(electronic music) (graphics whooshing) (graphics tinkling) >> Telecommunications is well north of a trillion-dollar business globally, that provides critical services on which virtually everyone on the planet relies. Dramatic changes are occurring in the sector, and one of the most important dimensions of this change is the underlying infrastructure that powers global telecommunications networks. Telcos have been thawing out, if you will, they're frozen infrastructure, modernizing. They're opening up, they're disaggregating their infrastructure, separating, for example, the control plane from the data plane, and adopting open standards. Telco infrastructure is becoming software-defined. And leading telcos are adopting cloud native microservices to help make developers more productive, so they can respond more quickly to market changes. They're embracing technology consumption models, and selectively leveraging the cloud where it makes sense. And these changes are being driven by market forces, the root of which stem from customer demand. So from a customer's perspective, they want services, and they want them fast. Meaning, not only at high speeds, but also they want them now. Customers want the latest, the greatest, and they want these services to be reliable and stable with high quality of service levels. And they want them to be highly cost-effective. Hello and welcome to this preview of Mobile World Congress 2023. My name is Dave Vellante, and at this year's event, theCUBE has a major presence at the show made possible by Dell Technologies, and with me to unpack the trends in telco, and look ahead to MWC23 are Dennis Hoffman, he's the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Dell's telecom business, and Aaron Chaisson, who is the Vice President of Telecom and Edge Solutions Marketing at Dell Technologies, gentlemen, welcome, thanks so much for spending some time with me. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Thanks, glad to be here. >> So, Dennis, let's start with you. Telcos in recent history have been slow to deliver and to monetize new services, and a large part because their purpose-built infrastructure could been somewhat of a barrier to responding to all these market forces. In many ways, this is what makes telecoms, really this market so exciting. So from your perspective, where is the action in this space? >> Yeah, the action Dave is kind of all over the place, partly because it's an ecosystem play. I think it's been, as you point out, the disaggregation trend has been going on for a while. The opportunity's been clear, but it has taken a few years to get all of the vendors, and all of the components that make up a solution, as well as the operators themselves, to a point where we can start putting this stuff together, and actually achieving some of the promise. >> So Aaron, for those who might not be as familiar with Dell's a activities in this area, here we are just ahead of Mobile World Congress, it's the largest event for telecoms, what should people know about Dell? And what's the key message to this industry? >> Sure, yeah, I think everybody knows that there's a lot of innovation that's been happening in the industry of late. One of the major trends that we're seeing is that shift from more of a vertically-integrated technology stack, to more of a disaggregated set of solutions, and that trend has actually created a ton of innovation that's happening across the industry, or along technology vendors and providers, the telecoms themselves. And so, one of the things that Dell's really looking to do is, as Dennis talked about, is build out a really strong ecosystem of partners and vendors that we're working closely together to be able to collaborate on new technologies, new capabilities that are solving challenges that the networks are seeing today. Be able to create new solutions built on those in order to be able to bring new value to the industry. And then finally, we want to help both partners, as well as our CSP providers activate those changes, so that they can bring new solutions to market, to be able to serve their customers. And so, the key areas that we're really focusing on with our customers is, technologies to help modernize the network, to be able to capitalize on the value of open architectures, and bring price performance to what they're expecting, and availability that they're expecting today. And then also, partner with the lines of business to be able to take these new capabilities, produce new solutions, and then deliver new value to their customers. >> Great, thank you, Aaron. So Dennis, you and I, known you for a number of years. I've watched you, you're are a trend spotter. You're a strategic thinker. I love now the fact that you're running a business that you had to go out and analyze, and now you got to make it happen. So, how would you describe Dell's strategy in this market? >> Well, it's really two things. And I appreciate the comment, I'm not sure how much of a trend spotter I am, but I certainly enjoy, and I think I'm fascinated by what's going on in this industry right now. Our two main thrusts, Dave, are first round, trying to catalyze that ecosystem, be a force for pulling together a group of folks, vendors that have been flying in fairly loose formation for a couple of years, to deliver the kinds of solutions that move the needle forward, and produce the outcomes that our network operator customers can actually buy and consume, and deploy, and have them be supported. The other thing is, there's a couple of very key technology areas that need to be advanced here. This ends up being a much anticipated year in telecom. Because of the delivery of some open infrastructure solutions that have being developed for years. With the Intel Sapphire Rapids program coming to market, we've of course got some purpose-built solutions on top of that for telecommunications networks. Some expanded partnerships in the area of multi-cloud infrastructure. And so, I would say the second main thrust is, we've got to bring some intellectual property to the party. It's not just about pulling the ecosystem together. But those two things together really form the twin thrusts of our strategy. >> Okay, so as you point out, you obviously not going to go alone in this market, it's way too broad, there's so many routes to market, partnerships, obviously very, very important. So, can you share a little bit more about the ecosystem and partners, maybe give some examples of some of the key partners that you'd be highlighting or working with, maybe at Mobile World Congress, or other activities this year? >> Yeah, absolutely. As Aaron touched on, I'm a visual thinker. The way I think about this thing is a very, very vertical architecture is tipping sideways. It's becoming horizontal. And all of the layers of that horizontal architecture are really where the partnerships are at. So, let's start at the bottom, silicon. The silicon ecosystem is very much focused on this market. And producing very specific products to enable open, high performance telecom networks. That's both in the form of host processors, as well as accelerators. One layer up, of course, is the stuff that we're known for, subsystems, compute storage, the hardware infrastructure that forms the foundation for telco clouds. A layer above that, all of the cloud software layer, the virtualization and containerization software, and all of the usual suspects there, all of whom are very good partners of ours, and we're looking to expand that pretty broadly this year. And then at the top of the layer cake, all of the network functions, all of the VNF's and CNF's that were once kind of the top of proprietary stacks, that are now opening up and being delivered, as well-formed containers that can run on these clouds. So, we're focusing on all of those, if you will, product partnerships, and there is a services wrapper around all of it. The systems integration necessary to make these systems part of a carrier's network, which of course, has been running for a long time, and needs to be integrated with in a very specific way. And so, all of that, together kind of forms the ecosystem, all of those are partners, and we're really excited about being at the heart of it. >> Interesting, it's not like we've never seen this movie before, which is, it's sort of repeating itself in telco. Aaron, you heard my little intro up front about the need to modernize infrastructure, I wonder if I could touch on another major trend, which we're seeing is the cloud, and I'm talkin' about not only public, but private and hybrid cloud. The public cloud is an opportunity, but it's also a threat for telcos. Telcom providers are lookin' to the public cloud for specific use cases, you think about like bursting for an iPhone launch or whatever. But at the same time, these cloud vendors, they're sort of competing with telcos. They're providing local zones, for example, sometimes trying to do an end run on the telco connectivity services, so telecom companies, they have to find the right balance between what they own and what they rent. And I wonder if you could add some color as to what you see in the market and what Dell specifically is doing to support these trends. >> Yeah, and I think the most important thing is what we're seeing, as you said, is these aren't things that we haven't seen before. And I think that telecom is really going through their own set of cloud transformations, and so, one of the hot topics in the industry now is, what is telco cloud? And what does that look like going forward? And it's going to be, as you said, a combination of services that they offer, services that they leverage. But at the end of the day, it's going to help them modernize how they deliver telecommunication services to their customers, and then provide value added services on top of that. From a Dell perspective, we're really providing the technologies to provide the underpinnings to lay a foundation on which that network can be built, whether that's best of breed servers that are built in design for the telecom environments. Recently, we announced our Infer block program, in partnering with virtualization providers, to be able to provide engineered systems that dramatically simplify how our customers can deploy, manage, and lifecycle manage throughout day two operations, an entire cloud environment. And whether they're using Red Hat, whether they're using Wind River, or VMware, or other virtualization layers, they can deploy the right virtualization layer at the right part of their network to support the applications they're looking to drive. And Dell is looking to solve how they simplify and manage all of that, both from a hardware, as well as on management software perspective. So, this is really what Dell's doing to, again, partner with the broader technology community, to help make that telco cloud a reality. >> Aaron, let's stay here for a second, I'm interested in some of the use cases that you're going after with customers. You've got Edge infrastructure, remote work, 5G, where's security fit, what are the focus areas for Dell, and can we double click on that a little bit? >> Yeah, I mean, I think there's two main areas of telecommunication industry that we're talking to. One, we've really been talking about the sort of the network buyer, how do they modernize the core, the network Edge, the RAN capabilities to deliver traditional telecommunication services, and modernize that as they move into 5G and beyond. I think the other side of the business is, telecoms are really looking from a line of business perspective to figure out how do they monetize that network, and be able to deliver value added services to their enterprise customers on top of these new networks. So, you were just touching on a couple of things that are really critical. In the enterprise space, AI and IoT is driving a tremendous amount of innovation out there, and there's a need for being able to support and manage Edge compute at scale, be able to provide connectivity, like private mobility, and 4G and 5G, being able to support things like mobile workforces and client capabilities, to be able to access these devices that are around all of these Edge environments of the enterprises. And telecoms are seeing as that, as an opportunity for them to not only provide connectivity, but how do they extend their cloud out into these enterprise environments with compute, with connectivity, with client and connectivity resources, and even also provide protection for those environments as well. So, these are areas that Dell is historically very strong at. Being able to provide compute, be able to provide connectivity, and being able to provide data protection and client services, we are looking to work closely with lines of businesses to be able to develop solutions that they can bring to market in combination with us, to be able to serve their end user customers and their enterprises. So, those are really the two key areas, not only network buyer, but being able to enable the lines of business to go and capitalize on the services they're developing for their customers. >> I think that line of business aspect is key, I mean, the telcos have had to sit back and provide the plumbing, cost per bit goes down, data consumption going through the roof, all the over at the top guys have had the field day with the data, and the customer relationships, and now it's almost like the revenge (chuckles) of the telcos. Dennis, I wonder if we could talk about the future. What can we expect in the years ahead from Dell, if you break out the binoculars a little bit. >> Yeah, I think you hit it earlier. We've seen the movie before. This has happened in the IT data center. We went from proprietary vertical solutions to horizontal open systems. We went from client server to software-defined open hardware cloud native. And the trend is likely to be exactly that, in the telecom industry because that's what the operators want. They're not naive to what's happened in the IT data center, they all run very large data centers. And they're trying to get some of the scale economies. Some of the agility, the cost of ownership benefits for the reasons Aaron just discussed. It's clear as you point out, this industry's been really defined by the inability to stop investing, and the difficulty to monetize that investment. And I think now, everybody's looking at this 5G, and frankly, 5G plus 6G, and beyond, as the opportunity to really go get a chunk of that revenue, and Enterprise Edge is the target. >> And 5G is touching so many industries, and that kind of brings me, Aaron into Mobile World Congress. I mean, you look at the floor layout, it's amazing. You got Industry 4.0, you've got our traditional industry and telco colliding. There's public policy. So, give us a teaser to Mobile World Congress 23, what's on deck at the show from Dell? >> Yeah, we're really excited about Mobile World Congress. This, as you know, is a massive event for the industry every year. And it's really the event that the whole industry uses to kick off this coming year. So, we're going to be using this obviously to talk to our customers and our partners about what Dell's looking to do, and what we're innovating on right now, and what we're looking to partner with them around. In the front of the house, we're going to be doin', we're going to be highlighting 13 different solutions and demonstrations to be able to show our customers what we're doing today, and show them the use cases, and put into action, so they get to actually look and feel, and touch, and experience what it is that we're working around. Obviously, meetings are important, everybody knows Mobile World Congress is the place to get those meetings and kickoff for the year. So, we're going to have, we're lookin' at several hundred meetings, hundreds of meetings that we're going to be lookin' to have across the industry with our customers and partners in the broader community. And of course, we've also got technology that's going to be in a variety of different partner spaces as well. So, you can come and see us in hall three, but we're also going to have technologies, kind of spread all over the floor. And of course, there's always theCUBE. You're going to be able to see us live all four days, all day, every day. You're going to be hearing our executives, our partners, our customers, talk about what Dell is doing to innovate in the industry, and how we're looking to leverage the broader, open ecosystem to be able to transform the network, and what we're lookin' to do. So, in that space, we're going to be focusing on what we're doing from an ecosystem perspective, our infrastructure focus. We'll be talking about what we're doing to support telco cloud transformation. And then finally, as we talked about earlier, how are we helping the lines of business within our telecoms monetize the opportunity? So, these are all different things we're really excited to be focusing on, and look forward to the event next month. >> Yeah, it's going to be awesome in Barcelona at the FITA, as you say, Dell's big presence in hall three, Orange is in there, Deutsche Telecom, Intel's in hall three. VMware's there, Nokia, Vodafone, you got some great things to see there. Check that out, and of course, theCUBE, we are super excited to be collaborating with you, we got a great setup. We're in the walkway right between halls four and five, right across from the government of Catalonia, who are the host partners for the event, so there's going to be a ton of action there. Guys, can't wait to see you there, really appreciate your time today. >> Great, thanks. >> Alright, Mobile World Congress, theCUBE's coverage starts on February 27th right after the keynotes. So, first thing in the morning, east coast time, we'll be broadcasting is, Aaron said all week, Monday through Thursday in the show floor, check that out at thecube.net. siliconangle.com has all the written coverage, and go to dell.com, see what's happenin' there, have all the action from the event. Don't miss us, this is Dave Vellante, we'll see you there. (electronic music)

(bright music) >> Hello cloud computing friends and welcome back to theCUBE, where we are live from Las Vegas, Nevada, here at AWS re:Invent all week. My name is Savannah Peterson, very excited to be joined by Paul Gillan today. How are you doing? >> I'm doing great, Savannah. It's my first re:Invent. >> I was just going to ask you >> So it's quite an experience. >> If you've ever been to re:Invent. >> It's dazzling much like the sequins on your top. It's dazzling. >> Yes. >> It's a jam packed affair. I came to the COMDEX Conference for many years in Las Vegas, which was huge event and this really rivals it in terms of these crowd sizes. But I think there's more intensity here. There's more excitement. People are just jazzed about being here to the extent that I never saw at other computer conferences. >> I thought I would agree with you. It's my first re:Invent as well. I'm glad we could share this experience together. And the vibe, the pulse, I think being back in person is really contagious as well. Ooh, maybe the wrong word to use, but in a great way. The energy is definitely radiating between people here. I'll watch my words a little bit better. >> And in person we have with us Samuel Nicholls, the director of public cloud at Global Product Marketing at Veeam Software. Sam, is it Sam or Samuel? >> Depends if I'm in trouble, Paul. >> Savannah: But it depends on who's saying it out loud. >> Yeah, yeah. It's typically, Samuel is usually reserved for my mother, so- >> Yeah. >> (laughs) Well, Sam, thanks for joining us. >> We'll stick with Sam on the show. >> Yeah. >> So Veeam been a red hot company for several years. Really made its, uh, its reputation in the VMware world. Now you've got this whole-sail shift to the cloud, not that VMware is not important still, but how is that affecting, you're shifting with it, how is that affecting your role as a product manager and the business overall? >> Yeah, it's a fantastic question. Obviously Veeam was pioneered in terms of being the purpose-built backup and recovery company for VMware. And as these workloads are being transitioned from the data center into the cloud or just net new workloads being created in the cloud, there is that equal need for backup and recovery there. So it's incredibly important that we were able to provide a purpose-built backup and recovery solution for workloads that live in AWS as well. >> Paul: And how different is it backing up an AWS workload compared to a VMware workload? >> I think it depends on what kind of service a user is, is, is utilizing, right? There's infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, software as a service. And given the differences in what is exposed to that customer that can make backup and recovery quite challenging. So I would say that the primary thing that we want to look at is utilizing native snapshots is our first line of defense when it comes to backup and recovery, irrespective of what workload that right might be whether it's a virtual machine, Amazon EC2, some sort of database on Amazon RDS, a file share, so on. >> Savannah: I bet you're seeing a lot across verticals and across the industry given the support that you're giving customers. What are you seeing in the market and in customer environments? What are some of those trends? >> So I think the major trends that we highlight in our data protection trend support, which is a new update is coming very shortly in the new year, is- >> Savannah: We have to check that out. >> Yeah, absolutely. The physical server is on a decline within the data center. Virtualized workloads, namely VMware is relatively static, kind of flat. The real hockey stick is with the cloud workloads. And as I mentioned before, that is partially because workloads are being transitioned from physical to virtual machines to being cloud hosted but also we're creating more applications and the cloud has become lead de facto standard for new workloads. So you hear about cloud first initiatives, digital transformation, the cloud is central to that. >> You mentioned snapshotting, which is a relatively new phenomenon, although it's taken a hold rapidly, how does snapshotting work in the cloud versus in on your on-prem environment? >> Samuel: It's not wildly different at all. I think the snapshots is again, a great first line of defense for helping users achieve very low recovery point objectives. So the frequency that they can protect their data as well as very low recovery time objectives, how quickly that I can recover the data. Because that's why we're backing up, right? We need the ability to recover. However, snapshots certainly have their limitations as well. They are not independent of the workload that is being protected. So if there were to be some sort of cybersecurity event like ransomware that is prolific throughout pretty much every business, every vertical. When that snapshot is not independent, if the production system becomes compromised that snapshot's likely to be compromised as well. And then going back to the recovery piece, not going to have something to recover from. >> And it's not a one and done with ransomware. >> No. >> It's, yeah. So how, so what is the role that backup plays? I mean a lot of people, I feel like security is such a hot topic here in the show and just in general, attacks are coming in unique form factors for everyone. I mean, I feel like backup is, no pun intended, the backbone of a system here. How does that affect what you're creating, I mean? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think, like you say the backup is core to any comprehensive security strategy, right? I think when we talk about security, everyone tends to focus on the preventative, the proactive piece, stopping the bad guys from getting in. However, there is that remediative aspect as well because like you say, ransomware is relentless, right? You, you as a good guy have to pretty much fend off each and every single attack that comes your way. And that can be an infinite number of attacks. We're all human beings, we're fallible, right? And sometimes we can't defend against everything. So having a secure backup strategy is part of that remediative recovery component for a cybersecurity strategy is critical. And that includes things like encryption, immutability, logical separation of data and so forth. >> Paul: We know that ransomware is a scourge on-premises, typically begins with the end users, end user workstation. How does ransomware work in the cloud? And do the cloud providers have adequate protections against ransomware? Or can they? >> Samuel: Yeah, it's a, it's a fantastic question as well. I think when we look at the cloud, one of the common misconceptions is as we transition workloads to the cloud, we are transitioning responsibility to that cloud provider. And again, it's a misconception, right? It is a shared responsibility between the cloud provider in this case, AWS and the user. So as we transition these workloads across varying different services, infrastructure, platform, software as a service, we're always, always transitioning varying degrees of responsibility. But we always own our data and it is our responsibility to protect and secure that data, for the actual infrastructure components, the hardware that is on the onus of the cloud provider, so I'd say that's the major difference. >> Is ransomware as big a threat in the cloud as it is on-prem? >> Absolutely. There's no difference between a ransomware attack on-premises or in the cloud. Irrespective of where you are choosing to run your workloads, you need to have that comprehensive cybersecurity strategy in order to defend against that and ultimately recover as well if there's a successful attempt. >> Yeah, it's, ooh, okay. Let's get us out at the dark shadows real quick (laughs) and bring us back to a little bit of the business use case here. A lot of people using AWS. What do you think are some of the considerations, they should have when they're thinking about this, thinking about growing their (indistinct)? >> Well, if we're going to stick down the dark shadows, the cybersecurity piece. >> We can be the darkness. >> You and me kind of dark shadows business. >> Yeah, yeah. >> We can go rainbows and unicorns, nice and happy if you like. I think there's a number of considerations they need to keep up. Security is, is, is number one. The next piece is around the recovery as well. I think folks, when they, when we talk about backup and recovery, the focus is always on the backup piece of it. But again, we need to focus on why we're doing the backup. It's the recovery, it's the recovery component. So making sure that we have a clean verifiable backup that we're able to restore data from. Can we do that in a, in efficient and timely manner? And I think the other major consideration is looking at the entirety of our environments as well. Very few companies are a hundred percent sole sourced on a single cloud provider. It is typically hybrid cloud. It's around 80% of organizations are hybrid, right? So they have their on-premises data and they also have workloads running in one or multiple clouds. And when it comes to backup and recovery of all of these different infrastructures and environments, the way that we approach it is very different. And that often leads to multiple different point products from multiple different vendors. The average company utilizes three different backup products, sometimes as many as seven and that can introduce a management nightmare that's very complex, very resource intensive, expensive. So looking at the entirety of the environment and looking to utilize a backup provider that can cover the entirety of that environment while centralizing everything under a single management console helps folks be a lot more efficient, a lot more cost effective and ultimately better when it comes to data protection. >> Amazon and all cloud providers really are increasingly making regions transparent. Just at this conference, Amazon introduced failover controls from multiple multi-region access points. So you can, you can failover from one access from one region to another. What kind of challenges does that present to you as a backup provider? >> I don't think it represents any challenges. When we look at the native durability of the cloud, we look at availability zones, we look at multi-region failover. That is, that durability is ultimately founded on, on replication. And I wouldn't say that replication and backup, you would use one or the other. I would say that they are complimentary. So for replication, that is going to help with the failover scenario, that durability component. But then backup again is that independent copy. Because if we look at replication, if let's say the source data were to be compromised by ransomware or there was accidental deletion or corruption, that's simply going to be copied over to the target destination as well. Having that backup as an independent copy, again compliments that strategy as well. >> Paul: You need it in either, in any scenario. >> Samuel: In any scenario. >> I think the average person would probably say that backup is not the most exciting technology aspect of this industry. But, but you guys certainly made, build a great business on it. What excites you about what's coming in backup? What are the new technologies, new advancements that perhaps we haven't seen and productized yet that you think are going to change the game? >> I think actually what we offer right now is the most exciting piece which is just choice flexibility. So Veeam again is synonymous with VMware backup but we cover a multitude of environments including AWS, containerized workloads, Kubernetes physical systems and the mobility pieces is critical because as organizations look to act on their digital transformation, cloud first initiatives, they need to be able to mobilize their workloads across different infrastructures, maybe from on-premises into the cloud, one cloud to another, maybe it's cloud back to on-premises, 'cause we do also see that. That flexibility of choice is what excites me about Veeam because it's ultimately giving the users best in class data protection tool sets without any prescriptive approach from us in terms of where you should be running your workloads. That is the choice that you use. >> Yeah, Veeam is definitely more than VMware. We actually had a chance to chat with you all like KubeCon and CloudNativeCon in Detroit. So we, we've seen the multitude of things that you touch. I want to bring it back to something and something kind of fun because you talked a lot about the community and being able to serve them. It's very clear, actually I shouldn't say this, I shouldn't say it's very clear, but to me it appears clear that community is a big priority for Veeam. I just want to call this out 'cause this was one of the cooler pieces of swag. You all gave out a hundred massage guns. Okay, very hot topic. Hot Christmas gift for 2022. I feel like Vanna White right now. And, but I thought that I was actually really compelled by this because we do a swag segment on theCUBE but it's not just about the objects or getting stuff. It's really about who's looking out for their community and how are they saying thanks. I mean, swag is a brand activation but it's also a thank you and I loved that you were giving out massage guns to the AWS Heroes and Community Builders. >> Yep. >> What role does community play in the culture and the product development at Veeam? >> So community has always been at the heart of Veeam. If you have a look at pretty much every single development across all of our versions, across all of our products it's always did by the community, right? We have a wonderful Veeam forum where we got 400,000 plus users actively providing feedback on the product what they would like to see. And that is ultimately what steers the direction of the product. Of course market trends and technology chain. >> A couple other factors, I'm sure. >> A couple of other factors, but community is huge for us. And the same goes for AWS. So, you know, talking with the AWS Heroes, the Community Builders helps Veeam reach further into that, into that community and the AWS user base and empower those folks with data protection tools and massage guns, when your feet are tired from, you know, being standing on them all day in Vegas. >> (laughs) Yeah, well, I mean, everybody, everybody's working hard and it's nice to say, it's nice to say, thank you. So I love, I love to hear that and it's, it's clear from the breadth of products that you're creating, the ways that you're supporting your customers that you already, they care a lot about community. We have a new challenge on theCUBE this year at AWS re:Invent. Think of it as an Instagram reel of your thought leadership, your hot take on the show, key themes as we look into 2023. What do you think is the most important story or trend or thing going on here at the show? >> I think it's just the continuation of cybersecurity and the importance of backup as a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy. You know, some folks might say that secure backup is your last line of defense. Again, ransomware is relentless. These folks are going to keep coming and even if they're successful, it's not a one and done thing. It's going to happen again and again and again. So, you know, we have a look around the show floor, the presentations there is a huge cybersecurity focus and really just what folks should be doing as their best practice to secure their AWS environments. >> That's awesome. Well, Paul, any final, any final thoughts or questions? >> I just quickly, you've mentioned data security, you mentioned data protection and backup sort of interchangeably but they're not really the same thing, are they? I mean, what businesses do you see Veeam as being here? >> I would say that we are a data protection company because of, yes, there is backup, but there's also the replication component. There's the continuous data protection component where we've got, you know, near-zero RTOs and then we again look at the cybersecurity components of that. What can we do to really protect that data? So I would say that the two are different. Backup is a subset of data protection. >> Sam, thank you so much for being here with us on theCUBE. It's been a super insightful conversation. Hopefully we'll get you back soon and more of the teams, there seem to be celebrities here with us on theCUBE. Paul Gillan, thank you so much for being here with me. >> Pleasure Savannah. >> And I'm glad we get to celebrate our first re:Invent and most importantly, thank you to the audience for tuning in. Without you, we don't get to hang out here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada, where we're live from the show floor at AWS re:Invent. My name is Savannah Peterson with Paul Gillan. We're theCUBE and we are the leading source for high-tech coverage. (bright music)

(gentle music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of the AWS Startup Showcase. Season two, episode three. This is about MarTech, emerging cloud scale customer experience. This is our ongoing series that you know and love hopefully that feature a great number of AWS ecosystem partners. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Got a great guest here from Branch. Michelle Lerner joins me, the senior director of business development. She's going to be talking about Branch but also about one of your favorite brands, Peet's, yep, the coffee place, and how they supercharged loyalty and app adoption with Branch. Michelle, it's great to have you on the program. >> Yeah. Great to be here. Thank you so much for having me. >> Tell us a little bit about Branch, what you guys do for the modern mobile marketer. >> Yeah, absolutely. So you can think about Branch as a mobile linking platform. So what that means is we offer a seamless deep linking experience and insightful campaign measurement across every single marketing channel and platform on mobile. We exist so that we can break down walled gardens to help our customers engage with their customers in the most optimal way across any device and from every marketing channel. Our products are specifically designed to help create an amazing user experience, but also provide full picture holistic downstream measurement across any paid, owned, and earned channels so that brands can actually see what's working. So what that really means is that we make it really easy to scale our links across every single marketing channel, which then route the users to the right place at any device through even past install so that they can get to the context that they expect for a seamless experience. We then provide that cross channel analytics back to the brand so that they could see what's working and they can make better business decisions. So kind of summing it up, our industry leading mobile linking actually powers those deep links, also supports that measurement so that brands can build a sophisticated experience that actually delight their users but also improve their metrics and conversion rates. >> Those two things that you said are key. We expected to be delighted with whatever experience we're having and we also want to make sure, and obviously, the brands want to make sure that they're doing that but also that from an attribution perspective, from a campaign conversion perspective, that they can really understand the right tactics and the right strategic elements that are driving those conversions. That's been a challenge for marketers for a long time. Speaking of challenges, we've all been living through significant challenges. There's no way to say it nicely. The last two years, every industry completely affected by the pandemic talk. We're going to talk about Peet's Coffee. And I want to understand some of the challenges that you saw in the quick service restaurant or QSR industry at large. Talk to me about those industry challenges and then we'll dig into the Peet's story. >> Yeah, absolutely. So obviously the pandemic changed so much in our lives whether it's going to work or commuting or taking our kids to school or even getting our morning coffee. So when you think about Peet's, specifically within the QSR industry, they knew that they needed to innovate in order to make sure that they could provide their customers with their daily cups of coffee in a really safe and effective way. So they thought really quickly on their feet, they engaged us at Branch to help launch their order ahead messaging across their online and offline channels. They really wanted to maintain their commitment to an excellent customer experience but in a way that obviously would be safe and effective. >> That was one of the things that I missed the very most in the very beginning of the pandemic was going to my local Peet's. I missed that experience. Talk me about, you mentioned the online and offline, I'm very familiar with the online as an app user, mobile app user, but what were some of the challenges that they were looking to Branch to resolve on the offline experiences? People were queuing outside or for those folks that were they trying to get folks to convert to using the mobile app that maybe weren't users already? What was that online and offline experience? What were some of the challenges they were looking to resolve? >> Yeah, absolutely. The modern marketer is really both, like you said, online and offline, there is a heavy focus within the app and Peet's kind of wanted to bridge those two by pushing users into the app to provide a better experience there. So what they ended up doing was they used our deep linking capabilities to seamlessly route their customers to their loyalty program and their rewards catalog and other menu offerings within the app so that they could actually get things done in real time, but also in real time was the ability to then measure across those different campaigns so that they had visibility, Peet's, into kind of the way that they could optimize that campaign performance but also still give that great experience to their users. And they actually saw higher loyalty adoption, order values, and attributed purchases when they were able to kind of see in real time where these users were converting. But another thing that we're actually seeing across the board and Peet's did a great job of this was leveraging Branch power QR codes where we are seeing like the rebirth of the QR code. They're back, they're here to stay. They actually used that across multiple channels. So they used it with their in-store signage. You might have even seen it on their to go cups, coffee cards that were handed out by baristas. They were all encouraging customers to go order ahead using the Peet's coffee app. But that was kind of just the beginning for them. The creation of unique links for those QR codes actually spread for them to create Branch links across everything from emails to ads on Instagram. So before long, most of Peet's retail marketing were actually Branch links just because of the ease of creation and reliability, but more so again, going back to that customer experience, it really provided that good experience for the customers to make sure that they were getting within the mobile app so that they can take action and order their coffee. Another way that Branch kind of bridges the different platforms is actually between mobile web and app. Peet used Branch Journeys and that's a product of ours. It's a way that they can convert their mobile web users into app users. So they used deferred deep links with the ultimate goal of then converting those users into high value app users. So the Peet's team actually tested different creative and interstitials across the mobile site which would then place those users into the key pages, like either the homepage or the store locator, or the menu pages within the app. So that also helped them kind of build up not just their mobile app order online but also their delivery business so they could hire new trials of seasonal beverages. They could pair them with a free delivery offering. So they knew that they were able to leverage that at scale across multiple initiatives. >> I love those kinds of stories where it's kind of like a land and expand where there was obviously a global massive problem. They saw that recognized our customers are still going to be is demanding. Maybe if not more than they were before with I want my coffee, I want it now, you mentioned real time. I think one of the things we learned during the pandemic is access to realtime data isn't a nice to have anymore. We expect it as consumers even in our business lives, but the ability to be able to measure, course correct, but then see, wow, this is driving average order value up, we're getting more folks using our mobile app, maybe using delivery. Let's expand the usage of Branch across what we're doing in marketing can really help transform our marketing organization and a business at the brand level. >> Absolutely. And it also helps predict that brand loyalty. Because like you said, we, as consumers expect that that brands are going to kind of follow us where we are in our life cycle as consumers and if you don't do that, then you're going to be left in the dust unfortunately. >> I think one of the memories that will always stick with me, Michelle, during the last couple years is that first cup of Peet's that I didn't have to make at home myself. Just finally getting the courage to go back in, use the app, go in there, but oh man, that was probably the best taste of coffee I probably will ever have. You mentioned some of the products, you mentioned Journeys, and that allows them to do AB testing, looking at different CTAs, being able to kind of course correct and adjust campaigns in real time. >> Yeah, absolutely. So Journeys, what it does is it's basically a banner or a full page interstitial that is populated on the mobile web. So if you go to let's say Peets.com, you could get served as a user, either different creative or depending on where you are, location wise, you could be in the store, maybe there's a promotion. So it's triggered by all these different targeting capabilities. And so what that does is it takes me as a user. I can click that and go into the app where, like we said before, we have higher order value, higher lifetime value of a customer. And all my credit card information is saved. It just makes it so much more seamless for me to convert as a user within the app. And obviously Peet's likes that as well because then their conversion rates are actually higher. There's also kind of fun ways to play around with it. So if I am already a loyal customer and I have the app, you probably would target different creative for me than you would for someone who doesn't have the app. So you could say, hey, download our app, get $5 off of your next mobile order. Things like that you could play around with and you can see really does help increase that loyalty. But actually they were able to take, they kind of are experimenting with the geotargeted journeys in different key markets with different Peet's. And actually it was helping ultimately get their reinstalls growing. So for customers who maybe had the app before but needed to reinstall it because now there's such a bigger focus, they saw it both on the acquisition and the re-engagement side as well. >> So Branch has been pretty transformative, not in my estimation to Peet's marketing, but to Peet's as a business I'm hearing absolutely customer loyalty, revenue obviously impacted, brand loyalty, brand reputation. These are things that really kind of boil up to the top of the organization. So we're not just talking about benefits to the marketing and the sales folks. This is the overall massive business outcomes that you guys are enabling organizations like Peet's to generate. >> Yeah, definitely. And that's kind of what we tell our customers when they come to Branch. We want them to think about what their overall business objectives are versus if you think just campaign by campaign, okay, that's fine. But ultimately what are we trying to achieve? How could we help the bottom line? And then how can we also kind of help integrate with other mobile marketing technology or the modern tech stack that they're using? How do we integrate into that and actually provide not just a seamless experience for their end user, but with their marketing orgs, their product orgs, whoever's kind of touching the business as well? >> Have you noticed along those lines in the last couple of years as things like customer delight, seamless experience, the ability to translate, if I start on my iPad and I go to my laptop and then I finish a transaction on my phone, have you noticed your customer conversations increasing up to the C-suite level? Is this much more of a broad organizational objective around we've got to make sure that we have a really strong digital user experience? >> Yeah, absolutely. Like we were talking about before, it really does help affect the bottom line when you're providing a great experience with Branch being a mobile linking platform, our links just work. We outperform everybody else in the space and it might sound like really simple, okay, a link is working getting me from point A to point B, but doing it the right way and being consistent actually will increase performance over time of all these campaigns. So it's just an addition to providing that experience, you're seeing those key business results every single time. >> Talk about attribution for a minute because I've been in marketing for a long time in the tech industry. And that's always one of the challenges is we want to know what lever did the customer pull that converted them from opportunity to a lead to whatnot? Talk about the ability for Branch from an attribution perspective to really tell those marketers and the organization exactly, tactically, down to the tactical level, this is what's working. This is what's not working. Even if it's a color combination for example. That science is critical. >> Yeah, absolutely. Because we are able to cover the entire marketing life cycle of that they're trying to reach their customers. We cover off on email. We have mobile web to app. We have organic, we have search. No matter what you can look at that purview under a Branch lens. So we are just providing not just the accurate attribution down to the post-install, what happens after that, but also a more holistic view of everything that's happening on mobile. So then you can stitch all that together and really look at which ones are actually performing so you could see exactly which campaigns attributed directly to what amount of spend or which campaigns helped us understand the true lifetime long term value of customers, let's say in this case who ordered delivery or pickup. So to the kind of customer persona, it really helped. And also they actually were able to see Peet's because of our attribution, they saw actually a four and a half time increase in attributed purchases at the peak of the pandemic. And even since then, they're still seeing a three times increase in monthly attributed purchases. So because they actually have the view across everything that they're doing, we're able to provide that insight. >> That insight is so critical these days, like we mentioned earlier talking about real time data. Well we expect the experiences to be real time. And I expect that when I go back on the app they're going to know what I ordered last time. Maybe I want that again. Maybe I want to be able to change that, but I want them to know enough about me in a non creepy way. Give me that seamless experience that I'm expecting because of course that drives me to come back over and over again and spend way too much money there which I'm guilty of, guilty as charged. >> Coffee is totally fine. >> Right? Thank you. Thank you so much for validating that. I appreciate that. But talk to me about, as we are kind of wrapping things up here, the brick and mortars, it was such a challenge globally, especially the mom and pops to be able to convert quickly and figure out how do we reach a digital audience? How do we get our customers to be loyal? What's some of the advice that you have for the brick and mortars or those quick service restaurants like Peet's who've been navigating this the last couple years now here we are in this interesting semi post pandemic I would like to believe world? >> Yeah, we're getting there slowly but surely, but yeah, it's really important for them to adapt as we kind of move into this semi post pandemic world, we're kind of in the middle of like a hybrid online, offline, are we in stores, are we ordering online? These brand and customer relationships are super complex. I think the mobile app is just one part of that. Customers really shouldn't have any problems getting from the content or item they're looking for, no matter if they're in the store, if they're in the app, if they're on the desktop, if they're checking their email, if they're perusing TikTok, the best customer relationships really are omnichannel in nature. So what I would say, the need for providing the stellar customer experience isn't going to go away. It's actually really key. Whether it's driving users from their mobile properties to the app, providing a great in-store experience, like the QR codes, customers are expecting a lot more than they did before the pandemic. So they're not really seeing these brand touch points as little silos. They're seeing one brand. So it really should feel like one brand you should speak to the customers as if it's one brand across every single device, channel, and platform, and really unify that experience for them. >> Absolutely. That's going to be I think for so many different brands, whether it's a brick and mortar QSR, that's going to be one of the defining competitive advantages. If they can give their end users a single brand experience across channels, and you mentioned TikTok, those channels are only going to grow. As are I think or expectations. I don't think anybody's going to go back to wanting less than they did two years ago, right? >> Absolutely. Absolutely. >> Well this has been great, Michelle, thank you so much for joining me, talking about Branch, what you guys are doing, mobile linking platform, mobile measurement platform, the deep links, what you were able to do with Peet's Coffee, a beloved brand since the 60s and so many others. We appreciate your insights, your time and the story that you shared. >> Thank you so much, Lisa. I hope you have a great rest of your day. >> You as well. For Michelle Lerner, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of the AWS Showcase. Keep it right here. More great content coming up from theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. (gentle music)

welcome back to la we are live in los angeles at kubecon cloudnativecon 21 lisa martin and dave nicholson we've been talking to folks all day great to be here in person about 2 700 folks are here the kubernetes the community the cncf community is huge 138 000 folks great to see some of them in person back collaborating once again dave and i are pleased to welcome our next guest we have suresh ragaram co-founder and ceo of platform 9. sarish welcome to the program thank you for having me it's a pleasure to be here give our audience an overview of platform 9 who are you guys what do you do when were you founded all that good stuff so we are about seven years old we were founded with a mission to make it easy to run private hybrid and edge clouds my co-founders and i were early engineers at vmware and what we realized is that it's really easy to go use the public cloud because the public clouds have this innovation which is they have a control plane which serves as a it serves as a foundation for them to launch a lot of services and make that really simple and easy to use but if you need to get that experience in a private cloud or a hybrid cloud or in the edge nobody gives you that cloud control plane you get it from amazon in amazon get it from azure in azure google and google who gives you a sas cloud control plane to run private clouds or edge clouds or hybrid clouds nobody and this is uh this is what we do so this is we make it easy to run these clouds using technologies like kubernetes with our our sas control plane now is it limited to kubernetes because when you you you mentioned your background at vmware uh is this a control plane for what people would think of as private clouds using vmware style abstraction or is this primarily cloud native so when we first started actually docker did not exist like okay so at the time our first product to market was actually an infrastructure service product and at the time we looked at what is what is out there we knew vmware vsphere was out there it's a vmware technology there was apache cloud stack and openstack and we had look the open ecosystem around vms and infrastructure as a service is openstack so we chose open source as the lingua franca for the service endpoint so our control plane we deliver openstack as a service that was our first product when kubernetes when the announcement of communities came out from google we knew at that time we're going to go launch because we'd already been studying lxc and and docker we knew at the time we're going to standardize on kubernetes because we believe that an open ecosystem was forming around that that was a big bet for us you know this this this foundation and this this community is proof that that was a good bet and today that's actually a flap flagship product it's our you know the biggest biggest share of revenue biggest share of install base uh but we do have more than one product we have openstack as a service we have bare metal as a service we have containers as a service with kubernetes i want to ask you some of the the i'm looking at your website here platform9.com some of the three marketing messages i want you to break these down for me simplify day two ops multi-cloud ready on day one and we know so many businesses are multi-cloud and percentage is only going up and faster time to market talk to me about this let's start with simplified day two ops how do you enable that so you know one of the biggest if you talk to anyone who runs like a large vmware environment and you ask them when was the last time you did an upgrade or for that matter somebody who's running like a large-scale kubernetes environment or an openstack environment uh probably in a private cloud deployment awesome when was the last time you did an upgrade how did that go when was the last time you had an outage who did you call how did that go right and you'll hear an outpouring of emotion okay same thing you go ask people when you use kubernetes in the public cloud how do these things work and they'll say it's pretty easy it's not that hard and so the question the idea of platform 9 is why is there such a divide there's this you know we talk about digital divide there is a cloud divide the public clouds have figured out something that the rest of the industry has not and people suffer with private clouds there's a lot of demand for private clouds very few people can make it work because they try to do it with a lot of like handheld tools and you know limited automation skills and scripting what you need is you need the automation that makes sure that ongoing troubleshooting 24x7 alerting upgrades to new versions are all fully managed when amazon doesn't upgrade to a new version people don't have to worry about it they don't have to stay up at night they don't deal with outages you shouldn't have to deal with that in your private cloud so those are the kinds of problems right the troubleshooting the upgrades the the remediation when things go wrong that are taken for granted in the public cloud that we bring to the customers who want to run them in private or hybrid or edge cloud environments how do you help customers and what does future proofing mean like how do you help customers future proof their cloud native journey what does that mean to platform 9 and what does that mean to your customers i'll give you one of my favorite stories is actually one of our early customers is snapfish it's a photo sharing company it's a consumer company right when they got started with us they were coming off of vmware they wanted to run an openstack environment they started nearly four years ago and they started using us with openstack and vms and infrastructure as a service fast forward to today 85 percent of the usage on us is containers and they didn't have to hire openstack experts nor do they have to hire kubernetes experts but their application development teams got went from moving from a somewhat legacy vmware style id environment to a modern self-service developer experience with openstack and then to containers and kubernetes and we're gonna we're gonna work on the next generation of innovation with serverless technologies simplifying you know building modern more elastic applications and so our control plane the beauty of our model is our control plane adds value it added value with openstack it added value with kubernetes it'll add value with what's next around the evolution of serverless technologies right it's evergreen and our customers get the benefit of all of that so when you talk about managing environments that are on premises and in clouds i assume you're talking hyperscale clouds like aws azure gcp um what kind of infrastructure needs to be deployed and when i say infrastructure that's can be software what needs to be deployed in say aws for this to work what does it look like so some 30 of our users use us on in the public cloud and the majority of that actually happens in aws uh because they're the number one cloud and we really give people three choices right so they can choose to use and consume aws the way they want to so we have a small minority of customers that actually provisions bare metal servers in aws that's a small minority because the specific use cases they're trying to do and they try to deploy like kubernetes on bare metal but the bare metal happens to be running on aws okay that's a small minority a larger majority of our users in aws or some hyperscale cloud brings their vpc under management so they come in get started sign up with platform 9 in their platform 9 control plane they go and say i want to plug in this vpc and i want to give you this much authorization to this vpc and in that vpc we essentially can impersonate them and on their behalf provision nodes and provision clusters using our communities open source kubernetes upstream cncf kubernetes but we also have customers that said hey i already have some clusters with eks i really like what the rest of your platform allows me to do and i think it's a better platform for me to use for a variety of reasons can you bring my eks clusters under management and then help me provision new new clusters on top and the answer is you can so you can choose to bring your bare metal you can choose to bring your vpc and just provision like virtual machine and treat them as nodes for communities clusters or you can bring pre-built kubernetes clusters and manage them using our management uh product what are your routes to market so we have three routes to market um we have a completely self-serve completely free forever uh experience where people can just go sign up log in get access to the control plane and be up and running within minutes right they can plug in their server hardware on premises at the edge in the cloud their vpcs and they can be up and running from there they can choose to upgrade upsell into a grow into an uh growth tier or you know choose to request for more support and a higher touch experience and work with our sales team and get into an enterprise tier and our that is our second go to market which is a direct go to market uh companies in the retail space companies tech companies uh companies in fintech companies that are investing in digital transformation a big way have lots of software developers and are adopting these technologies in a big way but want private or hybrid or edge clouds that's the second go to market the third and and in the last two years this is new to us really exciting go to market to us is a partner partner let go to market where partners like rackspace have oem platform line so we have a partnership d partnership with rackspace all of rackspace's customers and they install base essentially including customers who are consuming public cloud services wire rackspace get access to platform 9 and rackspace working together with rackspace's ability to kind of service the whole mile uh and also uh we have a very important partnership with maveneer in the 5g space so 5g we think is a large opportunity and there's a there's a joint product there called maven webscape platform to run 5g networks on our community stack so platform nine why what does that mean harry potter harry potter so it's platform nine and three quarters okay we had this realization my cofounders and i were at vmware for 10 for 10 15 years and we were struggling with this problem of why is the public cloud so easy to use why is it so hard to run a private cloud and even today i think not many people realize uh and that's the analogy to platform nine and three quarters it's like it's right in the middle of king's cross station you go through it and you enter the whole new world of magic that that secret door that platform nine and three quarters is a sas control plane that is a secret sauce that amazon has and azure has and google has and we're bringing that for anybody who wants to use it on any infrastructure of their choice where can customers go to learn more about platform nine so platform nine dot com uh follow us on twitter platform line says or on linkedin you know and if any of our viewers are here at kubecon they can stop by your booth what are some of the things that you're featuring there we are at the booth we have our product managers we have our support engineers we have the people that are actually doing the real work behind the product right there we're talking about our roadmap we're talking about the product demos we're doing like specific show talks on specific deep dives in our product and we're also talking about some some really cool things that are coming up in the garage uh in the in the next six months can you leave us with any teasers about what some of the cool things are that are coming up in the garage yeah one one one thing that is a really big deal is um uh is the ability to manage kubernetes clusters as as as cattle right kubernetes makes node management and app management lets you treat them as cattle instead of pets but kubernetes clusters themselves our customers tell us like even in amazon eks and others these clusters themselves become pets and they become hard to manage so we have a really really interesting capability to manage these as more as you know from infrastructure code with githubs uh as cattle we actually have an announcement that i'm not able to share at this point which is coming out in two weeks uh in the ed space so you'll have to stay tuned for that so folks can go to platformnine.com.com check out that announcement two weeks two weeks from now by the end of october that's right awesome sharers thank you so much for joining us i love the fact that you asked that question because i kept thinking platform nine where do i know that from and i just googled harry potter that's right from nine and five dying because i didn't automatically make the correlation because my son and i are the most unbelievable potterheads ever yeah well so we have that in common that's fantastic awesome thank you for joining us sharing what platform mine is some of the exciting stuff coming out and two weeks learn to hear some great news about the edge absolutely awesome thank you for joining us my pleasure thank you for having me uh our pleasure as well for dave nicholson i'm lisa martin live in los angeles thecube is covering kubecon cloudnativecon21 stick around we'll be right back with our next guest

>> Commvault was an idea that incubated as a project inside of bell labs, one of the most prestigious research and development organizations in the world, back in the day. It became an official company in 1996, and Commvault just celebrated its 25th anniversary. As such, Commvault has had to reinvent itself many times over the past two and a half decades. From riding the waves of the very early PC networking era, to supporting a rich set of solutions for the evolving enterprise. This includes things like cloud computing, ransomware disaster, recovery, security compliance, and pretty much all things data protection and data management. And with me to talk about the company, its vision for the future, with also a voice of the customer. Three great guests, Isabel Geese is the Chief Marketing Officer of Commvault, Manoj Nair is the GM of Metallic, and Tim Carben is a principal systems engineer with Mitchell International. Folks, welcome to the Commvault power panel. Come inside the cube. It's awesome to have you. >> Great to be here Dave. >> All right. First of all, I got to congratulate you celebrating 25 years. That's a long time, not a lot of tech companies make it that far and are still successful and relevant. So Isabelle, maybe you could start off. What do you think has been the driving factor for your ability to kind of lead through the subsequent technological waves that I alluded to upfront? >> So well, 25 years is commendable but we are not counting success in number of years we're really counting success in how many customer we've helped over those years. And I will say what has been the driving mater for us as who that has been innovating with our customers. You know, we were there every step of the way, when they migrate to hybrid cloud. And now as they go to multi cloud in a post COVID world, where they have to win gold you know, distributed workforce, different types of workloads and devices, we are there too. We have that workload as well. So the innovation keep coming in, thanks to us listening to our customer. And then adding needs that change over the last 25 years and probably for the next 25 as well. You know, we, we want to be here for customer who think that data is an asset, not a liability. And also making sure that we offer them a broad range of use cases to book why things simple because the word is getting too complex for them. So let's take the complexity on us. >> Thank you for that. So Manoj, you riffed on the cube before about, you know putting on the, the binoculars and looking at the future. So let's talk about that. Where do you see the future for this industry? What are some of the key driving factors that matter. >> Dave it's great to be back on the Cube. You know, we see our industry no different than lots of other industries. The SAS model is rapidly being adopted. And the reason is, you know customers are looking for simplicity simplicity not just in leveraging, you know the great technology that Commvault has built but in the business model and the experience. So, you know, that's one of the fastest growing trends that started in consumer apps and other applications, other B to B apps. And now we're seeing it in core infrastructure like data management, data protection. They're also trying to leverage their data better, make sure it's not fragmented. So, how do you deliver more intelligent services? You know, securing the data insights from the beta, transforming the data and that combination, you know our ability to do that in a multi-cloud world like Isabel said, now with increasing edge work loads. Sometimes, you know, our customers say their data centers are the new edge too. So you kind of have this, you know, data everywhere, workloads everywhere, yet the desire to deliver that with a holistic experience, we call it the power of bank. The ability to manage your data and leverage the data with the simple lesson without compromise. And that's really what we're seeing as part of the future. >> Okay. Manoj I to come back to you and double click on that but I want to introduce Tim to the conversation here. You bring in the voice of the customer, as they say. Tim, my understanding is Mitchell has been a Commvault customer since the mid two thousands. So tell us why Commvault? What has kept you with the company for more than 15 years? >> Yeah! It was what, 2006 when we started and really when it all boils down to it, it's just as Isabel said, innovation. At Mitchell we're always looking to stay ahead of the trend. And, you know, just to like was mentioned earlier data is the most important part here. Commvault provides us peace of mind to protect and manage our data. And they do data protection for all of our environments, right now. We've been a partner to help enable our digital transformation including SAS and cloud adoption. When we start talking about the solutions we have, I mean we of course started in 2006. I mean, this was version six, if I remember right, this predates me at the company. Upgraded to seven, eight, nine. We brought in 10, brought in 11, brought in hyper scale and then moved on to bring in the Metallic. And Commvault provides the reason for this. I guess I should say is, Commvault provides a reliable backup but most importantly, recovery, rapid recovery. That's what gives me confidence. That's what helps me sleep better at night. So when I started looking at SAS, as a differentiator to protect our 036 environments or 065 environments. Metallic was a natural choice, and the one thing I wanted to add to that is it came out cheaper than us building it ourselves. When you take into account resources, as well as compute and storage. So again, just a natural choice. >> Yeah. As the saying goes, back up is one thing, recoveries everything. Isabel you know we've seen the SAS suffocation of the enterprise, particularly, you know from the app side. You came from Salesforce. So you, the company that is the poster child for SAS. But my question is what's catalyzing this shift and why do you think data protection is ready to make the move? >> Well, there's so many good things about SAS. You know, you remember when people started moving to the cloud and transforming their CapEx into OPEX, well SAS bring yet another level of benefits. I.T, we know always has to do more with less. And so SAS allows you to, once you set up you've got all the software upgrades automatically without you know, I think it's smart work. You can better manage your cash flow because you pay as you grow. And also you have a faster time to value. So all of this at help, the fast adoption and I will tell you today, I don't think there is a single customer who doesn't have at least one SAS application because they have things of value of this. Now, when it comes to backup and recovery, everybody's at different stages you still have on premise, you have cloud, they have SAS and workloads devices. And so what we think was the most important was to offer a raw choice of delivery model. Being able to support them if they want software subscription, if they want an integrated appliance or easy one as SAS. As a service model, and also some of our partners are actually delivering this in a more custom and managed way as well. So offering choice because everybody is at a different stage on this journey when it comes to data management and protection, I actually, you know I think team is the example of taking full advantage or this broad choice. >> Well, you mentioned Tim that you leaned into Metallic. We have seen the SAS everywhere. We used to have a email server, right? I mean, (laughing) on prem, that just doesn't happen anymore. But how was Mitchell International thinking about SAS? Maybe you could share your, from your customer perch, what you're seeing. >> Well, What's interesting about this is Mitchell is been providing SAS for a long time. We are a technology company and we do provide solutions, SAS solutions to our customers. And this makes it so important to be able to embrace it because we know the value behind it. We're providing that to our customers. And when I look at what Commvault is doing I know that Commvault is doing the same thing. They're providing the SAS model as a value to their customers. And it's so important to go with this because we keep our environments cutting edge. As GDPR says, you need to have a cutting edge environment. And if you don't, if you cannot check that box you do not move forward. Commvault has that. And this is one less thing that I have to worry about when choosing Metallic to do my backup of O365. >> So thank you for that, Tim. So Manoj, thinking about what you just heard from Isabel and Tim, you know kind of fitting into a company's cloud or hybrid cloud, more importantly strategy, you were talking before about this. And in other words, it's not an either or, it's not a zero sum game. It's simpatico, if you will. I wonder if you could elaborate. >> Yeah. The power of band Dave I'm very proud of that. You know, when I think of the power of band I think of actually folks like Tim, our customers and Commonwealth first, right. And, really that need for choice. So for example, you know customers on various different paths to the cloud, we kind of homogenize it and say, they're on a cloud journey or they're on a digital transformation journey but the journey looks different. And so part of that, and as Isabella was saying is really the ability to meet them where they are in that journey. So for example, do you, go in there and say, "Hey, you know what I'm going to be some customers 100% multi-cloud or single cloud even. And that includes SaaS applications and my infrastructure running as a service." So there's a natural fit there saying great all your data protection. You're not going to be running software appliances for that. So you've got to data protection, data management as a service that Metallic is able to offer across the whole estate. And that's, you know, that's probably a small set of customers, but rapidly growing. Then you see a lot more customers were saying I'm going to do away as you're talking about with the email server, I'm going to move to Office 365 leverage the power of Teams. And there's a shared responsibility model there which is different than an on-prem data protection use case. And so they're, they're able to just add on Metallic to the existing Commvault environment whether it's a Commvault software or hyper-scale and connect the two. So it's a single integrated experience. And then you kind of go to the other end of the spectrum and say "great" customers' all in on a SaaS delivered data protection, as you know and you hear a lot from a lot of your guests and we hear from our customers, there's still a lot of data sitting out there. you know 90 plus percent of workloads in data centers, increasing edge data workloads. And if you were to back up one of those data workloads and say that the only copy can be in the cloud, then that would take like a 10 day recovery SLA. You know, we have some competent users who say that then that's what they have. Our flexibility, our ability to kind of bring in the hyper-scale deployment and just, you know dock it into Metallic and have a local copy instant recovery, SLA, remote backup copy in the cloud for ransomware or your worst case scenario. That's the kind of flexibility. So all those are scenarios we're really seeing with our customers. And that's kind of really the power of mandates. Very unique part of our portfolio. Companies can have portfolio products but to have a single integrated offering with that flexibility, that kind of depending on the use case you can start here and grow into a different point. That's really the unique part of the power event. >> Yeah, yeah. 10 day RTO just doesn't cut it, but Tim, maybe maybe you could weigh in here. Why, what was the catalyst for you adopting Metallic and maybe you could share what was the business impact there? >> Well, the catalyst and impact obviously two different things. The catalyst, when we look at it, there was a lot of what are we going to do with this? We have an environment, we need to back it up and how are we going to approach this? So we looked at it from a few different standpoints and of course, when it boils down to it one of the major reasons was the financial. But when we started looking at everything else that we have available to us and the flexibility that Commvault has in rolling out new solutions, this really was a no brainer, at this point. We are able to essentially back up new features and new products, as soon as they're available. within our Metallic environment we are running the activate. We are running the, the self-service for the end users, to where they can actually recover their own files. We are adding the teams into it to be able to recover and perform these backups for teams. And I want to step aside really quick and mention something about this because I'd been with, you know, Metallic for a long time and I'd been waiting for this. We've been waiting for an ability to do these backups and anyone I know, Manoj knows that I've been waiting for it. And you know, Commvault came back to me a while back and they said, we just have to wait for the API. We have to wait for Microsoft to release it. Well, I follow the news. I saw Microsoft released the API and I think it may have been two days later that Commvault reached out to me and said, Hey we got it available. Are you ready to do this? And that sort of turned around, that sort of flexibility, being on top of new applications with that, with Salesforce, that is, you know just not necessarily the reason why I adopted Metallic but one of those things that puts a smile on my face because I adopted Metallic. >> Well, that's an interesting story. I mean, you get the SDKs and if you're a leader you get them, you know, you can put the resources on it and you're ready when, when the product comes to GA. Manoj, I wonder if we could talk about just the notion of backing up a SAS. Part of the announcements today included within Metallica included backup and, and offerings for dynamics 365. But my question is why support dynamics specifically in in SAS apps generally? I mean, customers might say, doesn't my SAS provider protect my data. Why do I need a third party? And, and the second part of that question is why Commvault? >> Dave, a great question as always. I'll start with the second part of the question. It's really three words, the shared responsibility model, and, you know, a lot of times our customers, as they go into the cloud model they really start understanding that there is something, that you're getting a lot of advantages that certain things you don't have to do. But the shared responsibility model is what every cloud and SAS provider will indoctrinate in it's in desolate. And certainly the application data is owned by the customer. And the meaning of that is not something that, you know some SAS provider can understand. And so that requires specialized skills. And that's a partnership where we've done this now very successfully with Microsoft and LG 65. We've added support for Salesforce, And we see a rapid customer adoption because of that shared responsibility model, If you have a, some kind of an admin issue as we have seen in the news somebody changed their team setting and then lost all their chat. Then that data is discoverable. And you, the customer, responsible for making sure that data is discoverable or ransomware attacks. Again, covering that SAS data is your responsibility because the attack could be coming in from your instance, not from the SAS provider. So those are the reasons dynamics is, you know one of the fastest growing SAS applications from a business applications perspective out there. And as we looked at our roadmap and you look at at the right compliment. What is arriving by the agency, we're seeing this part of a Microsoft's business application suite growing, you know, millions of users out there and it's rapidly growing. And it's also integrated with the rest of the Microsoft family. So we're now, you know, proud to say that we support all three Microsoft clouds by Microsoft 365 dynamics. Those applications are increasingly degraded so we're seeing commonality in customer base and that's a business critical data. And so customers are looking to manage the data, have solutions that they can be sure they can leverage, it's not just protecting data from worst-case scenarios. In the case of some of the apps like dynamics we offer a support, like setting up the staging environment. So it's improving productivity off the application admins and that's really kind of that the value we're bringing able to bring to the table. >> Yeah. You know, that shared responsibility model. I'm glad you brought that up because I think it's oftentimes misunderstood but when you talk to CSOs, they understand it well. They'll tell you the shared responsibility is my responsibility. You know, maybe the cloud provider who will secure the the object storage bucket for the physical space, but it's, it's on me. So that's really important. So thank you for that. Isabelle, last question. The roadmap, you know how do you see Commvaults, Metallic, SAS portfolio evolving? what can you tell us? >> Oh, well, it has a big strategic impact on Commvault for sure, first because all of our existing customer as you mentioned earlier, 25 years, it's a lot of customer will have somehow some workload as SaaS. And so the ability without adding more complexity without adding another vendor just to be able to protect them in one take, and as teams, they bring a smile to his face is really important for us. The second is also a lot of customer come toCommvault from Metallic. This is the first time they enter the Commvault community and Commvault family and as they start protecting their SaaS application they realize that they could leverage the same application to protect their on-premise, data as well. So back to the power of hand and without writing off their past investments, you know going to the cloud at the pace they want. So from that perspective, there is a big impact on our customer community that quickened that Metallic brings. I don't know Manojs' way too humble, but, you know he doubled his customers every quarter. And, you know, we have added 24 countries to the portfolio, to the product. So we see a rapid adoption. And so obviously back to your question, we see the impacts of Metallic growing and growing fast because of the market demand because of the rapid innovation. We can take the Commvault technology and put it in the SaaS model and our customers really like it. So I'm very excited. I think it's going to be, you know, a great innovation, a great positive impact for customers and our new customer will welcome it, which by the way I think half, Manoj correct me but I think half of the Metallic customer at Commvault and the other half are new to our family. So, so they're very bullish about this. And it's just the beginning, as you know we all 25 year old or sorry, 25 year young and looking forward to the next 25. >> Well, I can confirm, you know we have a data partner, survey partner ETR enterprise technology research, and I was looking at the Commvault data and it shows within the cloud segment, when you cut the data by cloud, you're actually accelerating the spending momentum is accelerating. And I think it's a function of, you know some of the acquisitions you've made some of the moves. You made an integration. So congratulations on 25 years and you know you're riding the correct wave. Isabel, Manoj, Tim thanks so much for coming in the cube. It was great to have you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you Dave. >> I really appreciate it. >> And thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Volante for the Cube. We'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Volante. And with me is Sandeep Singh, he is the vice president of Storage Marketing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And we're going to riff on some of the trends in the industry, what we're seeing. And we got a little treat for you. Sandeep, great to see you man. >> Dave, it's a pleasure to be here. >> You and I've known each other for a long time. We've had some great discussions, some debates, some intriguing mind benders. What are you seeing out there in Storage? So much has changed. What are the key trends you're seeing and let's get into it. >> Yeah, across the board, as you said, so much has changed. When you reflect back at the underlying transformation that's taken place with data, cloud and AI across the board. First of all, for our customers they're seeing this massive data explosion that literally now spans edge to core to cloud. They're also seeing a diversity of the application workloads across the board. And the emphasis that it's placing is on the complexity that underlies overall infrastructure and data management. Across the board, we're hearing a lot from customers about just the underlying infrastructure complexity and the infrastructure sprawl. And then the second element of that is really extending into the complexity of data management. >> So it's interesting you're talking about data management. You remember you and I, we were in Andover. It was probably like five years ago and all we were talking about was media. Flash this and flash that, and at the time that was kind of the hot storage topic. Well, flash came in addressing some of the mics that we historically talked about it. Now the problem statement is really kind of quote unquote metaphorically moving up the stack if you will, you mentioned management but let's dig into that a little bit. I mean, what is management? I mean, a lot of people that means different things to different people. You talk to a database person or a backup person. How do you look at management? What does that mean to you? >> Yeah, Dave, you mentioned that the flash came in and it actually accelerated the overall speed and latency that storage was delivering to the application workloads. But fundamentally when you look back at storage over a couple of decades the underlying way of how you're managing storage hasn't fundamentally changed. There's still an incredible amount of complexity for IT. It's still a manual admin driven experience for customers. And what that's translating to is more often than not IT is in the world of firefighting and it's leaves them unable to help with them more strategic projects to innovate for the business. And basically IT has that pressure point of moving beyond that and helping bring greater levels of agility that line of business owners are asking for and to be able to deliver on more of the strategic projects. So that's one element of it. The second element that we're hearing from customers about is as more and more data just continues to explode from edge to core to cloud. And as basically the infrastructure has grown from just being on-Prem to being at the Edge to being in the cloud. Now that complexity is expanding from just being on-Prem to across multiple different clouds. So when you look across the date data life cycle how do you store it? How do you secure it? How do you basically protect it and archive it and analyze that data. That end to end life cycle management of data today resides on just a fragmented set of overall infrastructure and tools and processes and administrative boundaries. That's creating a massive challenge for customers. And the impact of that ultimately is essentially comes at a cost to agility, to innovation and ultimately business risk. >> Yeah, so we've seen obviously the cloud has addressed a lot of these problems but the problem is the cloud is in the cloud and much of my stuff, most of my stuff, isn't in the cloud. So I have all these other workloads that are either on-Prem and now you've got this emerging Edge. And so I wonder if we could just talk a little vision here for a minute. I mean what I've been envisioning is this abstraction layer that cuts across all weather. It doesn't really matter where it is. If it's on-Prem, if it's across cloud, if it's in the cloud, on the edge, we could talk about what that all means. But if customers that I talked to they're sort of done with the complexity of that underlying infrastructure. They want technology to take care of that. They want automation they want AI brought in to that equation. And it seems like we're from the cusp of the decade where that might happen. What's your take? >> Well, yeah, certainly I mentioned that data cloud and AI are really the disruptive forces, better propelling. The digital transformation for customers. Cloud has set the standard for agility and AI driven insights and intelligence are really helping to make the underlying infrastructure invisible and customers are looking for this notion of being able to get that cloud operational agility pretty much everywhere because they're discovering that that's a game changer. And yet a lot of their application workloads and data is on-Prem and is increasingly growing at the edge. So they want same experience to be able to truly bring that agility to wherever their data in absolute. And that's one of the things that we're continuing to hear from customers. >> And this problem is just going to get worse. I mean for decades we marched to the cadence of Moore's Law and everybody's going to forgets about Moore's Law. And say, "Ah, it's dying or whatever." But actually when you look at the processing power that's coming out now, it's more than doubling every two years, quadrupling every two years. So now you've got this capability in your hands and application design minors, storage companies, networking companies. They're going to have all this power to now bring in AI and do things that we've never even imagined before. So it's not about the box and the speeds and feeds of the box. It's really more about this abstraction layer that I was talking about. The management if you will that you were discussing and what we can do in terms of being able to power new workloads in machine intelligence, it's this kind of ubiquitous, call it the cloud but it's expanding pretty much everywhere in every part of our lives even to the edge you think about autonomous vehicles, you think about factories it's actually quite mind boggling where we're headed. >> It is and you touched upon AI. And certainly when you look at infrastructure, for example there's been a ton of complexity in infrastructure management. One of the studies that was done actually by IDC indicated that over 90% of the challenges that arise, for example ultimately down at the storage infrastructure layer that's powering the apps ultimately arises from way above the stack all the way from the server layer on down where even the virtual machine layer. And there, for example, AIOps for infrastructure has become a game changer for customers to be able to bring the power of AI and machine learning and multi-variate analysis to be able to predict and prevent issues. Dave, you also touched upon Edge and across the board. What we're seeing is the Enterprise Edge is becoming that frontier for customer experiences and the opportunity to reimagine customer experiences as well as just the frontier for commerce that's happening. When you look at retail and manufacturing and or financial services. So across the board with the data growth that's happening and this Edge becoming the strategic frontier for delivering the customer experiences how you power your application workloads there and how you deliver that data and protect that data and be able to seamlessly manage that overall infrastructure. As you mentioned abstracted away at a higher level becomes incredibly important for customers. >> So interesting to hear how the conversations changed. I'd like to say, I go back to whatever it was five years ago, we're talking about flash storage class memory, NVMe and those things are still there but your emphasis now you're talking about machine learning, AI, math around deep learning. It's really software is really what you're focusing on these days. >> Very much so. Certainly this notion of software and services that are delivering and unlocking a whole new experience for customers that's really the game changer going forward for customers. And that's what we're focused on. >> Well, I said we had a little surprise for you. So you guys are having an event on May 4th. It's called Unleash The Power of Data. What's that event all about Sandeep? >> Yeah. We are very much excited about our May 4th event. As you mentioned, it's called Unleash The Power of Data. And as most organizations today are data driven and data is at the heart of what they're doing. We're excited to invite everyone to join this event. And through this event we're unveiling a new vision for data that accelerates the data driven transformation from Edge to cloud. This event promises to be a pivotal event and one that IT admins, cloud architects, virtual machine admins, vice presidents, directors of IT and CIO really won't want to mess. Across the board this event is just bringing a new way of articulating the overall problem statement and in market in focused the articulation of the trends that we were just discussing. It's an event that's going to be hosted by a Business and Technology Journalist, Shabani Joshi. It will feature a market in panel with a focus on the crucial role that data is playing in customers digital transformation. It will also include and feature Antonio Neary, CEO of HPE and Tom black, senior vice president and general manager of HPE Storage Business and industry experts including Julia Palmer, research vice president at Gartner. We will unveil game changing HPE innovations that will make it possible for organizations across Edge to cloud to unleash the power of data. >> Sounds like great event. I presume I can go to hpe.com and get information, is it a registered event? How does that all work? Yeah, we invite everyone to visit hpe.com and by visiting there you can click and save the date of May 4th at 8:00 AM Pacific. We invite everyone to join us. We couldn't be more excited to get to this event and be able to share the vision and game-changing HPE innovations. >> Awesome. So I don't have to register, right? I don't have to give up my three children's name and my social security number to attend your event. Is that right? >> No registration required, come by, click on hpe.com. Save the date on your calendar. And we very much look forward to having everyone join us for this event. >> I love it, it's pure content event. I'm not going to get a phone call afterwards saying, "Hey, buy some stuff from me." That could come other channels but so that's good. Thank you for that. Thanks for providing that service to the industry. I'm excited to see what you guys are going to be announcing that day and look Sandeep. I mean, like I said, we've known each other a while. We've seen a lot of trends but the next 10 years it ain't going to look like the last 10 is it? >> It's going to be very different and we couldn't be more excited. >> Well, Sandeep, thanks so much for coming to theCube and riffing with me on the industry and giving us a preview for your event. Good luck with that. And always great to see you. >> Thanks a lot, Dave. Always great to see you as well. >> All right. And thank you everybody. This is Dave Volante for theCube and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>okay. >>Just about a year ago, governments around the world forced shutdowns of their respective economies. We've never seen anything like it. Central banks took immediate action and effective monetary policy like none we've ever seen before. They dropped interest rates to near zero, injected a huge amount of cash into the system, and they fueled this liquidity boom to support those individuals and businesses that were in greatest need. Banks were overwhelmed with the volume of paperwork, for instance, small business P, P P loans and other things. Home buying boomed as mortgage rates hit all time lows for several weeks in the spring, it was complete chaos, but the tech industry stepped up and accommodated work from home. Cloud infrastructure was spun up instantly as access to data centers was really restricted, and Saas companies became a fundamental staple of not only keeping the lights on but helping customers thrive in the face of a pandemic. Automation became a >>mandate >>as humans, they couldn't possibly keep up with the tidal wave of demand, a document overload that was hitting the system. Now, one of the companies that was there to help financial firms in particular, get through the knothole was Oculus, a company that focuses on intelligent automation to deploy the power of machines to allow humans to focus on what they do best. Hello, everyone. And welcome to this cube conversation. My name is Dave Volonte, and we're profiling the most interesting SAS startups that are reimagining how we work. And with me is Sam Bobbly, the co founder and CEO of Oculus. Sam, welcome to the Cube. First time. >>Hey, Dave. Thanks so much for having me excited to have the conversation. >>Yeah, me too. So, listen, I know you've told the story of a zillion times, but I want a community here. How and why did you start the company >>for sure. So when I was in college, I was having a conversation with my dad. Uh, he was telling me about a meeting he just had with his elder law attorney. And the other law attorney was complaining about having to review hundreds or thousands of pages of financial documents for every long term care Medicaid application. When you apply for Medicaid coverage to enter a nursing home, you're required to submit 60 months of financials along with your application. And traditionally the elder law attorney or a nursing home would review those documents literally page by page, line by line to find high value transactions, transfers and other financial trends. And when I heard about this, it just it didn't make sense to me. I said, You know why? In this day and age isn't there? Why isn't there a technology solution that can ingest the documents and spit out a digital report replacing the cumbersome manual page by page review? So it really just started as a research project, trying to learn more about optical character recognition, which is the technology of transforming images into text. And, you know, as we kind of kicked around different products in the market, we we realized that there was an opportunity to build a unique platform that could ingest documents of any format quality and produce perfectly accurate results. And that was the genesis behind what ultimately became Oculus. >>You were a young man at this time. How old were you at that time? >>I was 22 when we started >>so fearless. And, uh, now my friend Eddie Mitchell started a company about 20 years ago. We hacked together a >>Dell >>system and this camera. It was all about the modern operating room in the future, and he showed it to a doctor and and it was just a prototype, she said. How much? He said 10 grand. She wrote a check right there. You have a similar story? How did you see the company? >>So we we we do have a pretty similar experience. You know, Our our concept was we want to get perfect results the customer every time. So if a customer sends us a clean bank statement from Chase or a blurry cell phone image with someone's thumb in the picture from a community bank in Maine, and it's rotated sideways or upside down like we want to give consistent, perfectly active results every single time. And you know, our our view was to completely solve the business problem. So the very first version of the software that we built, we had a rudimentary machine process to extract 60 or 70% of the data, and then we had a little tool built on the back end, where literally, me, myself and some of our early employees would clean up the data output, make sure it's perfect and then return When we couldn't submit, we'd returned to the customer accurate data that could be used at the time for for a Medicaid decision. And what happened is, while we were in our beta period, customers fell in love with the product. They felt it was magical and really just superior from an accuracy standpoint to anything they had ever tested before. And And one of our beta testers said to us, uh, where do I submit credit card information? So at that time, I turned to my colleagues and I said, I think we're ready to I think we're ready. Start charging for this thing and and roll it out for prime time. >>When I was researching the company, I learned that you leveraged. At least some of the idea came from the capture, and I never knew this, But the capture that we all hate came from Google where they write, they had at one point you could maybe you still can. You can go online. You can read books and have to It's just scanned. You can't even read the stuff half the time. So they were putting the capture in front of us, quite brilliant to try to solve for those those those white spaces that they didn't know. So So how did you learn from that? Was there an A P I that you could plug into Google's data set, or did you do your own? What was that? How did that all work? >>The the concept of humans in the loop is super powerful, right? So when we first started, we recognize that OCR and machine data capture couldn't do the job completely. OCR, generally speaking, can process financial documents with roughly 80 to 85% accuracy plus or minus machines, particularly struggled with semi structured and unstructured documents where the format is unpredictable as well as lower quality images. So pretty early on, we recognized that we needed human intervention in the process in order to achieve perfect accuracy every single time, and also to create training data to constantly teach our machine learning models to get smarter and drive additional automation. So, as I mentioned, the very first version was myself and other employees verifying the data on our own. But as we started thinking about how to scale this up and, you know, take on millions and millions of documents, we needed to, uh, you know, learn how to better parallelized task and really build the system for for efficiency and for scanning. So we we we learned about the Google Books Initiative and their ability to leverage capture technology and a distributed workforce to verify pieces of information that their systems couldn't automatically read from books. And we took a lot of those learnings into building our human in the loop infrastructure. And, you know, a way to think about our our product is it's the marriage of machines and humans that makes us unique. As much of the heavy lifting as we can do with machines we do. But whatever we can't do automatically, we slice into smaller tasks and intelligently route those tasks to humans to perform verification. We then layer in algorithmic checks to make sure our humans did the review correctly. The customer gets perfect results, and that same perfect output is used in a feedback loop to train our machine learning models to get smarter and smarter, which dynamically improves the product on an ongoing basis. And, you know, the folks at Google were we're onto this pretty early with the capture technology, and we were following in their footsteps with our own unique take on it, but specifically applying it to financial documents. >>I mean on the Cube. We know a lot about this because we were looking at transcriptions of video all the time, and it just keeps getting better and better and better in our systems. Get smarter and smarter, smarter. So we're sort of closing that gap between what humans can can do and machines can't. And I would expect that you're seeing the same thing. I mean, you think there's always going to be kind of humans in the loop in terms of the quality or is that gap going to be, you know, six nines in the, you know, near near term. >>I think it's gonna take a while to get rid of all the edge cases. You know, you mentioned the PPB program like we've been on the back end processing P p P loans for some of the leading players, like Cross River Bank, blue Vine, Square Capital and others. And you know, what we've seen during the ppb process is just a a wide variety of different documents and inputs, Uh, and a lot of difficult to read documents that are, you know, very challenging to automate. So I think we will, you know, incrementally continue to automate more and more of the process. But the value of having humans plus machines is much more powerful than just having machines alone or just having humans alone. And as it relates to the end customer, our our goal is to do as much of the mundane work as possible to free our customer up to do the more cerebral analysis. So in a lending context and and for the record, you know, our our biggest market opportunity is in the limbic space. Despite the fact that we started with medicating attorneys, we quickly pivoted and realized that our technology was super valuable to to lenders to help them automate the underwriting process. And our our thesis is, if we can take out all of the necessary evils like document review and allow underwriters to focus on the actual analysis of financial health, it's a win win win and creates a really fantastic, complementary relationship between us and our customers. >>Yes, I want to ask you about the pivot to financial services. You said you started well, you have the inspiration from elder law because Jimmy McGill. Okay. Saul Goodman breaking bad. You got started. An elder law. But then you made the pivot to financial services. Really pretty early on. You had really good, great product market fit, but you kind of went for it. I get early twenties. You know, you didn't have a big family at the time. I didn't have a lot of a lot of risks. So you went for it, right? But talk about that pivot because a lot of companies wouldn't do that. They get comfortable and just, you know, stay where they're at. But you made that >>call. It was a big risk, for sure. I mean, look, the product was working. We launched the paid version of our product in 2016. Pretty quickly were onboarding dozens of accountants and attorneys, you know, doing Medicaid work. Um, in mid to late 2016, we got introduced to a large small business lender in New York City called strategic funding Source. They've since renamed them their company Capital as the current name, but we met with the CEO and the head of product and showed them a demo of the technology. And they said, You know, quote unquote, we've been looking for this for years. We've been looking for something exactly like this for years, and we said back to them about how many pages of financial documents to review every single month. They pointed out to a bullpen of dozens of people sitting there tearing through bank statements, page by page, line by line. And they said, You know, it's hundreds of thousands. My eyes almost fell out of my head. I couldn't believe the volume, and it was much bigger than what the, you know, single accountants or attorneys were doing. Uh, so we made the strategic decision to pivot at that time and focus on FINTECH. Lenders continue to tailor the product and build additional features for the fintech lending space. And and, you know, lending in general had the perfect mix of short sale cycle and high average customer value that allowed a company like ours to scale and ramp our revenue quite quite quickly. Um, and then the other thing that happened is kind of as we were getting deeper and deeper into the space, the fintech space as a whole started growing massive. So we we kind of had the perfect storm of product market fit, plus the market growing that allowed us to really ramp significantly grow revenue. And, uh, you know, despite the fact that it was the risk it was, it was totally right. Decision to to focus the business on financial services >>much bigger Tam. And you could subjectively measure it by the size of the stack of papers. Um, how how does this relate to our p A. As you know, the R p. A hot space. You probably get this question a lot, and it sounds like there are some similarities with software bots. What's the similarity? What's the difference? >>Good question. It's It's totally a synergistic offering, right? So rrp a companies like UI path and automation anywhere they typically provide a horizontal toolkit to allow you know, banks and lenders to automate much of the mundane work like, for example, collecting information from emails or doing onboarding for a new employee. Or, you know, different types of tasks that a manual worker would have done but could be automated with relatively simple code. Um, what happens in our p a. Workflows is they get hung up on tasks that can't be completely automated. So, for example, a robot might be, uh, trying to complete an intend lending flow. But when a bank statement is submitted as part of that flow, the robot can't parse it. So what they do instead, is they routed to an underwriter who performs a manual analysis, keys information into a back office system that the bank is using and that information then gets handed back to a robot and continues the automation flow. What we do is we plug the gaps that used to be manual so a robot can pass US documents like bank statements or pay stubs or tax stops. We run our unique human in the loop process. We return structure Jason output directly to a robot, and it continues into the, you know, to the next step of the flow. And, you know, in in summary, the combination of robotic process automation and human in the loop, which is what we're doing, creates true and and automated flows rather than R P. A mite by itself might get you 80% of the way there. >>So do you have, like, software integrations or partnerships with those companies. How are you integrating with them? >>We do. We have software integrations with both UI path and automation anywhere in our core fintech lending business. R P A isn't as prevalent, but we are now expanding beyond fintech lenders into mortgage lending and traditional banks. And we're also expanding use cases, right? Like historically small business lending was the core of our business. More recently, we've moved into consumer auto mortgage, additional asset classes. And as we've gotten deeper with financial institutions, we've seen even more opportunity to partner and coexist with broader r p a player's >>Yeah, great. I mean, I was just staring at their s one. I guess it was came up Monday. Half over half a billion dollars in a are are they're actually cash flow positive as you iPad. So we're going to see we're going to see them hit the public market shortly. Um, hang on, folks. Uh, now it's okay. So this is you sell a sas, right? A SAS service. Even though there's that human in the loop, that's all part of the service. How do you How do you price? >>So usage based model. So we we kind of try to model are themselves nerve. A massive company is super powerful. We apply that same concept document processing, so it's a usage based model. Customers will pay us either per application per document or per page, and if they want to subscribe for, you know, one document per month or millions of documents per month, it's up to them. And we're able to flex up and flex down to meet the supply and demand. Um and that that concept that scalability and flexibility was particularly powerful in the P P P program, right? P P. P. Was kind of a very unique situation in the sense that lenders weren't able to predict the amount of loans they needed to process in normal lending. A small business lender can tell you Hey, we expect to get roughly 10,000 applications in the month of April with P P p. They could tell us, Hey, we're going to send out 200,000 marketing emails and we expect 30% of people might reply, but we really don't have any idea, right? So what happened is the big banks ended up hiring without exaggeration. Thousands of temporary employees to come in and review documents and kind of scrambled to do this in a work from home setting during the pandemic. Whereas Cross River, they took a technology first approach. They implemented our A P I in the back end, and it enabled them to instantly scale up their resources. And the result of that is Cross River ended up becoming a top three pp, a top three p p. P lender nationally, outperforming many of the big banks with a super efficient and fast document review process. Because we were able to help them on the back end with the automation. >>That's awesome. I love the pricing model you mentioned. You mentioned Amazon. Is that the cloud you use or >>we do Our Our product is hosted in AWS and we, you know, take a lot of learnings from them from a business model and and positioning point of view. >>Yeah, and and I'm thrilled to hear you say I mean, I think a lot of forward thinking startups are doing the consumption model. I mean, you certainly see that with companies like snowflake and data dog and stripe. I mean, I think that that SAS model of okay, we're gonna lock you into a one year, two year, three year term. Sorry if if you get acquired, you're stuck with some, you know, stranded licenses. That's your problem. I think that, you know, you really thought that out. Well, um, you mentioned you're sort of expanding your your your total available market now, looking at at new markets, what are some of the big trends that you want to ride over the coming decade as you scale your company? >>The biggest one for us is mortgage automation. You know, the kind of the one of fintech small business and consumer loans were optimized, and we went from a place where, uh, you know, you would deal with a loan officer and have an in person transaction to modern day. You can get a loan from small business. If you're a small business, you can get a loan from PayPal online effectively instantly. If you're a consumer, you can get a loan from Sofia or lending club super smooth digital experience and really revolutionized the way that you know, the market thinks about financial products. I think the next wave of that is mortgage, and that's what we're focused on. Uh, you know, mortgage is a massive market in the sense of thousands of lenders. The average application contains a couple 100 pages worth of financial documents, and the pain points of the back end of the mortgage process were really accentuated. During covid, right refi Valium went way up and mortgage lenders were forced to process that volume in a work from home setting. So what happened is mortgage lenders were struggling with the concept of sending personally identifiable financial information to underwriters who aren't working in an office there, working at home and, you know, kids running around a million things going on. And it's just more difficult to manage than ever before. Um, and you know, as as the the volume kind of normalized debate and mortgage lenders thought about their own future of automation, I think there was just clear recognition across the board that these these mortgage lenders needed to learn from some of the fintech and really focus on automating the back office peace and you know, to your point earlier about business model, what we think about is translating cost that used to be a fixed cost and turning them into a variable costs So now, instead of worrying about having to match supply and demand and hire or fire people, depending on the volume that's coming in on any given month, a mortgage lender can instantly flex up, reflects down and have a super fast, accurate process to handle the darks. Um, and you know, we're seeing just awesome traction in the market with that with the mortgage space and we're excited to push >>forward there. That's great. Thank you. I mean you, Sam. You describe the chaos that work from home. The financial industry is very overly officious. If you know it's very security conscious. How do you handle security? Maybe you could comment on that. How you think about that? >>Sure. I mean, we we take a compliance first approach. We built the product from the ground up with compliance in mind, knowing that we were selling into financial institutions. We have a sock to type one and type two certification, which is, you know, an industry standard. All of our our verification happens with the Oculus employees. So there's no third parties involved in our process whatsoever. Um and then lastly, But perhaps most importantly, our product in and of itself is innately, um, you know, innately drives compliance. So every data point that we process from a financial document, we not only return the data, we return an exact bounding box coordinates of where that data field appeared on the original source so that that audit trail lives with the loan throughout its life cycle. What we saw prior to Oculus is a mortgage would go through an underwriting process. They make a decision, and then that loan might be sold downstream and a diligence firm as to come in. And they don't have the resources to review all the loans. So they review 15% of the loan tape and then they say, you know, they give a rating and what we do is we proactively tackle that by creating a a perfect audit trail upon origination that can live with the loan throughout its life cycle and that that process and that traceability has been super valuable to our mortgage and banking partners. >>So you can ensure the providence there. So let me end just by talking about the company a little bit. So you incubated you nailed the product market fit the and you pivoted and re nailed the product market fit. And like a lot of companies in your position, I would imagine you saw your growth come from just having a great product. You know, initially, word gets around, but then you got a scale. Uh, maybe you could talk a little bit about how how you did that. How you're doing that. You know where your hiring how you're hiring, what your philosophy is on on scaling. >>Sure. Look, I think the key for us is just surrounding ourselves with the right people. You know, the right mentors, advisors and investors to help us really take the business to the next level. Uh, you know, we had no pride of authorship. We're building this and recognize that there are a lot of people out there who have been there, done that and can really guide us and show us the way. I know you had interviewed Marc Roberge on on the show previously. Formerly the C r. O of hubspot. Mark was someone that we you know, we we read his book and had taken sales advice from him from an early age. And over the over time, we got him a little bit more familiar with the company. And and ultimately, Mark and his partner, J Po at Stage two Capital ended up investing in Oculus and really helping us understand how to build the right go to market engine. Um, as the company got bigger, we took on investments from really reputable firms in the financial services space. So our largest investors are okay, H C F T fintech collective and and QED investors. Uh, you know, QED was was founded by Nigel Morris, who is the co founder of Capital One. They backed Sophia and Prosper and a lot of big fintech lenders and, you know, bringing the collective expertise from the fintech sector as well as you know, from a sales and go to market strategy. Point of view created the right mix of ingredients for us to to really ramp up significantly. Uh, we had an awesome run over the years. We were pretty recently recognized by magazine as the number one fastest growing fintech company. And, you know, as the momentum is increased and the market conditions have been very favorable to us, we we just want to double down and expand. Mortgage is the biggest area of opportunity for us. And what we're seeking from a hiring perspective is, you know, go to market sales account executive type resources on the mortgage side as well as you know, deeper products expertise both on the mortgage side as well as with machine learning our product. Because we have the human in the loop piece, we create massive amounts of training data on a daily basis. So it's a, I think, a really exciting place for cutting edge machine learning developers to come and and innovate. >>What can you share with our audience about, you know, your company, any metrics and whatever you're comfortable with, how much money you've raised on my head count? If you want to get some companies comfortable giving a r r others on. But what what do you What can you share with us? >>Sure. Um, you know, we we've raised about 50 million in venture capital. We have grown from one to north of 20 million in revenue in the in the last three years. So particularly since you know, 2017, 2018 is what we really started to see. The growth take off, uh, company size. We have about 800 to 900 employees globally. Now we have about 200 corporate employees who perform the, you know, the the day to day functions of Oculus. And then we have a long tail of about 600 or so verifiers who perform data verification and quality control work again, Speaking to the human in the loop piece of the bottle. Uh, we're, you know, we're focused on expanding beyond the fintech customer base, where we serve customers like plaid PayPal lending club so fi square, etcetera into the mortgage space and ultimately into the traditional banking space where you know, the problems, frankly, are extremely similar. Just on a much larger scale. >>San Bobbly. Congratulations on all the success. You You've got a great road ahead. I really appreciate you coming on the Cube, >>Dave. Thanks so much. It's been a great chat. Look forward to keeping in touch. >>Alright, Did our pleasure. Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volonte for the Cube. We'll see you next time

>>Yeah, yeah. Welcome back to the third session in our building, A vibrant data ecosystem track. This session is unleash the power of your cloud data warehouse. So what comes after you've moved your data to the cloud in this session will explore White Enterprise Analytics is finally ready for the cloud, and we'll discuss how you can consume Enterprise Analytics in the very same way he would cloud services. We'll also explore where analytics meets cloud and see firsthand how thought spot is open for everyone. Let's get going. I'm happy to say we'll be hearing from two folks from thought spot today, Michael said Cassie, VP of strategic partnerships, and Vika Valentina, senior product marketing manager. And I'm very excited to welcome from our partner at AWS Gal Bar MIA, product engineering manager with Red Shift. We'll also be sharing a live demo of thought spot for BTC Marketing Analytics directly on Red Shift data. Gal, please kick us off. >>Thank you, Military. And thanks. The talks about team and everyone attending today for joining us. When we talk about data driven organizations, we hear that 85% of businesses want to be data driven. However, on Lee. 37% have been successful in We ask ourselves, Why is that and believe it or not, Ah, lot of customers tell us that they struggled with live in defining what being data driven it even means, and in particular aligning that definition between the business and the technology stakeholders. Let's talk a little bit. Let's look at our own definition. A data driven organization is an organization that harnesses data is an asset. The drive sustained innovation and create actionable insights. The super charge, the experience of their customers so they demand more. Let's focus on a few things here. One is data is an asset. Data is very much like a product needs to evolve sustained innovation. It's not just innovation innovation, it's sustained. We need to continuously innovate when it comes to data actionable insights. It's not just interesting insights these air actionable that the business can take and act upon, and obviously the actual experience we. Whether whether the customers are internal or external, we want them to request Mawr insights and as such, drive mawr innovation, and we call this the for the flywheel. We use the flywheel metaphor here where we created that data set. Okay, Our first product. Any focused on a specific use case? We build an initial NDP around that we provided with that with our customers, internal or external. They provide feedback, the request, more features. They want mawr insights that enables us to learn bringing more data and reach that actual data. And again we create MAWR insights. And as the flywheel spins faster, we improve on operational efficiencies, supporting greater data richness, and we reduce the cost of experimentation and legacy environments were never built for this kind of agility. In many cases, customers have struggled to keep momentum in their fleet, flywheel in particular around operational efficiency and experimentation. This is where Richie fits in and helps customer make the transition to a true data driven organization. Red Shift is the most widely used data warehouse with tens of thousands of customers. It allows you to analyze all your data. It is the only cloud data warehouse that sits, allows you to analyze data that sits in your data lake on Amazon, a street with no loading duplication or CTL required. It is also allows you to scale with the business with its hybrid architectures it also accelerates performance. It's a shared storage that provides the ability to scale toe unlimited concurrency. While the UN instant storage provides low late and say access to data it also provides three. Key asks that customers consistently tell us that matter the most when it comes to cost. One is usage based pricing Instead of license based pricing. Great value as you scale your data warehouse using, for example, reserved instances they can save up to 75% compared to on the mind demand prices. And as your data grows, infrequently accessed data can be stored. Cost effectively in S three encouraged through Amazon spectrum, and the third aspect is predictable. Month to month spend with no hitting charges and surprises. Unlike and unlike other cloud data warehouses, where you need premium versions for additional enterprise capabilities. Wretched spicing include building security compression and data transfer. >>Great Thanks. Scout um, eso. As you can see, everybody wins with the cloud data warehouses. Um, there's this evolution of movement of users and data and organizations to get value with these cloud data warehouses. And the key is the data has to be accessible by the users, and this data and the ability to make business decisions on the data. It ranges from users on the front line all the way up to the boardroom. So while we've seen this evolution to the Cloud Data Warehouse, as you can see from the statistic from Forrester, we're still struggling with how much of that data actually gets used for analytics. And so what is holding us back? One of the main reasons is old technology really trying to work with today's modern cloud data warehouses? They weren't built for it. So you run into issues of trying to do data replication, getting the data out of the cloud data warehouse. You can do analysis and then maintaining these middle layers of data so that you can access it quickly and get the answers you need. Another issue that's holding us back is this idea that you have to have your data in perfect shape with the perfect pipeline based on the exact dashboard unique. Um, this isn't true. Now, with Cloud data warehouse and the speed of important business data getting into those cloud data warehouses, you need a solution that allows you to access it right away without having everything to be perfect from the start, and I think this is a great opportunity for GAL and I have a little further discussion on what we're seeing in the marketplace. Um, one of the primary ones is like, What are the limiting factors, your Siegel of legacy technologies in the market when it comes to this cloud transformation we're talking about >>here? It's a great question, Michael and the variety of aspect when it comes to legacy, the other warehouses that are slowing down innovation for companies and businesses. I'll focus on 21 is performance right? We want faster insights. Companies want the ability to analyze MAWR data faster. And when it comes to on prem or legacy data warehouses, that's hard to achieve because the second aspect comes into display, which is the lack of flexibility, right. If you want to increase your capacity of your warehouse, you need to ensure request someone needs to go and bring an actual machine and install it and expand your data warehouse. When it comes to the cloud, it's literally a click of a button, which allows you to increase the capacity of your data warehouse and enable your internal and external users to perform analytics at scale and much faster. >>It falls right into the explanation you provided there, right as the speed of the data warehouses and the data gets faster and faster as it scales, older solutions aren't built toe leverage that, um, you know, they're either they're having to make technical, you know, technical cuts there, either looking at smaller amounts of data so that they can get to the data quicker. Um, or it's taking longer to get to the data when the data warehouse is ready, when it could just be live career to get the answers you need. And that's definitely an issue that we're seeing in the marketplace. I think the other one that you're looking at is things like governance, lineage, regulatory requirements. How is the cloud you know, making it easier? >>That's That's again an area where I think the cloud shines. Because AWS AWS scale allows significantly more investment in securing security policies and compliance, it allows customers. So, for example, Amazon redshift comes by default with suck 1 to 3 p. C. I. Aiso fared rampant HIPPA compliance, all of them out of the box and at our scale. We have the capacity to implement those by default for all of our customers and allow them to focus. Their very expensive, valuable ICTY resource is on actual applications that differentiate their business and transform the customer experience. >>That's a great point, gal. So we've talked about the, you know, limiting factors. Technology wise, we've mentioned things like governance. But what about the cultural aspect? Right? So what do you see? What do you see in team struggling in meeting? You know, their cloud data warehouse strategy today. >>And and that's true. One of the biggest challenges for large large organizations when they moved to the cloud is not about the technology. It's about people, process and culture, and we see differences between organizations that talk about moving to the cloud and ones that actually do it. And first of all, you wanna have senior leadership, drive and be aligned and committed to making the move to the cloud. But it's not just that you want. We see organizations sometimes Carol get paralyzed. If they can't figure out how to move each and every last work clothes, there's no need to boil the ocean, so we often work with organizations to find that iterative motion that relative process off identifying the use cases are date identifying workloads in migrating them one at a time and and through that allowed organization to grow its knowledge from a cloud perspective as well as adopt its tooling and learn about the new capabilities. >>And from an analytics perspective, we see the same right. You don't need a pixel perfect dashboard every single time to get value from your data. You don't need to wait until the data warehouse is perfect or the pipeline to the data warehouse is perfect. With today's technology, you should be able to look at the data in your cloud data warehouse immediately and get value from it. And that's the you know, that's that change that we're pushing and starting to see today. Thanks. God, that was That was really interesting. Um, you know, as we look through that, you know, this transformation we're seeing in analytics, um, isn't really that old? 20 years ago, data warehouses were primarily on Prem and the applications the B I tools used for analytics around them were on premise well, and so you saw things like applications like Salesforce. That live in the cloud. You start having to pull data from the cloud on Prem in order to do analytics with it. Um, you know, then we saw the shift about 10 years ago in the explosion of Cloud Data Warehouse Because of their scale, cost reduced, reduce shin reduction and speed. You know, we're seeing cloud data. Warehouses like Amazon Red Shift really take place, take hold of the marketplace and are the predominant ways of storing data moving forward. What we haven't seen is the B I tools catch up. And so when you have this new cloud data warehouse technology, you really need tools that were custom built for it to take advantage of it, to be able to query the cloud data warehouse directly and get results very quickly without having to worry about creating, you know, a middle layer of data or pipelines in order to manage it. And, you know, one company captures that really Well, um, chick fil A. I'm sure everybody has heard of is one of the largest food chains in America. And, you know, they made a huge investment in red shift and one of the purposes of that investment is they wanted to get access to the data mawr quickly, and they really wanted to give their business users, um, the ability to do some ad hoc analysis on the data that they were capturing. They found that with their older tools, the problems that they were finding was that all the data when they're trying to do this analysis was staying at the analyst level. So somebody needed to create a dashboard in order to share that data with a user. And if the user's requirements changed, the analysts were starting to become burdened with requests for changes and the time it took to reflect those changes. So they wanted to move to fought spot with embrace to connect to Red Shift so they could start giving business users that capability. Query the database right away. And with this, um, they were able to find, you know, very common things in in the supply chain analysis around the ability to figure out what store should get, what product that was selling better. The other part was they didn't have to wait for the data to get settled into some sort of repository or second level database. They were able to query it quickly. And then with that, they're able to make changes right in the red shift database that were then reflected to customers and the business users right away. So what they found from this is by adopting thought spot, they were actually able to arm business users with the ability to make decisions very quickly. And they cleared up the backlog that they were having and the delay with their analysts. And they're also putting their analysts toe work on different projects where they could get better value from. So when you look at the way we work with a cloud data warehouse, um, you have to think of thoughts about embrace as the tool that access that layer. The perfect analytic partner for the Cloud Data Warehouse. We will do the live query for the business user. You don't need to know how to script and sequel, um Thio access, you know, red shift. You can type the question that you want the answer to and thought spot will take care of that query. We will do the indexing so that the results come back faster for you and we will also do the analysis on. This is one of the things I wanted to cover, which is our spot i. Q. This is new for our ability to use this with embrace and our partners at Red Shift is now. We can give you the ability to do auto analysis to look at things like leading indicators, trends and anomalies. So to put this in perspective amount imagine somebody was doing forecasting for you know Q three in the western region. And they looked at how their stores were doing. And they saw that, you know, one store was performing well, Spot like, you might be able to look at that analysis and see if there's a leading product that is underperforming based on perhaps the last few quarters of data. And bring that up to the business user for analysis right away. They don't need to have to figure that out. And, um, you know, slice and dice to find that issue on their own. And then finally, all the work you do in data management and governance in your cloud data warehouse gets reflected in the results in embrace right away. So I've done a lot of talking about embrace, and I could do more, but I think it would be far better toe. Have Vika actually show you how the product works, Vika. >>Thanks, Michael. We learned a lot today about the power of leveraging your red shift data and thought spot. But now let me show you how it works. The coronavirus pandemic has presented extraordinary challenges for many businesses, and some industries have fared better than others. One industry that seems to weather the storm pretty well actually is streaming media. So companies like Netflix and who Lou. And in this demo, we're going to be looking at data from B to C marketing efforts. First streaming media company in 2020 lately, we've been running campaigns for comedy, drama, kids and family and reality content. Each of our campaigns last four weeks, and they're staggered on a weekly basis. Therefore, we always have four campaigns running, and we can focus on one campaign launch per >>week, >>and today we'll be digging into how our campaigns are performing. We'll be looking at things like impressions, conversions and users demographic data. So let's go ahead and look at that data. We'll see what we can learn from what's happened this year so far, and how we can apply those learnings to future decision making. As you can already see on the thoughts about homepage, I've created a few pin boards that I use for reporting purposes. The homepage also includes what others on my team and I have been looking at most recently. Now, before we dive into a search, will first take a look at how to make a direct connection to the customer database and red shift to save time. I've already pre built the connection Red Shift, but I'll show you how easy it is to make that connection in just three steps. So first we give the connection name and we select our connection type and was on red Shift. Then we enter our red shift credentials, and finally, we select the tables that we want to use Great now ready to start searching. So let's start in this data to get a better idea of how our marketing efforts have been affected either positively or negatively by this really challenging situation. When we think of ad based online marketing campaigns, we think of impressions, clicks and conversions. Let's >>look at those >>on a daily basis for our purposes. So all this data is available to us in Thought spot, and we can easily you search to create a nice line chart like this that shows US trends over the last few months and based on experience. We understand that we're going to have more clicks than impressions and more impressions and conversions. If we started the chart for a minute, we could see that while impressions appear to be pretty steady over the course of the year, clicks and especially conversions both get a nice boost in mid to late March, right around the time that pandemic related policies were being implemented. So right off the bat, we found something interesting, and we can come back to this now. There are few metrics that we're gonna focus on as we analyze our marketing data. Our overall goal is obviously to drive conversions, meaning that we bring new users into our streaming service. And in order to get a visitor to sign up in the first place, we need them to get into our sign up page. A compelling campaign is going to generate clicks, so if someone is interested in our ad, they're more likely to click on it, so we'll search for Click through Rape 5% and we'll look this up by campaign name. Now even compare all the campaigns that we've launched this year to see which have been most effective and bring visitors star site. And I mentioned earlier that we have four different types of campaign content, each one aligned with one of our most popular genres. So by adding campaign content, yeah, >>and I >>just want to see the top 10. I could limit my church. Just these top 10 campaigns automatically sorted by click through rate and assigned a color for each category so we could see right away that comedy and drama each of three of the top 10 campaigns by click through rate reality is, too, including the top spot and kids and family makes one appearance as well. Without spot. We know that any non technical user can ask a question and get an answer. They can explore the answer and ask another question. When you get an answer that you want to share, keep an eye on moving forward, you pin the answer to pin board. So the BBC Marketing Campaign Statistics PIN board gives us a solid overview of our campaign related activities and metrics throughout 2020. The visuals here keep us up to date on click through rate and cost per click, but also another really important metrics that conversions or cost proposition. Now it's important to our business that we evaluate the effectiveness of our spending. Let's do another search. We're going to look at how many new customers were getting so conversions and the price cost per acquisition that we're spending to get each of these by the campaign contact category. So >>this is a >>really telling chart. We can basically see how much each new users costing us, based on the content that they see prior to signing up to the service. Drama and reality users are actually relatively expensive compared to those who joined based on comedy and kids and family content that they saw. And if all the genres kids and family is actually giving us the best bang for our marketing >>buck. >>And that's good news because the genres providing the best value are also providing the most customers. We mentioned earlier that we actually saw a sizable uptick in conversions as stay at home policies were implemented across much of the country. So we're gonna remove cost per acquisition, and we're gonna take a daily look how our campaign content has trended over the years so far. Eso By doing this now, we can see a comparison of the different genres daily. Some campaigns have been more successful than others. Obviously, for example, kids and family contact has always fared pretty well Azaz comedy. But as we moved into the stay at home area of the line chart, we really saw these two genres begin to separate from the rest. And even here in June, as some states started to reopen, we're seeing that they're still trending up, and we're also seeing reality start to catch up around that time. And while the first pin board that we looked at included all sorts of campaign metrics, this is another PIN board that we've created so solely to focus on conversions. So not only can we see which campaigns drug significant conversions, we could also dig into the demographics of new users, like which campaigns and what content brought users from different parts of the country or from different age groups. And all this is just a quick search away without spot search directly on a red shift. Data Mhm. All right, Thank you. And back to you, Michael. >>Great. Thanks, Vika. That was excellent. Um, so as you can see, you can very quickly go from zero to search with thought Spot, um, connected to any cloud data warehouse. And I think it's important to understand that we mentioned it before. Not everything has to be perfect. In your doubt, in your cloud data warehouse, um, you can use thought spot as your initial for your initial tool. It's for investigatory purposes, A Z you can see here with star, Gento, imax and anthem. And a lot of these cases we were looking at billions of rows of data within minutes. And as you as your data warehouse maturity grows, you can start to add more and more thoughts about users to leverage the data and get better analysis from it. So we hope that you've enjoyed what you see today and take the step to either do one of two things. We have a free trial of thoughts about cloud. If you go to the website that you see below and register, we can get you access the thought spots so you can start searching today. Another option, by contacting our team, is to do a zero to search workshop where 90 minutes will work with you to connect your data source and start to build some insights and exactly what you're trying to find for your business. Um thanks, everybody. I would especially like to thank golf from AWS for joining us on this today. We appreciate your participation, and I hope everybody enjoyed what they saw. I think we have a few questions now. >>Thank you, Vika, Gal and Michael. It's always exciting to see a live demo. I know that I'm one of those comedy numbers. We have just a few minutes left, but I would love to ask a couple of last questions Before we go. Michael will give you the first question. Do I need to have all of my data cleaned and ready in my cloud data warehouse before I begin with thought spot? >>That's a great question, Mallory. No, you don't. You can really start using thought spot for search right away and start getting analysis and start understanding the data through the automatic search analysis and the way that we query the data and we've seen customers do that. Chick fil a example that we talked about earlier is where they were able to use thoughts bought to notice an anomaly in the Cloud Data Warehouse linking between product and store. They were able to fix that very quickly. Then that gets reflected across all of the users because our product queries the Cloud Data Warehouse directly so you can get started right away without it having to be perfect. And >>that's awesome. And gal will leave a fun one for you. What can we look forward to from Amazon Red Shift next year? >>That's a great question. And you know, the team has been innovating extremely fast. We released more than 200 features in the last year and a half, and we continue innovating. Um, one thing that stands out is aqua, which is a innovative new technology. Um, in fact, lovely stands for Advanced Square Accelerator, and it allows customers to achieve performance that up to 10 times faster, uh, than what they've seen really outstanding and and the way we've achieved that is through a shift in paradigm in the actual technological implementation section. Uh, aqua is a new distributed and hardware accelerated processing layer, which effectively allows us to push down operations analytics operations like compression, encryption, filtering and aggregations to the storage there layer and allow the aqua nodes that are built with custom. AWS designed analytics processors to perform these operations faster than traditional soup use. And we no longer need to bring, you know, scan the data and bring it all the way to the computational notes were able to apply these these predicates filtering and encourage encryption and compression and aggregations at the storage level. And likewise is going to be available for every are a three, um, customer out of the box with no changes to come. So I apologize for being getting out a little bit, but this is really exciting. >>No, that's why we invited you. Call. Thank you on. Thank you. Also to Michael and Vika. That was excellent. We really appreciate it. For all of you tuning in at home. The final session of this track is coming up shortly. You aren't gonna want to miss it. We're gonna end strong, come back and hear directly from our customer a T mobile on how T Mobile is building a data driven organization with thought spot in which >>pro, It's >>up next, see you then.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's the CUBE with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020 special coverage sponsored by AWS Global Partner Network. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's virtual coverage of AWS re:invent 2020, it's virtual this year, we're usually in person this year we have to do remote interviews because of the pandemic, but it's been a great run, a lot of great content happening here in these next three weeks of re:Invent. We've got two great guests here as part of our coverage of the APN Partner Experience. I'm your host, John Furrier. Barbara Kessler, Global APN Programs Leader, and Ryan Broadwell, Global Director of ISVs for AWS. Thanks for coming on the CUBE, Thanks for joining me. >> Hey, thanks for having us, it's great to be here. >> You know we heard of-- >> Yeah thanks for having us John. >> Thanks for coming on. Sorry we're not in person, but tons of content. I mean, there's a lot of the VODs, the main stages, but the news hitting this morning around Doug's comments from strong focus of ISVs is just a continuation. We heard that last year, but this year more focus investments there, new announcements take us through what we just heard and what it means. >> Yeah John, I'll jump in first and then let Barbara add some additional color and commentary, but I think it is a continuation for us as we look at continuing to build a momentum with our ISVs they're mission critical for us, and we hear that loud and clear from our customers. So as you think about building off what Doug was talking about, I think it's first important for us to start with, we look to help our partners build and build well-designed solutions on AWS, supporting their innovation and transformation and working together to deliver scalable, reliable, secure solutions for our customers. To facilitate this, we offer programs such as AWS SaaS Factory, that provide enablement to our ISVs to build new products, migrate single tenent environments or optimize existing SaaS Solutions on AWS. And we do this through mechanisms like Webinars, Bootcamps, Workshops and even one-on-one engagements. You know, as you talked about, we just heard from Doug announce AWS SaaS Boost, which is a ready to use open source implementation of SaaS tooling and best practices to accelerate ISV SaaS Path. Through SaaS Factory which we've worked on with many ISVs in the last few years and you're well aware of, we have lots of learnings and we've helped a lot of partners make that journey towards SaaS. Partners like BMC, CloudZero, Nasdaq, Cohesity, or F5 transform their delivery and business models to SaaS. We've had a lot of demand for this type of engagement. And we knew it was important that we come up with a scalable way to help partners accelerate their transformation. SaaS Boost provides prescriptive experience to transform applications through an intuitive tool with many core services needed to develop and operate on the AWS Cloud. In addition to that, we look to use the well-architected framework, which is proven to set the architectural best practices for designing in operating systems in the Cloud, to help ISVs build their solutions on AWS. We just launched two additional lenses in well-architected tool, to enable ISVs to conduct these reviews from within the AWS console, one SaaS environment, and one aligned with foundational technical reviews, which helps partners prepare for the technical validation in AWS Partner Programs. >> You know, the SaaS Boost, I love that I was joking on Twitter, it sounds like an energy drink. Give me some of that SaaS Boost, don't drink too many of them you get immune to two to strong out, but this is what people want Barbara. This is about the Partner Network. You guys are providing more stuff, more successful programs and capabilities. This is what the demand is for. Help me get there faster path to SaaS. Can you explain what this means for partners? What's in it for them, can you share your thoughts? >> Yeah, absolutely. And you know, Ryan talked about some of the things that we do to help partners build their ISVs and software or SaaS products. But in addition to that, we provide a number of programs and resources to help partners also grow their business through marketing and sales focused programs. That's an area that we are focused on investing deeply with our partner community. For example, we offer APN Marketing Central through which partners can find and launch free customizable marketing campaigns, or even find a marketing agency to work with that has experienced messaging AWS, it also offers APN marketing activity. We recognize that not all partners, especially if they're in their startup stages, have those investments and skill sets yet around marketing. So Marketing Academy offers self service content to teach partners who don't have that capability in house today, to how to drive awareness campaigns and build demand for their offerings. We also offer a broad set of funding benefits to help partners starting from the build stage that Ryan talks about through Sandbox Credits to support their development, all the way through marketing with Market Development Funds as they're selling with what we call our partner Opportunity Acceleration Program, which is how we fund POC to support our partners and winning new customers. We also heard Doug announce in the keynote that we are launching the ISV Accelerate Program. This is our new co-selling program for ISVs that offer compensation incentives for AWS account managers, access to co-sale specialists and reduced marketplace listing fees to help our partners continue to grow their business with us. >> You know, successful selling is amazing. You want to make money. I mean, come on, you bring it a lot to the table. Co-selling I think that's a huge point. Nice call out there. Ryan, can you give some examples of partners that have been successful with these resources? >> Hey John, thank you. Yeah, it'd be great to kind of walk through with one good example and a little bit of detail. And what we've seen with Sisense is a great example of a partner that leveraged these resources and the work that they've done with Luma Health. So Luma Health serves millions of patients, provides a Cloud-hosted patient engagement platform that connects patients and providers. You know when word about COVID started, spreading Luma helped solve a big increase in questions and concerns from patients and the providers. Luma Health saw an opportunity to create new products, to help patients and providers during the pandemic, to decide what to build and how to build it, the company wanted to analyze sentimental signal and data real-time. Using Sisense, Amazon Redshift and Amazon Web Services, Data Migration Services, Luma Health built a platform that delivered analytics and insights it needed, democratizing access to the data for all users. As a result, Luma Health uncovered insights such as facts that SMS was the preferred method of communication and that many patients had similar questions. Just three weeks after their hypothesis, Luma Health released new products based on its insights, a turn-key EHR enabled healthcare solution, zero contact check-in and COVID-19 Broadcast Messaging System. >> So a lot of good successes. The question that I would ask you guys, this is the probably what's on everyone's mind is I'm a partner, I'm growing, obviously I'm in the partner network because I'm being successful. I don't have a lot of time. I need to figure out all the stuff that you have. You have so much going on that's good for me. I don't know what to do. Can you help me figure out what resources and programs to leverage? I could imagine this is a question that I would have, I want it too, I want to make money co-sell, I want to get into this program. What's the best path? I mean, what do I do? Can you share how you help your partners get on the right road, have the right resources, What are the right programs? 'Cause it makes it more consumable. This is probably a big challenge, can you share your thoughts? >> Yeah, happy to explore that. So we certainly find a lot of opportunity to innovate with our partners and customers and a result we do offer a broad range of programs, resources, material to meet the diverse needs of those partners and customers. One focus of these programs and enablement models that we offer partners, is to help our partners build their products and build their business with us. And the other focus is to create program structures that help customers find the right partner and the right solution at the right time. But we recognize it's a lot (chuckles) and we want to make sure that our partners are easily able to find what's most relevant to them. And to deliver this more effectively for ISV partners specifically, Doug just announced the launch of ISV Partner Path. As with everything we do at AWS, this new program structure works backwards from our customers and our partners to deliver the needs of both of those audiences. When a customer identifies a need for a solution, they search for that solution based on their business needs and the outcomes that they're looking to deliver rather than searching based on a partner profile. So ISV Partner Path pivots the focus that we have today on partner-level tier badging to instead focus on solution-level validation badging that helps us better align to what our customers are looking for and how they look for software products. The new model responds to that partner and customer feedback that we've heard, it removes APN tier requirements for ISVs and introduces the ability to engage across all of the products, services, and solutions that a partner offers and it pivots the partner badge attainment. So today our partners attain badging based on a tier and moving forward, they'll attain that badging to go to market with solutions that are validated and have gone through a technical assessment to either integrate effectively or run effectively on AWS. So if you were requirements to access APN programs from differentiation to funding and co-selling, partners can engage more quickly in a more meaningful way and in a more clear path to develop their solution offering and go to market with AWS. >> Ryan anything you want to add on in terms of structural support in terms of account management and does everyone get in on a wrap? Is there certain levels of attention? When does that come into play? >> Yeah, I think Barbara has made a great point in that we have a lot of great programmatic resources, but there's also no substitution for engagement with a person. And we have Partner Development Resources available to engage with our partners and help them develop their individualized plans that help them understand how they maximize the opportunity with their customer set and expand their customer sets. This starts as soon as a partner registers with the AWS Partner Network, they're contacted by a Partner Development team member within the first business day. This is a commitment we find incredibly important to the partner. And even when we have five or more new partners registering every single day. We look to go beyond that and it's not just about onboarding to your point John, our partner team works backwards from the customer and the partner to help develop what is that joint plan? How do we focus on what strategic to the partner and what becomes strategic to our customers? With that plan our team works to activate that broadly across the team in support of achieving our joint goals. And then naturally all partnerships, we want join accountability, we want mechanisms to measure success. >> You know I talked to a lot of channel partners over the years in my career, and the Cloud it really highlights the speed and the agility feature, but it all comes down to the same thing. I want to get my solution in front of the customer, I want to make money, I want to make it easy to use, make it easy to consume. I want to leverage the Cloud. This is kind of the process, this is how it always happens. This is what they want and you guys are bringing a lot to the table and that's important. And I think co-selling having the kind of support, making it consumable is easy and super great. So I have to ask you with that, what's your advice for people who are jumping in? Because you're seeing more on boarding of ISVs than ever before. And we've been commenting on theCUBE for multiple years. We've been seeing the uptick in software SaaS ISVs. And remember Amazon is not in the SaaS business a hundred percent. And government just collapsed the platform as a service in the IS categories that highlights the fact that your entire ISV landscape is wide open and growing. So there's new ISV is coming in. (chuckles) What advice would you give them to get started, experience and -- >> Yeah, I can take that. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, I can take that one thank you. And I actually want to build on something Ryan said, we actually have more than 50 new partners joining the AWS Partner Network every single day. And so having the right structure for those partners to easily navigate and the right resources for them is something that's very top of mind for us. I think I can distill down about two primary pieces of advice from my perspective for a new partner who's trying to figure out how to work with us and get involved. First and foremost, build a relationship with your Partner Manager, help them know and understand your business, the customers that you focus on, the solutions you provide. The Partner Manager is your advocate and could be your mentor in working with AWS. Make sure they know what you're good at. Partners are able to build the best traction with our shared customers and our AWS sales team when it's very clear what they're good at and how their solutions solve specific customer problems. And specialization through programs such as competency, which validate solutions based on industry in this case or workload is really key to helping communicate that specific value. And second, I would say avail yourself of the resources available to you. We offer a number of self-serve resources, such as the new ISV Navigate Track that is launching in conjunction with ISV Partner Path that provides individuals the sort of step by step guidance to move through that engagement with us, they connect them to all the resources that they need. Marketing Central which we discussed earlier to drive marketing campaigns that can be very self-served and driven by the Partner Central, which offers a wealth of content, white papers, et cetera. That's our portal through which partners engage. And you can also access things like training and certification discounts to build your Cloud skills to support your business. But I think both of those are really important things to keep in mind for partners who are just kind of getting started with us as well as partners who've been working with us for a while now. >> Ryan, what do you want to add to that because again, there's more ISVs is coming. And again, Amazon has been very disruptive in it's enablement of partners. Not everyone fits into a nice clean bucket. I mean what looks like a category might be old and being disrupted into to a new category being developed. All these new categories and new solutions. It's hard to put people into buckets. So you have a tough job, how do you give advice to your partners? >> It is tough, and the rate of transformation continues. And the rate of innovation continues to quicken. My advice is lean in with us. We continue to invest our efforts in developing this vibrant community of partners. So lean in, we'll continue to iterate around and optimize our joint plans and activities. And we'd look to be able to continue to drive success for our customers and our partners. >> Well, you guys do a great job. I want to say I've watched the APN grow and change and evolve. Market demand is there and you got the Factory, you got the Boost, you got the Lenses, you got the Partner Network, the people. It's people equation with software so congratulations. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much, appreciate the time. >> Thank you. >> Okay, great event here, re:Invent 2020 Virtual. This is theCUBE Virtual. I'm John Furrier your host, wall-to-wall coverage with theCUBE, thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>>Hello, everyone. And welcome back to our wall to wall coverage of the data Cloud Summit. This is Dave a lot. And we're seeing the emergence of a next generation workload in the cloud were more facile access and governed. Sharing of data is accelerating. Time to insights and action. All right, allow me to introduce our next guest. Amy Irwin is here. She's the vice president of strategy for experience. And Matt Glickman is VP customer product strategy it snowflake with an emphasis on financial services. Folks, welcome to the Cube. Thanks so much for coming on. >>Thanks for >>having us >>nice to be here. Hey, >>So, Amy, I mean, obviously 2020 has been pretty unique and crazy and challenging time for a lot of people. I don't know why I've been checking my credit score a lot more for some reason. On the app I love the app I got hacked. I had a lock it the other day I locked my credit. Somebody tried to dio on and it worked. I was so happy. So thank you for that. But so we know experience, but there's a ton of data behind what you do. I wonder if you could share kind of where you sit in the data space and how you've seen organizations leverage data up to this point. And really, if you could address maybe some of the changes that you're seeing as a result of the pandemic, that would be great. >>Sure, sure. Well, Azaz, you mentioned experience Eyes best known as a credit bureau. Uh, I work in our marketing services business unit, and what we do is we really help brands leverage the power of data and technology to make the right marketing decisions and better understand and connect with consumers. Eso we offer markers products around data identity activation measurement. We have a consumer view data file that's based on off line P I and contains demographic interest, transaction data and other attributes on about 300 million people in the U. S. Uh, and on the identity side, we've always been known for our safe haven or privacy friendly matching that allows marketers to connect their first party data to experience or other third parties. Uh, but in today's world, with the growth and importance of digital advertising and consumer behavior shifting to digital, uh, experience also is working to connect that offline data to the digital world for a complete view of the customer you mentioned co vid, um, we actually we serve many different verticals. And what we're seeing from our clients during co vid is that there's a bearing impact of the pandemic. The common theme is that those that have successfully pivoted their businesses to digital are doing much better. Uh, as we all know, Kobe accelerated very strong trends to digital both in the commerce and immediate viewing habits. We work with a lot of retailers. Retail is a tale of two cities with big box and grocery growing and apparel retail really struggling. We've helped our clients leveraging our data to better understand the shifts in these consumer behaviors and better segment their customers during this really challenging time. Eso think about there's there's a group of customers that is still staying home that is sheltered in place. There's a group of customers starting that significantly varied their consumer behavior, but it's starting to venture out a little. And then there's a group of customers that's doing largely what they did before and a somewhat modified fashion. So we're helping our clients segment those customers into groups to try and understand the right messaging and right offers for each of those groups. And we're also helping them with at risk audiences. Eso That's more on the financial side. Which of your customers air really struggling? Do the endemic And how do you respond? >>It's awesome, thank you. You know, it's it's funny. I mean somebody I saw Twitter poll today asking if we measure our screen time and I said, Oh my no eso Matt, let me ask you. You spend a ton of time in financial services. You really kind of cut your teeth there, and it's always been very data oriented. You've seen a lot of changes tell us about how your customers are bringing together data, the skills that people obviously a big part of the equation and applications to really put data at the center of their universe. What's new and different that these companies were getting out of the investments in data and skills. >>That's a great question. Um, the acceleration that Amy mentioned Israel, Um, we're seeing it particularly this year, but I think even in the past few years, the reluctance of customers to embrace the cloud is behind us. And now there's this massive acceleration to be able to go faster on, and in some ways the new entrance into this category. Have an advantage versus, you know, the companies that have been in the space within its financial services or beyond. Um, and in a lot of ways they are are seeing the cloud and services like snowflake as a way toe not only catch up but leapfrog your competitors and really deliver a differentiated experience to your customers to your business, internally or externally. Um, and this past, you know, however long this crisis has been going on, has really only accelerated that, because now there's a new demand. Understand your customer better your your business better with with your traditional data sources and also new alternative data sources, Um, and also be able to take a pulse. One of things that we learned which was you know, I opening experience was as the crisis unfolded, one of our data partners decided to take the data sets about where the cases where were happening from the Johns Hopkins and World Health Organization and put that on our platform, and it became a runaway hit where now with thousands of our customers overnight, we're using this data to understand how their business was doing versus how the crisis was unfolding in real time. On this has been a game changer, and I think it's only it's only scratching the surface of what now the world will be able to do when data is really at their fingertips. You're not hindered by your legacy platforms. >>I wrote about that back in the early days of the pandemic when you guys did that and talked about some of the changes that you guys enabled and and, you know you're right about Cloud. I mean, financial services. Cloud used to be an evil word, and now it's almost become a mandate. Amy, I >>wonder if you >>could tell us a little bit more about what? What, you know your customers they're having to work through in order to achieve some of these outcomes. I mean, I'm interested in the starting point. I've been talking a lot and writing a lot on talking to practitioners about what I call the data lifecycle. Sometimes people call it the data pipeline. It za complicated matter, but those customers and companies that can put data at the center and really treat that pipeline is the heart of their organization, If you will, really succeeding. What are you seeing and what really is the starting point there? >>Yes, yes, that's a good question. And as you mentioned, first party, I mean, we start with first party data. Right? First party data is critical to understanding consumers on been in different verticals, different companies. Different brands have varying levels of first party data. So retailers gonna have a lot more first party data financial services company, then say an auto manufacturer. Uh, while many marketers have that first party data to really have a 3 60 view of the customer, they need third party data as well. And that's where experience comes in. We help brands connect those disparate data sets both 1st and 3rd party baked data to better understand consumers and create a single customer view, which has a number of applications. I think the last that I heard was that there's about eight devices on average per person. I always joke that we're gonna have these enormous. I mean, that that number is growing. We're gonna have these enormous charging stations in our house, and I think we're because all the different devices and way seamlessly move from device to device along our customer journey. And, um, if the brand doesn't understand who we are, it's much harder for the brand to connect with consumers and create a positive customer experience and way site that about 95% of companies are actually that they are looking to achieve that single customer view. They recognize, um, that they need that. And they've aligned various teams from e commerce to marketing to sales toe at a minimum in just their first party data and then connect that data to better understand, uh, consumers so consumers can interact with the brand through website and mobile app in store visits, um, by the phone, TV ads, etcetera. And a brand needs to use all of those touchpoints often collected by different parts of the organization and then adding that third party data to really understand the consumers in terms of specific use cases, Um, there's there's about three that come to mind, so there's first. There's relevant advertising and reaching the right customer. There's measurement s or being able to evaluate your advertising efforts. Uh, if you see an ad on the if I see it out of my mobile and then I by by visiting a desktop website understanding or get a direct mail piece, understanding that those connect those interactions are all connected to the same person is critical for measurement. And then there's, uh, there's personalization, um, which includes encourage customer experience amongst your own, um, touch points with that consumer personalized marketing communication and then, of course, um, analytics. So those are the use cases we're seeing? Great. >>Thank you, Amy. I'm out. You can't really talk about data without talking about, >>you know, >>governance and and and compliance. And I remember back in 2006, when the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure went in, it was easy. The lawyers just said, No, nobody can have access, but that's changed. One of things I like about what snowflakes doing with the data cloud is it's really about democratizing access, but doing so in a way that gives people confidence that they only have access to the right data. So maybe you could talk a little bit about how you're thinking about this topic, what you're doing to help customers navigate, which has traditionally been such a really challenging problem. >>No, it's another great question. Um, this is where I think the major disruption is happening. Um, and what Amy described being able to join together 1st and 3rd party data sets. Um, being able to do this was always a challenge because data had to be moved around, had a ship, my first party data to the other side. The third party data had to be shipped to me on being able to join those data sets together, um was problematic at best. And now, with the focus on privacy and protecting P, I, um, this is this is something that has to change. And the good news is with the data cloud data does not have to move. Data can stay where it belongs. Experiencing keep its data experience. Customers can hold on to their data. Yet the data can be joined together on this universal global platform that we call the data cloud. On top of that, and particularly with the regulations that are coming out that are gonna prevent data from being collected on either a mobile device or in wet warren as cookies and Web browsers, new approaches. And we're seeing this a lot in our space, both in financials and in media is to set up these data clean rooms where both sides can give access to one another, but not have to reveal any P i i to do that joint. Um, this is gonna be huge right now. You actually can protect your your customers, private your consumers, private identities, but still accomplish that. Join that Amy mentioned to be able to thio relate the cause and effect of these campaigns and really understand the signals. Um, that these data sets are trying to say about one another again without having to move data without having to reveal P. I We're seeing this happening now. This is this is the next big thing that we're gonna see explode over the next months and years to come. >>I totally agree. Massive changes coming in public policy in this area, and I wanted we only have a few minutes left. I wonder if for our audience members that you know, looking for some advice, what's the what's the one thing you'd recommend? They start doing differently or consider putting in place. That's going to set them up for success over the next decade. >>Yeah, that's a good question. Um, you know, I think e always say, you know, first harness all of your first party data across all touchpoints. Get that first party data in one place and working together Second back that data with trusted third parties and in mats, just in some ways to do that and then third, always with the customer first speak their language. Uh, where and when they want to be, uh, reached out thio on and use the information. You have to really create a better a better customer experience for your customers. >>Matt. What would you add to that? Bring us home if you would >>applications. Um, the idea that data can now be your data can now be pulled into your own business applications the same way that Netflix and Spotify are pulled into your consumer and lifestyle applications again without data moving these personalized applications experiences is what I encourage everyone to be thinking about from first principles. What would you do in your next app that you're gonna build? If you had all of your consumers, consumers had access to their data in the app and not having to think about things you know from scratch. Leverage the data cloud leverage these, you know, service providers like experience and build the applications of tomorrow. >>I'm super excited when I talked to practitioners like yourselves about the future of data Guys, Thanks so much for coming on. The Cube was really a pleasure having you and hope we can continue this conversation in the future. >>Thank you. >>All right. Thank you for watching. Keep it right there. We've got great content. Tons of content coming at the Snowflake Data Cloud Summit. This is Dave Volonte for the Cube. Keep it right there.

>>Hello. Everyone were here in the Data Cloud Summit, and we had a real treat for you. I call it the CMO Power Panel. We're gonna explore how data is transforming marketing, branding and promotion, and with me, a three phenomenal marketing pros and chief marketing officers. Denise Person is the CMO Snowflakes Scott Holden of Thought Spot and Laura Langdon, of which pro folks great to see you. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube. >>Think >>great to be here with you, David. Awesome >>did. He's Let's let's start with you. I want to talk about the role and the changing role of the CMO. It's changed a lot, you know, sports, of course, with all this data, but I wonder what you're experiencing And can you share us share with us? Why marketing, especially, is being impacted by data? >>Well, data is really what has helped turn us marketers into revenue drivers into call centers, and it's clearly a much better place to be. What I'm personally most excited about is the real time access we have to data today. In the past, I used to get a stale report a few weeks after a marketing program was over and a tough time, but we couldn't make any. Changes to the investments were already made. Today we get data in the midst of running a program so we can reallocate investments at the time of program is up and running, and that's really a profound today as well. I would say that adaptability has truly become the true superpowers or marketing today and data. It's really what enables us to adapt to scale. We can adapt to customers, behavior and preferences at scale, and that's truly a profound new way of working as well. >>That's interesting what you say because, you know, in tough times used to be okay. Sales and engineering put a brick wall around those and you know the name it. Marketing, Say Okay, cut. But now it's like you go to marketing and say, Okay, what's the data say? How do we have to pivot and Scott? I wonder what of data and cloud really brought to the modern marketer that you might not have had before this modern era? Well, >>it's ah, this era. I don't think there's ever been a better time to be a marketer than there is right now. and the primary reason is that we have access to data and insights like we've never had. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that I have 100 times more access to data than I had a decade ago. It's just phenomenal when you look at the power cloud search AI these new consumer experiences for analytics, we can do things in seconds. It used to take days. And so it's B comments that he said, Ah, superpower for us toe. Have access to so much data. And it's, you know, Kobe has been hard. Ah, lot of our marketing teams who've never worked harder, making this pivot from the physical world to the virtual world. But there, you know, at least we're working, and three other part of it is that digital she's created this phenomenal opportunity for us because the beauty of digital and digital transformation is that everything now is trackable, which makes it measurable and means that we can actually get insights that we can act on in a smarter way. And you know, it's worth giving an example. If you just look at this show right, like this event that we're doing in a physical world. All of you watching at home, you'd be in front of us in a room and we'd be able to know if you're in the room, right? We tracking the scanners when you walked in. But that's basically it. At that point, we don't really get a good sense for how much you like what we're saying. Uh, maybe you filled out a survey, but only 5 to 10% of people ever do that. In the digital world. We know how long you stick around, and as a result, like, it's easy people can just with the click, you know, change the channel. And so the bar for content has gone way up as we do these events. But we know how long people are sticking around. And that's what's so special about it. You know Denise and her team as the host of this show, they're going to know how long people watch this segment and that knowing is powerful. I mean, it's simple. As you know, using a product like that spot, you could just ask a question. You know how many you know, what's the average you time by session and boom and chart pops up, you're gonna know what's working, what's not. And that's something that you could take and act on in the future. And that's what our That's what customers were doing. So you know, snowflake and the spot that we share a customer with Lulu and they're tracking programs. So what people are watching at home, how long they're watching what they're watching next, and they're able to do that in a super granular way and improve their content as a result. And that's the power of this new world we live in. Uh, that's made the cloud and data so accessible. Folks like us. >>Well, thank you for that. And I want to come back to that notion to understand how you're bringing data into your marketing office. But I want to bring Laura and Laura were pro You guys partner with a lot of brands, a lot of companies around the world. I mean, thousands of partners, obviously snowflake in in thought spot are are, too. How are you using data to optimize these co marketing relationships? You know specifically, what are the trends that you're seeing around around things like customer experience? >>So, you know, we used data for all of our marketing decisions, our own as well as with our partners. And I think what's really been interesting about partner marketing data is we can we can feed that back to our sales team, right? So it's very directional for them as well in their efforts moving forward. So I think that's a place where specifically to partners, it's really powerful. We can also use our collective data to go out to customers to better effect. And then, you know, regarding these trends, we just did a survey on the state of the intelligent enterprise. We we interviewed 300 companies, US and UK, and there were three Interesting. I thought statistics relevant to this, um only 22% of the companies that we interviewed felt that their marketing was where it needed to be from an automation standpoint. So lots of room for us to grow right. Lots of space for us to play, and 61% of them believed that it was critical that they implement this technology to become a more intelligent enterprise. But when they ranked readiness by function, marketing came in six right, So H R R and D finance were all ahead of marketing was followed by sales, you know. And then the final data point that I think was interesting was 40% of those agreed that while the technology was the most important thing, that thought leadership was critical, you know? And I think that's where marketers really could bring. You know, our tried and true experience to bear and merging with this technology. >>Great. Thank you. So so did he say I've been getting the Kool Aid injection this week around Data Cloud? I've been pushing people, but now that I have the CMO in front of me, I wanna ask about the data cloud and what it means specifically for the customers. And what are some of the learnings? Maybe that you've experienced that, that that can support some of the things that that Laura and Scott were just discussing. >>Yeah, As Scott said before, right, he had 100 times more data than he ever has before. And that's again if you look at all the companies we talked to around the world, it's not about the amount of data that they have. That is the problem is the ability to access that data that data for most companies is trapped across Silas across the organization. It's It's in data applications, systems of records. Some of that data sits with your partners that you want access, and that's really what the data clouds comes in. Data Cloud is really mobilizing that data for you. It brings all that data together for you in one place so you can finally access that data and really provide ubiquitous access to that data to everyone in your organization that needs it and can truly unlock the value off that data. And from a marketing perspective, I mean, we are responsible for the customer experience, you know, we provide to our customers, and if you have access toe all the data on your customers, that's when you have that customer 3 60 that we've all been talking about for so many years. If you have all the data, you can truly, you know, look at their, you know, buying behaviors, put all those adults together and create those exceptional customer experiences. You can do things such as the retailers do in terms of personal decision for, for instance, right, and those are the type of experiences in our customers are expecting today. They are expecting a 100% personalized experience for them, you know, all the time. And if you don't have all the data, you can't really put those experiences together at scale. And that is really where the data cloud comes in again. The data cloud is not only about mobilizing your own data within your enterprise. It's also about having access to data from your partners or extending access to your own data in a secure way to your partners within your ecosystems. >>Yeah, So I'm glad you mentioned a couple of things. I've been writing about this a lot, and particularly the 3 60 that we would dying for but haven't really been able to tap. I didn't call it the Data Cloud. I don't have a marketing gene. I had another sort of boring name for it, but I think there's, you know, similar vectors there. So I appreciate that, Scott, I want to come back to this notion of of building data DNA in your marketing, you know, fluency on and how you put data at the core of your marketing ops. I've been working with a lot of folks in banking and manufacturing and other industries that air that are struggling to do this. How are you doing it? What are some of the challenges that you can share and maybe some advice for your your peers out there? >>Yeah, sure, it's, um Well, you brought up this concept of data fluency and it zone important one. And there's been a lot of talking industry about data literacy on being able to read data. But I think it's more important to be able to speak data to be fluent. And as marketers, we're all storytellers. And when you combine data with storytelling, magic happens. And so getting the data fluency is a great goal for us toe have for all of the people in our companies. And to get to that end. I think one of the things that's happening is that people are hiring wrong and they're thinking about it. They're making some mistakes. And so a couple of things come to mind when, especially when I look at marketing teams that I'm familiar with, they're hiring a lot of data analysts and data scientists, and those folks are amazing and every team needs them. Uh, but if you go to big on that, you do yourself a disservice. The second key thing is that you're basically giving your frontline focus, your marketing managers or people on the front lines. An excuse not to get involved data. And I think that's a big mistake because it used to be really hard. But with the technologies available to us now, these new consumer like experiences for Data Analytics, anybody can do it. And so we as leaders have to encourage them to do it. And I'll give you just a you know, an example. You know, I've got about 32 people on my marketing team, and I don't have any data analysts on my team across our entire company. We have a couple of analysts and a couple of data engineers, and what's happening is the world is changing where those folks, their enablers, they architect the system, they bring in the different status sources they use. Technologies like snowflake has been so great at making it easier for people to pull technology together, and they get access data out of it quickly. But they're pulling it together, and then simple things like, Hey, I just want to see this weekly instead of monthly. You don't need to waste your expensive data science talent. You know, Gardner puts a stand out there. 50% of data scientists are doing basic visualization work. That's not a good use of their time. You The products are easy enough now that everyday marketing managers can do that. And when you have a marketing manager come to you and say, You know, I just figured out this this campaign, which looks great on the surface, is doing poorly. From our perspective, that's a magic moment. And so we all need to coach our teams to get there. And I would say, you know, lead by example, give them an opportunity Thio access data and turn it into a story that's really powerful. And then, lastly, praised people who do it like use it as something to celebrate inside our companies is a great way to kind of get this initiative. >>E love it. You talk about democratizing data, making it self service. People feel ownership, you know, Laura did. He starts talking about the ecosystem, and you're kind of the ecosystem pro here. How does the ecosystem help marketers succeed? Maybe you could talk about the power of of many versus the resource of one. >>So, you know, I think it's a it's a game changer and it will continue to be. And I think it's really the next level for marketers to harness this. This power that's out there and use it. Um, you know, it's something that's important to us, but it's also something we're starting to see our customers demand, you know, we went from a one size fits all solution, Thio. They want to bring the best in class to their organization. Um, we all need to be really agile and flexible right now. And I think this ecosystem allows that, you know, you think about the power of a snow plate snowflake mining data for you, and then a thought spot really giving you the dashboard toe, have what you want. And then, of course, on implementation partner like a whip Roh coming in and really being able to plug in whatever else you need to deliver. And I think it's really super powerful, and I think it gives us, you know, it just gives us so much to play with and so much room to grow market. >>Thank you. Did he say, Why don't you bring us home? We were almost out of time here, but marketing, art, science both. What do your thoughts? >>Definitely Both. I think that's exciting. Part about marketing. It is a balancing act between art and science. Clearly, it's probably mawr science today than it used to be. But the art part is really about inspiring change. It's about changing people's people's behavior and challenging the status quo, right? That's the art part. The science part. That's about making the right decisions all the time, right? It's making sure we are truly investing in what's gonna drive revenue for us. >>Guys, thanks so much for coming on the Cube. Great discussion. Really appreciate it. Okay. And thank you for watching. Keep it right there. Wall to wall coverage of the Snowflake Data Cloud Summit on the Cube.

>> Hello everyone, and welcome back to our wall-to-wall coverage of the Datacloud summit, this is Dave Vellante, and we're seeing the emergence of a next generation workload in the cloud, more facile access, and governed sharing of data is accelerating time to insights and action. Alright, allow me to introduce our next guest. Aimee Irwin is here, she's the vice president of strategy for Experian, and Matt Glickman is VP of customer product strategy at Snowflake, with an emphasis on financial services, folks, welcome to theCUBE, thanks so much for coming on. >> Thanks Dave, nice to be here. >> Hey so Aimee, obviously 2020's been pretty unique and crazy and challenging time for a lot of people, I don't know why, I've been checking my credit score a lot more for some reason on the app, I love the app, I had to lock it the other day, I locked my credit, somebody tried to do, and it worked, I was so happy, so thank you for that. So, we know Experian, but there's a ton of data behind what you do, I wonder if you could share kind of where you sit in the data space, and how you've seen organizations leverage data up to this point, and really if you could address some of the changes you're seeing as a result of the pandemic, that would be great. >> Sure, sure. Well, as you mentioned, Experian is best known as a credit bureau. I work in our marketing services business unit, and what we do is we really help brands leverage the power of data and technology to make the right marketing decisions, and better understand and connect with consumers. So we offer marketers products around data, identity, activation, measurement, we have a consumer-view data file that's based on offline PII and contains demographic interest, transaction data, and other attributes on about 300 million people in the US. And on the identity side we've always been known for our safe haven, or privacy-friendly matching, that allows marketers to connect their first party data to Experian or other third parties, but in today's world, with the growth in importance of digital advertising, and consumer behavior shifting to digital, Experian also is working to connect that offline data to the digital world, for a complete view of the customer. You mentioned COVID, we actually, we serve many different verticals, and what we're seeing from our clients during COVID is that there's a varying impact of the pandemic. The common theme is that those who have successfully pivoted their businesses to digital are doing much better, as we all know, COVID accelerated very strong trends to digital, both in e-commerce and in media-viewing habits. We work with a lot of retailers, retail is a tale of two cities, with big box and grocery growing, and apparel retail really struggling. We've helped our clients, leveraging our data to better understand the shifts in these consumer behaviors, and better psych-map their customers during this really challenging time. So think about, there's a group of customers that is still staying home, that is sheltered in place, there's a group of customers starting to significantly vary their consumer behavior, but is starting to venture out a little, and then there's a group of customers that's doing largely what they did before, in a somewhat modified fashion, so we're helping our clients segment those customers into groups to try and understand the right messaging and right offers for each of those groups, and we're also helping them with at-risk audiences. So that's more on the financial side, which of your customers are really struggling due to the pandemic, and how do you respond. >> That's awesome, thank you. You know, it's funny, I saw a twitter poll today asking if we measure our screen time, and I said, "oh my, no." So, Matt, let me ask you, you spent a ton of time in financial services, you really kind of cut your teeth there, and it's always been very data-oriented, you're seeing a lot of changes, tell us about how your customers are bringing it together, data, the skills, the people, obviously a big part of the equation, and applications to really put data at the center of the universe, what's new and different that these companies are getting out of the investments in data and skills? >> That's a great question, the acceleration that Aimee mentioned is real. We're seeing, particularly this year, but I think even in the past few years, the reluctance of customers to embrace the cloud is behind us, and now there's this massive acceleration to be able to go faster, and in some ways, the new entrants into this category have an advantage versus the companies that have been in this space, whether it's financial services or beyond, and in a lot of ways, they all are seeing the cloud and services like Snowflake as a way to not only catch up, but leapfrog your competitors, and really deliver a differentiated experience to your customers, to your business, internally or externally. And this past, however long this crisis has been going on, has really only accelerated that, because now there's a new demand to understand your customer better, your business better, with your traditional data sources, and also new, alternative data sources, and also being able to take a pulse. One of the things that we learned, which was an eye-opening experience, was as the crisis unfolded, one of our data partners decided to take the datasets about where the cases were happening from the Johns Hopkins, and World Health Organization, and put that on our platform, and it became a runaway hit. Thousands of our customers overnight were using this data to understand how their business was doing, versus how the crisis was unfolding in real time. And this has been a game-changer, and it's only scratching the surface of what now the world will be able to do when data is really at their fingertips, and you're not hindered by your legacy platforms. >> I wrote about that back in the early days of the pandemic when you guys did that, and talked about some of the changes that you guys enabled, and you know, you're right about cloud, in financial services cloud used to be an evil word, and now it's almost, it's become a mandate. Aimee, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about what your customers are having to work through in order to achieve some of these outcomes. I mean, you know, I'm interested in the starting point, I've been talking a lot, and writing a lot, and talking to practitioners about what I call the data life cycle, sometimes people call it the data pipeline, it's a complicated matter, but those customers and companies that can put data at the center and really treat that pipeline as the heart of their organization, if you will, are really succeeding. What are you seeing, and what really is the starting point, there? >> Yes, yeah, that's a good question, and as you mentioned, first party, I mean we start with first party data, right? First party data is critical to understanding consumers. And different verticals, different companies, different brands have varying levels of first party data. So a retailers going to have a lot more first party data, a financial services company, than say, an auto manufacturer. And while many marketers have that first party data, to really have a 360 view of the customer, they need third party data as well, and that's where Experian comes in, we help brands connect those disparate datasets, both first and third party data to better understand consumers, and create a single customer view, which has a number of applications. I think the last stat I heard was that there's about eight devices, on average, per person. I always joke that we're going to have these enormous, and that number's growing, we're going to have these enormous charging stations in our house, and I think we already do, because of all the different devices. And we seamlessly move from device to device, along our customer journey, and, if the brand doesn't understand who we are, it's much harder for the brand to connect with consumers and create a positive customer experience. And we cite that about 95 percent of companies, they are looking to achieve that single customer view, they recognize that they need that, and they've aligned various teams from e-commerce, to marketing, to sales, to at a minimum adjust their first party data, and then connect that data to better understand consumers. So, consumers can interact with a brand through a website, a mobile app, in-store visits, you know, by the phone, TV ads, et cetera, and a brand needs to use all of those touchpoints, often collected by different parts of the organization, and then add in that third party data to really understand the consumers. In terms of specific use cases, there's about three that come to mind. So first there's relevant advertising, and reaching the right customer, there's measurement, so being able to evaluate your advertising efforts, if you see an ad on, if I see an ad on my mobile, and then I buy by visiting a desktop website, understanding, or I get a direct mail piece, understanding that those interactions are all connected to the same person is critical for measurement. And then there's personalization, which includes improved customer experience amongst your own touchpoints with that consumer, personalized marketing communication, and then of course analytics, so those are the use cases we're seeing. >> Great, thank you Aimee. Now Matt, you can't really talk about data without talking about governance and compliance, and I remember back in 2006, when the federal rules of civil procedure went in, it was easy, the lawyers just said, "no, nobody can have access," but that's changed, and one of the things I like about what Snowflake's doing with the data cloud is it's really about democratizing access, but doing so in a way that gives people confidence that they only have access to the right data. So maybe you could talk a little bit about how you're thinking about this topic, what you're doing to help customers navigate, which has traditionally been such a really challenging problem. >> Another great question, this is where I think the major disruption is happening. And what Aimee described, being able to join together first and third party datasets, being able to do this was always a challenge, because data had to be moved around, I had to ship my first party data to the other side, and the third party data had to be shipped to me, and being able to join those datasets together was problematic at best, and now with the focus on privacy and protecting PII, this is something that has to change, and the good news is, with the data cloud, data does not have to move. Data can stay where it belongs, Experian can keep its data, Experian's customers can hold onto their data, yet the data can be joined together on this universal, global platform that we call the data cloud. On top of that, and particularly with the regulations that are coming out that are going to prevent data from being collected on either a mobile device or as cookies on web browsers, new approaches, and we're seeing this a lot in our space, both in financials and media, is to set up these data clean rooms, where both sides can give access to one another, but not have to reveal any PII to do that join. This is going to be huge, now you actually can protect your customers' and your consumers' private identities, but still accomplish that join that Aimee mentioned, to be able to relate the cause and effect of these campaigns, and really understand the signals that these datasets are trying to say about one another, again without having to move data, without having to reveal PII, we're seeing this happening now, this is the next big thing, that we're going to see explode over the months and years to come. >> I totally agree, massive changes coming in public policy in this area, and we only have a few minutes left, and I wonder if for our audience members that are looking for some advice, what's the, Aimee, what's the one thing you'd recommend they start doing differently, or consider putting in place that's going to set them up for success over the next decade? >> Yeah, that's a good question. You know, I think, I always say, first, harness all of your first party data across all touchpoints, get that first party data in one place and working together, second, connect that data with trusted third parties, and Matt suggested some ways to do that, and then third, always put the customer first, speak their language, where and when they want to be reached out to, and use the information you have to really create a better customer experience for your customers. >> Matt, what would you add to that? Bring us home, if you would. >> Applications. The idea that data, your data can now be pulled into your own business applications the same way that Netflix and Spotify are pulled into your consumer and lifestyle applications, again, without data moving, these personalized application experiences is what I encourage everyone to be thinking about from first principles. What would you do in your next app that you're going to build, if you had all your consumers, if the consumers had access to their data in the app, and not having to think about things from scratch, leverage the data cloud, leverage these service providers like Experian, and build the applications of tomorrow. >> I'm super excited when I talk to practitioners like yourselves, about the future of data, guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, it was a really a pleasure having you, and I hope we can continue this conversation in the future. >> Thank you. >> Thanks. >> Alright, thank you for watching, keep it right there, we got great content, and tons of content coming at the Snowflake data cloud summit, this is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, keep it right there.

>> Hello everyone, this is Dave Volante. On November 10th theCUBE 365 is hosting Workplace next. It's an event focused on how organizations are adapting to the new abnormal, and architecting the workplace of the future. And it's brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And with me is David Crozier who heads, HPE Pointnext Services Marketing Organization. David, what do people expect from this event? Who should attend? And what's in it for them? >> Well as you said Dave, a lot of people are struggling with the way that we have to change our work patterns right now. So what's it for people attending the event is we're going to talk about some of the lessons that business leaders have learned over the last six months, how to apply that for the future and how to go forward. It's really aimed at leaders across different fields in IT roles of course, but also no IT roles like Site Plant Facilities and Human Resources. >> Fantastic. I mean, this is an amazing program. It's very timely. So if you care about how to help your employees be as productive as possible, while at the same time creating a culture where people are enthusiastic, motivated, and very importantly safe. Click on the link in the description of this video and register. We'll see you there. (digital upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From the CUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hi everybody, This is Dave Vellante and welcome to this CUBE Conversation. We've been following a company called Actifio for quite some time. Now they've really popularized the concept of copy data management. Really innovative Boston based Waltham based company. And with me Brian Regan who's the chief marketing officer and Paul Forte who's the newly minted chief revenue officer of Actifio. Guys great to see you. I wish we were face to face at your June event but this will have to do. >> You're welcome. >> Thanks Dave. >> You bet Dave. >> Yeah, so Brian you've been on theCUBE a bunch. I'm going to start with Paul if that's okay. Paul, let's talk a little bit about your background. You've done a number of stints at a variety of companies. Big companies like IBM and others as well. What attracted you to Actifio? >> Yes Dave I would say in all honesty, I've been a software guy and candidly a data specific leader for many many years. And so IT infrastructure particularly associated around data has always been sort of my forte for on and onwards there. And so Actifio was just smack dab in the middle of that. And so when I was looking for my next adventure I had an opportunity to meet with Ash our CEO and founder and describe and discuss kind of what Actifio was all about. And candidly, the number of connections that we had that were the same. There are a lot of OEM relationships with people that I actually worked with and for some that work for me historically. So it was almost this perfect world. And I'm a Boston guy so it is in my old backyard. And yeah it was a perfect match for what I was looking for. Which was really a small growth company that was trying to get to the next level that had compelling technology in a space that I was super familiar with and could understand and articulate the value proposition. >> Well as we say in Boston, Paulie we got to get you back here. (laughs) >> I know (mumbles) so I'll pack my car. >> (laughs) Yeah. So Brian... >> For 25 years, I still got it. >> let's talk about the climate right now. I mean nobody expected this of course. And it's funny I saw Ash at an event in Boston last fall. We were talking like "Hey, what are you expecting for next year?" "Yeah a little bit of softening" but nobody expected this sort of black swan. But you guys I just got your press release. You put it out. You had a good quarter. You had a record first quarter. What's going on in the marketplace. How are you guys doing? >> Yeah, well I think that today more than ever businesses are realizing that data is what is actually going to carry them through this crisis. And that data whether it's changing the nature of how companies interact with their customers, how they manage through their supply chain and frankly how they take care of their employees, is all very data centric. And so businesses that are protecting that data that are helping businesses get faster access to that data and ultimately give them choice as to where they manage that data. On premises, in the cloud and hybrid configuration. Those are the businesses that are really going to be top of a CIO's mind. I think RQ1 is a demonstration that customers voted with their wallets and they are confident in Actifio as an important part of their data supply chain. >> Paul I want to come back to you. First of all I want to let people know you're an Ex-Army Ranger. So thank you for your service, that's awesome. >> You're welcome (mumbles). >> I was talking to Frank Slootman, I interviewed in the other day and he was sharing with me sort of how he manages and he says "Yeah I manage by a playbook". He's a situational manager and that's something that he learned in the military. Well it's weird. This is a situation. (Paul laughs) And that really is kind of how you're trained. And of course we've never seen anything like this but you're trained to deal with things that you've never seen before. So how you seeing organizations generally, Actifio specifically kind of manage through this crisis. What are some of the moves that you'are advising, recommending? Give us some insight there. >> Yeah, so it's really interesting. It's funny that you mentioned my military background. So I was just having this discussion with one of my leaders the other day. That one of the things that they trained for in the military, is the eventuality of chaos. So when you do an exercise we will literally tap the leader on the shoulder and say okay you are now dead. And without that person being allowed to speak they take a knee and the (mumbles) unit has to go on. And so what happens is you learn by muscle memory like how to react in times of crisis and you know this is a classic example of leadership in crisis. And so it's just interesting. So to me you have a playbook. I think everybody needs to start with a playbook and then start with the plan. I can't remember if it was Mike Tyson but one of my famous quotes was "Plan is good until somebody punches you in the face". (Dave laughs) >> That's the reality of what just happened to business across the globe. This is just a punch in the face. And so you've got a playbook that you rely on and then you have to remain nimble and creative and candidly opportunistic. And from a leadership perspective, I think you can't lose your confidence. Right, so I've watched some of my friends and I've watched some other businesses cripple in the midst of this pandemic because they're afraid instead of looking at this. In my first commentary in our first staff meeting Brian, if I remember it was this, okay so what makes Actifio great in this environment? Not why is it not great? And so we didn't get scared. We jumped right into it. We adjusted our playbook a little bit and candidly we just had a record quarter. And we took down deals. Honestly Dave we took down deals in every single geography around the globe to include Italy. It was insane, it was really fun. >> Okay, so this wasn't just one monster deal that gave you that record quarter. It was really a broad based demand. >> Yeah, so if you dug underneath the covers you would see that we had the largest number of transactions ever in the first quarter. We had the largest average selling price in the first quarter ever. We had the largest contribution from our nano partners and our OEM partners ever. And we had the highest number ever. And so it was really a nice truly balanced performance across the globe and across the size of deal sets and candidly across industries. >> Interesting, you used the term opportunistic and I get right on. You obviously don't want to be chasing ambulances. At the same time, we've talked to a lot of CEOs and essentially what they're doing and I'd like to get your feedback on this Brian. You're kind of reassessing the ideal profile of a customer. You're reassessing your value proposition in the context of the current pandemic. And I noticed that you guys in your press release talked about cyber resiliency. You talked about digital initiatives, data center, transformations etc. So maybe you could talk a little bit about that, Brian. Did you do those things, how did you do those things? What kind of pace were you guys at? How did you do it remotely with everybody working from home? Give us some color on that. >> Sure, and if Ash, if he were here he would probably remind us that Actifio was born in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis. So we have essentially been book ended by two black swans over the last decade. The lessons we learned in 2008 are every bit is as relevant today. Everything starts with cost containment and cost reduction. Hence in protection of the business and so CIOs in the midst of this shock to the system. I think we're very much looking at what are the absolutely vital and critical initiatives and what is a "nice to have" and I'm going to hit pause on nice to have and invest entirely in the critical initiative. And the critical initiatives tended to be around getting people safely working remotely. Getting people safe access to their systems and their applications and their data. And then ultimately it also became about protecting the systems from malicious individuals in the state actors. Unfortunately as we've seen in other times of crisis this is when crime and cyber crime particularly tends to spike, particularly against industries that don't have the strong safeguards in place to really ensure the resiliency in their applications. So we very much went a little bit back to the 2008 playbook around helping people get control of their costs, helping people continue to do the things they need to do at a much more infrastructural light manner. But also really emphasized the fact that if you are under attack or if you are concerned that you're infected but you don't know when, instant access to data and a time machine that can take you back and forth to those points in time is something that is something that is incredibly valuable. >> So let's dig into cyber resiliency. So specifically what is Actifio doing for its customers from a product standpoint, capabilities, maybe it's part of the 10C announcement as well but can you give us some specifics on where you fit in. Let's take that use case, cyber resiliency? >> Yeah, absolutely. So I think there's a stack of capabilities when it comes to cyber resiliency. At the lowest level, you need a time machine because most people don't know when they're infected. And so the ability to go back in time, test the recoverability of data, test the validity of the data is step one. Step two is once you found the clean point, being able to resume operations, being able to resume the applications operation instantly or very rapidly is the next phase. And that's something that Actifio was founded on this notion of instant access to data. And then the third phase and this is really where our partnerships really shine is you probably want to go back and mitigate that risk. You want to go back and clean that system. You want to go back and find the infection and eliminate it. And that's where our partnership with IBM for example, resiliency services and their cyber incident recovery solutions which takes the Actifio platform and then wrappers in a complete manage services around it. So they can help the customer not only get their systems and applications back on their feet but clean the systems and allow them to resume operations normally on a much safer and more stable ground. >> Okay, so that's interesting. So Paul was it kind of new adoptions? Was it increases from existing customers combination? Can you talk to that? >> Yeah, totally. So ironically to really come clean the metrics that we had in the first quarter were very similar to do with the metrics that we see historically. So the mix with mean our existing customer base and then our new customer acquisition were very similar to our historical metrics which candidly we were a little surprised by. We anticipated that the majority of our business would come from that safe harbor of your existing customer base. But candidly we had a really nice split which was great which meant that our value proposition was resonating not only with our existing customer base where you would expect it but also in any of our new customers as well who had been evaluating us that either accelerate it or just continue down the path of adoption during the timeframe of COVID-19. Across industries I would say that again there were some industries I would say that pushed pause. And so the ones that you can imagine that accelerated during this past period were the ones you would think of, right? So financial institutions primarily as well as some of the medical. So some of those transactions, healthcare and medical they accelerated along with financial institutions. And then I would say that we did have some industries that pushed pause. You can probably guess what some of those are. Among the majority of those were the ones that were dealing with the small and midsize businesses or consumer-facing businesses, things like retail and stuff like that. Well we typically do have a pretty nice resonance and a really nice value proposition but there were definitely some transactions that we saw basically just pause. Like we're going to come back. But overall yeah the feedback was just in general. It felt like any other quarter and it felt like just pretty normal. As strange as that sounds. 'Cause I know speaking to a lot of my friends in peer companies, peer software companies, they didn't have that experience but we did pretty well. >> That's interesting, you're right. Certain industries, airlines, I'm interviewing a CIO of a major resort next week. Really interested to hear how they're dealing with this but those are obviously depressed and they've dialed everything down. But we were one of the first to report that work from home pivot, it didn't, it didn't buffer the decline in IT spending that were expected to be down maybe as much as 5% this year but it definitely offset it. What about Cloud? We're seeing elevated levels in Cloud demand. Guys have offerings there. What are you seeing in Cloud guys? >> Do you want to take it Brian? >> Yeah, I'll start and then Paul please weigh in. I think that the move to the cloud that we've been witnessing and the acceleration of the move to cloud that we've been we've been witnessing over the past several years probably ramped up in intensity over the last two months. The projects that might have been on the 18 to 24 month roadmap have of all of a sudden been accelerated into maybe this year of our roadmap. But in terms of the wholesale everything moves to Cloud and I abandoned my on-premises estate. I don't think we've seen that quite yet. I think that the world is still hybrid when it comes to Cloud. Although I do think that the beneficiaries of this are probably the non-number one and number two Cloud providers but the rest of the hyper-scalers who are fighting for market shares because now they have an opportunity to perhaps, Google for example, a strategic partner of ours has a huge offering when it comes to enabling work from home and the remote work. So leveraging that as a platform and then extending into their enterprise offerings, I think it gives them a wedge that the Amazon might not have for example. So it's an acceleration of interest but I think it's just a continuation of the trend that we've been seeing for years. >> Yeah, and I would add a little bit Dave. The IBM held their Think Conferences past week. I don't know if you had an opportunity to participate. They're one of our OEM partners and... >> Dave: Oh Yeah, we covered it. >> When our CEO presented his opening his opening remarks it was really about digital transformation and he really put it down to two things and said any business that's trying to transform is either talking about hybrid Clouds or they're talking about AI and machine learning. And that's kind of it, right? And so every digital business is talking in one of those categories. And when I look to Q1 it's interesting that we really didn't see anything other than as Brian talked about all of the cloud business which is some version of an acceleration. But outside of that the customers that are in those industries that are in position to accelerate and double down during this opportunity did so and those that did not just peeled back a little bit. But overall I would agree with IBM's assessment of the market that those are kind of the two hotspots and hybrid Cloud is hot and the good news is, we've got a nice value prop right in the middle of it. >> Yeah, Alvin Chris has talked about, and he has it, maybe not a thing but he talked earlier in his remarks on the earnings call just in public statements that IBM must win the battle the architectural battle, the hybrid Cloud. And also that he wants to lead with a more technical sell essentially, which is to mean those two things are great news for you guys, obviously Red Hat is the linchpin of that. I want to ask you guys about your conference, Data-Driven. So we were there last year it was a really great intimate event. Of course you can't have the physical events anymore. So you've pushed to September or you're going all digital? Give us the update on that Brian. >> We're eager to have theCube participate in our September event. So I'm sure we'll be talking more about that in the coming weeks, but also >> Dave: Awesome, love it. (Brian laughs) >> Exactly, so you can tell Frank to put that in there. So we've been participating in some of the other conferences most notably last week learning a lot and really trying to cherry pick the best ideas and the best tactics we're putting on the digital event. I think that as we look to September and as we look to put on a really rich digital event one of the things that is first and foremost in our minds is we want to actually produce more on demand digital content particularly from a technology standpoint. Our technology sessions last year were oversubscribed. The digital format allows people to stream whenever they can and frankly as many sessions as they might want. So I think we can be far more efficient in terms of delivering technical content for the users of our technology. And then we're also eager to have as we've done with data driven in years past, our customers tell the story of how they're using data. And this year certainly I think we're going to hear a lot of stories about in particular how they use data during this incredible crisis and hopefully renewal from the crisis. >> Well one of my favorite interviews last year at your show was the guy from DraftKings. So hopefully they'll be back on and we'll have some football to talk about, well let's hope. >> Amen. >> I Want to end with just sort of this notion of we've been so tactical the last eight weeks. Right? You guys too I'm sure. Just making sure you're there for customers, making sure your employees are okay. But as we start to think about coming out of this into a Post-COVID Era and it looks like it's going to be with us for a while but we getting back to Quaseye opening. So I'm hearing hybrid is here to stay. We agree for sure. Cyber resiliency is very interesting. I think one of the things we've said is that companies may sub-optimize near term profitability to make sure that they've got the flexibility and business resiliency in place. That's obviously something that is I think good news for you guys but I'll start with Paul and then maybe Brian you can bring us home. How do you see this sort of emergence from this lockdown and into the Post-COVID Era? >> Yeah, this is a really interesting topic for me. In fact I've had many discussions over the last couple of weeks with some of our investors as well as with our executive staff. And so my personal belief is that the way buying and selling has occured, for IT specifically at the enterprise level, it's about to go through a transformation, no different than we watched the transformation of SAS businesses when you basically replaced a cold calling sales person with an inside and inbound marketing kind of effort followed up with SDR and BDR. Because what we're finding is that our clients now are able to meet more frequently because we don't have the friction of airplane ride or physical building to go through. And so that whole thing has been removed from the sales process. So it's interesting to me that one of the things that I'm starting to see is that the amount of activity that our sales organization is doing and the amount of physical calls that were going on, they happen to be online. However, way higher than what we can (mumbles), you coupled that with the cost savings of not traveling around the globe and not being in offices. And I really think that those companies that embrace this new model, are going to find ways to penetrate more customers in a less expensive way. And I do believe that the professional sales enterprise sales person of tomorrow is going to look different than it looks today. And so I'm super excited to be in a company that is smack dab in the middle of selling to enterprise clients and watching us learn together how we're going to buy, sell and market to each other in this post-COVID way. 'Cause the only thing I really do know it's just not going to be the way it used to be. What is it going to look like? I think all of us are placing bets and I don't think anybody has the answer yet. But it's going to look different for sure. >> They're very, very thoughtful comments. And so Brian, you know our thinking is the differentiation in the war. Gets one in digital. How is that affecting your marketing and your things around that? >> We fortunately decided coming into 2020, our fiscal 21, that we were actually going to overweigh digital anyway. We felt that, it was far more effective, we were seeing far better conversion rates. We saw way better ROI in terms of very targeted additive digital campaigns or general purpose ABM type of efforts. So our strategy had essentially been set and what this provided us is the opportunity to essentially redirect all of the other funds into digital. So we have essentially a two pronged marketing attack, right now, which is digital creating inbounds and BDRs that are calling on those inbounds that are created digitally. And so it's going to be a really interesting transition back when physical events if and when they do actually back and spawn, how much we decide to actually go back into that. To some extent we've talked about this in the past Dave. The physical events and the sheer spectacle and the sheer audacity of having to spend a million dollars just to break through that was an unsustainable model. (laughs) And so I think this is hastening perhaps the decline or demise of really silly marketing expense and getting back to telling customers what they need to know to help and assist their buying journey and their investigation journey into new technology. >> There in the IT world is hybrid. And I think the events world is also going to be hybrid. Intimate, they're going to live on but they're also going to have a major digital component to them. I'm very excited that there's a lot of learnings now in digital especially around events and by September, a lot of the bugs are going to be worked out. You know we've been going, feels like 24/7, but really excited to have you guys on. Thanks so much, really looking forward to working with you in September at Data-Driven. So guys thanks a lot for coming on theCUBE. >> Oh my gosh, thank you Dave. So nice to be here, Thank you. >> All right, stay safe. >> Thanks Dave, always a pleasure. You too. >> Thank you everybody, thank you. And thanks for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time. (gentle music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, it's the theCUBE covering IBM Think. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Valanti and welcome back to the IBM Think 2020 digital event experience. This is the afterglow, the after thoughts, the post halo effect. Mani Dasgupta is here. She's the Vice President of Brand and Product Marketing at IBM. Great to see you again, thanks for coming back on Mani. >> Thank you Dave, it's fantastic to be here after Think which has been super successful for us, so excited to have this chat. >> You know it's really nice, one of the silver linings of these digital events is you can actually have these kinds of conversations in an afterglow, so I want to get right into it. Mark Foster kind of set things up for the division and the service, he talked about a lot of customers. He talked about the cognitive enterprise, and he gave really three sort of arcs of his content discussion. One was the market making platforms, the second was intelligent work flows, and the third is the whole enterprise experience in humanity and he tied it in to the whole COVID-19 pandemic. I wonder if you could give us your thoughts, and maybe an example? >> Sure, absolutely, sure can. You know the cognitive enterprise is a framework that businesses can adapt as they go on forward with their business transformation journey. The market making platform is in simple terms, its how do you put yourself in the route for growth? Do you need to look for new customers, do you need to look for new markets? What's your competitive advantage? Build a platform, or create a platform which signifies competitive advantage for you. So that's the first piece of it. The second piece of it pertains to the operations of the company. How well are you run? How efficient are you? How effective are your processes? How have you been able to apply the latest and greatest in technologies? Edge, 5G, automation, artificial intelligence. How are you able to apply those technologies to make your processes work better for you? So that's the second big piece. And the third piece is keeping your customers at the core of whatever you do. So the experience of the customers, the updated and newer demands of the customers. How do you address that with the human at the center of it, right? The empathy that I was talking about when we spoke last, before and during Think. It's truly important especially in these times, every company is trying to figure out, in this scenario, how do they keep their business on the growth track? And the cognitive enterprise framework helps them on this journey. >> Was there an example that came out of Think that you can point to that is reflective of this? >> Absolutely, there were actually three great case studies that clients and colleagues who joined us during Think, we had the CEO of Yara, we had Shell and we had Frito Lay. A quick example is Frito Lay, and I bring them up because this is a brand that everybody recognizes, in fact they are now in 94% of all US households. And these are name brands like your chips, especially when we are all stuck at home during this pandemic they are a name that quite often comes to mind, Frito Lay. So a good example of what they are having to deal with. They haven't changed their transformation trajectory, they have sped it up. They have just become way more agile, teams that were in different locations are now all near shore. If you think about this scenario right now, everybody is working on Webex, everybody is getting distributed agile to work, so everybody, nobody is at a disadvantage because they are somewhere in India or they are somewhere in Mexico, or they are somewhere in the US, they are all together right now working together on the same digital platform. So actually everybody's near shore. So they have sped up their direct to consumer channel, in the past one month they have been able to quickly pivot and bring snacks.com to people, everybody across the US, that's a very good example of how you can apply the changes around you to your advantage, and make sure that this contributes to the growth and success of their business, and we had Frito join us live during Think, if you want to see it you can go live to our, now on our on demand platform and watch them. >> One of the things that Mark Foster mentioned in his remarks was that a lot of executives might have been thinking prior to COVID that they wanted to shake things up a little bit. But it's risky, you know they're kind of reticent to do that well, things have been shaken up. And now they've got you know the perfect reason to disrupt their own business. And organizations have been very tactical, focus on the customer, really trying to keep the lights on, managing cash, et cetera, but as we start to come out of this, they're beginning to think of the more midterm impacts, they're rethinking the ideal customer profile, and the value proposition in this new reality. So how should customers think about getting started on this journey of the cognitive enterprise if they haven't started already? >> You know it's, the good thing is the technology right now is available to us, even if people want to get started they can do it right now. One of the ways that we have been advising our clients to get started who haven't get started this journey, is to come together in a distributed agile framework, what we call the IBM Garage our Co-Creation Workshop, put the customer at the center of it and create an empathy map. Around what is the problem that we are trying to solve? What's the most important thing that that particular business is trying to solve? And for every business it may be a different answer, right? And so it's not prescriptive, its a place where you can come and lay out the cards on the table and figure out what's the right next step for your business, and then we can use the same model to unpack the problem into solvable components and apply technology to very quickly show results. The beauty of this is not just an MVP, this is actually solving real world problems, and it is doing it at global scale. That's the beauty of it and I think that's where we should start. >> You know a lot of these big events, the big physical events, of course we love them it's something theCUBE has been doing for 10 years, but the disappointing thing is oftentimes after the event everybody disappears, they go back to work and it's sort of forgotten. The great thing about these digital events is you can kind of continue the discussion, not unlike what we're doing now, but also you have these Think Summits, and you're going to be connecting the dots in the thread from Think all the way through until this thing ends and even beyond I would predict, that digital is here to stay, at least an event standpoint, and a hybrid, and other businesses. So give us the update on the Think Summits, how do we get more information, what are they all about? >> Absolutely, for more information is always available on our on demand platforms, so you can go onto IBM.com/think, but what you said Dave is so important. That this is not a one and done, we want to keep the conversations running, we want to keep engaging with everybody who has come last week to have an engaging discussion with us, we will continue this in June, in Europe, in different cities we have a number of Think Summits. This will be followed with other Think Summits across the globe. Now as IBM we feel we have a responsibility not just that we create content and thought leadership that is consumed by millions of people across the globe, we do it in a way that is global. So we want to make sure that you and I today are talking in English, that we are able to have our colleagues in China are able to have the same conversation in the language that they prefer, and so in Japan and so on and so forth, IBM being the truly global company that we are, we want to make sure that the conversations also have nuances that are impacting these countries in real time, in the situation that we are in, not all companies are in the same space in the curve, some are recovering, some are bouncing back, some are just getting into this scenario that's all around us. So the remedy and the routes that business will take, is also slightly different. So we want to make sure we are very customized, we want to make sure we are really very relevant to that audience. So follow us on the Think Summits across the globe, as the new dates are keeping on newer dates are getting announced on the Think platform, so that's ready to go. The one last thing I would also say Dave, is that at this time what's very important is that not all tech is created equal, and not all companies are created equal. What's the cost of bad advice and so I think it's very important to be mindful of who you engage with. And make sure that we are not taken advantage of in these kind of scenarios. Be very mindful of how how well your partner understands your business, how well your partner understands what could go wrong. And plan for it, and not just show but be there with your clients, with your customers throughout the journey, and take them back to the path of growth. >> Yeah that whole notion of business resilience and not only as a defensive move, but also something that you can lean into, really try to grow your business, there's a lot of learning going on, a lot of great content on the IBM Think Digital Experience site. Of course theCUBE.net. Mani, thanks so much for coming back on, and breaking down IBM Think, and giving us a forward look to the Think Summits. Great to have you. >> Absolutely my pleasure Dave, thank you. >> And thank you for watching everybody, this is Dave Valanti for theCUBE and we'll see you next time. (upbeat instrumental music)

>> Jeff: Hello, everybody, and thank you for joining us today for the virtual Vertica BDC 2020. Today's breakout session is entitled "A Deep Dive "into the Vertica Mangement Console Enhancements and Roadmap." I'm Jeff Healey of Vertica Marketing. I'll be your host for this breakout session. Joining me are Bhavik Gandhi and Natalia Stavisky from Vertica engineering. But before we begin, I encourage you to submit questions or comments during the virtual session. You don't have to wait, just type your question or comment in the question box below the slides and click submit. There will be a Q and A session at the end of the presentation. We'll answer as many questions as we're able to during that time. Any questions we don't address, we'll do our best to answer them offline. Alternatively visit Vertica Forums at forum.vertica.com. Post your question there after the session. Our engineering team is planning to join the forums to keep the conversation going well after the event. Also, a reminder that you can maximize the screen by clicking the double arrow button in the lower right corner of the slides. And yes, this virtual session is being recorded and will be available to you on demand this week. We'll send you a notification as soon as it's ready. Now let's get started. Over to you, Bhavik. >> Bhavik: All right. So hello, and welcome, everybody doing this presentation of "Deep Dive into the Vertica Management Console Enhancements and Roadmap." Myself, Bhavik, and my team member, Natalia Stavisky, will go over a few useful announcements on Vertica Management Console, discussing a few real scenarios. All right. So today we will go forward with the brief introduction about the Management Console, then we will discuss the benefits of using Management Console by going over a couple of user scenarios for the query taking too long to run and receiving email alerts from Management Console. Then we will go over a few MC features for what we call Eon Mode databases, like provisioning and reviving the Eon Mode databases from MC, managing the subcluster and understanding the Depot. Then we will go over some of the future announcements on MC that we are planning. All right, so let's get started. All right. So, do you want to know about how to provision a new Vertica cluster from MC? How to analyze and understand a database workload by monitoring the queries on the database? How do you balance the resource pools and use alerts and thresholds on MC? So, the Management Console is basically our answer and we'll talk about its capabilities and new announcements in this presentation. So just to give a brief overview of the Management Console, who uses Management Console, it's generally used by IT administrators and DB admins. Management Console can be used to monitor both Eon Mode and Enterprise Mode databases. Why to use Management Console? You can use Management Console for provisioning Vertica databases and cluster. You can manage the already existing Vertica databases and cluster you have, and you can use various tools on Management Console like query execution, Database Designer, Workload Analyzer, and set up alerts and thresholds to get notified by some of your activities on the MC. So let's go over a few benefits of using Management Console. Okay. So using Management Console, you can view and optimize resource pool usage. Management Console helps you to identify some critical conditions on your Vertica cluster. Additionally, you can set up various thresholds thresholds in MC and get other data if those thresholds are triggered on the database. So now let's dig into the couple of scenarios. So for the first scenario, we will discuss about queries taking too long and using workload analyzer to possibly help to solve the problem. In the second scenario, we will go over alert email that you received from your Management Console and analyzing the problem and taking required actions to solve the problem. So let's go over the scenario where queries are taking too long to run. So in this example, we have this one query that we are running using the query execution on MC. And for some reason we notice that it's taking about 14.8 seconds seconds to execute this query, which is higher than the expected run time of the query. The query that we are running happens to be the query used by MC during the extended monitoring. Notice that the table name and the schema name which is ds_requests_issued, and, is the schema used for extended monitoring. Now in 10.0 MC we have redesigned the Workload Analyzer and Recommendations feature to show the recommendations and allow you to execute those recommendations. In our example, we have taken the table name and figured the tuning descriptions to see if there are any tuning recommendations related to this table. As we see over here, there are three tuning recommendations available for that table. So now in 10.0 MC, you can select those recommendations and then run them. So let's run the recommendations. All right. So once recommendations are run successfully, you can go and see all the processed recommendations that you have run previously. Over here we see that there are three recommendations that we had selected earlier have successfully processed. Now we take the same query and run it on the query execution on MC and hey, it's running really faster and we see that it takes only 0.3 seconds to run the query and, which is about like 98% decrease in original runtime of the query. So in this example we saw that using a Workload Analyzer tool on MC you can possibly triage and solve issue for your queries which are taking to long to execute. All right. So now let's go over another user scenario where DB admin's received some alert email messages from MC and would like to understand and analyze the problem. So to know more about what's going on on the database and proactively react to the problems, DB admins using the Management Console can create set of thresholds and get alerted about the conditions on the database if the threshold values is reached and then respond to the problem thereafter. Now as a DB admin, I see some email message notifications from MC and upon checking the emails, I see that there are a couple of email alerts received from MC on my email. So one of the messages that I received was for Query Resource Rejections greater than 5, pool, midpool7. And then around the same time, I received another email from the MC for the Failed Queries greater than 5, and in this case I see there are 80 failed queries. So now let's go on the MC and investigate the problem. So before going into the deep investigation about failures, let's review the threshold settings on MC. So as we see, we have set up the thresholds under the database settings page for failed queries in the last 10 minutes greater than 5 and MC should send an email to the individual if the threshold is triggered. And also we have a threshold set up for queries and resource rejections in the last five minutes for midpool7 set to greater than 5. There are various other thresholds on this page that you can set if you desire to. Now let's go and triage those email alerts about the failed queries and resource rejections that we had received. To analyze the failed queries, let's take a look at the query statistics page on the database Overview page on MC. Let's take a look at the Resource Pools graph and especially for the failed queries for each resource pools. And over to the right under the failed query section, I see about like, in the last 24 hours, there are about 6,000 failed queries for midpool7. And now I switch to view to see the statistics for each user and on this page I see for User MaryLee on the right hand side there are a high number of failed queries in last 24 hours. And to know more about the failed queries for this user, I can click on the graph for this user and get the reasons behind it. So let's click on the graph and see what's going on. And so clicking on this graph, it takes me to the failed queries view on the Query Monitoring page for database, on Database activities tab. And over here, I see there are a high number of failed queries for this user, MaryLee, with the reasons stated as, exceeding high limit. To drill down more and to know more reasons behind it, I can click on the plus icon on the left hand side for each failed queries to get the failure reason for each node on the database. So let's do that. And clicking the plus icon, I see for the two nodes that are listed, over here it says there are insufficient resources like memory and file handles for midpool7. Now let's go and analyze the midpool7 configurations and activities on it. So to do so, I will go over to the Resource Pool Monitoring view and select midpool7. I see the resource allocations for this resource pool is very low. For example, the max memory is just 1MB and the max concurrency is set to 0. Hmm, that's very odd configuration for this resource pool. Also in the bottom right graph for the resource rejections for midpool7, the graph shows very high values for resource rejection. All right. So since we saw some odd configurations and odd resource allocations for midpool7, I would like to see when this resource, when the settings were changed on the resource pools. So to do this, I can preview the audit logs on, are available on the Management Console. So I can go onto the Vertica Audit Logs and see the logs for the resource pool. So I just (mumbles) for the logs and figuring the logs for midpool7. I see on February 17th, the memory and other attributes for midpool7 were modified. So now let's analyze the resource activity for midpool7 around the time when the configurations were changed. So in our case we are using extended monitoring on MC for this database, so we can go back in time and see the statistics over the larger time range for midpool7. So viewing the activities for midpool7 around February 17th, around the time when these configurations were changed, we see a decrease in resource pool usage. Also, on the bottom right, we see the resource rejections for this midpool7 have an increase, linear increase, after the configurations were changed. I can select a point on the graph to get the more details about the resource rejections. Now to analyze the effects of the modifications on midpool7. Let's go over to the Query Monitoring page. All right, I will adjust the time range around the time when the configurations were changed for midpool7 and completed activities queries for user MaryLee. And I see there are no completed queries for this user. Now I'm taking a look at the Failed Queries tab and adjusting the time range around the time when the configurations were changed. I can do so because we are using extended monitoring. So again, adjusting the time, I can see there are high number of failed queries for this user. There about about like 10,000 failed queries for this user after the configurations were changed on this resource pool. So now let's go and modify the settings since we know after the configurations were changed, this user was not able to run the queries. So you can change the resource pool settings of using Management Console's database settings page and under the Resource Pools tab. So selecting the midpool7, I see the same odd configurations for this resource pool that we saw earlier. So now let's go and modify it, the settings. So I will increase the max memory and modify the settings for midpool7 so that it has adequate resources to run the queries for the user. Hit apply on the right hand top to see the settings. Now let's do the validation after we change the resource pool attributes. So let's go over to the same query monitoring page and see if MaryLee user is able to run the queries for midpool7. We see that now, after the configuration, after the change, after we changed the configuration for midpool7, the user can run the queries successfully and the count for Completed Queries has increased after we modified the settings for this midpool7 resource pool. And also viewing the resource pool monitoring page, we can validate that after the new configurations for midpool7 has been applied and also the resource pool usage after the configuration change has increased. And also on the bottom right graph, we can see that the resource rejections for midpool7 has decreased over the time after we modified the settings. And since we are using extended monitoring for this database, I can see that the trend in data for these resource pools, the before and after effects of modifying the settings. So initially when the settings were changed, there were high resource rejections and after we again modified the settings, the resource rejections went down. Right. So now let's go work with the provisioning and reviving the Eon Mode Vertica database cluster using the Management Console on different platform. So Management Console supports provisioning and reviving of Eon Mode databases on various cloud environments like AWS, the Google Cloud Platform, and Pure Storage. So for Google, for provisioning the Vertica Management Console on Google Cloud Platform you can use launch a template. Or on AWS environment you can use the cloud formation templates available for different OS's. Once you have provisioned Vertica Management Console, you can provision the Vertica cluster and databases from MC itself. So you can provision a Vertica cluster, you can select the Create new database button available on the homepage. This will open up the wizard to create a new database and cluster. In this example, we are using we are using the Google Cloud Platform. So the wizard will ask me for varius authentication parameters for the Google Cloud Platform. And if you're on AWS, it'll ask you for the authentication parameters for the AWS environment. And going forward on the Wizard, it'll ask me to select the instance Type. I will select for the new Vertica cluster. And also provide the communal location url for my Eon Mode database and all the other preferences related to the new cluster. Once I have selected all the preferences for my new cluster I can preview the settings and I can hit, if I am, I can hit Create if all looks okay. So if I hit Create, this will create a new, MC will create a new GCP instances because we are on the GCP environment in this example. It will create a cluster on this instance, it'll create a Vertica Eon Mode Database on this cluster. And it will, additionally, you can load the test data on it if you like to. Now let's go over and revive the existing Eon Mode database from the communal location. So you can do it the same using the Management Console by selecting the Revive Eon Mode database button on the homepage. This will again open up the wizard for reviving the Eon Mode database. Again, in this example, since we are using GCP Platform, it will ask me for the Google Cloud storage authentication attributes. And for reviving, it will ask me for the communal location so I can enter the Google Storage bucket and my folder and it will discover all the Eon Mode databases located under this folder. And I can select one of the databases that I would like to revive. And it will ask me for other Vertica preferences and for this video, for this database reviving. And once I enter all the preferences and review all the preferences I can hit Revive the database button on the Wizard. So after I hit Revive database it will create the GCP instances. The number of GCP instances that I created would be seen as the number of hosts on the original Vertica cluster. It will install the Vertica cluster on this data, on this instances and it will revive the database and it will start the database. And after starting the database, it will be imported on the MC so you can start monitoring on it. So in this example, we saw you can provision and revive the Vertica database on the GCP Platform. Additionally, you can use AWS environment to provision and revive. So now since we have the Eon Mode database on MC, Natalia will go over some Eon Mode features on MC like managing subcluster and Depot activity monitoring. Over to you, Natalia. >> Natalia: Okay, thank you. Hello, my name is Natalia Stavisky. I am also a member of Vertica Management Console Team. And I will talk today about the work I did to allow users to manage subclusters using the Management Console, and also the work I did to help users understand what's going on in their Depot in the Vertica Eon Mode database. So let's look at the picture of the subclusters. On the Manage page of Vertica Management Console, you can see here is a page that has blue tabs, and the tab that's active is Subclusters. You can see that there are two subclusters are available in this database. And for each of the subclusters, you can see subcluster properties, whether this is the primary subcluster or secondary. In this case, primary is the default subcluster. It's indicated by a star. You can see what nodes belong to each subcluster. You can see the node state and node statistics. You can also easily add a new subcluster. And we're quickly going to do this. So once you click on the button, you'll launch the wizard that'll take you through the steps. You'll enter the name of the subcluster, indicate whether this is secondary or primary subcluster. I should mention that Vertica recommends having only one primary subcluster. But we have both options here available. You will enter the number of nodes for your subcluster. And once the subcluster has been created, you can manage the subcluster. What other options for managing subcluster we have here? You can scale up an existing subcluster and that's a similar approach, you launch the wizard and (mumbles) nodes. You want to add to your existing subcluster. You can scale down a subcluster. And MC validates requirements for maintaining minimal number of nodes to prevent database shutdown. So if you can not remove any nodes from a subcluster, this option will not be available. You can stop a subcluster. And depending on whether this is a primary subcluster or secondary subcluster, this option may be available or not available. Like in this picture, we can see that for the default subcluster this option is not available. And this is because shutting down the default subcluster will cause the database to shut down as well. You can terminate a subcluster. And again, the MC warns you not to terminate the primary subcluster and validates requirements for maintaining minimal number of nodes to prevent database shutdown. So now we are going to talk a little more about how the MC helps you to understand what's going on in your Depot. So Depot is one of the core of Eon Mode database. And what are the frequently asked questions about the Depot? Is the Depot size sufficient? Are a subset of users putting a high load on the database? What tables are fetched and evicted repeatedly, we call it "re-fetched," in Depot? So here in the Depot Activity Monitoring page, we now have four tabs that allow you to answer those questions. And we'll go a little more in detail through each of them, but I'll just mention what they are for now. At a Glance shows you basic Depot configuration and also shows you query executing. Depot Efficiency, we'll talk more about that and other tabs. Depot Content, that shows you what tables are currently in your Depot. And Depot Pinning allows you to see what pinning policies have been created and to create new pinning policies. Now let's go through a scenario. Monitoring performance of workloads on one subcluster. As you know, Eon Mode database allows you to have multiple subclusters and we'll explore how this feature is useful and how we can use the Management Console to make decisions regarding whether you would like to have multiple subclusters. So here we have, in my setup, a single subcluster called default_subcluster. It has two users that are running queries that are accessing tables, mostly in schema public. So the query started executing and we can see that after fetching tables from Communal, which is the red line, the rest of the time the queries are executing in Depot. The green line is indicating queries running in Depot. The all nodes Depot is about 88% full, a steady flow, and the depot size seems to be sufficient for query executions from Depot only. That's the good case scenario. Now at around 17 :15, user Sherry got an urgent request to generate a report. And at, she started running her queries. We can see that picture is quite different now. The tables Sherry is querying are in a different schema and are much larger. Now we can see multiple lines in different colors. We can see a bunch of fetches and evictions which are indicated by blue and purple bars, and a lot of queries are now spilling into Communal. This is the red and orange lines. Orange line is an indicator of a query running partially in Depot and partially getting fetched from Communal. And the red line is data fetched from Communal storage. Let's click on the, one of the lines. Each data point, each point on the line, it'll take you to the Query Details page where you can see more about what's going on. So this is the page that shows us what queries have been run in this particular time interval which is on top of this page in orange color. So that's about one minute time interval and now we can see user Sherry among the users that are running queries. Sherry's queries involve large tables and are running against a different schema. We can see the clickstream schema in the name of the, in part of the query request. So what is happening, there is not enough Depot space for both the schema that's already in use and the one Sherry needs. As a result, evictions and fetches have started occurring. What other questions we can ask ourself to help us understand what's going on? So how about, what tables are most frequently re-fetched? So for that, we will go to the Depot Efficiency page and look at the middle, the middle chart here. We can see the larger version of this chart if we expand it. So now we have 10 tables listed that are most frequently being re-fetched. We can see that there is a clickstream schema and there are other schemas so all of those tables are being used in the queries, fetched, and then there is not enough space in the Depot, they getting evicted and they get re-fetched again. So what can be done to enable all queries to run in Depot? Option one can be increase the Depot size. So we can do this by running the following queries, which (mumbles) which nodes and storage location and the new Depot size. And I should mention that we can run this query from the Management Console from the query execution page. So this would have helped us to increase the Depot size. What other options do we have, for example, when increasing Depot size is not an option? We can also provision a second subcluster to isolate workloads like Sherry's. So we are going to do this now and we will provision a second subcluster using the Manage page. Here we're creating subcluster for Sherry or for workloads like hers. And we're going to create a (mumbles). So Sherry's subcluster has been created. We can see it here, added to the list of the subclusters. It's a secondary subcluster. Sherry has been instructed to use the new SherrySubcluster for her work. Now let's see what happened. We'll go again at Depot Activity page and we'll look at the At a Glance tab. We can see that around >> 18: 07, Sherry switched to running her queries on SherrySubcluster. On top of this page, you can see subcluster selected. So we currently have two subclusters and I'm looking, what happened to SherrySubcluster once it has been provisioned? So Sherry started using it and the lines after initial fetching from Depot, which was from Communal, which was the red line, after that, all Sherry's queries fit in Depot, which is indicated by green line. Also the Depot is pretty full on those nodes, about 90% full. But the queries are processed efficiently, there is no spilling into Communal. So that's a good case scenario. Let's now go back and take a look at the original subcluster, default subcluster. So on the left portion of the chart we can see multiple lines, that was activity before Sherry switched to her own designated subcluster. At around 18:07, after Sherry switched from the subcluster to using her designated subcluster, there is no, she is no longer using the subcluster, she is not putting a load in it. So the lines after that are turning a green color, which means the queries that are still running in default subcluster are all running in Depot. We can also see that Depot fetches and evictions bars, those purple and blue bars, are no longer showing significant numbers. Also we can check the second chart that shows Communal Storage Access. And we can see that the bars have also dropped, so there is no significant access for Communal Storage. So this problem has been solved. Each of the subclusters are serving queries from Depot and that's our most efficient scenario. Let's also look at the other tabs that we have for Depot monitoring. Let's look at Depot Efficiency tab. It has six charts and I'll go through each one of them quickly. Files Reads by Location gives an indicator of where the majority of query execution took place in Depot or in Communal. Top 10 Re-Fetches into Depot, and imagine the charts earlier in our user case, it shows tables that are most frequently fetched and evicted and then fetched again. These are good candidates to get pinned if increasing Depot size is not an option. Note that both of these charts have an option to select time interval using calendar widget. So you can get the information about the activity that happened during that time interval. Depot Pinning shows what portion of your Depot is pinned, both by byte count and by table count. And the three tables at the bottom show Depot structure. How long tables stay in Depot, we would like tables to be fetched in Depot and stay there for a long time, how often they are accessed, again, the tables in Depot, we would like to see them accessed frequently, and what the size range of tables in Depot. Depot Content. This tab allows us to search for tables that are currently in Depot and also to see stats like table size in Depot. How often tables are accessed and when were they last accessed. And the same information that's available for tables in Depot is also available on projections and partition levels for those tables. Depot Pinning. This tab allows users to see what policies are currently existing and so you can do this by clicking on the first little button and click search. This'll show you all existing policies that are already created. The second option allows you to search for a table and create a policy. You can also use the action column to modify existing policies or delete them. And the third option provides details about most frequently re-fetched tables, including fetch count, total access count, and number of re-fetched bytes. So all this information can help to make decisions regarding pinning specific tables. So that's about it about the Depot. And I should mention that the server team also has a very good presentation on the, webinar, on the Eon Mode database Depot management and subcluster management. that strongly recommend it to attend or download the slide presentation. Let's talk quickly about the Management Console Roadmap, what we are planning to do in the future. So we are going to continue focusing on subcluster management, there is still a lot of things we can do here. Promoting/demoting subclusters. Load balancing across subclusters, scheduling subcluster actions, support for large cluster mode. We'll continue working on Workload Analyzer enhancement recommendation, on backup and restore from the MC. Building custom thresholds, and Eon on HDFS support. Okay, so we are ready now to take any questions you may have now. Thank you.