver the impact. And I and I speculate that that is for a few reasons because the idea itself wasn't a good one or wasn't at the right time because you were unable to understand what the measure of good looked like and therefore him just be able to create that path. And in order to transform a company, you must transform the individuals within a company. And so that way of working becomes incredibly holistic and it's those three things, I think amongst the whole myriad of others are the primary reasons why those programs fail. And what garage does is it breaks this by putting innovation at the heart of your enterprise and by using data driven value orchestration. That means that we don't no, we don't guess where the value to be gained is. We know it's no longer checking ideas at the wall to see what sticks it's meaningful research. It's not searching. This is my favorite quote from my dear friend Courtney, know, who says it's not about searching for the innovation needle in the proverbial haystack. It's using your research in order to de risk your investment and drive your innovation to enable your outcomes. So if you do innovation without a view to how it's going to yield your business outcomes, I agree. I fundamentally agree that it's pointless. >>Exactly. Of course, we're on the writing side. We love titles like innovation is dead long live innovation, so that's classic. Get your attention. But I think >>Exactly, and of course what I really mean is that innovation is a separate entity, >>totally. >>There is no longer relevant for company to make sure they achieve their business >>outcome. Well, this is what I wanted to just double click on that with you on is that you look at transformation, you guys essentially saying transformation meets innovation with the garage philosophy if I get that right. Um, and, and, and it's interesting I had, and we've experienced here with the cube where the cube virtual, we're not at IBM think there is no physical game day, like >>my house. >>And, and so I was talking to a Ceo and he said, I said, hey you guys are doing really, really good. You know, we had to pivot with the cube and he goes, you guys did a good pivot yourself because no, john we did not pivot, we actually put our business on hold because of the pandemic. We actually created a line extension. So technically we're going to bring that business back when Covid is gone and we come back to real life. So it's technically not a pivot. We're not pivoting our business. We've created new functionality through the innovations that they were doing. So this is kind of like, this is the real deal here. This is like depends proven what's your share your thoughts on that? >>Well, it's just to me it's about people get so focused on the output that they lose track of the outcome, right? And so being really clear on what you're doing and why and the outcomes can be really broad that, you know, so instead of saying, you know, we're all going to implement the new E. R. P. Or build a new mobile app. That's that's that's not an outcome, right? What we should be saying is what we're trying to achieve is a 10% growth in net promoter score in china, Right in this group or whatever it is we were trying to achieve right, we want to make a 25 reduction in our operating cost base by simplifying our estate whatever those outcomes are. I mean that's the starting point and then driving that use to use as the vehicle for what is the right innovation, what is going to deliver that value and fast right garage delivers 3-5 times faster than other models and reduced delivery costs. And so it's all about that speed, speed of decision, speed of insight, speed of culture and training, speed of new skills and speed to outcomes. >>You got a great job, love what you're doing in Karaj got a great model, congratulations on the growth. Love this intersection or transformation meets innovation because innovation is transformation advice versus interplay going on there I think has proven that. Let me dig into a little bit more about the garage. What's going on? How many practitioners you guys have there now at IBM? Um, you've got growth. Are you adding more people in? I'll see virtual first. Covid. Is there still centers of design take us through what's going on at garage? >>Certainly. So I think I mentioned it right up front. Right. So our goal is to make IBM guards the primary way our clients experiences. We've proven that it delivers higher value to our clients and they get really rich and broad set of outcomes. And so in order for us to deliver on that promise, we have to be unable to cross IBM to deliver to it. Right? So over the last 18 months or so we've had a whole range of training programs and enable we have a whole badging and certification program. We have all the skills and the pathways and the career pathways to find. But garages for everybody. Right? And so it isn't about creating a selected group that can do this across IBM, this is about making all of services capable. So in 2020 we we trained over 28,000 people right? In in all the different skills that are needed from selling to execution to QA to use a research, whatever it is. And this year we're launching our garage skills academy which will take that across all of services and make it easily available. So we will, you've got to >>talk about the footprint of the global side because again, not to bring up global, but global is what yours in your title companies need to be global because now with virtual workforce is you're seeing much more tapped creativity and execution ability to execute from global teams. How does that impact you? >>Well, so garages as in its global in two perspectives. Right, So number one, we have garages all around the world. Right? It isn't it isn't just the market of you are most developed nations in the Americas and europe. It is everywhere. We see it in all emerging markets, from latin America through to you all parts of eastern europe which are really beginning to come into their own. So we see all these different garages of different different scales and opportunity. So definitely global from that image. But what what what virtualization has also enabled these truly global teams because it's really easy to go, I need one of those. Okay, I need a supply chain expert and I need an Ai expert and I need somebody who's got industry experience in whatever it is and you can quickly gather them around the virtual table faster than you can in a physical table. But we still leverage the global community >>for the network. You have an expert network there at IBM. >>You have a huge network. Yeah. And both both within IBM and of course a growing network of ecosystem partners that we continue to work >>with. Debbie. I'm really excited. Congratulations. Growth. I'm looking forward to partnering with you on your ecosystem as that develops. I can almost imagine you must be getting a lot of outside IBM practitioners and experts coming in to collaborate. It is a social construct. It's a great program. Thanks for sharing >>my pleasure. It's been great to be here. Thank >>you. Okay, IBM's global garage. Lee Debbie Vegas who's here on the queue with IBM services, a phenomenon. This is social construct is helping companies with digital transformation intersecting with innovation. I'm john for your host. Thanks for watching

>>Bye from San Francisco. It's the cube covering RSA conference, 2020 San Francisco brought to you by Silicon angle media. >>Hey, welcome back. Everyone's keeps coverage here in San Francisco at the Moscone center for RSA conference 2020 I'm John, your host, as cybersecurity goes to the next generation as the new cloud scale, cyber threats are out there, the real impact a company's business and society will be determined by the industry. This technology and the people that a cube alumni here, caramel Jaffer, SVP, senior vice president of strategy and corporate development for iron net. Welcome back. Thanks to Shawn. Good to be here. Thanks for having so iron net FC general Keith Alexander and you got to know new CEO of there. Phil Welsh scaler and duo knows how to scale up a company. He's right. Iron is doing really well. The iron dome, the vision of collaboration and signaling. Congratulations on your success. What's a quick update? >> Well look, I mean, you know, we have now built the capability to share information across multiple companies, multiple industries with the government in real time at machine speed. >>Really bringing people together, not just creating collected security or clip to defense, but also collaborating real time to defend one another. So you're able to divide and conquer Goliath, the enemy the same way they come after you and beat them at their own game. >> So this is the classic case of offense defense. Most corporations are playing defense, whack-a-mole, redundant, not a lot of efficiencies, a lot of burnout. Exactly. Not a lot of collaboration, but everyone's talking about the who the attackers are and collaborating like a team. Right? And you guys talk about this mission. Exactly. This is really the new way to do it. It has, the only way it works, >> it is. And you know, you see kids doing it out there when they're playing Fortnite, right? They're collaborating in real time across networks, uh, to, you know, to play a game, right? You can imagine that same construct when it comes to cyber defense, right? >>There's no reason why one big company, a second big company in a small company can't work together to identify all the threats, see that common threat landscape, and then take action on it. Trusting one another to take down the pieces they have folk to focus on and ultimately winning the battle. There's no other way a single company is gonna be able defend itself against a huge decency that has virtually unlimited resources and virtually unlimited human capital. And you've got to come together, defend across multiple industries, uh, collectively and collaboratively. >> Do you mean, we talked about this last time and I want to revisit this and I think it's super important. I think it's the most important story that's not really being talked about in the industry. And that is that we were talking last time about the government protects businesses. If someone dropped troops on the ground in your neighborhood, the government would protect you digitally. >>That's not happening. So there's really no protection for businesses. Do they build their own militia? Do they build their own army? Who was going to, who's going to be their heat shield? So this is a big conversation and a big, it brings a question. The role of the government. We're going to need a digital air force. We're going to need a digital army, Navy, Navy seals. We need to have that force, and this has to be a policy issue, but in the short term, businesses and individuals are sitting out there being attacked by sophisticated mission-based teams of hackers and nation States, right? Either camouflaging or hiding, but attacking still. This is a huge issue. What's going on? Are people talking about this in D C well, >> John, look not enough. People are talking about it, right? And forget DC. We need to be talking about here, out here in the Silicon Valley with all these companies here at the RSA floor and bring up the things you're bringing up because this is a real problem we're facing as a nation. >>The Russians aren't coming after one company, one state. They're coming after our entire election infrastructure. They're coming after us as a nation. The Chinese maybe come after one company at a time, but their goal is to take our electoral properties, a nation, repurpose it back home. And when the economic game, right, the Iranians, the North Koreans, they're not focused on individual actors, but they are coming after individual actors. We can't defend against those things. One man, one woman, one company on an Island, one, one agency, one state. We've got to come together collectively, right? Work state with other States, right? If we can defend against the Russians, California might be really good at it. Rhode Island, small States can be real hard, defends against the Russians, but if California, Rhode Island come together, here's the threats. I see. Here's what it's. You see share information, that's great. Then we collaborate on the defense and work together. >>You take these threats, I'll take those threats and now we're working as a team, like you said earlier, like those kids do when they're playing fortnight and now we're changing the game. Now we're really fighting the real fight. >> You know, when I hear general Keith Alexander talking about his vision with iron net and what you guys are doing, I'm inspired because it's simply put, we have a mission to protect our nation, our people, and a good businesses, and he puts it into kind of military, military terms, but in reality, it's a simple concept. Yeah, we're being attacked, defend and attack back. Just basic stuff. But to make it work as the sharing. So I got to ask you, I'm first of all, I love the, I love what he has, his vision. I love what you guys are doing. How real are we? What's the progression? >>Where are we on the progress bar of that vision? Well, you know, a lot's changed to the last year and a half alone, right? The threats gotten a lot, a lot more real to everybody, right? Used to be the industry would say to us, yeah, we want to share with the government, but we want something back for, right. We want them to show us some signal to today. Industry is like, look, the Chinese are crushing us out there, right? We can beat them at a, at some level, but we really need the governor to go do its job too. So we'll give you the information we have on, on an anonymized basis. You do your thing. We're going to keep defending ourselves and if you can give us something back, that's great. So we've now stood up in real time of DHS. We're sharing with them huge amounts of data about what we're seeing across six of the top 10 energy companies, some of the biggest banks, some of the biggest healthcare companies in the country. >>Right? In real time with DHS and more to come on that more to come with other government agencies and more to come with some our partners across the globe, right? Partners like those in Japan, Singapore, Eastern Europe, right? Our allies in the middle East, they're all the four lenses threat. We can bring their better capability. They can help us see what's coming at us in the future because as those enemies out there testing the weapons in those local areas. I want to get your thoughts on the capital markets because obviously financing is critical and you're seeing successful venture capital formulas like forge point really specialized funds on cyber but not classic industry formation sectors. Like it's not just security industry are taking a much more broader view because there's a policy implication is that organizational behavior, this technology up and down the stack. So it's a much broad investment thesis. >>What's your view of that? Because as you do, you see that as a formula and if so, what is this new aperture or this new lens of investing to be successful in funding? Companies will look, it's really important what companies like forge point are doing. Venture capital funds, right? Don Dixon, Alberta Pez will land. They're really innovating here. They've created a largest cybersecurity focused fund. They just closed the recently in the world, right? And so they really focus on this industry. Partners like, Kleiner Perkins, Ted Schlein, Andrea are doing really great work in this area. Also really important capital formation, right? And let's not forget other funds. Ron Gula, right? The founder of tenable started his own fund out there in DC, in the DMV area. There's a lot of innovation happening this country and the funding on it's critical. Now look, the reality is the easy money's not going to be here forever, right? >>It's the question is what comes when that inevitable step back. We don't. Nobody likes to talk about it. I said the guy who who bets on the other side of the craps game in Vegas, right? You don't wanna be that guy, but let's be real. I mean that day will eventually come. And the question is how do you bring some of these things together, right? Bring these various pieces together to really create long term strategies, right? And that's I think what's really innovative about what Don and Alberto are doing is they're building portfolio companies across a range of areas to create sort of an end to end capability, right? Andrea is doing things like that. Ted's doing stuff like that. It's a, that's really innovation. The VC market, right? And we're seeing increased collaboration VC to PE. It's looking a lot more similar, right? And now we're seeing innovative vehicles like stacks that are taking some of these public sort of the reverse manner, right? >>There's a lot of interests. I've had to be there with Hank Thomas, the guys chief cyber wrenches. So a lot of really cool stuff going on in the financing world. Opportunities for young, smart entrepreneurs to really move out in this field and to do it now. And money's still silver. All that hasn't come as innovation on the capital market side, which is awesome. Let's talk about the ecosystem in every single market sector that I've been over, my 30 year career has been about a successful entrepreneurship check, capital two formation of partnerships. Okay. You're on the iron net, front lines here. As part of that ecosystem, how do you see the ecosystem formula developing? Is it the same kind of model? Is it a little bit different? What's your vision of the ecosystem? Look, I mean partnerships channel, it's critical to every cyber security company. You can't scale on your own. >>You've got to do it through others, right? I was at a CrowdStrike event the other day. 91% of the revenue comes from the channel. That's an amazing number. You think about that, right? It's you look at who we're trying to talk about partnering with. We're talking about some of the big cloud players. Amazon, Microsoft, right? Google, right on the, on the vendor side. Pardon me? Splunk crashes, so these big players, right? We want to build with them, right? We want to work with them because there's a story to tell here, right? When we were together, the AECOS through self is defendant stronger. There's no, there's no anonymity here, right? It's all we bring a specialty, you bring specialty, you work together, you run out and go get the go get the business and make companies safer. At the end of the day, it's all about protecting the ecosystem. What about the big cloud player? >>Cause he goes two big mega trends. Obviously cloud computing and scale, right? Multi-cloud on the horizon, hybrids, kind of the bridge between single public cloud and multi-cloud and then AI you've got the biggies are generally will be multiple generations of innovation and value creation. What's your vision on the impact of the big waves that are coming? Well, look, I mean cloud computing is a rate change the world right? Today you can deploy capability and have a supercomputer in your fingertips in in minutes, right? You can also secure that in minutes because you can update it in real time. As the machine is functioning, you have a problem, take it down, throw up a new virtual machine. These are amazing innovations that are creating more and more capability out there in industry. It's game changing. We're happy, we're glad to be part of that and we ought to be helping defend that new amazing ecosystem. >>Partnering with companies like Microsoft. They didn't AWS did, you know, you know, I'm really impressed with your technical acumen. You've got a good grasp of the industry, but also, uh, you have really strong on the societal impact policy formulation side of government and business. So I want to get your thoughts for the young kids out there that are going to school, trying to make sense of the chaos that's going on in the world, whether it's DC political theater or the tech theater, big tech and in general, all of the things with coronavirus, all this stuff going on. It's a, it's a pretty crazy time, but a lot of work has to start getting done that are new problems. Yeah. What is your advice as someone who's been through the multiple waves to the young kids who have to figure out what half fatigue, what problems are out there, what things can people get their arms around to work on, to specialize in? >>What's your, what's your thoughts and expertise on that? Well, John, thanks for the question. What I really like about that question is is we're talking about what the future looks like and here's what I think the future looks like. It's all about taking risks. Tell a lot of these young kids out there today, they're worried about how the world looks right? Will America still be strong? Can we, can we get through this hard time we're going through in DC with the world challenges and what I can say is this country has never been stronger. We may have our own troubles internally, but we are risk takers and we always win. No matter how hard it gets them out of how bad it gets, right? Risk taking a study that's building the American blood. It's our founders came here taking a risk, leaving Eagle to come here and we've succeeded the last 200 years. >>There is no question in my mind that trend will continue. So the young people out there, I don't know what the future has to hold. I don't know if the new tape I was going to be, but you're going to invent it. And if you don't take the risks, we're not succeed as a nation. And that's what I think is key. You know, most people worry that if they take too many risks, they might not succeed. Right? But the reality is most people you see around at this convention, they all took risks to be here. And even when they had trouble, they got up, they dust themselves off and they won. And I believe that everybody in this country, that's what's amazing about the station is we have this opportunity to, to try, if we fail to get up again and succeed. So fail fast, fail often, and crush it. >>You know, some of the best innovations have come from times where you had the cold war, you had, um, you had times where, you know, the hippie revolution spawn the computer. So you, so you have the culture of America, which is not about regulation and stunting growth. You had risk-taking, you had entrepreneurship, but yet enough freedom for business to operate, to solve new challenges, accurate. And to me the biggest imperative in my mind is this next generation has to solve a lot of those new questions. What side of the street is the self driving cars go on? I see bike lanes in San Francisco, more congestion, more more cry. All this stuff's going on. AI could be a great enabler for that. Cyber security, a direct threat to our country and global geopolitical landscape. These are big problems. State and local governments, they're not really tech savvy. They don't really have a lot ID. >>So what do they do? How do they serve their, their constituents? You know, look John, these are really important and hard questions, but we know what has made technology so successful in America? What's made it large, successful is the governor state out of the way, right? Industry and innovators have had a chance to work together and do stuff and change the world, right? You look at California, you know, one of the reasons California is so successful and Silicon Valley is so dynamic. You can move between jobs and we don't enforce non-compete agreements, right? Because you can switch jobs and you can go to that next higher value target, right? That shows the value of, you know, innovation, creating innovation. Now there's a real tendency to say, when we're faced with challenges, well, the government has to step in and solve that problem, right? The Silicon Valley and what California's done, what technology's done is a story about the government stayed out and let innovators innovate, and that's a real opportunity for this nation. >>We've got to keep on down that path, even when it seemed like the easier answer is, come on in DC, come on in Sacramento, fix this problem for us. We have demonstrated as a country that Americans and individual are good at solve these problems. We should allow them to do that and innovate. Yeah. One of my passions is to kind of use technology and media to end communities to get to the truth faster. A lot of, um, access to smart minds out there, but young minds, young minds, uh, old minds, young minds though. It's all there. You gotta get the data out and that's going to be a big thing. That's the, one of the things that's changing is the dark arts of smear campaigns. The story of Bloomberg today, Oracle reveals funding for dark money, group biting, big tech internet accountability projects. Um, and so the classic astroturfing get the Jedi contract, Google WASU with Java. >>So articles in the middle of all this, but using them as an illustrative point. The lawyers seem to be running the kingdom right now. I know you're an attorney, so I'm recovering, recovering. I don't want to be offensive, but entrepreneurship cannot be stifled by regulation. Sarbanes Oxley slowed down a lot of the IPO shifts to the latest stage capital. So regulation, nest and every good thing. But also there's some of these little tactics out in the shadows are going to be revealed. What's the new way to get this straightened out in your mind? We'll look, in my view, the best solution for problematic speech or pragmatic people is more speech, right? Let's shine a light on it, right? If there are people doing shady stuff, let's talk about it's an outfit. Let's have it out in the open. Let's fight it out. At the end of the day, what America's really about is smart ideas. >>Winning. It's a, let's get the ideas out there. You know, we spent a lot of time, right now we're under attack by the Russians when it comes to our elections, right? We spent a lot of time harping at one another, one party versus another party. The president versus that person. This person who tells committee for zap person who tells committee. It's crazy when the real threat is from the outside. We need to get past all that noise, right? And really get to the next thing which is we're fighting a foreign entity on this front. We need to face that enemy down and stop killing each other with this nonsense and turn the lights on. I'm a big believer of if something can be exposed, you can talk about it. Why is it happening exactly right. This consequences with that reputation, et cetera. You got it. >>Thanks for coming on the queue. Really appreciate your insight. Um, I want to just ask you one final question cause you look at, look at the industry right now. What is the most important story that people are talking about and what is the most important story that people should be talking about? Yeah. Well look, I think the one story that's out there a lot, right, is what's going on in our politics, what's going on in our elections. Um, you know, Chris Krebs at DHS has been out here this week talking a lot about the threat that our elections face and the importance about States working with one another and States working with the federal government to defend the nation when it comes to these elections in November. Right? We need to get ahead of that. Right? The reality is it's been four years since 2016 we need to do more. That's a key issue going forward. What are the Iranians North Koreans think about next? They haven't hit us recently. We know what's coming. We got to get ahead of that. I'm going to come again at a nation, depending on staff threat to your meal. Great to have you on the QSO is great insight. Thanks for coming on sharing your perspective. I'm John furrier here at RSA in San Francisco for the cube coverage. Thanks for watching.

>> live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the Cube covering A W s reinforce 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web service is and its ecosystem partners. >> Well, welcome back. Everyone's Cube Live coverage here in Boston, Massachusetts, for AWS. Reinforce Amazon Web sources. First inaugural conference around security. It's not Osama. It's a branded event. Big time ecosystem developing. We have returning here. Cube Alumni Bill Jeff for VP of strategy and the partnerships that Iron Net Cyber Security Company. Welcome back. Thanks. General Keith Alexander, who was on a week and 1/2 ago. And it was public sector summit. Good to see you. Good >> to see you. Thanks for >> having my back, but I want to get into some of the Iran cyber communities. We had General Qi 1000. He was the original commander of the division. So important discussions that have around that. But don't get your take on the event. You guys, you're building a business. The minute cyber involved in public sector. This is commercial private partnership. Public relations coming together. Yeah. Your models are sharing so bringing public and private together important. >> Now that's exactly right. And it's really great to be here with eight of us were really close partner of AWS is we'll work with them our entire back in today. Runs on AWS really need opportunity. Get into the ecosystem, meet some of the folks that are working that we might work with my partner but to deliver a great product, right? And you're seeing a lot of people move to cloud, right? And so you know some of the big announcement that are happening here today. We're willing. We're looking to partner up with eight of us and be a first time provider for some key new Proactiv elves. AWS is launching in their own platform here today. So that's a really neat thing for us to be partnered up with this thing. Awesome organization. I'm doing some of >> the focus areas around reinforcing your party with Amazon shares for specifics. >> Yes. So I don't know whether they announced this capability where they're doing the announcement yesterday or today. So I forget which one so I'll leave that leave that leave that once pursued peace out. But the main thing is, they're announcing couple of new technology plays way our launch party with them on the civility place. So we're gonna be able to do what we were only wanted to do on Prem. We're gonna be able to do in the cloud with AWS in the cloud formation so that we'll deliver the same kind of guy that would deliver on prime customers inside their own cloud environments and their hybrid environment. So it's a it's a it's a sea change for us. The company, a sea change for a is delivering that new capability to their customers and really be able to defend a cloud network the way you would nonpregnant game changer >> described that value, if you would. >> Well, so you know, one of the key things about about a non pregnant where you could do you could look at all the flows coming past you. You look at all the data, look at in real time and develop behavior. Lana looks over. That's what we're doing our own prime customers today in the cloud with his world who looked a lox, right? And now, with the weight of your capability, we're gonna be able to integrate that and do a lot Maur the way we would in a in a in a normal sort of on Prem environment. So you really did love that. Really? Capability of scale >> Wagon is always killed. The predictive analytics, our visibility and what you could do. And too late. Exactly. Right. You guys solve that with this. What are some of the challenges that you see in cloud security that are different than on premise? Because that's the sea, So conversation we've been hearing. Sure, I know on premise. I didn't do it on premises for awhile. What's the difference between the challenge sets, the challenges and the opportunities they provide? >> Well, the opportunities air really neat, right? Because you've got that even they have a shared responsibility model, which is a little different than you officially have it. When it's on Prem, it's all yours essential. You own that responsibility and it is what it is in the cloud. Its share responsible to cloud provider the data holder. Right? But what's really cool about the cloud is you could deliver some really interesting Is that scale you do patch updates simultaneously, all your all your back end all your clients systems, even if depending how your provisioning cloud service is, you could deliver that update in real time. You have to worry about. I got to go to individual systems and update them, and some are updated. Summer passed. Some aren't right. Your servers are packed simultaneously. You take him down, you're bringing back up and they're ready to go, right? That's a really capability that for a sigh. So you're delivering this thing at scale. It's awesome now, So the challenge is right. It's a new environment so that you haven't dealt with before. A lot of times you feel the hybrid environment governed both an on Prem in sanitation and class sensation. Those have to talkto one another, right? And you might think about Well, how do I secure those those connections right now? And I think about spending money over here when I got all seduced to spend up here in the cloud. And that's gonna be a hard thing precisely to figure out, too. And so there are some challenges, but the great thing is, you got a whole ecosystem. Providers were one of them here in the AWS ecosystem. There are a lot here today, and you've got eight of us as a part of self who wants to make sure that they're super secure, but so are yours. Because if you have a problem in their cloud, that's a challenge. Them to market this other people. You talk about >> your story because your way interviews A couple weeks ago, you made a comment. I'm a recovering lawyer, kind of. You know, we all laughed, but you really start out in law, right? >> How did you end up here? Yeah, well, the truth is, I grew up sort of a technology or myself. My first computer is a trash 80 a trs 80 color computer. RadioShack four k of RAM on board, right. We only >> a true TRS 80. Only when I know what you're saying. That >> it was a beautiful system, right? Way stored with sword programs on cassette tapes. Right? And when we operated from four Keita 16 k way were the talk of the Rainbow Computer Club in Santa Monica, California Game changer. It was a game here for 16. Warning in with 60 give onboard. Ram. I mean, this is this is what you gonna do. And so you know, I went from that and I in >> trouble or something, you got to go to law school like you're right >> I mean, you know, look, I mean, you know it. So my dad, that was a chemist, right? So he loved computers, love science. But he also had an unrequited political boners body. He grew up in East Africa, Tanzania. It was always thought that he might be a minister in government. The Socialist came to power. They they had to leave you at the end of the day. And he came to the states and doing chemistry, which is course studies. But he still loved politics. So he raised at NPR. So when I went to college, I studied political science. But I paid my way through college doing computer support, life sciences department at the last moment. And I ran 10 based. He came on climate through ceilings and pulled network cable do punch down blocks, a little bit of fibrous placing. So, you know, I was still a murderer >> writing software in the scythe. >> One major, major air. And that was when when the web first came out and we had links. Don't you remember? That was a text based browser, right? And I remember looking to see him like this is terrible. Who would use http slash I'm going back to go for gophers. Awesome. Well, turns out I was totally wrong about Mosaic and Netscape. After that, it was It was it was all hands on >> deck. You got a great career. Been involved a lot in the confluence of policy politics and tech, which is actually perfect skill set for the challenge we're dealing. So I gotta ask you, what are some of the most important conversations that should be on the table right now? Because there's been a lot of conversations going on around from this technology. I has been around for many decades. This has been a policy problem. It's been a societal problem. But now this really focus on acute focus on a lot of key things. What are some of the most important things that you think should be on the table for techies? For policymakers, for business people, for lawmakers? >> One. I think we've got to figure out how to get really technology knowledge into the hands of policymakers. Right. You see, you watch the Facebook hearings on Capitol Hill. I mean, it was a joke. It was concerning right? I mean, anybody with a technology background to be concerned about what they saw there, and it's not the lawmakers fault. I mean, you know, we've got to empower them with that. And so we got to take technologist, threw it out, how to get them to talk policy and get them up on the hill and in the administration talking to folks, right? And one of the big outcomes, I think, has to come out of that conversation. What do we do about national level cybersecurity, Right, because we assume today that it's the rule. The private sector provides cyber security for their own companies, but in no other circumstance to expect that when it's a nation state attacker, wait. We don't expect Target or Wal Mart or any other company. J. P. Morgan have surface to air missiles on the roofs of their warehouses or their buildings to Vegas Russian bear bombers. Why, that's the job of the government. But when it comes to cyberspace, we expect Private Cummings defending us everything from a script kiddie in his basement to the criminal hacker in Eastern Europe to the nation state, whether Russia, China, Iran or North Korea and these nation states have virtually a limited resource. Your armies did >> sophisticated RND technology, and it's powerful exactly like a nuclear weaponry kind of impact for digital. >> Exactly. And how can we expect prices comes to defend themselves? It's not. It's not a fair fight. And so the government has to have some role. The questions? What role? How did that consist with our values, our principles, right? And how do we ensure that the Internet remains free and open, while still is sure that the president is not is not hampered in doing its job out there. And I love this top way talk about >> a lot, sometimes the future of warfare. Yeah, and that's really what we're talking about. You go back to Stuxnet, which opened Pandora's box 2016 election hack where you had, you know, the Russians trying to control the mean control, the narrative. As you pointed out, that that one video we did control the belief system you control population without firing a shot. 20 twenties gonna be really interesting. And now you see the U. S. Retaliate to Iran in cyberspace, right? Allegedly. And I was saying that we had a conversation with Robert Gates a couple years ago and I asked him. I said, Should we be Maur taking more of an offensive posture? And he said, Well, we have more to lose than the other guys Glasshouse problem? Yeah, What are your thoughts on? >> Look, certainly we rely intimately, inherently on the cyber infrastructure that that sort of is at the core of our economy at the core of the world economy. Increasingly, today, that being said, because it's so important to us all the more reason why we can't let attacks go Unresponded to write. And so if you're being attacked in cyberspace, you have to respond at some level because if you don't, you'll just keep getting punched. It's like the kid on the playground, right? If the bully keeps punching him and nobody does anything, not not the not the school administration, not the kid himself. Well, then the boy's gonna keep doing what he's doing. And so it's not surprising that were being tested by Iran by North Korea, by Russia by China, and they're getting more more aggressive because when we don't punch back, that's gonna happen. Now we don't have to punch back in cyberspace, right? A common sort of fetish about Cyrus is a >> response to the issue is gonna respond to the bully in this case, your eggs. Exactly. Playground Exactly. We'll talk about the Iran. >> So So if I If I if I can't Yeah, the response could be Hey, we could do this. Let them know you could Yes. And it's a your move >> ate well, And this is the key is that it's not just responding, right. So Bob Gates or told you we can't we talk about what we're doing. And even in the latest series of alleged responses to Iran, the reason we keep saying alleged is the U. S has not publicly acknowledged it, but the word has gotten out. Well, of course, it's not a particularly effective deterrence if you do something, but nobody knows you did it right. You gotta let it out that you did it. And frankly, you gotta own it and say, Hey, look, that guy punch me, I punch it back in the teeth. So you better not come after me, right? We don't do that in part because these cables grew up in the intelligence community at N S. A and the like, and we're very sensitive about that But the truth is, you have to know about your highest and capabilities. You could talk about your abilities. You could say, Here are my red lines. If you cross him, I'm gonna punch you back. If you do that, then by the way, you've gotta punch back. They'll let red lines be crossed and then not respond. And then you're gonna talk about some level of capabilities. It can't all be secret. Can't all be classified. Where >> are we in this debate? Me first. Well, you're referring to the Thursday online attack against the intelligence Iranian intelligence community for the tanker and the drone strike that they got together. Drone take down for an arm in our surveillance drones. >> But where are we >> in this debate of having this conversation where the government should protect and serve its people? And that's the role. Because if a army rolled in fiscal army dropped on the shores of Manhattan, I don't think Citibank would be sending their people out the fight. Right? Right. So, like, this is really happening. >> Where are we >> on this? Like, is it just sitting there on the >> table? What's happening? What's amazing about it? Hi. This was getting it going well, that that's a Q. What's been amazing? It's been happening since 2012 2011 right? We know about the Las Vegas Sands attack right by Iran. We know about North Korea's. We know about all these. They're going on here in the United States against private sector companies, not against the government. And there's largely been no response. Now we've seen Congress get more active. Congress just last year passed to pass legislation that gave Cyber command the authority on the president's surgery defenses orders to take action against Russia, Iran, North Korea and China. If certain cyber has happened, that's a good thing, right to give it. I'll be giving the clear authority right, and it appears the president willing to make some steps in that direction, So that's a positive step. Now, on the back end, though, you talk about what we do to harden ourselves, if that's gonna happen, right, and the government isn't ready today to defend the nation, even though the Constitution is about providing for the common defense, and we know that the part of defense for long. For a long time since Secretary Panetta has said that it is our mission to defend the nation, right? But we know they're not fully doing that. How do they empower private sector defense and one of keys That has got to be Look, if you're the intelligence community or the U. S. Government, you're Clinton. Tremendous sense of Dad about what you're seeing in foreign space about what the enemy is doing, what they're preparing for. You have got to share that in real time at machine speed with industry. And if you're not doing that and you're still count on industry to be the first line defense, well, then you're not empowered. That defense. And if you're on a pair of the defense, how do you spend them to defend themselves against the nation? State threats? That's a real cry. So >> much tighter public private relationship. >> Absolutely, absolutely. And it doesn't have to be the government stand in the front lines of the U. S. Internet is, though, is that you could even determine the boundaries of the U. S. Internet. Right? Nobody wants an essay or something out there doing that, but you do want is if you're gonna put the private sector in the in the line of first defense. We gotta empower that defense if you're not doing that than the government isn't doing its job. And so we gonna talk about this for a long time. I worked on that first piece of information sharing legislation with the House chairman, intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers and Dutch Ruppersberger from Maryland, right congressman from both sides of the aisle, working together to get a fresh your decision done that got done in 2015. But that's just a first step. The government's got to be willing to share classified information, scaled speed. We're still not seeing that. Yeah, How >> do people get involved? I mean, like, I'm not a political person. I'm a moderate in the middle. But >> how do I How do people get involved? How does the technology industry not not the >> policy budgets and the top that goes on the top tech companies, how to tech workers or people who love Tad and our patriots and or want freedom get involved? What's the best approach? >> Well, that's a great question. I think part of is learning how to talk policy. How do we get in front policymakers? Right. And we're I run. I run a think tank on the side at the National Institute at George Mason University's Anton Scalia Law School Way have a program funded by the Hewlett Foundation who were bringing in technologists about 25 of them. Actually. Our next our second event. This Siri's is gonna be in Chicago this weekend. We're trained these technologies, these air data scientists, engineers and, like talk Paul's right. These are people who said We want to be involved. We just don't know how to get involved And so we're training him up. That's a small program. There's a great program called Tech Congress, also funded by the U. A. Foundation that places technologists in policy positions in Congress. That's really cool. There's a lot of work going on, but those are small things, right. We need to do this, its scale. And so you know, what I would say is that their technology out there want to get involved, reach out to us, let us know well with our partners to help you get your information and dad about what's going on. Get your voice heard there. A lot of organizations to that wanna get technologies involved. That's another opportunity to get in. Get in the building is a >> story that we want to help tell on be involved in David. I feel passion about this. Is a date a problem? So there's some real tech goodness in there. Absolutely. People like to solve hard problems, right? I mean, we got a couple days of them. You've got a big heart problems. It's also for all the people out there who are Dev Ops Cloud people who like to work on solving heart problems. >> We got a lot >> of them. Let's do it. So what's going on? Iron? Give us the update Could plug for the company. Keith Alexander found a great guy great guests having on the Cube. That would give the quick thanks >> so much. So, you know, way have done two rounds of funding about 110,000,000. All in so excited. We have partners like Kleiner Perkins Forge point C five all supporting us. And now it's all about We just got a new co CEO in Bill Welshman. See Scaler and duo. So he grew Z scaler. $1,000,000,000 valuation he came in to do Oh, you know, they always had a great great exit. Also, we got him. We got Sean Foster in from from From Industry also. So Bill and Sean came together. We're now making this business move more rapidly. We're moving to the mid market. We're moving to a cloud platform or aggressively and so exciting times and iron it. We're coming toe big and small companies near you. We've got the capability. We're bringing advanced, persistent defense to bear on his heart problems that were threat analytics. I collected defence. That's the key to our operation. We're excited >> to doing it. I call N S A is a service, but that's not politically correct. But this is the Cube, so >> Well, look, if you're not, if you want to defensive scale, right, you want to do that. You know, ECE knows how to do that key down here at the forefront of that when he was in >> the government. Well, you guys are certainly on the cutting edge, riding that wave of common societal change technology impact for good, for defence, for just betterment, not make making a quick buck. Well, you know, look, it's a good business model by the way to be in that business. >> I mean, It's on our business cards. And John Xander means it. Our business. I'd say the Michigan T knows that he really means that, right? Rather private sector. We're looking to help companies to do the right thing and protect the nation, right? You know, I protect themselves >> better. Well, our missions to turn the lights on. Get those voices out there. Thanks for coming on. Sharing the lights. Keep covers here. Day one of two days of coverage. Eight of us reinforce here in Boston. Stay with us for more Day one after this short break.

>> Narrator: Live, from Washington DC, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit here in our nation's capital. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Co-hosting along side John Furrier. We are joined by Jamil Jaffer, he is the VP Strategy and Partnerships at IronNet. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me Rebecca. >> Rebecca: I know you've been watching us for a long time so here you are, soon to be a CUBE alumn. >> I've always wanted to be in theCUBE, it's like being in the octagon but for computer journalists. (laughing) I'm pumped about it. >> I love it. Okay, why don't you start by telling our viewers a little bit about IronNet and about what you do there. >> Sure, so IronNet was started about 4 1/2 years ago, 5 years ago, by General Kieth Alexander, the former director of the NSA and founding commander of US Cyber command. And essentially what we do is, we do network traffic analytics and collective defense. Now I think a lot of people know what network traffic analytics are, you're looking for behavioral anomalies and network traffic, trying to identify the bad from the good. Getting past all the false positives, all the big data. What's really cool about what we do is collective defense. It's this idea that one company standing alone can't defend itself, it's got to work with multiple companies, it's got to work across industry sectors. Potentially even with the governments, and potentially across allied governments, really defending one another. And the way that works, the way we think about that, is we share all the anomalies we see across multiple companies to identify threat trends and correlations amongst that data, so you can find things before they happen to you. And so the really cool idea here is, that something may not happen to you, but it may happen to your colleague, you find about it, you're defended against it. And it takes a real commitment by our partners, our companies that we work with, to do this, but increasingly they're realizing the threat is so large, they have no choice but to work together, and we provide that platform that allows that to happen. >> And the premise is that sharing the data gives more observational space to have insights into that offense, correct? >> That's exactly right. It's as though, it's almost like you think about an air traffic control picture, or a radar picture, right? The idea being that if you want to know what's happening in the air space, you got to see all of it in real time at machine speed, and that allows you to get ahead of the threats rather than being reactive and talking about instant response, we're talking about getting ahead of the problems before they happen so you can stop them and prevent the damage ahead of time. >> So you're an expert, they're lucky to have you. Talk about what you've been doing before this. Obviously a lot of experience in security. Talk about some about some of the things you've done in the past. >> So I have to admit to being a recovering lawyer, but you have to forgive me because I did grow up with computers. I had a Tandy TRS-80 Color computer when I first started. 4K of all more RAM, we upgraded to 16K, it was the talk of the rainbow computer club, what are you doing, 16K of RAM? (laughing) I mean, it was-- >> Basic programming language, >> That's right. (laughing) Stored on cassette tapes. I remember when you used to have to punch a hole in the other side of a 5 1/4 floppy disc to make it double sided. >> Right, right. >> John: Glory days. >> Yeah, yeah. I paid my way through college running a network cable, but I'm a recovering lawyer, and so my job in the government, I worked at the House Intelligence Committee, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and then the Bush administration on the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative, both the Justice Department and the White House. >> You've seen the arc, you've seen the trajectory, the progress we're making now seems to me slower than it should be, obviously a lot of inertia as Amy Chasity said today about these public sector government agencies, what not. But a real focus has been on it, we've been seeing activity. Where are we with the state of the union around the modernization of cyber and awareness to what's happening? How critical are people taking this threat seriously? >> Well I think I variety of things to say on that front. First, the government itself needs modernize its systems, right? We've seen that talked about in the Obama administration, we've seen President Trump put out an executive order on modernization of federal infrastructure. The need to move to the cloud, the need to move to shared services, make them more defensible, more resilient long-term. That's the right move. We've seen efforts at the Department of Defense and elsewhere. They aren't going as fast as the need to, more needs to happen on that front. IT modernization can really be accelerated by shifting to the cloud, and that's part of why that one of the things that IronNet's done really aggressively is make a move into the cloud space, putting all of our back end in the cloud and AWS. And also, ability, capability to do surveillance and monitoring. When I say surveillance I mean network threat detection not surveillance of the old kind. But network threat detection in the cloud, and in cloud-enabled instances too. So both are important, right? Classic data centers, but also in modern cloud infrastructure. >> Yeah, one of the things people want to know about is what your enemy looks like, and now with the democratization with open source, and democratization of tools, the enemies could be hiding through obscure groups. The states, the bad actors and the state actors can actually run covert activities through other groups, so this is kind of a dynamic that creates confusion. >> No, in fact, it's their actual mode of operating, right? It's exactly what they do, they use proxies, right? So you'll see the Russians operating, looking like a criminal hacker group operating out of the eastern Europe. In part because a lot of those Russian criminal rings, in actuality. You see a lot of patriotic hackers, right? I would tell most people, if you see a patriotic hacker there's probably a government behind that whole operation. And so the question becomes, how do you confront that threat, right? A lot of people say deterrence doesn't work in cyberspace. I don't believe that. I think deterrence can and does work in cyberspace, we just don't practice it. We don't talk about our capabilities, we don't talk our red lines, we don't talk about what'll happen if you cross our red lines, and when we do establish red lines and they're crossed, we don't really enforce them. So it's no surprise that our enemies, or advisories, are hitting us in cyberspace, are testing our boundaries. It's cause we haven't really give them a sense of where those lines are and what we're going to do if they cross them. >> Are we making an progress on doing anything here? What's the state of the market there? >> Well the government appears to have gotten more aggressive, right? We've seen efforts in congress to give the Department of Defense and the US Intelligence Committee more authorities. You can see the stand up of US Cyber Command. And we've seen more of a public discussion of these issues, right? So that's happening. Now, is it working? That's a harder question to know. But the real hard question is, what do you do on private sector defense? Because our tradition has been, in this country, that if it's a nation-state threat, the government defends you against it. We don't expect Target or Walmart or Amazon to have service to air missiles on the roof of your buildings to defend against Russian Bear bombers. We expect the government to do that. But in cyberspace, the idea's flipped on its head. We expect Amazon and every company in America, from a mom and pop shop, all the way up to the big players, to defend themselves against script kiddies, criminal hacker gangs, and nation-states. >> John: And randomware's been taking down cities, Baltimore, recent example, >> Exactly. >> John: multiple times. Hit that well many times. >> That's right, that's right. >> Talk about where the US compares. I mean, here as you said, the US, we are starting to have these conversations, there's more of an awareness of these cyber threats. But modernization has been slow, it does not quite have the momentum. How do we rate with other countries? >> Well I think in a lot of ways we have the best capabilities when it comes to identifying threats, identifying the adversary, the enemy, and taking action to respond, right? If we're not the top one, we're in the top two or three, right? And the question, though, becomes one of, how do you work with industry to help industry become that good? Now our industry is at the top of that game also, but when you're talking about a nation-state, which has virtually unlimited resources, virtually unlimited man-power to throw at a problem, it's not realistic to expect a single company to defend itself, and at the same time, we as a nation are prepared to say, "Oh, the Department of Defense should be sitting on "the boundaries of the US internet." As if you could identify them even, right? And we don't want that. So the question becomes, how does the government empower the private sector to do better defense for itself? What can the government do working with industry, and how can industry work with one another, to defend each other? We really got to do collective defense, not because it makes sense, which it does, but because there is no other option if you're going to confront nation-state or nation-state enabled actors. And that's another threat, we've seen the leakage of nation-state capabilities out to a lot broader of an audience now. That's a problem, even though that may be 2013 called and wants it's hack back, those things still work, right? What we saw in Baltimore was stuff that has been known for a long time. Microsoft has released patches long ago for that, and yet, still vulnerable. >> And the evolution of just cyber essential command, and Cyber Command, seems to be going slow, at least from my frame. Maybe I'm not in the know, but what is the imperative? I mean, there's a lot of problems to solve. How does the public sector, how does the government, solve these problems? Is cloud the answer? What are some of the things that people of this, the top minds, discussing? >> Well and I think cloud is clearly one part of the solution, right? There's no question that when you move to a cloud infrastructure, you have sort of a more bounded perimeter, right? And that provides that ability to also rapidly update, you could update systems in real time, and in mass. There's not going around and bringing your floppy disc and loading software, and it sounds like that's sort of a joke about an older era, but you look at what happened with NotPetya and you read this great Wired article about what happened with NotPetya, and you look at Maersk. And the way that Maersk brought its systems back up, was they had domain controller in Africa that had gone down due to a power surge, where they were able to recover the physical hard drive and re-image all their world-wide domain controls off of that one hard drive. You think about a major company that runs a huge percentage of the world's ports, right? And this is how they recovered, right? So we really are in that, take your disc and go to computers. In a cloud infrastructure you think about how you can do that in real time, or rapidly refresh, rapidly install patches, so there's a lot of that, that's like a huge part of it. It's not a complete solution, but it's an important part. >> Yeah, one of the things we talk about, a lot of tech guys, is that this debate's around complexity, versus simplicity. So if you store your data in one spot, it's easy to audit and better for governing compliance, but yet easier for hackers to penetrate. From an IQ standpoint, the more complex it is, distributed, harder. >> Yeah I think that's right. >> John: But what's the trade off there? How are people thinking about that kind of direction? >> No that's a great question, right? There's a lot of benefits to diversity of systems, there's a lot of benefit to spreading out your crown jewels, the heart of your enterprise. At the same time, there's real resilience in putting it in one place, having it well defended. Particularly when it's a shared responsibility and you have partial responsibility for the defense, but the provider to, I mean, Amazon, and all the other cloud providers, Microsoft and Google, all have it in their own self interest to really defend their cloud really well. Because whether or not you call it shared responsibility, it's your stock price that matters if you get hit, right? And so, instead of you, Amazon, and all the other cloud players have an incentive to do the right thing and do it really well. And so this shared responsibility can work to both side's benefits. That being said, there's an ongoing debate. A lot of folks want to do there stuff on-prem in a lot of ways. You know, a lot of us are old school, right? When you touch it, you feel it, you know it's there. And we're working through that conversation with folks, and I think that at the end of the day, the real efficiency gains and the power of having super computing power at your fingertips for analytics, for consumer purposes and the like. I really think there's no way to avoid moving to a cloud infrastructure in the long run. >> I know you said you were a recovering lawyer, but you are the founding director of the National Security Institute at the Antonin Scalia School of Law. How are you thinking about educating the next generation of lawyers who could indeed become policy makers or at least work on these committees, to think about these threats that we don't even know about yet? >> That's a great question. So one of the things we're doing, is we're working through the process with the state commission on establishing a new LLM and cyber intelligence national security law. That'll be a great opportunity for lawyers to actually get an advanced degree in these issues. But we're also training non-lawyers. One of the interesting things is, you know, One of the challenges DC has, is we make a lot of tech policy, a lot of it not great, because it's not informed by technologists, so we've got a great partnership with the Hewlett Foundation where we're bringing technologists from around the country, mid-career folks, anywhere from the age of 24 to 38. We're bringing them to DC and we're educating them on how to talk to policy makers. These are technologists, these are coders, data scientists, all the like, and it's a real opportunity for them to be able to be influential in the process of making laws, and know how to involve themselves and talk that speak. Cause, DC speak is a certain thing, right? (laughing) And it's not typically consistent with tech speak, so we're trying to bridge that gap and the Hewlett Foundation's been a great partner in that effort. >> On that point about this collaboration, Silicon Valley's been taking a lot of heat lately, obviously Zuckerberg and Facebook in the news again today, more issues around irresponsibility, but they were growing a rocket ship, I mean, company's only 15 years old roughly. So the impact's been significant, but tech has moved so fast. Tech companies usually hire policy folks in DC to speak the language, educate, a little bit different playbook. But now it's a forcing function between two worlds colliding. You got Washington DC, the Silicon Valley cultures have to blend now. What are some of the top minds thinking about this? What are some of the discussions happening? What's the topic of conversations? >> Well look, I mean, you've see it in the press, it's no surprise you're hearing this talk about breaking up big tech companies. I mean, it's astounding. We used to live in world in which being successful was the American way, right? And now, it seems like at least, without any evidence of anti-trust concerns, that we're talking about breaking up companies that have otherwise hugely successful, wildly innovative. It's sort of interesting to hear that conversation, it's not just one party, you're hearing this in a bipartisan fashion. And so it's a concern, and I think what it reveals to tech companies is, man, we haven't be paying a lot of attention to these guys in DC and they can cause real trouble. We need to get over there and starting talking to these folks and educating them on what we do. >> And the imperative for them is to do the right thing, because, I mean, the United States interest, breaking up, say, Facebook, and Google, and Apple, and Amazon, might look good on paper but China's not breaking up Alibaba anytime soon. >> To the contrary. They're giving them low-interest loans and helping them all to excel. It's crazy. >> Yeah, and they have no R&D by the way, so that's been- >> Jamil: Right, because they stole all of our IP. >> So the US invests in R&D that is easily moving out through theft, that's one issue. You have digital troops on our shores from foreign nations, some will argue, I would say yes. >> Jamil: Inside the border. >> Inside the border, inside the interior, with access to the power grids, our critical infrastructure, this is happening now. So is the government now aware of the bigger picture around what we have as capabilities and criticalities that were needed now for digital military? What is that conversation like? >> Well I think they're having this conversation, right? I think the government knows it's a problem, they know that actually in a lot of ways a partnership with tech is better than an adversary relationship. That doesn't change the fact that, for some reason, in the last three, four years, we really have seen what some people are calling a "techlash", right? A backlash against technology. It kind of strikes me as odd, because of course, the modern economy that we've so benefited from is literally built on the back of the innovations coming out of the Silicon Valley, out of the west coast, and out of the DC metro area, where a lot these tech companies are developing some of the most innovative new ideas. Now they're, frankly, helping government innovate. So Amazon's a key part of that effort, right? Here in the public sector. And so I'm hoping that education will help, I know that the arrival of tech companies here to really have that conversation in an open and sensible way, I hope will sort of waft back some of this. But I worry that for too long the tech and the policies have ignored on another. And now they're starting to intersect as you say, and it has the possibility of going wrong fast, and I'm hoping that doesn't happen. >> You know, one of the things that Rebecca and I were talking about was this talent gap between public sector and private sector. These agencies aren't going to go public anytime soon, so maybe they should get equity deals and get a financial incentive. (laughing) You know what I mean? Shrink down the cost, increase the value. But as you get the collaboration between the two parties, the cloud is attracting smart people, because it gives you an accelerant of value. So people can see some entry points to land, some value out of the gate, verus giving up and abandoning it through red tape, or in other processes. So you starting to see smart people get attracted to cloud as a tool for making change. How is that working? And how is that going to work? Cause this could be coming to the partnership side of it. People might not want to work for the government, but could work with the government. This is a dynamic that we see as real. What's your thoughts? >> I think that's exactly right. Having these cloud infrastructures gives the ability to one, leverage huge amounts of computing power, but also to leverage insights and knowledge from the private sector in ways that you never could have imagined. So I really do think the cloud is an opportunity to bring real benefits from private sector innovation into the public sector very rapidly, right? So, broad-clouded option. And that's part of why John Alexander, my boss, and I have been talking a lot about the need for broad-clouded option. It's not just innovative in technology, it's benefits to the war fighter, Right? I mean, these are real, tangible benefits pushing data in real time, the war fighter, You know John Alexander had one of the biggest innovations in modern war fighting, where he's able to take civil intelligence down from weeks and months, down to minutes and seconds, that the naval and our war fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan to really take the fight to the enemy. The cloud brings that power scaled up to a huge degree, right? By orders of magnitude. And so the government recognizes this and yet today we don't see them yet moving rapidly in that direction. So I think the EO was a good move, a good first step in that direction, now we got to see it implemented by the various agencies down below. >> Well we'll kep in touch, great to have you on. I know we're wrapping up the day here, they're breaking down, we're going to pull the plug literally. (laughing) We'll keep in touch and we'll keep progress on you. >> Thank you so much, I appreciate it. >> Rebecca: Jamil, you are now a CUBE alumn, >> I love it, thank you. >> Rebecca: So congrats, you've joined the club. >> I love it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier you have been watching theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit. (electronic music)

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube covering Adobe Summit twenty nineteen brought to you by X Ensure Interactive. >> Welcome back to the Cubes. Live coverage here in Las Vegas for Adobe Summit. Twenty nineteen. I'm John Murray with Jeffrey Kerr. Next guest. Touch Wars. Who's a global delivery lead for Adobe with sent a censure interactive. That was a tongue twister. You for you, for the adobe relationship with a censure interactive. That's correct. Thank you. Global delivery lead. Thank you. That's right. Look into the Cube. Thankyou. So global. Big big landscape, cloud computing, Global impact delivery. That's hard corn nuts and bolts on the front lines. Tell us by what you do, what some of the issues around delivery, because that's where the rubber hits the road on all this. >> Well, that's exactly right. You know, when I think of my roll, think of me if someone who's out there working shoulder to shoulder with customers when it, you know from a delivery aspect, you know, providing the capability, providing the skills, providing the talent, making sure that we're getting the results that our clients are looking for and ultimately the quality that that we need to deliver for them. >> You guys do a lot of work. I mean, censure Interactive got a great team that sets up all the upgrade ideas, all the new business models. New tech is here. People process, culture change all going on. The end of the day comes into your I've gotta deliver it. And then the outcome is that the one has to accept that this is a core issue of people, talk about operational izing new things and sometimes has changed. Management involved his new culture shifts. So this is where we hear a lot. It's not. The tech problem is the people and the culture. Can you share your view on this because you're on the front lines on this one issue? >> It's a great point. And I think you know, one thing is standing up technology, and you can sort of get some of the nuts and bolts running. It's another thing to really get our clients and our customers enabled so they can unleash the power of some of these platforms. The technologies you know, there's a entire journey map on what their own people we need to go through from in a moment. There is a change management aspect around how we get those folks sort of feeling comfortable about that, and we often go through a couple different methods to do that. Sometimes we do it too, in the box where we'll sort of act with them and the same role other ways we'll sort of lead by example and do it and then they'll sort of shadow us and then eventually we just sort of make that transition. In some cases, they just frankly, you know, outsource it to us, right? And well take over that sort of feature and functionality a role in position on behalf of our customer. And that's okay. >> kind of horsepower. Do you bring to the table? And we just interviewed Nicky, who handles the essential interactive operations that seem like a great power source standing up fast, some operational capabilities. What else do you guys do bring to the table in terms of the delivery piece? >> Well, >> what Nikki and her team do is vital for us. So when you think about when I'm out there doing, I'm out there standing up these capabilities, empowering our customers, and then Nikki's with her team and everything we're doing an X century active operations is sort of operating that for that client, right? So once we sort of turn on some of those features and functions that Nicki's out there with her team, sort of running with it. And in that multiyear run in, getting those >> custom will hand the keys to her. Do so you, that's the hand off. Is that okay? >> Exactly. Right. So once we once we sort of power everything on with our client's power, all that integration on and then we leverage Nikki and her team in many ways to sort of take over that run. Tom, if you talk about the skills, that kind of the skills gap, if you will on some of the clients that you have and how are the skills and the rules evolving to execute with some of these new tooling in this kind of new process? It wasn't like build a campaign and slow roll it out. Now it's Go, go, go, go, go! Oh, you're absolutely right on that and I think I know that. But it's evolving, right? I mean, we data scientists are more important than they ever were. And so all of our customers and ourselves are investing on how we get data science because at the heart of it and If you think about what he's talking about in some of the new products that are coming out, it's about building that data layer right. And it's about taking that data later to the next level, too, around security and tradition. So helping our customers started get their arms around what it means to manage that data and all those aspects around the view of a customer is critical. Even the even the presentation tear you know it'LL be provides all those amazing technologies that allow customers to drive those rich experiences, whether it's on a tablet, whether it's on a mobile, whether it's on your desktop, ubiquitous doesn't matter. But that presentation tears is constantly changing. I mean, we didn't have, you know, the anger and the React ten years ago. Now you have all these other frameworks you have to begin to prepare for. >> About the one of his Aquino yesterday we've got my attention was the word and look, I love the way it sounds personalization at scale. And that's just just think about that concert for second. It's mind blowing. We love we love personalization doesn't like personalization. Yeah, but at scale a lot of moving parts. This is in your guy's wheelhouse. Century irregulars have large scale customers globally. What does that mean to you? Because I had us had happened best by so much. Send out forty million emails means insane the personalization experience. What does it mean? >> Well, what? >> When I hear something needs to be a scale, you gotta break it down to be a simple as possible. You got to figure out how you make that something super complex and dumb it down to where you truly can't scale it where you can enable people quickly. Um and sometimes you think big and start small so often What we'LL do is we'LL have our customers say, if you want to do one toe, one personalization we need to be thinking about how we can create content quickly, how we can create art quickly, how we can go and and operationalized that globally. Right, Because many times you need be working around the clock. So for me, when I think of that scale, it's how do we turn those capabilities on around the globe quickly for our clients and basically, you need to break it down. >> It's a place you go, though customs saying, Let's let's pick some use cases. That's a beachhead. Get that figured out. Make sure it's not a lot of moving parts. >> Yeah, and against >> software, because experience engine things of that nature >> and sort of start small, you know? So I you know, I would light up some teams take some initial use cases, maybe think about how you know, what are some of those you know, initial user journeys that end in journey. We wantto prove out. And then let's operationalize those. And then we'LL build on top of that overtime. >> Be asked by the Adobe announcements. What's getting you excited here? The event with some of the hallway conversations and conversations after hours, a lot different events going on. What are you talking about? What's the top conversation that you're involved in >> for sure AP when you talk about the new experience platform that's coming out and everything around there to me, I think that's a game changer in the marketplace, and I think it's also critical. Certainly OD eyes all wrapped in there and all the data theater aspects. But the new experience platform that Adobe is investing, it is sort of where I think our customers are driving towards and what's required in order to meet the demands of how to secure this data. How to wrap some permissions around it, how to take. You know what we would consider a P I and pH. I like data on be able to use it and more of their tools knowing that we have the security of the integrity of >> our CM taxi. Your job with customer experience. Platform >> right. Impact. Our job is it unleashes all kinds of potential. Uh, you know, when we do you think about what were out there helping our customers solution, it opens the gamut for us to go and sort of drive those next generation experiences in a much more you know, I guess, uh, formidable way, you know, I can >> more capabilities. Oh, absolutely. You know, >> execution. Exactly. What was super complex for me to build now just became a lot easier. Because now I have a frame, Eric and a structure and a platform that they're enabling it >> has impact the interview. The customer. I mean, so the partner landscape because you guys have a lot of partnerships, just always a key. One house. You hear Adobe Summit. But, you know, you might have some of these little Miss Provider's come in with a nice tool chain. Say, Hey, you know what? I want to plug this in the biggest center interactive engine. You guys got a lot of global breath. You're gonna probably get some impact on the ecosystem. How do you see partners? Because if it's an enabling platform and should be in the building something so that's going to tell Sign what? What's your view on the partner ecosystem? >> What's the first thing I'LL say about that is I think we're in a unique position because if you look at the scale we have at Accenture, so although I'm in extension interactive, I'm very focused on that digital and building the best experience on Planet I have this huge engine behind me of Broderick Center that has these capabilities. I mean, you know what we're dreaming up around, how we're working with Microsoft and happy Well, guess what? We already do that, too, so I can bring a lot of those vendor relationships and experiences capabilities and bring him right in house quickly. And when I need to go out to market and partner. I have those avenues, and I can go bring that niche that >> Lego blocks together now. Yeah, big things, auto integrate. Just put it together and >> adobes continue to invest in their io. And that allows us to integrate and plug in these things a lot quicker than we ever have before. >> What's the biggest challenge? You see it that adobe and the markers and and market is having the marketplace because a lot of new tech, a lot of great capabilities. Now emergency. There's a shift happening. Yeah, you know what kind of been going slow? You know, yard by yard, moved the chains like a football analogy. But now big movements gonna have we see happening Way. Siya shift coming. Big wave of innovation. What's the challenge? >> That definitely two challenges. I think one, uh, it's just the speed, right. The speed in which the market is moving. And how do you keep up with that speed? And how do you continue to invest in your own people? T learn it. And then, too, I think this year amount of data like the fact that we can store all this data. We have more data coming in than we've ever had before. I mean, just think of what I owe tea is doing to our our landscape and all the data that's coming in from a night and now we can use that as a as a whole, another level of, ah, sophistication and our analytics and our segmentation. And that's a tough job, right? That's how marketers keep up with that. It's, uh, it's changing their landscape, for sure. But what about just kind of the point of view when they get competition that comes out of complete left field, right, that you know, uber and lift or the obviously examples to get way overused. But you know, the company's heir now beating against companies that weren't even in their radar before that were purpose built on moving at light speed to your point. How do you help those legacy? Those legacy guys kind of take the big league, take the big step, get to hyperspeed personalization? I mean one thing. You can't be complacent, I think if you are complacent, your you know, one of those small, innovative companies is going to slowly eat your lunch on. So I think, you know, take advantage of that mindset that those small, you know, incubation type companies or this moth and maybe even think about How do I How do I build that same type of innovation within my own halls? And how do I take a manager? How that rapid development of that rapid change and oftentimes we're helping our customers go in and bootstrap that right started like, Let's go inside. And let's build a little innovation hub inside your own organization to go and compete with them. Otherwise, you know you're going to see what you know, like the case studies you just >> referenced right, because they're in the driver's seat, for sure. I mean, I think this is great innovation. Question. That week that came up in our last segment with Jim Leyland was you know, he talked about the vendor dynamics. Yes, When you have the world floating upside down, things have changed. Sweet vendors lead and enable. Now you have abs dictating terms, the infrastructure. That's a cloud model. He made a good point, he said. You know, a lot of the transformational stuff is great, but then it fails during integration and pointing out that they get to a certain point. It just crashes, not crashes. That's my word. But he said thiss challenges. It wasn't specific on outcomes of of transmission, we said pretty much its struggles and usually doesn't happen. Yeah, how do you see that? Because with now, automation machine learning Now you have agility in a marketing landscape, not just marketing cloud. You got all kinds of other things. It's like this sales and marketing. And there is everything you have agility. How does the integration impacts and has the delivery impact that transformation >> Goal? What ends? You're exactly right in the fact that when organizations make a big investment and Toby Technologies, they typically have a lot of other investor. It's another technologies as well. And so how do you create agility where you gotta plug and play sometimes more than one, and I'm sure Jim talk to you about our customer experience, engine and the beauty of that right where we can go and really bring a framework to our customers and our clients. That allows us to take the best of all these of all these experiences all these platforms, I should say, to build the best in class experience, and that's something we absolutely bring to the table. It's a framework. We've proved it out. And frankly, we have a whole bunch of connectors that already exist. So from my mind, when I'm trying to get them to be agility, I bring that type of thing to the table to help them move fast. >> I think that's a successful tell sign we see with successful, then vendors and partners and integrators is that you guys took your core competency and rose software and he packaged it up to automate the heavy lifting that I mean, why wouldn't >> you do the >> way you >> are accustomed there, >> buddy? I mean, I walk in our customers and I'm like, Well, they have a little this. They have a little that, then they're goingto go on, make this massive invest in Adobe, and it's like they're not going to just discard to retire some of those things. So way attempt to solve that problem. >> That's a real differentiate. Congratulations. Jim was great on that final question for you. Look going forward. What do you excited about? What's on your road map? What's what's next for you is the next leg of the journey for global delivery. Well, more delivery, you >> know. Honestly, it's it's to continue to build off scale around all of our locations. So when you look at its Centre Interactive were, you know, obviously a big North American business. But we have businesses all over the globe, and it's to continue to create, you know, to meet our customer's demands as they expand global. That's how do we deliver local and how do we deliver around the clock for them? And so for me, it's about build those capabilities everywhere you go South America, Australia, New Zealand in Eastern Europe, and, uh, and making sure that we create the same delivery patterns and we leverage the same assets and accelerators like the customer experience engine in all those places. >> And one final question. As you look at the arena of the all the vendors competing, what's the what's the winning formula? What's the posture that you see that's a successful vendor as they integrate it in this kind of these journeys in these experiences, what successful makeup of a successful supplier to customers >> from this from a from a technology >> that you look at all the players got Microsoft big part of the job you got Amazon, you got all these. You know, Marsh, Martek Stack is littered with logo's consolidations happening. There's a lot of battles battles on the field right now. Players of fighting for their future. >> Well, honestly, I think those who are going to make it as simple and as easy to empower their people to use is gonna be the winner. And I think you're you're seeing that certainly at at Adobe. But there's a lot of other formidable vendors out there who are creating very simple techniques to go on like this up. The more you could empower a business person and a marketer to do self service, the bigger win you're gonna have >> and to your point about scale. Simplicity. Yeah, thanks for coming on. Great insight. Thank you so much to share in the commentary. Appreciate Todd Schwarz here on the Cube Global delivery lead for the Adobe account for a censure Interactive Stevens. One more day to coverage after this short break. I'm John free with Jeffrey will be right back