(upbeat electronic music) >> Okay, welcome back to Supercloud 2, live here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier, with Dave Vellante. Again, all day wall-to-wall coverage, just had a great interview with Walmart, we've got a Next interview coming up, you're going to hear from Bob Muglia and Tristan Handy, two experts, both experienced entrepreneurs, executives in technology. We're here to break down what just happened with Walmart, and what's coming up with George Gilbert, former colleague, Wikibon analyst, Gartner Analyst, and now independent investor and expert. George, great to see you, I know you're following this space. Like you read about it, remember the first days when Dataverse came out, we were talking about them coming out of Berkeley? >> Dave: Snowflake. >> John: Snowflake. >> Dave: Snowflake In the early days. >> We, collectively, have been chronicling the data movement since 2010, you were part of our team, now you've got your nose to the grindstone, you're seeing the next wave. What's this all about? Walmart building their own super cloud, we got Bob Muglia talking about how these next wave of apps are coming. What are the super apps? What's the super cloud to you? >> Well, this key's off Dave's really interesting questions to Walmart, which was like, how are they building their supercloud? 'Cause it makes a concrete example. But what was most interesting about his description of the Walmart WCMP, I forgot what it stood for. >> Dave: Walmart Cloud Native Platform. >> Walmart, okay. He was describing where the logic could run in these stateless containers, and maybe eventually serverless functions. But that's just it, and that's the paradigm of microservices, where the logic is in this stateless thing, where you can shoot it, or it fails, and you can spin up another one, and you've lost nothing. >> That was their triplet model. >> Yeah, in fact, and that was what they were trying to move to, where these things move fluidly between data centers. >> But there's a but, right? Which is they're all stateless apps in the cloud. >> George: Yeah. >> And all their stateful apps are on-prem and VMs. >> Or the stateful part of the apps are in VMs. >> Okay. >> And so if they really want to lift their super cloud layer off of this different provider's infrastructure, they're going to need a much more advanced software platform that manages data. And that goes to the -- >> Muglia and Handy, that you and I did, that's coming up next. So the big takeaway there, George, was, I'll set it up and you can chime in, a new breed of data apps is emerging, and this highly decentralized infrastructure. And Tristan Handy of DBT Labs has a sort of a solution to begin the journey today, Muglia is working on something that's way out there, describe what you learned from it. >> Okay. So to talk about what the new data apps are, and then the platform to run them, I go back to the using what will probably be seen as one of the first data app examples, was Uber, where you're describing entities in the real world, riders, drivers, routes, city, like a city plan, these are all defined by data. And the data is described in a structure called a knowledge graph, for lack of a, no one's come up with a better term. But that means the tough, the stuff that Jack built, which was all stateless and sits above cloud vendors' infrastructure, it needs an entirely different type of software that's much, much harder to build. And the way Bob described it is, you're going to need an entirely new data management infrastructure to handle this. But where, you know, we had this really colorful interview where it was like Rock 'Em Sock 'Em, but they weren't really that much in opposition to each other, because Tristan is going to define this layer, starting with like business intelligence metrics, where you're defining things like bookings, billings, and revenue, in business terms, not in SQL terms -- >> Well, business terms, if I can interrupt, he said the one thing we haven't figured out how to APIify is KPIs that sit inside of a data warehouse, and that's essentially what he's doing. >> George: That's what he's doing, yes. >> Right. And so then you can now expose those APIs, those KPIs, that sit inside of a data warehouse, or a data lake, a data store, whatever, through APIs. >> George: And the difference -- >> So what does that do for you? >> Okay, so all of a sudden, instead of working at technical data terms, where you're dealing with tables and columns and rows, you're dealing instead with business entities, using the Uber example of drivers, riders, routes, you know, ETA prices. But you can define, DBT will be able to define those progressively in richer terms, today they're just doing things like bookings, billings, and revenue. But Bob's point was, today, the data warehouse that actually runs that stuff, whereas DBT defines it, the data warehouse that runs it, you can't do it with relational technology >> Dave: Relational totality, cashing architecture. >> SQL, you can't -- >> SQL caching architectures in memory, you can't do it, you've got to rethink down to the way the data lake is laid out on the disk or cache. Which by the way, Thomas Hazel, who's speaking later, he's the chief scientist and founder at Chaos Search, he says, "I've actually done this," basically leave it in an S3 bucket, and I'm going to query it, you know, with no caching. >> All right, so what I hear you saying then, tell me if I got this right, there are some some things that are inadequate in today's world, that's not compatible with the Supercloud wave. >> Yeah. >> Specifically how you're using storage, and data, and stateful. >> Yes. >> And then the software that makes it run, is that what you're saying? >> George: Yeah. >> There's one other thing you mentioned to me, it's like, when you're using a CRM system, a human is inputting data. >> George: Nothing happens till the human does something. >> Right, nothing happens until that data entry occurs. What you're talking about is a world that self forms, polling data from the transaction system, or the ERP system, and then builds a plan without human intervention. >> Yeah. Something in the real world happens, where the user says, "I want a ride." And then the software goes out and says, "Okay, we got to match a driver to the rider, we got to calculate how long it takes to get there, how long to deliver 'em." That's not driven by a form, other than the first person hitting a button and saying, "I want a ride." All the other stuff happens autonomously, driven by data and analytics. >> But my question was different, Dave, so I want to get specific, because this is where the startups are going to come in, this is the disruption. Snowflake is a data warehouse that's in the cloud, they call it a data cloud, they refactored it, they did it differently, the success, we all know it looks like. These areas where it's inadequate for the future are areas that'll probably be either disrupted, or refactored. What is that? >> That's what Muglia's contention is, that the DBT can start adding that layer where you define these business entities, they're like mini digital twins, you can define them, but the data warehouse isn't strong enough to actually manage and run them. And Muglia is behind a company that is rethinking the database, really in a fundamental way that hasn't been done in 40 or 50 years. It's the first, in his contention, the first real rethink of database technology in a fundamental way since the rise of the relational database 50 years ago. >> And I think you admit it's a real Hail Mary, I mean it's quite a long shot right? >> George: Yes. >> Huge potential. >> But they're pretty far along. >> Well, we've been talking on theCUBE for 12 years, and what, 10 years going to AWS Reinvent, Dave, that no one database will rule the world, Amazon kind of showed that with them. What's different, is it databases are changing, or you can have multiple databases, or? >> It's a good question. And the reason we've had multiple different types of databases, each one specialized for a different type of workload, but actually what Muglia is behind is a new engine that would essentially, you'll never get rid of the data warehouse, or the equivalent engine in like a Databricks datalake house, but it's a new engine that manages the thing that describes all the data and holds it together, and that's the new application platform. >> George, we have one minute left, I want to get real quick thought, you're an investor, and we know your history, and the folks watching, George's got a deep pedigree in investment data, and we can testify against that. If you're going to invest in a company right now, if you're a customer, I got to make a bet, what does success look like for me, what do I want walking through my door, and what do I want to send out? What companies do I want to look at? What's the kind of of vendor do I want to evaluate? Which ones do I want to send home? >> Well, the first thing a customer really has to do when they're thinking about next gen applications, all the people have told you guys, "we got to get our data in order," getting that data in order means building an integrated view of all your data landscape, which is data coming out of all your applications. It starts with the data model, so, today, you basically extract data from all your operational systems, put it in this one giant, central place, like a warehouse or lake house, but eventually you want this, whether you call it a fabric or a mesh, it's all the data that describes how everything hangs together as in one big knowledge graph. There's different ways to implement that. And that's the most critical thing, 'cause that describes your Uber landscape, your Uber platform. >> That's going to power the digital transformation, which will power the business transformation, which powers the business model, which allows the builders to build -- >> Yes. >> Coders to code. That's Supercloud application. >> Yeah. >> George, great stuff. Next interview you're going to see right here is Bob Muglia and Tristan Handy, they're going to unpack this new wave. Great segment, really worth unpacking and reading between the lines with George, and Dave Vellante, and those two great guests. And then we'll come back here for the studio for more of the live coverage of Supercloud 2. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of AWS re:Invent. Friends, it's good to see you. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. This is our fourth day of CUBE wall-to-wall coverage, Dave. I can't believe it. And the expo hall is still going incredibly strong. >> Yeah, it is. It feels like the biggest re:Invent ever. I'm told it's almost as big as 2019. I don't know, maybe I was half asleep at 2019. That's very possible. But I'm excited because in 2017 Andy Jassy came on theCUBE and he said if Amazon had to do it all over again, if it knew then what it had now, we would've done the whole thing in containers or using Lambda, using serverless and using containers. Didn't have that opportunity back then. And I'm excited 'cause Rafay Systems is someone we've worked with a lot as an innovator in this space. >> Yep, and we're going to be talking with Rafay again. I think it's your 10th time Haseeb on the show >> Like once or twice. >> And a great customer who's going to talk about their serverless journey. Haseeb Budhani joins us once again, the CEO of Rafay. Great to see you. Rakesh Singh is here as well, the Head of Cloud and DevOps at Regeneron. Guys, it's great to have you on the program. How you feeling on day four of re:Invent? >> Excitement is as high as ever basically. >> Isn't it amazing? >> Rakesh: That's true. >> Haseeb: I just need some sleep. >> I'm with you on that. Caffeine and sleep. >> So many parties. So many meetings, oh my God. >> But the great thing is, Haseeb, that people want to engage with you. They're loving what Rafay is doing. You guys are a great testament to that, which we're going to uncover on the show. What are some of the things that you're hearing in the booth from customers? What's been some of the feedback? >> So firstly, as I said, it feels like the biggest one ever. I've been coming to re:Invent a long time and I mean, I know the numbers say it's not, but oh my God, this is a lot of people. Every time we've spoken over the last year and the point I always make to you, and we've spoken enough time about this is that enterprises are truly adopting this idea of Kubernetes containers, serverless, et cetera. And they're all trying to figure out what is the enterprise strategy for these things? They're thinking beyond technology and thinking operationalization of these technologies. And that's not the same thing. There's a toy and then there's the real thing. And that's not the same thing. And that's the gap that every enterprise customer I talked to and the booth traffic has been just amazing. I mean, but coming here I was thinking, my God, this is really expensive. And I'm thinking, wow, this is a great investment. Because we met such amazing companies who all essentially are saying exactly the same thing, which is as we go and productize and bring our high value applications to the modern infrastructure space, like Kubernetes, Lambda, et cetera, solving for the automation governance is really, really hard because, well, at one point, I guess when the economy was doing crazy well, I could keep hiring people, but I can't do that anymore either. So they're out looking for automation strategies that allow them to do more with the teams they have. And that's exactly what Rafay is here for. >> Yeah. Lisa, Adam Selipsky in his keynote, I love the, he said, "If you want to save money, the cloud is the place to do it." >> Exactly. Yep. Let's talk about Regeneron. Everyone knows it's a household word especially over the last couple of years, but talk about, Rakesh, Regeneron as a technology company that delivers life-saving pharmaceuticals. And where does cloud and Rafay fit into your strategy? >> So cloud has been a backbone of our compute strategy within Regeneron for a very long time now. The evolution from a traditional compute structure to more serverless compute has been growing at a rapid pace. And I would say like we are seeing exponential growth within the adaption of the compute within containers and Kubernetes world. So we've been on this journey for a long time and I think it's not stopping anytime soon. So we have more and more workload, which is running on Kubernetes containers and we are looking forward to our partnership with Rafay to further enhance it, as Haseeb mentioned, the efficiency is the key. We need to do more with less. Resourcing is critical and cloud is evolved from that journey that do more things in a more efficient manner. >> That was the original catalyst as we got to help our development team, be more productive. >> That's correct. >> Eliminate the heavy lifting. And then you started presumably doing some of the less heavy, but still heavy lifting and we talked off camera and then you're increasingly moving toward serverless. >> Rakesh: That's correct. >> Can you describe that journey? What that's like? >> So I think like with the whole adoption that things are taking a much faster pace. Basically we are putting more compute onto containers and the DevOps journey is increasingly getting more, more faster. >> Go ahead. 'Cause I want to understand where Rafay sits in this whole equation. I was talking about, I'm not a developer, but I was talking to developer yesterday trying to really understand the benefits of containers and serverless and I said, take me through what you have to do when you're using containers. He said, I got to build the container image then I got to deploy an EC2 instance where I got to choose and I got to allocate memory of the fence the app in a VM then I got to run the computing instance against the app. And then, oh by the way, I got to pay 'cause all that EC2 that whole time. Depending on how you approach serverless you're going to eliminate a lot of those steps. >> That is correct. So what we do is basically like in a traditional sense, the computer is sitting idle at quite a lot basically. >> But you're paying. >> And you're still paying for that. Serverless technologies allows us to use the compute as needed basis. So whenever you need it, it is available. You run your workload on that and after that it shuts down or goes to minimal state and you don't need to pay as much as your paying. >> And then where do you guys fit in that whole equation? >> Look, serverless has a paradigm. If you step back from the idea of containers versus Lambda or whatever functions. The idea should be that the list you just read out of what developers have to do. Here's what they really should do. They should write their code, they should check it in, and they never have to think about it again. That should be the case. If they want to debug their application, there should be a nice front end where they go and they interact with their application and that's it. What is Kubernetes? I don't care. That's the right answer. And we did not start this journey as an industry there because usually the initial adopters are developers who do the heavy lifting. Developers want to learn, they want to solve these problems. But then eventually the expectation is that the platform organization and an enterprise is going to own this platform for me so I can go back to doing my job, which is writing code. And that's where Rakesh's team comes in. So Rakesh team is building the standard at Regeneron. Whether you're writing a long-lasting app, which is going to run in a container or you're going to write an event-driven application, which is going to be a function, whatever. You write your app, we will give you the necessary tooling and plumbing to take care of all these things. And this is my problem. My being Rakesh. Rakesh is my customer. He has his customers. We as Rafay, A, we have to make Rakesh's system successful because we have to give them right automation to do all these things so that he can service hundred, or in his case, thousands and thousands of different individuals. But then collectively, we have to make sure that the developer experience is optimal so that truly they just write their code and EC2, they don't want to deal with this. In fact, on Monday evening, in the Kubernetes keynote by Barry Cooks, one of the things he said was that in a CIO sort of survey they did, CIO said, 80% of the time of developers is wasted on infrastructure stuff and not on innovation. We need to bring that 80% back so that a hundred percent of the work is on innovation and today it's not. >> And that's what you do. >> That's what we do. >> In your world as a developer, I only have to worry about my writing my code and what functions I'm going to call. >> That is correct. And it is important because the efficiencies of a developer need to be focused on doing the things which business is asking for. The 80% of the work like to make sure the things are secure, they're done the right way, the standards are followed, scanning part of it, that work if we can offload to a platform, for example, Rafay, saves a lot of works, a lot of work cycles from the developers perspective. >> Thank you for that. It was nice little tutorial on the benefits. >> Absolutely. So you transform the developer experience. >> That's correct. >> How does that impact Regeneron overall business? We uplevel that. Give me that view. >> So with that, like what happens, the key thing is the developers productivity increases. We are able to do more with less. And that is the key thing to our strategy that like with the increase in business demand, with the increase in lot of compute things, which we are doing, we need to do and hiring resources is getting more difficult than ever. And we need to make sure that we are leveraging platforms and tools basically to do, enable our developers to focus on key business activity rather than doing redundant things and things which we can leverage some other tooling and platform for that business. >> Is this something in terms of improving the developer experience and their productivity faster time to market? Is this accelerating? >> That's correct. >> Is this even like accelerating drug discovery in some cases? >> So COVID is like a great example for that. Like we were able to fast track our drug discovery and like we were able to turn it into an experience where we were able to discover new drugs and get it to the market in a much faster pace. That whole process was expedited using these tools and processes basically. So we are very proud of that. >> So my understanding is you're running Rafay with EKS. A lot of choices out there. Why? Why did you choose to go in that direction? >> So Regeneron has heavily invested in cloud recently, over the years basically. And then we are focusing on hybrid cloud now that we we are like, again, these multiple cloud providers of platforms which are coming in are strategies to focus on hybrid cloud and Rafay is big leader in that particular space where we felt that we need to engage or partner with Rafay to enable those capabilities, not just on AWS, but across the board. One single tool, one single process, one single knowledge base helps us achieve more efficiencies. >> Less chaos, less complexity. >> That's correct. Let's say when you're in customer conversations, which I know you've had many this week, but you probably do that all the time. Regeneron is a great use case for Rafay. It's so tangible, life sciences. We all get that, especially coming out of the pandemic. What do you say to customers are the top three differentiators of Rafay and why they should go Rafay on top of EKS? >> What's really interesting about these conversations is that, look, we have some pretty cool features in our product. Obviously we must have something interesting otherwise nobody would buy our product. And we have access management and zero trust models and cluster provisioning, all these very nice things. But it always comes down to exactly the same thing, which is every large enterprise that started a journey, independent or Rafay because they didn't know who we were, it's fine. Last year we were a young company, now we are a larger company and they all are basically building towards a roadmap which Rafay truly understands. And in my opinion, and I'm confident when I say this, we understand their life, their journey better than any other company in the market. The reason why we have the flurry of customers we have, the reason why the product has the capacity that it does is because for whatever reason, look, it's scale lock. That's for the history books. But we have complete clarity on what a pharmaceutical company or financial customers company or a high tech company the journey they will take to the cloud and automation for modern infrastructure, we get it. And what I'm selling them is the is the why, not the what. There's a lot of great answers for the what? What do we do? Rakesh doesn't care. I mean, he's trying to solve a bigger problem. He's trying to get his researchers to go faster. So then when they want to run a model, they should be able to do it right now. That's what he cares about. Then he looks for a tool to solve the business problem. And we figured out how to have that conversation and explain why Rafay helps him, essentially multiply the bandwidth that he has in his organization. And of course to that end we have some great technology/ But that's a secondary issue, the first, to me the why is more important than the what. And then we talk about how, which he has to pay us money. That's the how. But yeah, we get there too. But look, this is the important thing. Every enterprise is on exactly the same journey, Lisa. And that if you think about it from just purely economic efficiencies perspective that is not a good investment for our industry. If everybody's solving the same problem that's a waste of resources. Let's find a way to do, what is the point of the cloud? We used to all build data centers. That was not efficient. We all went to the cloud because it's more efficient to have somebody else, AWS, solve this problem for us so we can now focus on the next level problem. And then Rafay solving that problem so that he can focus on his drug discovery, not on Kubernetes. >> That's correct. It's all about efficiencies. Like doing things, learn from each other's experience and build upon it. So the things have been solved. One way you need to leverage that, reuse it. So the principles are the same. >> So then what's next? You had done an amazing job transforming the company. You're facilitating drug discovery faster than ever before. From an infrastructure perspective, what's next on your journey? >> So right now the roadmap what we have is basically talking about making sure that the workload are running more efficient, they're more secure. As we go into these expandable serverless technology, there are more challenging opportunities for us to solve. Those challenges are coming up. We need to make sure that with the new, the world we are living in, we are more securely doing stuff what we were doing previously. More efficiencies is also the key and more distributed. Like if we can leverage the power of cloud in doing more things on demand is on our roadmap. And I think that is where we are all driving. >> And when you said hybrid, you're talking about connecting to your on-prem tools and data? How about cross cloud? >> We are invested in multiple cloud platform itself and we are looking forward to leveraging a technology, which is truly cloud native and we can leverage things together on that. >> And I presume you're helping with that, obviously. >> Last question for both of you. We're making an Instagram reel. Think of this as a sizzle reel, like a 32nd elevator pitch. Question, first one goes to you, Rakesh. If you had a bumper sticker, you put it on, I don't know, say a DeLorean, I hear those are coming back. What would it say about Regeneron as a technology company that's delivering therapeutics? >> It's a tough question, but I would try my best. The bumper sticker would say, discover drug more faster, more efficient. >> Perfect. Haseeb, question about Rafay. What's the bumper sticker? If you had a billboard in on Highway 101 in Redwood City about Rafay and what it's enabling organizations enterprises across the globe to achieve, what would it say? >> I'll tell you what our customers say. So our customers call us the vCenter for Kubernetes and we all know what a vCenter is. We all know why vCenter's so amazingly successful because it takes IT engineers and gives them superpowers. You can run a data center. What is the vCenter for this new world? It us. So vCenter is obviously a trademark with our friends at VMware, so that's why I'm, but our customers truly call us the vCenter for Kubernetes. And I think that's an incredible moniker because that truly codifies our roadmap. It codifies what we are selling today. >> There's nothing more powerful and potent in the voice of the customer. Thank you both for coming on. Thank you for sharing the Regeneron story. Great to have you back on, Haseeb. You need a pin for the number of times you've been on theCUBE. >> At least a gold star. >> We'll work on that. Guys, thank you. We appreciate your time. >> Haseeb: Thank you very much. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>Good morning. It's the cube live from Las Vegas. This is day four of our coverage at AWS reinvent 2021. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. We have had since Monday two live sets two remote studios over 100 guests on the program. This is a 10th annual reinvent. We're talking about the next decade of cloud innovation and we're pleased to welcome Ashley Kramer, the chief product officer and chief marketing officer of Sisense to the program. Welcome Ashley, thanks for having me today. So you own marketing and product. Tell me a little bit about your role. Obviously that's done. >>It's a big role. It has a big role, but I think as the analytics ecosystem has evolved, it makes sense to bring the product you're building the platform you're building and the messaging that you're taking to market together in one. And so I've been in size since almost two years, and I am responsible for both the messaging and the building of the product. >>Awesome. Talk to me a little bit about the next generation of business intelligence. Define Gen-Z one, two and where we are with three. >>Yeah. So when we think about the generations of analytics and we think about how the world is evolved, we're here clearly at a cloud conference, data apps, and the way people work has evolved over time. And I think analytics hasn't quite kept up and I'll explain what I mean about that. The first generation of analytics was really about, you know, that we're talking by the way, late nineties, early two thousands, big on-premise servers of data, things that would make people here sort of cringe, right? And the way to extract value was to put an analytics server right next to it, go wait in line, ask her it, Hey, I need a report. And then wait a few weeks. That report gets delivered. It's the wrong data. It's now stale. You've got to go get back in line, enter gen two, which by the way, I was a part of in my career at Tableau. >>And what we said was let's put data at everybody's fingertips. Let's allow people via desktop tool to drag and drop and build the perfect, beautiful dashboard. And then we can deploy it to everybody and we will break down that barrier to it. And that was successful. But the one thing that we didn't understand was not, everybody's an analyst, not everybody's data literate and dashboards could be very, very intimidating to the everyday worker. And so now we're on the cusp of what we call gen three and sysynced is well-positioned to really nail this market, which is make data invisible, make analytics invisible, and bring it to where people are. And that's what we consider gen three. And I of course can talk about that for hours. So I'd love to talk more about it. >>So are the lines blurred between what people think of as artificial intelligence and BI, because you're talking about, um, you know, making this invisible or transparent, you know, frictionless access, um, are you talking recommendations or just a presentation of raw information? How are those two topics, interleaved >>Talking both. And so what's, what's really beautiful about this is the dashboard doesn't have to go away, but you have to break it apart and you have to make it less intimidating, more approachable, more understandable, which is where AI comes in natural language generation, natural language querying maybe for some people, maybe for a doctor, they want to see the data presented in plain text, plain English. Great. Let them do that. And so AI is a big, big piece of this gen three. When we think about where BI and analytics is evolving to. So >>Like it, from a customization perspective, you're going to be able to allow people in healthcare, finance, marketing, sales, operations products, be able to have data at their fingertips when they need it. Because one of the things that we learned in the pandemic is that access to real-time data is no longer a nice to have it's required. But to your point, if it's intimidating or if it's inaccessible, or if it's too complicated, it's not useful. >>That's right. And what we also learned during the pandemic is people are busy and they don't have time to change what they're doing. They don't have time to leave their everyday workflow and process to go look for something. They don't have time to look for an unnatural experience and try to interpret what it says. So customization is a huge piece of this, make it look and feel the way that a healthcare worker needs it to look and feel, make it look and feel the way that, you know, a construction worker makes it as part of their everyday job. And that's a core piece of gen three as well. >>What are some of the things that you guys are doing with AWS? Obviously, AWS, very, very customer focused. They always talk about working backwards from the customer, really this customer obsession. What are some of the things that you guys are working on together that your joint customers will benefit from? >>Fun fact, I was Amazonian as part of my career. So I grew up with Amazon in the early days of AWS. And we are very close partners with them from two really big perspectives. The first is the data's moving there, all of the data, particularly things like red shift. And that is a perfect place for size sense to sit right on top of that data, query it live, bring that and extract it to people in the way that they need it to consume. It really make data-driven decisions. The second piece is, um, and we saw a great keynote yesterday by Swami, which is the AI piece of the story, the comprehend, the Lexio, you know, really bringing to people, the data and the information and the way they need, and that all plugs into the size sense experience. And we can be that visual front end layer on top of all of those services. >>So where you sit because of your purview, looking at product marketing, and then let's, let's make, let's make the third point in the triangle, the customer always what, from your perspective, because you're thinking in terms of product customer requirements, and then you're thinking about how do you get the message across to make sure people understand what you're doing? What does a delighted customer sound like to you? What makes you smile? When someone says, Hey, Ashley, we have this customer who absolutely loves us. And these are the things they love about us. What does, what does that sound like? >>Really a very, very simple thing to answer because through my career too often, and I've read products at all of the companies I've worked for, you sell these big deals and you help them be successful with one use case. And you come back a year later in three people in the organization are actually using that solution to make data-driven decisions. So my perfect customer is, you know, we take them by the hand, we help them deploy that we come back a year later and the entire organization, all of their customers are using the solution because we've made it more approachable, more personalized and less intimidating. >>So what's the opposite of shelf ware. That's what you just described >>The opposite of shelfware and that breaks down every stat you see out there, there's a really widely known one that, um, less than 30% of organizations are actually successful with their analytics solutions. And my theory, my thesis and the research that we've done is that's exactly why it's too intimidating. It's too clunky and it's too disjointed. >>So talk to me, I, one of the things I think is the best validation of brand can get is the voice of the customer. I agree with you that it's, it's exciting when you, cause there's, there's so many, there's so many tools and you just mentioned the stat, um, in terms of adoption, but share with us a customer example that you think really articulates the value of what you're talking about. That gen three BI customizable, personable, what customer comes to mind are customers. You have. >>So one of my favorites is a company called outreach and what outreach outreach caters to is sales. It's, you know, early sales, sales enablement, helping people understand which customers should I go target. And should I go sell to, these are not analysts using the platform. And when outreach came to us, they said, we want data and analytics to drive our experience for all of our customers. But these are young salespeople. They can't just be looking at dashboards. And so what we've done with them is we were actually the AI engine that drives the experience. And as that BDR, ADR SDR gets in there, they're actually using analytics to figure out who to call what account is hot, what to do next, and right. They're actioning right in the experience. And they have no clue that they're will using data. And that's okay. And they're optimized. They're more efficient at their job because science is powering that experience. >>So they could be in Salesforce and accessing this, like under the covers, not even knowing it, they have no idea >>Exactly >>What they're empowered with BI AI to be able to make decisions. >>And they're becoming better at their jobs because they're using data and they're not learning a new skill set because they don't have time. There's no time. >>That's a great point. One of the other points that we've heard a lot, the last three days is every company has to become a data company. One thing to say it whole other can of worms, right? To actually enable it. Because to your point earlier, you have access to data it's confusing or it's stale. There's a competitor right here. Ready to take over. Talk to me about how your customer conversations have changed, especially in the last 22 months about how do we become data really? Data-driven, >>That's, that's interesting because if you would've asked me two, three years ago, I would have given you this big pitch on, well, we need to go in and help them build this culture of data and analytics, right? We're going to go in and help them. That has changed. What we need to do now is accept that building. That whole culture is too hard to do. It requires people to go beyond their job and really learn a new skill set. So what we do is we make every company, a data company by not necessarily making them really realize that they're using analytics and data. We're making it personalized. We're removing the nuances that come with building the state of literacy culture. So yes, you still need to build the culture around it and have the support, but you need it to be less intimidating and you need it to just be part of the everyday workflow, the everyday process, the everyday experience, regardless of job title. There's another interesting stat that there's over 1 billion knowledge workers out there that are underserved. That's the barrier we need to break down. Next analysts are happy. Data scientists are happy. They have what they need. How do we get what they're doing to those 1 billion plus underserved knowledge workers. >>So when you're in customer conversations and they're like, Ashley, help us figure this out. >>You say, we go in and we show, you know, we, we figure out what their business case is. And they very often say, okay, let's start with a big, huge dashboard. Step them back and say, what are you really trying to solve? Okay. You want that doctor to be more efficient? You want to triage more properly, maybe right there within your system, within your medical system. We're just going to pop, you know, we're going to pull data out of red shift and we're just going to pop some insights there. Some recommendations, as you mentioned earlier, some plain text, we'll give you a search experience so you can search, you know, what beds are open and it will bring it back to you the way that you understand how to work, you don't have to change. >>And that's critical because one of the things that we talk about all the time is change management, cultural change. It's really hard to do, especially given the dynamics of the environment that we're in. People are still scattered, working from anywhere. That's going to persist for a while. We need to meet them where they are >>Absolutely a hundred percent nailed it. And I'm going to steal that in my marketing material. Thank you. I'm a marketer trademarks. Um, but absolutely meet them where they are. And you know, everybody wants to evolve. Everybody wants to upscale and you can help them, but don't expect it to happen overnight. And don't expect they're going to take it on as a second job because their core job function is the most critical. >>It's interesting from a marketer's perspective. Um, it's always great to have people running around wearing size sense, hoodies on the customer site what's even better is having them using the product. And maybe they don't even know as long as key stakeholders in the organization knows so that you can drive, you know, drive into the market. But is there anything disheartening about sort of being toiling in obscurity at times? >>It is the hardest part of the CMO hat that I wear is you both are very likely using size sense in something that you're doing and you have no idea. And that is a brand's nightmare. So yes, checking my pockets. In fact, we are giving away Fanny packs. And as soon as I'm done, I will be over here with two Fanny packs for you. Apparently that's the new thing. That's what the kids are doing. Um, but it is very hard. It's um, we have to do more because lots of people are using size sense and actually lots of people at this conference right now, a lot of these vendors have size sense embedded, and they don't necessarily know they're using it. It's a double-edged sword though, >>Because you're saying, you know, the whole point is making analytics invisible. So, but it is, but I'll take the Fanny pack. >>I'll be out. Don't worry about that. Don't you worry? >>So here we are wrapping up 10th annual at reinvent. You were an Amazonian. So you've been to many of these, obviously the first one in two years, there's nothing like the conversations that are going on behind it. There's nothing like an in-person interview to have a really a conversation about the technology. What are some of the things that have you heard at the conference that excite you going into 2022? >>My excitement going in is the focus that everybody's putting just beyond what's next beyond data like the AI, right? The AI perspective of everything, the way that AWS is evolving their data story, lots of serverless spoken by Adam in the first day. And I think there's really, really big things coming. You see the three big clouds competing and making each other better and better. You see vendors like size sense working cross-cloud because everybody has something best in class. And so I am one very excited to be in person and to be shaking hands and hugging friends that I have not seen except over zoom in two years. But I'm really excited for the direction. Particularly AWS is taking the data ecosystem inside sense plans to be a core part of that. >>Awesome. It's exciting. The amount of innovation that has gone on is we think, you know, the next 10 years is we're going to see far more in the next, probably five than we did in the previous 10. Actually. Thank you so much for joining us, talking to us about science. We'll have to, we'll have to think about that. Well, when we get our Fanny pack, so we can talk about science, how we're using it, but awesome. To be able to bring analytics to everyone so that it is invisible, usable, and we can actually extract value from data in real time. Thank you for >>Having me today. Our >>Pleasure for Dave Nicholson. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube, the global leader in live tech coverage.

hey welcome back to los angeles thecube is live here at kubecon cloud native con 2021 we're so excited to be here in person lisa martin with dave nicholson and we are here with priyanka sharma the executive director of cnc at prayanka welcome to the program thank you so much for having me first of all congratulations on doing an event in person in such a safe clean way i was really impressed when i walked in this morning was asked for my vaccination record my temperature was scanned you're proving you can do these events safely this isn't rocket science so agreed and i'm so glad you appreciate all the measures we've put in place because this is how we can do it in-person interaction is essential for us as human beings for us as professionals and so we owe it to each other to just do the right thing you know have a vaccine requirement wear your masks have these what i call the traffic light uh system where if you have a green a green band it means people can come a little closer it's okay red means please at least six feet of distance and these things go a long way in making an event successful in times like this they do i love that when i saw that mine keeps falling off i'm cold so it keeps falling i'm green just so you know i know you're green what about you i'm green here you can can i have yours that's my favorite and you know you fell off again you had um the three folks that came up who were uh like uh co-chairs co-chairs yeah yeah and uh and they did almost a little almost a little skit yes that on the surface people could say well that's ridiculous and it's like no it's not it's giving everybody the guidelines so that everyone can be comfortable because when i see your green wristband i understand that you are comfortable because i don't want to accidentally reach out to give you a fist bump when you might be particularly of course yeah yeah so no visual cues make it easy yes yeah yeah very very easy very comfortable talk about the energy at the event this is the second full day tina was standing room only yesterday give us an overview of the energy and some of the things that are happening since you can't replicate those hallway networking conversations on video conference i know exactly what you mean man it is so lovely to be in person to meet people and you know for those who are comfortable there's like the fist bumps and the hugs and the big smiles and that energy i haven't seen it in almost two years um and even you know just standing on stage as i was telling you folks uh off camera i've been in this role for over a year and a close to a year and a half i've done three cube cons already but this was my first in person and being on that stage experiencing the energy of the people in that room like when i asked everyone during my keynote i was like are you all proud to be team cloud native and i got a resounding yes back from the audience that's what i'm talking about yeah you know it was amazing what's some of the news that's breaking lots of stuff going on obviously some first one in person in almost two years but talk to me about some of the the news that's breaking here at the event yes so so much new stuff to share um from our side on cncf our journey has been very much about being celebrating our culture and welcoming more and more people into it so that we can have more folks in team cloud native to take various jobs to find fulfillment and all those great things right and all of our announcements are around that theme of people finding a place here people paying it forward in this community and building the culture the first one i would like to share is the announcement of the kubernetes and cloud native associate certification so this is an exam that is going to go live end of the year so people sign up apparently the beta signups went away like this after i announced it so it was really cool wow popular by demanding yeah very very popular and it's it's an exam for folks who are brand new to cloud native and it the studying for it you'll go through you know the fun fundamentals of kubernetes what is the cncf landscape what are the key projects and ultimately you will actually deploy an application using coop cuddle commands and it's such a great primer so so how brand new can someone be when you when you say brand new are you talking about someone who already has a phd in computer science but hasn't done anything in the kubernetes space tell me how brand new can you be uh-huh that's a very good question and it is literally you can come with zero knowledge you would of course have to study for the exam and like go through that journey but the idea is that it is the gateway and so it is possible you're a phd in computer science but you've studied some esoteric part of computer science that's very unconnected to what we do sure go ahead and take it but maybe most likely you would like the more advanced certifications better but if you're let's say a marketer looking to break into the cloud native industry this is the move take this exam and suddenly all these employers you speak their language they'll be impressed that you took it and it's it's an opportunity to advance your career the oh community is huge i was looking at the website the other day 138 000 contributors yes from more than 177 countries 186 is the latest number 186 awesome 289 plus million lines of code written this community is really so productive and so prolific and it's great that you're offering more folks that don't have the background like you were saying to be able to get in and get started absolutely it's our whole thing of bring in more people because as you all probably know there's so much demand for cloud native skill sets across job functions so that's why we're here to help with yeah i you know i i want to double click on this as we say because you hear the word inclusive associated with this whole community so much um you're talking about something that is a certification yeah a marketer okay fine but we're really talking about anyone who has the drive to potentially completely transform their lives yes and in this age where things can be done remotely you don't necessarily have to live in silicon valley or cambridge massachusetts to do this or in one of the other global centers of technology anywhere yeah so that's the that's the kind of energy that's part of this that isn't a part of any large industry focused conference because you really are making opportunities for people of all backgrounds to change their lives so i don't know i don't am i extending a a virtual thank you from all of those people whose lives have been changed and will be changed in the future maybe i am but so but talk about inclusiveness in in you know from from other perspectives yes i think that you know talent drive skills none of these are exclusive to a certain zip code you know people everywhere have great qualities and deserve chances and why shouldn't they be part of a community that as you said is especially inclusive feels especially nice to be a part of and that's what i exhorted the community to do in my keynote yesterday which is that our ranks will grow and we should go out of our way to make sure our ranks grow and we do that by shining a light on our culture telling people to join in lending a hand and you know letting people's personalities shine even when they'll be different from who we are whether in terms of job function or skill set whatever and i think that's the top level um paradigm that we want to have right where we are always welcoming people when we think of inclusiveness it is you know there is certifications like kcna did do a great job there are also efforts that we must always be doing so something that we work on constantly consistently is contributor strategy where we're working on creating ladders and pathways for folks to become open source contributors it is known now that open source contributions lead to job advancement in your career right and so the whole goal is bring people in not just to hang out not just to talk but to actually grow and actually kubecon cloudnativecon is a great example of another little thing we do which is uh we uh award uh underrepresented minorities and people who are who need need-based funds scholarships to attend nice yeah and it's changed one thousand 1518 lives already and we actually uh in uh in this event have announced that we are renaming the scholarship to the dan khan scholarship fund um i i do you folks know dan yes did yeah so dan he breathed life into team cloud native right he built this organization to have the impact that it does today and all the while he was relentlessly focused on diversity equity inclusion so it was it was just like the idea came from within the team and the minute someone said it it just struck a chord with all of us yeah we're like we're doing this no question and it was one of the fastest decisions we've ever made i saw uh some results of a dei micro survey on the website where 75 percent of respondents say this community is becoming more inclusive there's obviously work to go but as a female in technology you feel that you see that as well yes i think i'm very proud of that survey that we did by the way because it's our way we're going to keep doing it it's our way to keep a pulse on the ecosystem because you can keep doing initiatives right but if people are not feeling great then who cares and so um but yes i think dei is a journey if there is no destination right always we have to be thinking harder trying harder to you know i think for example something cncf's done a great job is identifying particularly gender diverse folks who are in the community and maybe could deserve a role of high responsibility so i'm really proud that our technical oversight committee which is our really the top technical people in the ecosystem who desi decide project stuff they are led by a woman there's many women on that and it's they're all very exemplary awesome technologists and so i think um the diversity survey gives us like a hint into like the things people do like and i mean the fact remains we need to do more to source more people to come into the ecosystem we need to always be changing and evolving with the needs of the community right as i mentioned the community is 138 000 strong 6.8 million plus contributions so far you can imagine by opening that dei door just the thought diversity that comes in alone and the number of projects that will come from folks that just come in with a different mindset oh 100 we are already seeing that um we started off as folks who had you know lots of projects from the great big tech companies people who had web scale problems as i call it and that was great but in recent years the end users who are initially just consuming this technology and that too slowly are now hook line and sinker in and we have like argo cd came from intuit which is an end user uh backstage came from spotify which is an end user so this trend is growing and the diversity as you said is continuing yeah i i'm particularly interested in the dynamic where you have people who have their day job if you will where their employer is absolutely 100 encouraging them to participate in the community to develop things that will not only help the employer and that mission but also building uh solutions for everyone and providing enrichment for the for the person and and i i'm i'm going to make a little bit of a prediction i want to get your thoughts on this i think that um one of the silver linings of what we've been through in the pandemic having a lot of people at home having that relationship with your primary employer be just a little bit different and just a little bit more removed i think everyone is realizing that you know what um we all need a passion play to be a part of in addition to whatever we're doing to put bread on the table in the immediate future and so i i think that i want to hear your thoughts there's going to be an explosion in contributions from people and hopefully a lot more openness on the part of employers to let people dedicate their time to this do you do you see that do you think that yes i think i think you're really on to something here um something i mentioned in my keynote right was this conversation i've had with so many that we in this community our identity is cloud native first so we're folks who are in team cloud native before we are working at insert company name you know um google at t spotify whatever it's not a dig on the company it's actually a celebration of those companies because they are liking the developments that happen in open source they are appreciating the value these people are creating and they're employing them so absolutely there is this ongoing trend of folks seeing great value in folks who understand this cloud native projects in particular and of course right because we have been such a great place for industry collaboration lots of vendors have great products make lots of money on these projects and that's as it should be and so the value of the people contributing to these projects is very high and it will only continue to grow i imagine so so here we are in los angeles at kubecon cloud native con 21 what's what's next well uh the good news is this was the first of many to come hybrid events in person plus virtual and the next one is happening in end of may in valencia for europe 22. valencia spain and i have heard beautiful weather very nice people amazing food so just for that that alone is worth registration yes i know right it's going to be amazing i'm so excited and i hope i will see you folks there sign me up i've never been to spain i'm there me too let's do it excited let's do it for our spanish-speaking uh viewers i will say claroque he you can't you do you can do it all you can speak spanish on the queue we can have something honestly i'm impressed i'm impressed i can't i can't do that any and you donated your green card so thank you so much so nice congratulations on the event thank you uh for growing the community for and growing the diversity of it and for the the projects that are going on now and we're sure many more to come we look forward to seeing you in valencia in may thank you so much see you in valencia all right we'll see you there for dave nicholson i'm lisa martin we are live in los angeles the cube is covering kubecon and cloudnativecon at 21. stick around we'll be back after a short break with our next guest

>>Hello, everyone. This is not appropriate to lapse of America. I'm going to talk about the motivation. For zero knowledge goes back to the heart off, winding down identity, ownership, community and control. Much of photography exists today to support control communications among individuals in the one world. We also consider devices as extensions of individuals and corporations as communities. Here's hoping you're not fit in this picture. What defines the boundary off an individual is the ability to hold a secret with maybe, it says, attached to the ownership. Off some ethic, we want the ability to use the secret to prove ownership of this asset. However, giving up the secret itself essentially announced ownership since then, anybody else can do the same. Dear Knowledge gives us tools to prove ownership without revealing the secret. The notion of proving ownership off a digital object without revealing it sounds very paradoxical outside the model off. So it gives us a surprise when this motion was formalized and constructed by Goldwasser Miccoli and back off in the late eighties, we'll focus on the non interactive >>version of Siri, a knowledge our music in the >>stock, which was first developed by blow Tillman and Peggy, where the general it can span multiple rounds of communications music only allows a single message to be trusted. No, let's get into some technical details for musics. The objective of for music is to show that an object X, which you can think off as the public footprint, often asset, belonging clan and the language without revealing its witness. W, which you can think off as the Future Analytics team consists off three algorithms, video proof and very. The key generation process is executed by a trusted third party and the very opposite, resulting in a common >>random string, or steers, which is made public. The >>true vendor produces a proof by based on the CIA's X and the very fine with the checks. The proof against X and accepts or rejects music off course has to satisfy some properties. We needed to be correct, which basically says that when everyone follows the protocol correctly on, so we can expect, we need to be thought, which says that a false statement cannot be proven. The channel is a trickier properly to form this. How do we capture the intuition behind saying that the proof there is no knowledge of the witness. One way to capture that is to imagine their tools is the real world where the proof is calculated. Using the witness on there's a simulation worth where the proof is calculated without a witness. To make this possible, the simulator may have some extra information about the CIA's, which is independent off the objectives. The property then requires that it is not possible to effectively distinguish these words Now. It is especially challenging to construct music's compared to encryption signature schemes, in particular in signature schemes. The analog off the Hoover can use a secret, and in any case, the analog off the very fire can use a secret. But in is it's none of the crew layer and the verifier can hold a secret. Yeah, in this talk, I'm going to focus on linear subspace languages. This class is the basis of hardness. >>Assumptions like GH and deliver >>on has proved extremely useful in crypto constructions. This is how we express DD it and dealing as linear software. We will use additive notation on express the spirit logs as the near group actions on coop elements. You think the syntax we can write down Deitch on dealing Jupiter's very naturally a zoo witness sector times a constant electric so we can view the language as being penetrated by a constant language. Metrics really was hard by many groups in our instructions. What does it mean? S while uh, Standard group allows traditions and explain it off by in your group also allows one modification In such groups, we can state various in yourself facing elections. The DDN is the simplest one. It assumes that sampling a one dimensional space is indistinguishable from something full professional. The decisional linear assumption assumes the theme from tours is three dimensional spaces generalizing the sequence of Presumptions. The scaling the resumption asks to distinguish between gay damaged examples and full it and >>examples from a K plus one national space. >>Right, So I came up with a breakthrough. Is the construction in Europe 2008 in particular? There? Music for many years Off Spaces was the first efficient >>construction based on idiots and gear. Structurally, >>it consisted of two parts Our commitment to the witness Andre question proof part and going how the witness actually corresponds to the object. The number of elements in the proof is linear in the number >>of witnesses on the number of elements in the object. >>The question remains to build even shorter visits. The Sierras itself seemed to provide some scoop Rosa Russo fix. See how that works for an entire class of languages? Maybe there's a way to increase proof efficiency on the cost of having had Taylor Sierra's for each year. This is what motivates quality and after six, where we let the solace depend on the language itself. In particular, we didn't require the discrete logs of the language constants to generate this, Yes, but we did require this constant student generated from witness sample distributions. This still turns out to be sufficient for many applications. The construction achieved a perfect knowledge, which was universally in the sense that the simulator was independent. However, soundness is competition. So here's how the construction differed from roots high at a very high level, the language constants are embedded into the CIA s in such a way that the object functions as it's only so we end up not needing any separate commitment in the perfect sense. Our particular construction also needed fewer elements in the question proof, as there On the flip side, the CIA's blows up quadratic instead of constant. Let's get into the detail construction, which is actually present with this script. Let the language apparently trace by Giovanni tricks with the witness changing over time, we sat down and matrices >>D and B with appropriate damages. >>Then we construct the public series into what C. S. D is meant to be used. By the way. On it is constructed by >>multiplying the language matrix with D and being worse, Sierra's V is the part that is meant to be used by the very fair, and it is constructed using details be on be embedded in teaching. >>Now let's say you're asked to computer proof for a candidate X with fitness number we computed simply as a product of the witness with CSP. The verification of the truth is simply taking with the pairing off the candidate and the proof with the Sierras. Seeming threats is equal to zero. If you look carefully. Sierra's V essentially embedded in G to the kernel of the Matrix, owned by the language metrics here and so to speak. This is what is responsible for the correctness. The zero knowledge property is also straightforward, >>given the trapdoor matrices, D and B. Now, >>when corrected journalism relatively simple to prove proving illnesses strictly The central observation is that, given CSP, there is still enough entropy. >>India and me to >>random I seriously in particular Sierra's we Can we expand it to have an additional component with a random sample from the kernel allows it. This transformation is purely statistical. No, we essentially invented idiots are killing their talent in the era of kernel part in this transform sitting within show that an alleged proof on a bad candidate and we used to distinguish whether a subspace sample was used for a full space >>sample was used at the challenge. The need >>to have the kernel of the language in this city. That's the technical >>reason why we need the language to come from a witness. Sample. >>Uh, let's give a simple illustration >>of the system on a standard Diffie Hellman, which g one with the hardness assumption being idiot. >>So the language is defined by G one elements small D, E and F, with pupils off the phone due to the W. After that ugly, the CIA is is generated as follows example D and >>B from random on Compute Sierra speak as due to the day after the being verse and Sierra's V as G to do to do the big on day two of the video. The >>proof of the pupil >>detail that I do after the bill is computed using W. As Sierra Speed race to the party. I know that this is just a single element in the group. The verification is done by bearing the Cooper and the proof with the Sierras VMS and then checking in quality. The >>similar can easily compute the proof using trapdoors demand without knowing that what we are expecting. People leave a Peter's die and reduce the roof size, the constant under a given independent of the number of witnesses and object dimensions. Finally, at Cryptocurrency 14 we optimize the proof toe, one group >>element under the idiots. In both the works, the theorists was reduced to linear sites. The >>number of bearings needed for ratification was also industry in years. This is the crypto Ford in construction in action, the construction skeleton remains more or less the famous VR turkey. But the core observation was that many of the Sierras elements could were anomaly. Comite. While still >>maintaining some of this, these extra random items are depicted in red in this side. >>This round of combination of the Sierras elements resulted in a reduction of boat, Bruce says, as also the number of clearings required for education in Europe in 2015 kills, and we came up with a beautiful >>interpretation of skill sets based on the concept of small predictive hash functions. >>This slide is oversimplified but illustrated, wanting, uh, this system has four collecting >>puzzle pieces. The goodness of the language metrics okay again and a key Haider when >>the hidden version of the key is given publicly in the Sears. Now, when we have a good object, the pieces fit together nicely into detectable. However, when we have a bad object, the pieces no longer fit and it becomes >>infeasible to come up with convincing. Zero knowledge is demonstrable by giving the key to the simulator on observing that the key is independent of the language metrics. >>Through the years, we have extended >>enhanced not mind to be six system, especially with our collaborators, Masayuki Abby Koko Jr. Born on U. >>N. Based on your visits, we were able to construct very efficient, identity based encryption structure, resulting signatures >>public verifiable CCS, secure encryption, nine signatures, group signatures, authorities, key extremes and so on. >>It has also been gratifying to see the community make leaps and bounces ideas and also use queuing visits in practical limits. Before finishing off, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about >>some exciting activities going on Hyper ledger, which is relevant for photographers. Hyper >>Leisure is an open source community for enterprise. Great. It's hosted by the minute formation on enjoys participation from numerous industry groups. Uh, so difficult funded to efforts in Africa, we have versa, which is poised to be the crypto home for all. Blocking it and practice a platform for prospecting transactions are part of the legs on the slide here, >>we would love participation from entity inference. So >>that was a brief history of your analytics. Thanks for giving me the opportunity. And thanks for listening

>> Announcer: From the Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCube Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special presentation. We have a launch from Dell Technologies updates from the VxRail family. We're going to do things a little bit different here. We actually have a launch video Shannon Champion, of Dell Technologies. And the way we do things a lot of times, is, analysts get a little preview or when you're watching things. You might have questions on it. So, rather than me just wanting it, or you wanting yourself I actually brought in a couple of Dell Technologies expertS two of our Cube alumni, happy to welcome you back to the program. Jon Siegal, he is the Vice President of Product Marketing, and Chad Dunn, who's the Vice President of Product Management, both of them with Dell Technologies. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Good to see you Stu. >> Great to be here. >> All right, and so what we're going to do is we're going to be rolling the video here. I've got a button I'm going to press, Andrew will stop it here and then we'll kind of dig in a little bit, go into some questions when we're all done. We're actually holding a crowd chat, where you will be able to ask your questions, talk to the experts and everything. And so a little bit different way to do a product announcement. Hope you enjoy it. And with that, it's VxRail. Taking HCI to the extremes is the theme. We'll see what that means and everything. But without any further ado, let's let Shannon take the video away. >> Hello, and welcome. My name is Shannon Champion, and I'm looking forward to taking you through what's new with VxRail. Let's get started. We have a lot to talk about. Our launch covers new announcements addressing use cases across the Core, Edge and Cloud and spans both new hardware platforms and options, as well as the latest in software innovations. So let's jump right in. Before we talk about our announcements, let's talk about where customers are adopting VxRail today. First of all, on behalf of the entire Dell Technologies and VxRail teams, I want to thank each of our over 8000 customers, big and small in virtually every industry, who've chosen VxRail to address a broad range of workloads, deploying nearly 100,000 nodes today. Thank you. Our promise to you is that we will add new functionality, improve serviceability, and support new use cases, so that we deliver the most value to you, whether in the Core, at the Edge or for the Cloud. In the Core, VxRail from day one has been a catalyst to accelerate IT transformation. Many of our customers started here and many will continue to leverage VxRail to simply extend and enhance your VMware environment. Now we can support even more demanding applications such as In-Memory databases, like SAP HANA, and more AI and ML applications, with support for more and more powerful GPUs. At the Edge, video surveillance, which also uses GPUs, by the way, is an example of a popular use case leveraging VxRail alongside external storage. And right now we all know the enhanced role that IT is playing. And as it relates to VDI, VxRail has always been a great option for that. In the Cloud, it's all about Kubernetes, and how Dell Technologies Cloud platform, which is VCF on VxRail can deliver consistent infrastructure for both traditional and Cloud native applications. And we're doing that together with VMware. VxRail is the only jointly engineered HCI system built with VMware for VMware environments, designed to enhance the native VMware experience. This joint engineering with VMware and investments in software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers. >> Alright, so Shannon talked a bit about, the important role of IT Of course right now, with the global pandemic going on. It's really, calling in, essential things, putting, platforms to the test. So, I really love to hear what both of you are hearing from customers. Also, VDI, of course, in the early days, it was, HCI-only-does-VDI. Now, we know there are many solutions, but remote work is putting that back front and center. So, Jon, why don't we start with you as the what is (muffled speaking) >> Absolutely. So first of all, Stu, thank you, I want to do a shout out to our VxRail customers around the world. It's really been humbling, inspiring, and just amazing to see The impact of our VxRail customers around the world and what they're having on on human progress here. Just for a few examples, there are genomics companies that we have running VxRail that have rolled out testing at scale. We also have research universities out in the Netherlands, doing the antibody detection. The US Navy has stood up a floating hospital to of course care for those in need. So we are here to help that's been our message to our customers, but it's amazing to see how much they're helping society during this. So just just a pleasure there. But as you mentioned, just to hit on the VDI comments, so to your points too, HCI, VxRail, VDI, that was an initial use case years ago. And it's been great to see how many of our existing VxRail customers have been able to pivot very quickly leveraging VxRail to add and to help bring their remote workforce online and support them with their existing VxRail. Because VxRail is flexible, it is agile, to be able to support those multiple workloads. And in addition to that, we've also rolled out some new VDI bundles to make it simpler for customers more cost effective cater to everything from knowlEdge workers to multimedia workers. You name it, you know from 250, desktops up to 1000. But again, back to your point VxRail, HCI, is well beyond VDI, it crossed the chasm a couple years ago actually. And VDI now is less than a third of the typical workloads, any of our customers out there, it supports now a range of workloads that you heard from Shannon, whether it's video surveillance, whether it's general purpose, all the way to mission critical applications now with SAP HAN. So, this has changed the game for sure. But the range of work loads and the flexibility of the actual rules which really helping our existing customers during this pandemic. >> Yeah, I agree with you, Jon, we've seen customers really embrace HCI for a number of workloads in their environments, from the ones that we sure all knew and loved back in the initial days of HCI. Now, the mission critical things now to Cloud native workloads as well, and the sort of the efficiencies that customers are able to get from HCI. And specifically, VxRail gives them that ability to pivot. When these, shall we say unexpected circumstances arise? And I think that that's informing their their decisions and their opinions on what their IP strategies look like as they move forward. They want that same level of agility, and ability to react quickly with their overall infrastructure. >> Excellent. Now I want to get into the announcements. What I want my team actually, your team gave me access to the CIO from the city of Amarillo, so maybe they can dig up that footage, talk about how fast they pivoted, using VxRail to really spin up things fast. So let's hear from the announcement first and then definitely want to share that that customer story a little bit later. So let's get to the actual news that Shannon's going to share. >> Okay, now what's new? I am pleased to announce a number of exciting updates and new platforms, to further enable IT modernization across Core, Edge and Cloud. I will cover each of these announcements in more detail, demonstrating how only VxRail can offer the breadth of platform configurations, automation, orchestration and Lifecycle Management, across a fully integrated hardware and software full stack with consistent, simplified operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications. I'll start with hybrid Cloud and recap what you may have seen in the Dell Technologies Cloud announcements just a few weeks ago, related to VMware Cloud foundation on VxRail. Then I'll cover two brand new VxRail hardware platforms and additional options. And finally circle back to talk about the latest enhancements to our VxRail HCI system software capabilities for Lifecycle Management. Let's get started with our new Cloud offerings based on VxRail. VxRail is the HCI foundation for Dell Technologies, Cloud Platform, bringing automation and financial models, similar to public Cloud to On-premises environments. VMware recently introduced Cloud foundation for Delta, which is based on vSphere 7.0. As you likely know by now, vSphere 7.0 was definitely an exciting and highly anticipated release. In keeping with our synchronous release commitment, we introduced VxRail 7.0 based on vSphere 7.0 in late April, which was within 30 days of VMware's release. Two key areas that VMware focused on we're embedding containers and Kubernetes into vSphere, unifying them with virtual machines. And the second is improving the work experience for vSphere administrators with vSphere Lifecycle Manager or VLCM. I'll address the second point a bit in terms of how VxRail fits in in a moment for VCF 4 with Tom Xu, based on vSphere 7.0 customers now have access to a hybrid Cloud platform that supports native Kubernetes workloads and management, as well as your traditional VM-based workloads. So containers are now first class citizens of your private Cloud alongside traditional VMs and this is now available with VCF 4.0, on VxRail 7.0. VxRail's tight integration with VMware Cloud foundation delivers a simple and direct path not only to the hybrid Cloud, but also to deliver Kubernetes at Cloud scale with one complete automated platform. The second Cloud announcement is also exciting. Recent VCF for networking advancements have made it easier than ever to get started with hybrid Cloud, because we're now able to offer a more accessible consolidated architecture. And with that Dell Technologies Cloud platform can now be deployed with a four-node configuration, lowering the cost of an entry level hybrid Cloud. This enables customers to start smaller and grow their Cloud deployment over time. VCF and VxRail can now be deployed in two different ways. For small environments, customers can utilize a consolidated architecture which starts with just four nodes. Since the management and workload domains share resources in this architecture, it's ideal for getting started with an entry level Cloud to run general purpose virtualized workloads with a smaller entry point. Both in terms of required infrastructure footprint as well as cost, but still with a Consistent Cloud operating model. For larger environments where dedicated resources and role-based access control to separate different sets of workloads is usually preferred. You can choose to deploy a standard architecture which starts at eight nodes for independent management and workload domains. A standard implementation is ideal for customers running applications that require dedicated workload domains that includes Horizon, VDI, and vSphere with Kubernetes. >> Alright, Jon, there's definitely been a lot of interest in our community around everything that VMware is doing with vSphere 7.0. understand if you wanted to use the Kubernetes piece, it's VCF as that so we've seen the announcements, Dell, partnering in there it helps us connect that story between, really the VMware strategy and how they talk about Cloud and where does VxRail fit in that overall, Delta Cloud story? >> Absolutely. So first of all Stu, the VxRail course is integral to the Delta Cloud strategy. it's been VCF on VxRail equals the Delta Cloud platform. And this is our flagship on prem Cloud offering, that we've been able to enable operational consistency across any Cloud, whether it's On-prem, in the Edge or in the public Cloud. And we've seen the Dell tech Cloud Platform embraced by customers for a couple key reasons. One is it offers the fastest hybrid Cloud deployment in the market. And this is really, thanks to a new subscription offer that we're now offering out there where in less than 14 days, it can be still up and running. And really, the Dell tech Cloud does bring a lot of flexibility in terms of consumption models, overall when it comes to VxRail. Secondly, I would say is fast and easy upgrades. This is what VxRail brings to the table for all workloads, if you will, into especially critical in the Cloud. So the full automation of Lifecycle Management across the hardware and software stack across the VMware software stack, and in the Dell software and hardware supporting that, together, this enables essentially the third thing, which is customers can just relax. They can be rest assured that their infrastructure will be continuously validated, and always be in a continuously validated state. And this is the kind of thing that those three value propositions together really fit well, with any on-prem Cloud. Now you take what Shannon just mentioned, and the fact that now you can build and run modern applications on the same VxRail infrastructure alongside traditional applications. This is a game changer. >> Yeah, I love it. I remember in the early days talking with Dunn about CI, how does that fit in with Cloud discussion and the line I've used the last couple years is, modernize the platform, then you can modernize the application. So as companies are doing their full modernization, then this plays into what you're talking about. All right, we can let Shannon continue, we can get some more before we dig into some more analysis. >> That's good. >> Let's talk about new hardware platforms and updates. that result in literally thousands of potential new configuration options. covering a wide breadth of modern and traditional application needs across a range of the actual use cases. First up, I am incredibly excited to announce a brand new Dell EMC VxRail series, the D series. This is a ruggedized durable platform that delivers the full power of VxRail for workloads at the Edge in challenging environments or for space constrained areas. VxRail D series offers the same compelling benefits as the rest of the VxRail portfolio with simplicity, agility and lifecycle management. But in a lightweight short depth at only 20 inches, it's adorable form factor that's extremely temperature-resilient, shock resistant, and easily portable. It even meets milspec standards. That means you have the full power of lifecycle automation with VxRail HCI system software and 24 by seven single point of support, enabling you to rapidly react to business needs, no matter the location or how harsh the conditions. So whether you're deploying a data center at a mobile command base, running real-time GPS mapping on the go, or implementing video surveillance in remote areas, you can ensure availability, integrity and confidence for every workload with the new VxRail ruggedized D series. >> All right, Chad we would love for you to bring us in a little bit that what customer requirement for bringing this to market. I remember seeing, Dell servers ruggedized, of course, Edge, really important growth to build on what Jon was talking about, Cloud. So, Chad, bring us inside, what was driving this piece of the offering? >> Sure Stu. Yeah, yeah, having been at the hardware platforms that can go out into some of these remote locations is really important. And that's being driven by the fact that customers are looking for compute performance and storage out at some of these Edges or some of the more exotic locations. whether that's manufacturing plants, oil rigs, submarine ships, military applications, places that we've never heard of. But it's also about extending that operational simplicity of the the sort of way that you're managing your data center that has VxRails you're managing your Edges the same way using the same set of tools. You don't need to learn anything else. So operational simplicity is absolutely key here. But in those locations, you can take a product that's designed for a data center where definitely controlling power cooling space and take it some of these places where you get sand blowing or seven to zero temperatures, could be Baghdad or it could be Ketchikan, Alaska. So we built this D series that was able to go to those extreme locations with extreme heat, extreme cold, extreme altitude, but still offer that operational simplicity. Now military is one of those applications for the rugged platform. If you look at the resistance that it has to heat, it operates at a 45 degrees Celsius or 113 degrees Fahrenheit range, but it can do an excursion up to 55 C or 131 degrees Fahrenheit for up to eight hours. It's also resistant to heat sand, dust, vibration, it's very lightweight, short depth, in fact, it's only 20 inches deep. This is a smallest form factor, obviously that we have in the VxRail family. And it's also built to be able to withstand sudden shocks certified to withstand 40 G's of shock and operation of the 15,000 feet of elevation. Pretty high. And this is sort of like wherever skydivers go to when they want the real thrill of skydiving where you actually need oxygen to, to be for that that altitude. They're milspec-certified. So, MIL-STD-810G, which I keep right beside my bed and read every night. And it comes with a VxRail stick hardening package is packaging scripts so that you can auto lock down the rail environment. And we've got a few other certifications that are on the roadmap now for naval shock requirements. EMI and radiation immunity often. >> Yeah, it's funny, I remember when we first launched it was like, "Oh, well everything's going to white boxes. "And it's going to be massive, "no differentiation between everything out there." If you look at what you're offering, if you look at how public Clouds build their things, but I called it a few years or is there's a pure optimization. So you need to scale, you need similarities but you know you need to fit some, very specific requirements, lots of places, so, interesting stuff. Yeah, certifications, always keep your teams busy. Alright, let's get back to Shannon to view on the report. >> We are also introducing three other hardware-based additions. First, a new VxRail E Series model based on where the first time AMD EPYC processors. These single socket 1U nodes, offer dual socket performance with CPU options that scale from eight to 64 Cores, up to a terabyte of memory and multiple storage options making it an ideal platform for desktop VDI analytics and computer aided design. Next, the addition of the latest Nvidia Quadro RTX GPUs brings the most significant advancement in computer graphics in over a decade to professional work flows. Designers and artists across industries can now expand the boundary of what's possible, working with the largest and most complex graphics rendering, deep learning and visual computing workloads. And Intel Optane DC persistent memory is here, and it offers high performance and significantly increased memory capacity with data persistence at an affordable price. Data persistence is a critical feature that maintains data integrity, even when power is lost, enabling quicker recovery and less downtime. With support for Intel obtain DC persistent memory customers can expand in memory intensive workloads and use cases like SAP HANA. Alright, let's finally dig into our HCI system software, which is the Core differentiation for VxRail regardless of your workload or platform choice. Our joining engineering with VMware and investments in VxRail HCI system software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers. Under the covers, VxRail offers best in class hardware, married with VMware HCI software, either vSAN or VCF. But what makes us different stems from our investments to integrate the two. Dell Technologies has a dedicated VxRail team of about 400 people to build market sell and support a fully integrated hyper converged system. That team has also developed our unique VxRail HCI system software, which is a suite of integrated software elements that extend VMware native capabilities to deliver seamless, automated operational experience that customers cannot find elsewhere. The key components of VxRail HCI system software shown around the arc here that include the extra manager, full stack lifecycle management, ecosystem connectors, and support. I don't have time to get into all the details of these elements today, but if you're interested in learning more, I encourage you to meet our experts. And I will tell you how to do that in a moment. I touched on the LCM being a key feature to the vSphere 7.0 earlier and I'd like to take the opportunity to expand on that a bit in the context of VxRail Lifecycle Management. The LCM adds valuable automation to the execution of updates for customers, but it doesn't eliminate the manual work still needed to define and package the updates and validate all of the components prior to applying them. With VxRail customers have all of these areas addressed automatically on their behalf, freeing them to put their time into other important functions for their business. Customers tell us that Lifecycle management continues to be a major source of the maintenance effort they put into their infrastructure, and then it tends to lead to overburden IT staff, that it can cause disruptions to the business if not managed effectively, and that it isn't the most efficient economically. Automation of Lifecycle Management and VxRail results in the utmost simplicity from a customer experience perspective, and offers operational freedom from maintaining infrastructure. But as shown here, our customers not only realize greater IT team efficiencies, they have also reduced downtime with fewer unplanned outages, and reduced overall cost of operations. With VxRail HCI system software, intelligent Lifecycle Management upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack are automated, keeping clusters and continuously validated states while minimizing risks and operational costs. How do we ensure Continuously validated states for VxRail. VxRail labs execute an extensive, automated, repeatable process on every firmware and software upgrade and patch to ensure clusters are in continuously validated states of the customers choosing across their VxRail environment. The VxRail labs are constantly testing, analyzing, optimizing, and sequencing all of the components in the upgrade to execute in a single package for the full stack. All the while VxRail is backed by Dell EMC's world class services and support with a single point of contact for both hardware and software. IT productivity skyrockets with single click non disruptive upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack without the need to do extensive research and testing. taking you to the next VxRail version of your choice, while always in a continuously validated state. You can also confidently execute automated VxRail upgrades. No matter what hardware generation or node types are in the cluster. They don't have to all be the same. And upgrades with VxRail are faster and more efficient with leapfrogging simply choose any VxRail version you desire. And be assured you will get there in a validated state while seamlessly bypassing any other release in between. Only VxRail can do that. >> All right, so Chad, the lifecycle management piece that Shannon was just talking about is, not the sexiest, it's often underappreciated. There's not only the years of experience, but the continuous work you're doing, reminds me back the early vSAN deployments versus VxRail jointly developed, jointly tested between Dell and VMware. So bring us inside why, 2020 Lifecycle Management still, a very important piece, especially in the VM family line. >> Yes, Stu, I think it's sexy, but, I'm pretty big nerd. (all laughing) Yeah, this is really always been our bread and butter. And in fact, it gets even more important, the larger the deployments come, when you start to look at data centers full of VxRails and all the different hardware software, firmware combinations that could exist out there. It's really the value that you get out of that VxRail HCI system software that Shannon was talking about and how it's optimized around the VMware use case. Very tightly integrated with each VMware component, of course, and the intelligence of being able to do all the firmware, all of the drivers, all the software all together in tremendous value to our customers. But to deliver that we really need to make a fairly large investment. So as Shannon mentioned, we run about 25,000 hours of testing across Each major release for patches, express patches, that's about 7000 hours for each of those. So, obviously, there's a lot of parallelism. And we're always developing new test scenarios for each release that we need to build in as we as we introduce new functionality. And one of the key things that we're able to do, as Shannon mentioned, is to be able to leapfrog releases and get you to that next validated state. We've got about 100 engineers just working on creating and executing those test cases on a continuous basis and obviously, a huge amount of automation. And we've talked about that investment to execute those tests. That's one worth of $60 million of investment in our lab. In fact, we've got just over 2000 VxRail units in our testbed across the US, Shanghai, China and Cork, Ireland. So a massive amount of testing of each of those components to make sure that they operate together in a validated state. >> Yeah, well, absolutely, it's super important not only for the day one, but the day two deployments. But I think this actually a great place for us to bring in that customer that Dell gave me access to. So we've got the CIO of Amarillo, Texas, he was an existing VxRail customer. And he's going to explain what happened as to how he needed to react really fast to support the work-from-home initiative, as well as we get to hear in his words the value of what Lifecycle Management means. So Andrew, if we could queue up that customer segment, please? >> It's been massive and it's been interesting to see the IT team absorb it. As we mature, I think they embrace the ability to be innovative and to work with our departments. But this instance, really justified why I was driving progress. So fervently why it was so urgent today. Three years ago, the answer would have been no. We wouldn't have been in a place where we could adapt With VxRail in place, in a week we spun up hundreds of instant balls. We spun up a 75-person call center in a day and a half, for our public health. We rolled out multiple applications for public health so they could do remote clinics. It's given us the flexibility to be able to roll out new solutions very quickly and be very adaptive. And it's not only been apparent to my team, but it's really made an impact on the business. And now what I'm seeing is those of my customers that work, a little lagging or a little conservative, or understanding the impact of modernizing the way they do business because it makes them adaptable as well. >> Alright, so great, Richard, you talked a bunch about the the efficiencies that that the IT put in place, how about that, that overall just managed, you talked about how fast you spun up these new VDI instances. need to be able to do things much simpler? So how does the overall Lifecycle Management fit into this discussion? >> It makes it so much easier. And in the old environment, one, It took a lot of man hours to make change. It was very disruptive, when we did make change, it overburdened, I guess that's the word I'm looking for. It really overburdened our staff to cause disruption to business. That wasn't cost efficient. And then simple things like, I've worked for multi billion dollar companies where we had massive QA environments that replicated production, simply can't afford that at local government. Having this sort of environment lets me do a scaled down QA environment and still get the benefit of rolling out non disruptive change. As I said earlier, it's allowed us to take all of those cycles that we were spending on Lifecycle Management because it's greatly simplified, and move those resources and rescale them in other areas where we can actually have more impact on the business. It's hard to be innovative when 100% of your cycles are just keeping the ship afloat. >> All right, well, nothing better than hearing it straight from the end user, public sector reacting very fast to the COVID-19. And, if you heard him he said, if this is his, before he had run this project, he would not have been able to respond. So I think everybody out there understands, if I didn't actually have access to the latest technology, it would be much harder. All right, I'm looking forward to doing the CrowdChat letting everybody else dig in with questions and get follow up but a little bit more, I believe one more announcement he can and got for us though. Let's roll the final video clip. >> In our latest software release VxRail 4.7.510, We continue to add new automation and self service features. New functionality enables you to schedule and run upgrade health checks in advance of upgrades, to ensure clusters are in a ready state for the next upgrade or patch. This is extremely valuable for customers that have stringent upgrade windows, as they can be assured the clusters will seamlessly upgrade within that window. Of course, running health checks on a regular basis also helps ensure that your clusters are always ready for unscheduled patches and security updates. We are also offering more flexibility and getting all nodes or clusters to a common release level with the ability to reimage nodes or clusters to a specific VxRail version, or down rev one or more nodes that may be shipped at a higher rate than the existing cluster. This enables you to easily choose your validated state when adding new nodes or repurposing nodes in a cluster. To sum up all of our announcements, whether you are accelerating data sets modernization extending HCI to harsh Edge environments, deploying an on-premises Dell Technologies Cloud platform to create a developer ready Kubernetes infrastructure. VxRail is there delivering a turn-key experience that enables you to continuously innovate, realize operational freedom and predictably evolve. VxRail provides an extensive breadth of platform configurations, automation and Lifecycle Management across the integrated hardware and software full stack and consistent hybrid Cloud operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications across Core, Edge and Cloud. I now invite you to engage with us. First, the virtual passport program is an opportunity to have some fun while learning about VxRail new features and functionality and sCore some sweet digital swag while you're at it. Delivered via an augmented reality app. All you need is your device. So go to vxrail.is/passport to get started. And secondly, if you have any questions about anything I talked about or want a deeper conversation, we encourage you to join one of our exclusive VxRail Meet The Experts sessions available for a limited time. First come first served, just go to vxrail.is/expertsession to learn more. >> All right, well, obviously, with everyone being remote, there's different ways we're looking to engage. So we've got the CrowdChat right after this. But Jon, give us a little bit more as to how Dell's making sure to stay in close contact with customers and what you've got for options for them. >> Yeah, absolutely. So as Shannon said, so in lieu of not having done Tech World this year in person, where we could have those great in-person interactions and answer questions, whether it's in the booth or in meeting rooms, we are going to have these Meet The Experts sessions over the next couple weeks, and we're going to put our best and brightest from our technical community and make them accessible to everyone out there. So again, definitely encourage you. We're trying new things here in this virtual environment to ensure that we can still stay in touch, answer questions, be responsive, and really looking forward to, having these conversations over the next couple of weeks. >> All right, well, Jon and Chad, thank you so much. We definitely look forward to the conversation here and continued. If you're here live, definitely go down below and do it if you're watching this on demand. You can see the full transcript of it at crowdchat.net/vxrailrocks. For myself, Shannon on the video, Jon, Chad, Andrew, man in the booth there, thank you so much for watching, and go ahead and join the CrowdChat.

>> Announcer: From the Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCube Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special presentation. We have a launch from Dell Technologies updates from the VxRail family. We're going to do things a little bit different here. We actually have a launch video Shannon Champion, of Dell Technologies. And the way we do things a lot of times, is, analysts get a little preview or when you're watching things. You might have questions on it. So, rather than me just wanting it, or you wanting yourself I actually brought in a couple of Dell Technologies expertS two of our Cube alumni, happy to welcome you back to the program. Jon Siegal, he is the Vice President of Product Marketing, and Chad Dunn, who's the Vice President of Product Management, both of them with Dell Technologies. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Good to see you Stu. >> Great to be here. >> All right, and so what we're going to do is we're going to be rolling the video here. I've got a button I'm going to press, Andrew will stop it here and then we'll kind of dig in a little bit, go into some questions when we're all done. We're actually holding a crowd chat, where you will be able to ask your questions, talk to the experts and everything. And so a little bit different way to do a product announcement. Hope you enjoy it. And with that, it's VxRail. Taking HCI to the extremes is the theme. We'll see what that means and everything. But without any further ado, let's let Shannon take the video away. >> Hello, and welcome. My name is Shannon Champion, and I'm looking forward to taking you through what's new with VxRail. Let's get started. We have a lot to talk about. Our launch covers new announcements addressing use cases across the Core, Edge and Cloud and spans both new hardware platforms and options, as well as the latest in software innovations. So let's jump right in. Before we talk about our announcements, let's talk about where customers are adopting VxRail today. First of all, on behalf of the entire Dell Technologies and VxRail teams, I want to thank each of our over 8000 customers, big and small in virtually every industry, who've chosen VxRail to address a broad range of workloads, deploying nearly 100,000 nodes today. Thank you. Our promise to you is that we will add new functionality, improve serviceability, and support new use cases, so that we deliver the most value to you, whether in the Core, at the Edge or for the Cloud. In the Core, VxRail from day one has been a catalyst to accelerate IT transformation. Many of our customers started here and many will continue to leverage VxRail to simply extend and enhance your VMware environment. Now we can support even more demanding applications such as In-Memory databases, like SAP HANA, and more AI and ML applications, with support for more and more powerful GPUs. At the Edge, video surveillance, which also uses GPUs, by the way, is an example of a popular use case leveraging VxRail alongside external storage. And right now we all know the enhanced role that IT is playing. And as it relates to VDI, VxRail has always been a great option for that. In the Cloud, it's all about Kubernetes, and how Dell Technologies Cloud platform, which is VCF on VxRail can deliver consistent infrastructure for both traditional and Cloud native applications. And we're doing that together with VMware. VxRail is the only jointly engineered HCI system built with VMware for VMware environments, designed to enhance the native VMware experience. This joint engineering with VMware and investments in software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers. >> Alright, so Shannon talked a bit about, the important role of IT Of course right now, with the global pandemic going on. It's really, calling in, essential things, putting, platforms to the test. So, I really love to hear what both of you are hearing from customers. Also, VDI, of course, in the early days, it was, HCI-only-does-VDI. Now, we know there are many solutions, but remote work is putting that back front and center. So, Jon, why don't we start with you as the what is (muffled speaking) >> Absolutely. So first of all, Stu, thank you, I want to do a shout out to our VxRail customers around the world. It's really been humbling, inspiring, and just amazing to see The impact of our VxRail customers around the world and what they're having on on human progress here. Just for a few examples, there are genomics companies that we have running VxRail that have rolled out testing at scale. We also have research universities out in the Netherlands, doing the antibody detection. The US Navy has stood up a floating hospital to of course care for those in need. So we are here to help that's been our message to our customers, but it's amazing to see how much they're helping society during this. So just just a pleasure there. But as you mentioned, just to hit on the VDI comments, so to your points too, HCI, VxRail, VDI, that was an initial use case years ago. And it's been great to see how many of our existing VxRail customers have been able to pivot very quickly leveraging VxRail to add and to help bring their remote workforce online and support them with their existing VxRail. Because VxRail is flexible, it is agile, to be able to support those multiple workloads. And in addition to that, we've also rolled out some new VDI bundles to make it simpler for customers more cost effective cater to everything from knowlEdge workers to multimedia workers. You name it, you know from 250, desktops up to 1000. But again, back to your point VxRail, HCI, is well beyond VDI, it crossed the chasm a couple years ago actually. And VDI now is less than a third of the typical workloads, any of our customers out there, it supports now a range of workloads that you heard from Shannon, whether it's video surveillance, whether it's general purpose, all the way to mission critical applications now with SAP HAN. So, this has changed the game for sure. But the range of work loads and the flexibility of the actual rules which really helping our existing customers during this pandemic. >> Yeah, I agree with you, Jon, we've seen customers really embrace HCI for a number of workloads in their environments, from the ones that we sure all knew and loved back in the initial days of HCI. Now, the mission critical things now to Cloud native workloads as well, and the sort of the efficiencies that customers are able to get from HCI. And specifically, VxRail gives them that ability to pivot. When these, shall we say unexpected circumstances arise? And I think that that's informing their their decisions and their opinions on what their IP strategies look like as they move forward. They want that same level of agility, and ability to react quickly with their overall infrastructure. >> Excellent. Now I want to get into the announcements. What I want my team actually, your team gave me access to the CIO from the city of Amarillo, so maybe they can dig up that footage, talk about how fast they pivoted, using VxRail to really spin up things fast. So let's hear from the announcement first and then definitely want to share that that customer story a little bit later. So let's get to the actual news that Shannon's going to share. >> Okay, now what's new? I am pleased to announce a number of exciting updates and new platforms, to further enable IT modernization across Core, Edge and Cloud. I will cover each of these announcements in more detail, demonstrating how only VxRail can offer the breadth of platform configurations, automation, orchestration and Lifecycle Management, across a fully integrated hardware and software full stack with consistent, simplified operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications. I'll start with hybrid Cloud and recap what you may have seen in the Dell Technologies Cloud announcements just a few weeks ago, related to VMware Cloud foundation on VxRail. Then I'll cover two brand new VxRail hardware platforms and additional options. And finally circle back to talk about the latest enhancements to our VxRail HCI system software capabilities for Lifecycle Management. Let's get started with our new Cloud offerings based on VxRail. VxRail is the HCI foundation for Dell Technologies, Cloud Platform, bringing automation and financial models, similar to public Cloud to On-premises environments. VMware recently introduced Cloud foundation for Delta, which is based on vSphere 7.0. As you likely know by now, vSphere 7.0 was definitely an exciting and highly anticipated release. In keeping with our synchronous release commitment, we introduced VxRail 7.0 based on vSphere 7.0 in late April, which was within 30 days of VMware's release. Two key areas that VMware focused on we're embedding containers and Kubernetes into vSphere, unifying them with virtual machines. And the second is improving the work experience for vSphere administrators with vSphere Lifecycle Manager or VLCM. I'll address the second point a bit in terms of how VxRail fits in in a moment for VCF 4 with Tom Xu, based on vSphere 7.0 customers now have access to a hybrid Cloud platform that supports native Kubernetes workloads and management, as well as your traditional VM-based workloads. So containers are now first class citizens of your private Cloud alongside traditional VMs and this is now available with VCF 4.0, on VxRail 7.0. VxRail's tight integration with VMware Cloud foundation delivers a simple and direct path not only to the hybrid Cloud, but also to deliver Kubernetes at Cloud scale with one complete automated platform. The second Cloud announcement is also exciting. Recent VCF for networking advancements have made it easier than ever to get started with hybrid Cloud, because we're now able to offer a more accessible consolidated architecture. And with that Dell Technologies Cloud platform can now be deployed with a four-node configuration, lowering the cost of an entry level hybrid Cloud. This enables customers to start smaller and grow their Cloud deployment over time. VCF and VxRail can now be deployed in two different ways. For small environments, customers can utilize a consolidated architecture which starts with just four nodes. Since the management and workload domains share resources in this architecture, it's ideal for getting started with an entry level Cloud to run general purpose virtualized workloads with a smaller entry point. Both in terms of required infrastructure footprint as well as cost, but still with a Consistent Cloud operating model. For larger environments where dedicated resources and role-based access control to separate different sets of workloads is usually preferred. You can choose to deploy a standard architecture which starts at eight nodes for independent management and workload domains. A standard implementation is ideal for customers running applications that require dedicated workload domains that includes Horizon, VDI, and vSphere with Kubernetes. >> Alright, Jon, there's definitely been a lot of interest in our community around everything that VMware is doing with vSphere 7.0. understand if you wanted to use the Kubernetes piece, it's VCF as that so we've seen the announcements, Dell, partnering in there it helps us connect that story between, really the VMware strategy and how they talk about Cloud and where does VxRail fit in that overall, Delta Cloud story? >> Absolutely. So first of all Stu, the VxRail course is integral to the Delta Cloud strategy. it's been VCF on VxRail equals the Delta Cloud platform. And this is our flagship on prem Cloud offering, that we've been able to enable operational consistency across any Cloud, whether it's On-prem, in the Edge or in the public Cloud. And we've seen the Dell tech Cloud Platform embraced by customers for a couple key reasons. One is it offers the fastest hybrid Cloud deployment in the market. And this is really, thanks to a new subscription offer that we're now offering out there where in less than 14 days, it can be still up and running. And really, the Dell tech Cloud does bring a lot of flexibility in terms of consumption models, overall when it comes to VxRail. Secondly, I would say is fast and easy upgrades. This is what VxRail brings to the table for all workloads, if you will, into especially critical in the Cloud. So the full automation of Lifecycle Management across the hardware and software stack across the VMware software stack, and in the Dell software and hardware supporting that, together, this enables essentially the third thing, which is customers can just relax. They can be rest assured that their infrastructure will be continuously validated, and always be in a continuously validated state. And this is the kind of thing that those three value propositions together really fit well, with any on-prem Cloud. Now you take what Shannon just mentioned, and the fact that now you can build and run modern applications on the same VxRail infrastructure alongside traditional applications. This is a game changer. >> Yeah, I love it. I remember in the early days talking with Dunn about CI, how does that fit in with Cloud discussion and the line I've used the last couple years is, modernize the platform, then you can modernize the application. So as companies are doing their full modernization, then this plays into what you're talking about. All right, we can let Shannon continue, we can get some more before we dig into some more analysis. >> That's good. >> Let's talk about new hardware platforms and updates. that result in literally thousands of potential new configuration options. covering a wide breadth of modern and traditional application needs across a range of the actual use cases. First up, I am incredibly excited to announce a brand new Dell EMC VxRail series, the D series. This is a ruggedized durable platform that delivers the full power of VxRail for workloads at the Edge in challenging environments or for space constrained areas. VxRail D series offers the same compelling benefits as the rest of the VxRail portfolio with simplicity, agility and lifecycle management. But in a lightweight short depth at only 20 inches, it's adorable form factor that's extremely temperature-resilient, shock resistant, and easily portable. It even meets milspec standards. That means you have the full power of lifecycle automation with VxRail HCI system software and 24 by seven single point of support, enabling you to rapidly react to business needs, no matter the location or how harsh the conditions. So whether you're deploying a data center at a mobile command base, running real-time GPS mapping on the go, or implementing video surveillance in remote areas, you can ensure availability, integrity and confidence for every workload with the new VxRail ruggedized D series. >> All right, Chad we would love for you to bring us in a little bit that what customer requirement for bringing this to market. I remember seeing, Dell servers ruggedized, of course, Edge, really important growth to build on what Jon was talking about, Cloud. So, Chad, bring us inside, what was driving this piece of the offering? >> Sure Stu. Yeah, yeah, having been at the hardware platforms that can go out into some of these remote locations is really important. And that's being driven by the fact that customers are looking for compute performance and storage out at some of these Edges or some of the more exotic locations. whether that's manufacturing plants, oil rigs, submarine ships, military applications, places that we've never heard of. But it's also about extending that operational simplicity of the the sort of way that you're managing your data center that has VxRails you're managing your Edges the same way using the same set of tools. You don't need to learn anything else. So operational simplicity is absolutely key here. But in those locations, you can take a product that's designed for a data center where definitely controlling power cooling space and take it some of these places where you get sand blowing or seven to zero temperatures, could be Baghdad or it could be Ketchikan, Alaska. So we built this D series that was able to go to those extreme locations with extreme heat, extreme cold, extreme altitude, but still offer that operational simplicity. Now military is one of those applications for the rugged platform. If you look at the resistance that it has to heat, it operates at a 45 degrees Celsius or 113 degrees Fahrenheit range, but it can do an excursion up to 55 C or 131 degrees Fahrenheit for up to eight hours. It's also resistant to heat sand, dust, vibration, it's very lightweight, short depth, in fact, it's only 20 inches deep. This is a smallest form factor, obviously that we have in the VxRail family. And it's also built to be able to withstand sudden shocks certified to withstand 40 G's of shock and operation of the 15,000 feet of elevation. Pretty high. And this is sort of like wherever skydivers go to when they want the real thrill of skydiving where you actually need oxygen to, to be for that that altitude. They're milspec-certified. So, MIL-STD-810G, which I keep right beside my bed and read every night. And it comes with a VxRail stick hardening package is packaging scripts so that you can auto lock down the rail environment. And we've got a few other certifications that are on the roadmap now for naval shock requirements. EMI and radiation immunity often. >> Yeah, it's funny, I remember when we first launched it was like, "Oh, well everything's going to white boxes. "And it's going to be massive, "no differentiation between everything out there." If you look at what you're offering, if you look at how public Clouds build their things, but I called it a few years or is there's a pure optimization. So you need to scale, you need similarities but you know you need to fit some, very specific requirements, lots of places, so, interesting stuff. Yeah, certifications, always keep your teams busy. Alright, let's get back to Shannon to view on the report. >> We are also introducing three other hardware-based additions. First, a new VxRail E Series model based on where the first time AMD EPYC processors. These single socket 1U nodes, offer dual socket performance with CPU options that scale from eight to 64 Cores, up to a terabyte of memory and multiple storage options making it an ideal platform for desktop VDI analytics and computer aided design. Next, the addition of the latest Nvidia Quadro RTX GPUs brings the most significant advancement in computer graphics in over a decade to professional work flows. Designers and artists across industries can now expand the boundary of what's possible, working with the largest and most complex graphics rendering, deep learning and visual computing workloads. And Intel Optane DC persistent memory is here, and it offers high performance and significantly increased memory capacity with data persistence at an affordable price. Data persistence is a critical feature that maintains data integrity, even when power is lost, enabling quicker recovery and less downtime. With support for Intel obtain DC persistent memory customers can expand in memory intensive workloads and use cases like SAP HANA. Alright, let's finally dig into our HCI system software, which is the Core differentiation for VxRail regardless of your workload or platform choice. Our joining engineering with VMware and investments in VxRail HCI system software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers. Under the covers, VxRail offers best in class hardware, married with VMware HCI software, either vSAN or VCF. But what makes us different stems from our investments to integrate the two. Dell Technologies has a dedicated VxRail team of about 400 people to build market sell and support a fully integrated hyper converged system. That team has also developed our unique VxRail HCI system software, which is a suite of integrated software elements that extend VMware native capabilities to deliver seamless, automated operational experience that customers cannot find elsewhere. The key components of VxRail HCI system software shown around the arc here that include the extra manager, full stack lifecycle management, ecosystem connectors, and support. I don't have time to get into all the details of these elements today, but if you're interested in learning more, I encourage you to meet our experts. And I will tell you how to do that in a moment. I touched on the LCM being a key feature to the vSphere 7.0 earlier and I'd like to take the opportunity to expand on that a bit in the context of VxRail Lifecycle Management. The LCM adds valuable automation to the execution of updates for customers, but it doesn't eliminate the manual work still needed to define and package the updates and validate all of the components prior to applying them. With VxRail customers have all of these areas addressed automatically on their behalf, freeing them to put their time into other important functions for their business. Customers tell us that Lifecycle management continues to be a major source of the maintenance effort they put into their infrastructure, and then it tends to lead to overburden IT staff, that it can cause disruptions to the business if not managed effectively, and that it isn't the most efficient economically. Automation of Lifecycle Management and VxRail results in the utmost simplicity from a customer experience perspective, and offers operational freedom from maintaining infrastructure. But as shown here, our customers not only realize greater IT team efficiencies, they have also reduced downtime with fewer unplanned outages, and reduced overall cost of operations. With VxRail HCI system software, intelligent Lifecycle Management upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack are automated, keeping clusters and continuously validated states while minimizing risks and operational costs. How do we ensure Continuously validated states for VxRail. VxRail labs execute an extensive, automated, repeatable process on every firmware and software upgrade and patch to ensure clusters are in continuously validated states of the customers choosing across their VxRail environment. The VxRail labs are constantly testing, analyzing, optimizing, and sequencing all of the components in the upgrade to execute in a single package for the full stack. All the while VxRail is backed by Dell EMC's world class services and support with a single point of contact for both hardware and software. IT productivity skyrockets with single click non disruptive upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack without the need to do extensive research and testing. taking you to the next VxRail version of your choice, while always in a continuously validated state. You can also confidently execute automated VxRail upgrades. No matter what hardware generation or node types are in the cluster. They don't have to all be the same. And upgrades with VxRail are faster and more efficient with leapfrogging simply choose any VxRail version you desire. And be assured you will get there in a validated state while seamlessly bypassing any other release in between. Only VxRail can do that. >> All right, so Chad, the lifecycle management piece that Shannon was just talking about is, not the sexiest, it's often underappreciated. There's not only the years of experience, but the continuous work you're doing, reminds me back the early vSAN deployments versus VxRail jointly developed, jointly tested between Dell and VMware. So bring us inside why, 2020 Lifecycle Management still, a very important piece, especially in the VM family line. >> Yes, Stu, I think it's sexy, but, I'm pretty big nerd. (all laughing) Yeah, this is really always been our bread and butter. And in fact, it gets even more important, the larger the deployments come, when you start to look at data centers full of VxRails and all the different hardware software, firmware combinations that could exist out there. It's really the value that you get out of that VxRail HCI system software that Shannon was talking about and how it's optimized around the VMware use case. Very tightly integrated with each VMware component, of course, and the intelligence of being able to do all the firmware, all of the drivers, all the software all together in tremendous value to our customers. But to deliver that we really need to make a fairly large investment. So as Shannon mentioned, we run about 25,000 hours of testing across Each major release for patches, express patches, that's about 7000 hours for each of those. So, obviously, there's a lot of parallelism. And we're always developing new test scenarios for each release that we need to build in as we as we introduce new functionality. And one of the key things that we're able to do, as Shannon mentioned, is to be able to leapfrog releases and get you to that next validated state. We've got about 100 engineers just working on creating and executing those test cases on a continuous basis and obviously, a huge amount of automation. And we've talked about that investment to execute those tests. That's one worth of $60 million of investment in our lab. In fact, we've got just over 2000 VxRail units in our testbed across the US, Shanghai, China and Cork, Ireland. So a massive amount of testing of each of those components to make sure that they operate together in a validated state. >> Yeah, well, absolutely, it's super important not only for the day one, but the day two deployments. But I think this actually a great place for us to bring in that customer that Dell gave me access to. So we've got the CIO of Amarillo, Texas, he was an existing VxRail customer. And he's going to explain what happened as to how he needed to react really fast to support the work-from-home initiative, as well as we get to hear in his words the value of what Lifecycle Management means. So Andrew, if we could queue up that customer segment, please? >> It's been massive and it's been interesting to see the IT team absorb it. As we mature, I think they embrace the ability to be innovative and to work with our departments. But this instance, really justified why I was driving progress. So fervently why it was so urgent today. Three years ago, the answer would have been no. We wouldn't have been in a place where we could adapt With VxRail in place, in a week we spun up hundreds of instant balls. We spun up a 75-person call center in a day and a half, for our public health. We rolled out multiple applications for public health so they could do remote clinics. It's given us the flexibility to be able to roll out new solutions very quickly and be very adaptive. And it's not only been apparent to my team, but it's really made an impact on the business. And now what I'm seeing is those of my customers that work, a little lagging or a little conservative, or understanding the impact of modernizing the way they do business because it makes them adaptable as well. >> Alright, so great, Richard, you talked a bunch about the the efficiencies that that the IT put in place, how about that, that overall just managed, you talked about how fast you spun up these new VDI instances. need to be able to do things much simpler? So how does the overall Lifecycle Management fit into this discussion? >> It makes it so much easier. And in the old environment, one, It took a lot of man hours to make change. It was very disruptive, when we did make change, it overburdened, I guess that's the word I'm looking for. It really overburdened our staff to cause disruption to business. That wasn't cost efficient. And then simple things like, I've worked for multi billion dollar companies where we had massive QA environments that replicated production, simply can't afford that at local government. Having this sort of environment lets me do a scaled down QA environment and still get the benefit of rolling out non disruptive change. As I said earlier, it's allowed us to take all of those cycles that we were spending on Lifecycle Management because it's greatly simplified, and move those resources and rescale them in other areas where we can actually have more impact on the business. It's hard to be innovative when 100% of your cycles are just keeping the ship afloat. >> All right, well, nothing better than hearing it straight from the end user, public sector reacting very fast to the COVID-19. And, if you heard him he said, if this is his, before he had run this project, he would not have been able to respond. So I think everybody out there understands, if I didn't actually have access to the latest technology, it would be much harder. All right, I'm looking forward to doing the CrowdChat letting everybody else dig in with questions and get follow up but a little bit more, I believe one more announcement he can and got for us though. Let's roll the final video clip. >> In our latest software release VxRail 4.7.510, We continue to add new automation and self service features. New functionality enables you to schedule and run upgrade health checks in advance of upgrades, to ensure clusters are in a ready state for the next upgrade or patch. This is extremely valuable for customers that have stringent upgrade windows, as they can be assured the clusters will seamlessly upgrade within that window. Of course, running health checks on a regular basis also helps ensure that your clusters are always ready for unscheduled patches and security updates. We are also offering more flexibility and getting all nodes or clusters to a common release level with the ability to reimage nodes or clusters to a specific VxRail version, or down rev one or more nodes that may be shipped at a higher rate than the existing cluster. This enables you to easily choose your validated state when adding new nodes or repurposing nodes in a cluster. To sum up all of our announcements, whether you are accelerating data sets modernization extending HCI to harsh Edge environments, deploying an on-premises Dell Technologies Cloud platform to create a developer ready Kubernetes infrastructure. VxRail is there delivering a turn-key experience that enables you to continuously innovate, realize operational freedom and predictably evolve. VxRail provides an extensive breadth of platform configurations, automation and Lifecycle Management across the integrated hardware and software full stack and consistent hybrid Cloud operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications across Core, Edge and Cloud. I now invite you to engage with us. First, the virtual passport program is an opportunity to have some fun while learning about VxRail new features and functionality and sCore some sweet digital swag while you're at it. Delivered via an augmented reality app. All you need is your device. So go to vxrail.is/passport to get started. And secondly, if you have any questions about anything I talked about or want a deeper conversation, we encourage you to join one of our exclusive VxRail Meet The Experts sessions available for a limited time. First come first served, just go to vxrail.is/expertsession to learn more. >> All right, well, obviously, with everyone being remote, there's different ways we're looking to engage. So we've got the CrowdChat right after this. But Jon, give us a little bit more as to how Dell's making sure to stay in close contact with customers and what you've got for options for them. >> Yeah, absolutely. So as Shannon said, so in lieu of not having done Tech World this year in person, where we could have those great in-person interactions and answer questions, whether it's in the booth or in meeting rooms, we are going to have these Meet The Experts sessions over the next couple weeks, and we're going to put our best and brightest from our technical community and make them accessible to everyone out there. So again, definitely encourage you. We're trying new things here in this virtual environment to ensure that we can still stay in touch, answer questions, be responsive, and really looking forward to, having these conversations over the next couple of weeks. >> All right, well, Jon and Chad, thank you so much. We definitely look forward to the conversation here and continued. If you're here live, definitely go down below and do it if you're watching this on demand. You can see the full transcript of it at crowdchat.net/vxrailrocks. For myself, Shannon on the video, Jon, Chad, Andrew, man in the booth there, thank you so much for watching, and go ahead and join the CrowdChat.

>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2020 brought to you by Cisco and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hi, everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage, it's our fourth day of four days of coverage here in Barcelona, Spain for Cisco Live 2020. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Stu Miniman and two great guests here in the DevNet studio where the theCUBE is sitting all week long, been packed with action, Mandy Whaley, Senior Director Developer Experience, Cisco DevNet and Par Merat, Senior Director welcome back to this CUBE. Good to see you guys. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Glad to be here. >> So, we have had a lot of history with you guys from day one. >> Mandy: Yes. >> Watching DevNet from an idea of "Hey, we should do developer thing." And you also have DevNet Create which is a separate, more developer focused. DevNet and Cisco's developer environment. We've been there from the beginning, what a progression! Congratulations on the success. >> Thank you. Thank you so much, it's great to be here in Barcelona with everybody here, you know, learning in the workshops, and we just love these times to connect with our community at Cisco Live, and At DevNet Create, which you mentioned, which is coming up in March. So its right on the corner. >> DevNet Zone which we're in has been really robust, it's been the talk of the show every year, and it gets bigger and the sessions are packed, because people are learning developers, new developers as well as Cisco engineers who are certified, are coming getting new skills as the modern cloud hybrid environments require new skills. It's a technology shift. >> Yeah, exactly and what we have in the DevNet Zone are different ways that the engineers and developers can engage with that technology shifts. So, we have demos around IoT and security, and showing how, you know, to prevent threats from attacking the industrial routers and things like that. We have coding workshops from beginning, intro to Python, intro to Gets, all the way up through advanced, like, Kubernetes topics and things like that. So, people can really dive in with what they're looking for. And this year, we are really excited because we have the new DevNet certifications with those exams coming out right around the corner in February. So, a lot of people are here saying, "I am ready to skill up for those exams, "I am starting to dive into these topics." >> Well, Susie Wee was on, she's the chief of DevNet, among other things, and she said, there's going to be a DevNet 500. The first 500 certifications of DevNet are going to be, kind of, like, the hall of fame or, you know, inaugural or founder certifications. So, can you explain what does it mean? It's not a DevNet certification badge. It's a series of different, can go deeper than that? >> Yeah, just like we have our, you know, existing Network Certifications which are so respected and loved around the world, people get CCIE tattoos and things. Just like there is an associate and professional and expert level on the networking track, there's now a DevNet Associate, a DevNet Professional and coming soon DevNet Expert. And then there's also Specialist badges which help you add specific skills like data center automation, IoT web access. So, it's a whole new set of certifications that are more focused on the software. So they're about 80% software skills, 20% knowledge of networking, and then how you really connect up and down the stack. >> So these are new certifications, they're not replacing anything else >> No, no, no they're all the same stuff? >> They are new, they are part of the same program, they have the same rigor, the same kind of test. They actually have ways to interweave with the existing networking certifications, because we want people to do both skill path, right, to build this new IT team of the future. And so, it's a completely new set of exams. The exams are going to be available to take February 24th, and you can start signing up now. So, with the DevNet 500, you know, that's going to be a special recognition for the first 500 people who get DevNet certifications. It'll be life-time achievement, they'll always be in a DevNet 500, right? And I've had people coming up and telling me, you know "I'm signed up for the first day, "I'm taking my exams on the first day, "I'm trying to get into that." >> Stu and I always want to be on the list, so I think we might be on the 500 study up there (laughs). >> Of course, yeah, And what's really great is with the certifications, we've heard from people in the Zone that, they have been coming and taking classes and learning the skills, but they didn't have a specific way to map that to their career path to get rewarded at work, you know, to have that sort of progression. And so with the certifications they will really will have that. And it's also really important for our partners and Par Merat is doing lot of work with certifications and partners. >> Yeah, Par, definitely, I would love to hear a little bit, we've interviewed on theCUBE over the years some of the DevNet partners from a technology standpoint, of course the channel ecosystem hugely important to Cisco's business. Give us the update as to, you know, DevNet partnering as well as, what will these certifications mean to about the technology and go-to-market partners? >> Yeah, the wonderful thing about this is, it really demonstrates Cisco's embracement of software, and making sure that we are providing that common language for software developers and networkers to bring the two together. And what we've found is that our partners are at different levels of maturity along that progression of programmability. And this new DevNet specialization, which is anchored in the individuals that are now certified at that partner, allow them to demonstrate from a go-to-market standpoint, from a recognition standpoint, that as a practice they have these skills. And look, at the end of the day, it's all about delivering what our customers need. And our customers are asking us for significant help in automation, digital transformation, they're trying to drive new business outcomes. And this will provide that recognition on who to partner with in the market. >> Yeah, this is so important I remember when Cisco helped a lot of the the partner ecosystem build data center practices. Went from the silos and now embracing, you've got the hardware the software, we're talking multicloud. It's the practice that is needed today going forward to help customers with with where they are going. >> It really is. And another benefit that we are finding in talking to our partners is where packaging this up and rolling it out, is not only will it help them from a recognition standpoint, from a practice stand point and from a competitive differentiation standpoint. But it will also help them attract talent. I mean, it's no secret, there is a talent shortage right now. If you talk to any CEO that's top of mind, and how these partners are able to attract these new skills and attract smart people. Smart people like working on smart things, right? And so this has really been a big traction point for them as well. >> It's also giving ways to really specifically train for new job roles. So some of the ways that you can combine the new DevNet certifications with the network engineering certifications. We've looked at it and said, you know, there's a role of network automation developer. That's a new role. Everyone we ask in one of our sessions, "Who needs that person on their team?" So many customers, partners raise their hands saying, "We want the Network Automation Developers on our team." And you can combine your CCNP Enterprise with a DevNet certification and build up the skills to be that Network Automation Developers >> Certainly it's been great buzz. I've got to get your guys' thoughts because certainly it's great for careers and you guys are betting on the people, and the people are betting on Cisco. This is what's going on, it's a maturity of DevNet, almost. It's like a pinch-me moment for you guys, but you continue to grow. I've got to ask you, what are some of the cool things that you're showing here? As you mature, you still have the start here session, which is intro to Python and other things, pretty elementary, and then there's more advanced things. What are some of the new things that's going on that you could share? >> So some of the new things we've got going on, one of my favorites is the IoT and security demonstration. There's an industrial robot arm that's picking and placing things, and you can see how it's connected to the network and then something goes wrong with that robot arm. And then you can actually show how you can use the software and security tools to see was there code trying to access, you know, something that that robot was using, that's getting in the way of it working? So you could detect threats and move forward on that. We also have a whole automation journey that starts from modeling your network to testing, to how you would deploy automation, to a deep dive on telemetry and then ends with multi-domain automation. So really helping engineers, like, look at that whole progression, that's been really popular. >> Par, talk about the specialization, which ones are more, I'd say popular or entry level, which ones are people coming into getting certified first, network engineering, automation first? Or what's the-- >> Yeah, so the program's going to to roll out with three different levels. One is a specialized level, the second is an advanced level, and then we'll look to that third level. Again, they're anchored in the individual certs. And so as we look for that entry level, it's really all about automation, right? I mean, some things you take for granted, but you still need these new skills to be able to automate and scale, and have repeatable, scalable benefits from that. The second tier will be more cross-domain and that's where we're really thinking that additional skill set is needed to deliver dashboard experience, compliance experiences, and then that next level, again, will anchor towards the expert level that's coming out. But one thing I want to point out is, in addition to just having the certified people on staff, they also have to demonstrate that they have a practice around it. So it's not just enough to say, "I passed an exam." As we work with them to roll out the practice and they earn the badge, they're demonstrating that they have the full methodology in place so that it really, there's a lot behind it. >> So that means we can't be in the 500 list then even if we pass (laughs). >> Well, you might be able to be in the 500 list, but I don't know that theCUBE would end up being specialized. >> It's good banner advertising. No, seriously all fun, it's all fun. Cisco Live in Europe. Is there a difference between European and U.S.? Are you seeing any differences in geographic talent? >> You know what, the first couple of years that we did it, I think there was a bigger difference. It felt like there were different topics that were very popular in the U.S., slightly different in Europe. Last year and this year I feel, like they have converged. It's the same focus on DevOps, automation, security is a huge focus in both places. And it also feels like the interest and level of the people attending has also converged. It's really similar. Congratulations, it's been fun to watch the rise and success of DevNet, continues to be strong, obviously in the hub here, and the DevNet zone behind us, packed sessions. >> Mandy: Yes, yes. >> What's the biggest surprise for you guys in terms of things that you didn't expect or some of the success, what's jumped out? >> Yeah, I think, you know, one of the points that I want to make sure we also cover and it has been an added benefit. We were hoping it would happen, we just didn't realize it would happen this soon. We're attracting new companies, new partners, so the specialization won't just be available for our traditional VARs. This is also available for our non resellers and we are finding different companies accessing DevNet resources and learning these skills. So that's been a really great benefit of DevNet overall. >> Definitely, my favorite surprises are when I show up at the community events and I hear from someone I met last year what they went back and did, and the change that they drove in their company. And I think we're seeing those across the board of people who start a grassroots movement, take back some new ideas, really create change, and then they come back and we get to hear about that from them. Those are my favorite surprises. >> And I tell you, we've known for years how important the developer is, but I think the timing on this has been perfect because it is no longer just, Oh, the developer has some tools that they'd liked in the corner. The developer connected to the business and driving things forward. >> Mandy: Exactly. So perfect timing, congratulations on the certification-- >> The other thing that's been great is that Cisco itself, we now have APIs across the whole portfolio and up and down the stack. So that's been a wonderful thing to see come together because it opens up possibilities for all these developers. >> So Cisco is API first company? >> We are building APIs everywhere we can, and the community is taking them and finding creative things to build. >> Well, it's been fun to watch you guys change Cisco, but also impact customers has been great to watch. Par many thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> Yeah, thank you. >> theCUBE's live coverage here in Barcelona for Cisco Live 2020 I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman. Be right back with more after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2020 brought to you by Cisco and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hi, everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage, it's our fourth day of four days of coverage here in Barcelona, Spain for Cisco Live 2020. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Stu Miniman and two great guests here in the DevNet studio where the theCUBE is sitting all week long, been packed with action, Mandy Whaley, Senior Director Developer Experience, Cisco DevNet and Par Merat, Senior Director welcome back to this CUBE. Good to see you guys. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Glad to be here. >> So, we have had a lot of history with you guys from day one. >> Mandy: Yes. >> Watching DevNet from an idea of "Hey, we should do developer thing." And you also have DevNet Create which is a separate, more developer focused. DevNet and Cisco's developer environment. We've been there from the beginning, what a progression! Congratulations on the success. >> Thank you. Thank you so much, it's great to be here in Barcelona with everybody here, you know, learning in the workshops, and we just love these times to connect with our community at Cisco Live, and At DevNet Create, which you mentioned, which is coming up in March. So its right on the corner. >> DevNet Zone which we're in has been really robust, it's been the talk of the show every year, and it gets bigger and the sessions are packed, because people are learning developers, new developers as well as Cisco engineers who are certified, are coming getting new skills as the modern cloud hybrid environments require new skills. It's a technology shift. >> Yeah, exactly and what we have in the DevNet Zone are different ways that the engineers and developers can engage with that technology shifts. So, we have demos around IoT and security, and showing how, you know, to prevent threats from attacking the industrial routers and things like that. We have coding workshops from beginning, intro to Python, intro to Gets, all the way up through advanced, like, Kubernetes topics and things like that. So, people can really dive in with what they're looking for. And this year, we are really excited because we have the new DevNet certifications with those exams coming out right around the corner in February. So, a lot of people are here saying, "I am ready to skill up for those exams, "I am starting to dive into these topics." >> Well, Susie Wee was on, she's the chief of DevNet, among other things, and she said, there's going to be a DevNet 500. The first 500 certifications of DevNet are going to be, kind of, like, the hall of fame or, you know, inaugural or founder certifications. So, can you explain what does it mean? It's not a DevNet certification badge. It's a series of different, can go deeper than that? >> Yeah, just like we have our, you know, existing Network Certifications which are so respected and loved around the world, people get CCIE tattoos and things. Just like there is an associate and professional and expert level on the networking track, there's now a DevNet Associate, a DevNet Professional and coming soon DevNet Expert. And then there's also Specialist badges which help you add specific skills like data center automation, IoT web access. So, it's a whole new set of certifications that are more focused on the software. So they're about 80% software skills, 20% knowledge of networking, and then how you really connect up and down the stack. >> So these are new certifications, they're not replacing anything else >> No, no, no they're all the same stuff? >> They are new, they are part of the same program, they have the same rigor, the same kind of test. They actually have ways to interweave with the existing networking certifications, because we want people to do both skill path, right, to build this new IT team of the future. And so, it's a completely new set of exams. The exams are going to be available to take February 24th, and you can start signing up now. So, with the DevNet 500, you know, that's going to be a special recognition for the first 500 people who get DevNet certifications. It'll be life-time achievement, they'll always be in a DevNet 500, right? And I've had people coming up and telling me, you know "I'm signed up for the first day, "I'm taking my exams on the first day, "I'm trying to get into that." >> Stu and I always want to be on the list, so I think we might be on the 500 study up there (laughs). >> Of course, yeah, And what's really great is with the certifications, we've heard from people in the Zone that, they have been coming and taking classes and learning the skills, but they didn't have a specific way to map that to their career path to get rewarded at work, you know, to have that sort of progression. And so with the certifications they will really will have that. And it's also really important for our partners and Par Merat is doing lot of work with certifications and partners. >> Yeah, Par, definitely, I would love to hear a little bit, we've interviewed on theCUBE over the years some of the DevNet partners from a technology standpoint, of course the channel ecosystem hugely important to Cisco's business. Give us the update as to, you know, DevNet partnering as well as, what will these certifications mean to about the technology and go-to-market partners? >> Yeah, the wonderful thing about this is, it really demonstrates Cisco's embracement of software, and making sure that we are providing that common language for software developers and networkers to bring the two together. And what we've found is that our partners are at different levels of maturity along that progression of programmability. And this new DevNet specialization, which is anchored in the individuals that are now certified at that partner, allow them to demonstrate from a go-to-market standpoint, from a recognition standpoint, that as a practice they have these skills. And look, at the end of the day, it's all about delivering what our customers need. And our customers are asking us for significant help in automation, digital transformation, they're trying to drive new business outcomes. And this will provide that recognition on who to partner with in the market. >> Yeah, this is so important I remember when Cisco helped a lot of the the partner ecosystem build data center practices. Went from the silos and now embracing, you've got the hardware the software, we're talking multicloud. It's the practice that is needed today going forward to help customers with with where they are going. >> It really is. And another benefit that we are finding in talking to our partners is where packaging this up and rolling it out, is not only will it help them from a recognition standpoint, from a practice stand point and from a competitive differentiation standpoint. But it will also help them attract talent. I mean, it's no secret, there is a talent shortage right now. If you talk to any CEO that's top of mind, and how these partners are able to attract these new skills and attract smart people. Smart people like working on smart things, right? And so this has really been a big traction point for them as well. >> It's also giving ways to really specifically train for new job roles. So some of the ways that you can combine the new DevNet certifications with the network engineering certifications. We've looked at it and said, you know, there's a role of network automation developer. That's a new role. Everyone we ask in one of our sessions, "Who needs that person on their team?" So many customers, partners raise their hands saying, "We want the Network Automation Developers on our team." And you can combine your CCNP Enterprise with a DevNet certification and build up the skills to be that Network Automation Developers >> Certainly it's been great buzz. I've got to get your guys' thoughts because certainly it's great for careers and you guys are betting on the people, and the people are betting on Cisco. This is what's going on, it's a maturity of DevNet, almost. It's like a pinch-me moment for you guys, but you continue to grow. I've got to ask you, what are some of the cool things that you're showing here? As you mature, you still have the start here session, which is intro to Python and other things, pretty elementary, and then there's more advanced things. What are some of the new things that's going on that you could share? >> So some of the new things we've got going on, one of my favorites is the IoT and security demonstration. There's an industrial robot arm that's picking and placing things, and you can see how it's connected to the network and then something goes wrong with that robot arm. And then you can actually show how you can use the software and security tools to see was there code trying to access, you know, something that that robot was using, that's getting in the way of it working? So you could detect threats and move forward on that. We also have a whole automation journey that starts from modeling your network to testing, to how you would deploy automation, to a deep dive on telemetry and then ends with multi-domain automation. So really helping engineers, like, look at that whole progression, that's been really popular. >> Par, talk about the specialization, which ones are more, I'd say popular or entry level, which ones are people coming into getting certified first, network engineering, automation first? Or what's the-- >> Yeah, so the program's going to to roll out with three different levels. One is a specialized level, the second is an advanced level, and then we'll look to that third level. Again, they're anchored in the individual certs. And so as we look for that entry level, it's really all about automation, right? I mean, some things you take for granted, but you still need these new skills to be able to automate and scale, and have repeatable, scalable benefits from that. The second tier will be more cross-domain and that's where we're really thinking that additional skill set is needed to deliver dashboard experience, compliance experiences, and then that next level, again, will anchor towards the expert level that's coming out. But one thing I want to point out is, in addition to just having the certified people on staff, they also have to demonstrate that they have a practice around it. So it's not just enough to say, "I passed an exam." As we work with them to roll out the practice and they earn the badge, they're demonstrating that they have the full methodology in place so that it really, there's a lot behind it. >> So that means we can't be in the 500 list then even if we pass (laughs). >> Well, you might be able to be in the 500 list, but I don't know that theCUBE would end up being specialized. >> It's good banner advertising. No, seriously all fun, it's all fun. Cisco Live in Europe. Is there a difference between European and U.S.? Are you seeing any differences in geographic talent? >> You know what, the first couple of years that we did it, I think there was a bigger difference. It felt like there were different topics that were very popular in the U.S., slightly different in Europe. Last year and this year I feel, like they have converged. It's the same focus on DevOps, automation, security is a huge focus in both places. And it also feels like the interest and level of the people attending has also converged. It's really similar. Congratulations, it's been fun to watch the rise and success of DevNet, continues to be strong, obviously in the hub here, and the DevNet zone behind us, packed sessions. >> Mandy: Yes, yes. >> What's the biggest surprise for you guys in terms of things that you didn't expect or some of the success, what's jumped out? >> Yeah, I think, you know, one of the points that I want to make sure we also cover and it has been an added benefit. We were hoping it would happen, we just didn't realize it would happen this soon. We're attracting new companies, new partners, so the specialization won't just be available for our traditional VARs. This is also available for our non resellers and we are finding different companies accessing DevNet resources and learning these skills. So that's been a really great benefit of DevNet overall. >> Definitely, my favorite surprises are when I show up at the community events and I hear from someone I met last year what they went back and did, and the change that they drove in their company. And I think we're seeing those across the board of people who start a grassroots movement, take back some new ideas, really create change, and then they come back and we get to hear about that from them. Those are my favorite surprises. >> And I tell you, we've known for years how important the developer is, but I think the timing on this has been perfect because it is no longer just, Oh, the developer has some tools that they'd liked in the corner. The developer connected to the business and driving things forward. >> Mandy: Exactly. So perfect timing, congratulations on the certification-- >> The other thing that's been great is that Cisco itself, we now have APIs across the whole portfolio and up and down the stack. So that's been a wonderful thing to see come together because it opens up possibilities for all these developers. >> So Cisco is API first company? >> We are building APIs everywhere we can, and the community is taking them and finding creative things to build. >> Well, it's been fun to watch you guys change Cisco, but also impact customers has been great to watch. Par many thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> Yeah, thank you. >> theCUBE's live coverage here in Barcelona for Cisco Live 2020 I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman. Be right back with more after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Miami, Florida, it's The Cube. Covering IBM's Data in AI Forum, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to Miami, everybody. You're watching The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here covering the IBM Data and AI Forum. Scott Buckles is here to my right. He's the business unit executive at IBM and long time Cube alum, Daniel Hernandez is the Vice President of Data and AI group. Good to see you guys, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> Good to see you. >> You're very welcome. We're going to talk about data ops, kind of accelerating the journey to AI around data ops, but what is data ops and how does it fit into AI? Daniel, we'll start with you. >> There's no AI without data. You've got data science to help you build AI. You've got dev ops to help you build apps. You've got nothing to basically help you prepare data for AI. Data ops is the equivalent of dev ops, but for delivering AI ready data. >> So, how are you, Scott, dealing with this topic with customers, is it resonating? Are they leaning into it, or are they saying, "what?" >> No, it's absolutely resonating. We have a lot of customers that are doing a lot of good things on the data science side. But, trying to get the right data at the right people, and do it fast, is a huge problem. They're finding they're spending too much time prepping data, getting the data into the models, and they're not spending enough time failing fast with some of those models, or getting the models that they need to put in production into production fast enough. So, this absolutely resonates with them because I think it's been confusing for a long time. >> So, AI's scary to a lot of people, right? It's a complicated situation, right? And how do you make it less scary? >> Talk about problems that can be solved with it, basically. You want a better customer experience in your contact center, you want a similarly amazing experience when they're interacting with you on the web. How do you do that? AI is simply a way to get it done, and a way to get it done exceptionally well. So, that's how I like to talk about it. I don't start with here's AI, tell me what problems you can solve. Here are the problems you've got, and where appropriate, here's where AI can help. >> So what are some of your favorite problems that you guys are solving with customers. >> Customer and employee care, which, basically, is any business that does business has customers. Customer and employee care are huge a problem space. Catching bad people, financial crimes investigation is a huge one. Fraud, KYC AML as an example. >> National security, things like that, right? >> Yeah. >> You spend all your time with customers, what else? >> Well, customer experience is probably the one that we're seeing the most. The other is being more efficient. Helping businesses solve those problems quicker, faster. Try to find new avenues for revenue. How to cut costs out of their organization, out of their run time. Those are the ones that we see the most. >> So when you say customer experience, immediately chat bots jumps into my head. But I know we're talking more than, sort of a, transcends chat bots, but double click on customer experience, how are people applying machine intelligence to improve customer experience? >> Well, when I think of it, I think about if you call in to Delta, and you have one bad experience, or your airline, whatever that airline may be, that that customer experience could lead to losing that customer forever, and there used to be an old adage that you have one bad experience and you tell 10 people about it, you have a good one, and you tell one person, or two peoples. So, getting the right data to have that experience is where it becomes a challenge and we've seen instances where customers, or excuse me, organizations are literally trying to find the data on the screen while the customer is on hold. So, they're saying, "can I put you on hold?" and they're trying to go out and find it. So, being able to automate finding that data, getting it in the right hands, to the right people, at the right time, in moment's notice, is a great opportunity for AI and machine learning, and that's an example of how we do it. >> So, from a technical standpoint, Daniel, you guys have this IBM Cloud Pak for Data that's going to magic data virtualization thing. Let's take an example that Scott just gave us, think of an airline. I love my mobile app, I can do everything on my mobile app, except there are certain things I can't do, I have to go to the website. There are certain things I have to do with e-commerce that I have to go to the website that I can't do. Sometimes watching a movie, I can't order a movie from the app, I have to go to website, the URL, and order it there and put it on my watch list. So, I presume that there's some technical debt in each of those platforms, and there's no way to get the data from here, and the data from here talking to each other. Is that the kind of problem that you're solving? >> Yes, and in this particular case, you're actually touching on what we mean by customer and employee care everywhere. The interaction you have on your phone should be the same as the interaction and the kind of response on the web, which should be the same, if not better, when you're talking to a human being. How do you have the exceptional customer and employee care, all channels. Today, say the art is, I've got a specific experience for my phone, a specific experience for my website, a specific, different experience in my contact center. The whole work we're doing around Watson Assistant, and it as a virtual assistant, is to be that nervous system that underpins all channels, and with Cloud Pak for Data, we can deliver it anywhere. You want to run your contact center on an IBM Cloud? Great. You want to run it on Amazon, Azure, Google, your own private center, or everything in between, great. Cloud Pak for Data is how you get Watson Assistant, the rest of Watson and our data stack anywhere you want, so you can deliver that same consistent, amazing experience, all channels, anywhere. >> And I know the tone of my question was somewhat negative, but I'm actually optimistic, and there's a couple examples I'll give. I remember Bill Belichick one time said, "Agh, the weather, it can't ever get the weather right," this is probably five, six years ago. Actually, they do pretty well with the weather compared to 10 or 15 years ago. The other is fraud detection. In the last 10 years, fraud detection has become so much better in terms of just the time it takes to identify a fraud, and the number of false positives. Even in the last, I'd say, 12 to 18 months, false positives are way down. I think that's machine intelligence, right? >> I mean, if you're using business rules, they're not way down. They're still way up. If you're using more sophisticated techniques, that are depending upon the operational data to be trained, then they should be way down. But, there is still a lot of these systems that are based on old school business rules that can't keep up. They're producing alerts that, in many cases, are ignored, and because they're ignored, you're susceptible to bad issues. With, especially AI based techniques for fraud detection, you better have good data to train this stuff, which gets back to the whole data ops thing, and training those with good data, which data ops can help you get done. >> And a key part to data ops is the people and the process. It's not just about automating things and automating the data to get it in the right place. You have to modernize those business processes and have the right skills to be able to do that as well. Otherwise, you're not going to make the progress. You're not going to reap the benefits. >> Well, that was actually my next question. What about the people and the process? We were talking before, off camera, about our PA, and he's saying "pave the cow path." But sometimes you actually have to re-engineer the process and you might not have the skill set. So it's people and process, and then technology you lay in. And we've always talked about this, technology is always going to change. Smart technologists will figure it out. But, the people and the process, that's the hardest part. What are you seeing in the field? >> We see a lot of customers struggling with the people and process side, for a variety of reasons. The technology seems to be the focus, but when we talk to customers, we spend a lot of time saying, "well, what needs to change in your business process "when this happens? "How do those business rules need to change "so you don't get those false positives?" Because it doesn't matter at the end of the day. >> So, can we go back to the business rules thing? So, it sounds like the business rules are sort of an outdated, policy based, rigid sort of structure that's enforced no matter what. Versus machine intelligence, which can interpret situations on the fly, but can you add some color to that and explain the difference between what you call sort of business rules based versus AI based. >> So the AI based ones, in this particular case, probably classic statistical machine learning techniques, to do something like know who I am, right? My name is Danny Hernandez, if you were to Google Danny Hernandez, the number one search result is going to be a rapper. There is a rapper that actually just recently came out, he's not even that good, but he's a new one. A statistical machine learning technique would be able to say, "all right, given Daniel "and the context information I know about him, "when I look for Daniel Hernandez, "and I supplement the identity with that "contextual information, it means it's one of "the six that work at IBM." Right? >> Not the rapper. >> Not the rapper. >> Not the rapper. >> Exactly. I don't mind being matched with a rapper, but match me with a good rapper. >> All you've got to do is search Daniel Hernandez and The Cube and you'll find him. >> Ha, right. Bingo. Actually that's true. So, in any case, the AI based techniques basically allow you to isolate who I am, based on more features that you know about me, so that you get me right. Because if you can't even start there, with whom are you transacting, you're not going to have any hope of detecting fraud. Either that, or you're going to get false positives because you're going to associate me with someone that I'm not, and then it's just going to make me upset, because when you should be transacting with me, you're not because you're saying I'm someone I'm not. >> So, that ties back to what we were saying before, know you're customer and anti money laundering. Which, of course, was big, and still is, during the crypto craze. Maybe crypto is not as crazy, but that was a big deal when you had bitcoin at whatever it was. What are some practical applications for KYC AML that you're seeing in the field today? >> I think that what we see a lot of, what we're applying in my business is automating the discovery of data and learning about the lineage of that data. Where did it come from? This was a problem that was really hard to solve 18 months ago, because it took a lot of man power to do it. And as soon as you did it once, it was outdated. So, we've recently released some capabilities within Watson Knowledge Catalog that really help automate that, so that as the data continues to grow, and continues to change, as it always does, that rather than having two, three hundred business analysts or data stewards trying to go figure that out, machine learning can go do that for you. >> So, all the big banks are glomming on to this? >> Absolutely. >> So think about any customer onboarding, right? You better know who your customer is, and you better have provisions around anti money laundering. Otherwise, there's going to be some very serious downside risk. It's just one example of many, for sure. >> Let's talk about some of the data challenges because we talked a lot about digital, digital business, I've always said the difference between a business and a digital business is how they use data. So, what are some of the challenging issues that customers are facing, and particularly, incumbents, Ginni Rometty used the term a couple of events ago, and it might have even been World of Watson, incumbent disruptors, maybe that was the first think, which I thought was a very poignant term. So, what are some of the data challenges that these incumbents are facing, and how is IMB helping solve them? >> For us, one of them that we see is just understanding where their data is. There is a lot of dark data out there that they haven't discovered yet. And what impact is that having on their analytics, what opportunities aren't they taking advantage of, and what risks are they being exposed to by that being out there. Unstructured data is another big part of it as well. Structured data is sort of the easy answer to solving the data problem, >> [Daniel Hernandez] But still hard. >> But still hard. Unstructured data is something that almost feels like an afterthought a lot of times. But, the opportunities and risks there are equally, if not greater, to your business. >> So yeah, what you're saying it's an afterthought, because a lot of times people are saying, "that's too hard." >> Scott Buckles: Right. >> Forget it. >> Scott Buckles: Right. Right. Absolutely. >> Because there's gold in them there hills, right? >> Scott Buckles: Yeah, absolutely. >> So, how does IBM help solve that problem? Is it tooling, is it discovery tooling? >> Well, yeah, so we recently released a product called InstaScan, that helps you to go discover unstructured data within any cloud environment. So, that was released a couple months ago, that's a huge opportunity that we see where customers can actually go and discover that dark data, discover those risks. And then combine that with some of the capabilities that we do with structured data too, so you have a holistic view of where your data is, and start tying that together. >> If I could add, any company that has any operating history is going to have a pretty complex data environment. Any company that wants to employ AI has a fundamental choice. Either I bring my AI to the data, or I bring my data to the AI. Our competition demand that you bring your data to the AI, which is expensive, hard, often impossible. So, if you have any desire to employ this stuff, you had better take the I'm going to bring my AI to the data approach, or be prepared to deal with a multi-year deployment for this stuff. So, that principle difference in how we think about the problem, means that we can help our customers apply AI to problem sets that they otherwise couldn't because they would have to move. And in many cases, they're just abandoning projects all together because of that. >> So, now we're starting to get into sort of data strategy. So, let's talk about data strategy. So, it starts with, I guess, understanding the value of your data. >> [Daniel Hernandez] Start with understanding what you got. >> Yeah, what data do I have. What's the value of that data? How do I get to that data? You just mentioned you can't have a strategy that says, "okay, move all the data into some God box." >> Good luck. >> Yeah. That won't work. So, do customers have coherent data strategies? Are they formulating? Where are we on that maturity curve? >> Absolutely, I think the advent of the CDO role, as the Chief Data Officer role, has really helped bring the awareness that you have to have that enterprise data strategy. >> So, that's a sign. If there's a CDO in the house. >> There's someone working on enterprise, yeah, absolutely. >> So, it's really their role, the CDO's role, to construct the data strategy. >> Absolutely. And one of the challenges that we see, though, in that, is that because it is a new role, is like going back to Daniel's historical operational stuff, right? There's a lot of things you have to sort out within your data strategy of who owns the data, right? Regardless of where it sits within an enterprise, and how are you applying that strategy to those data assets across the business. And that's not an easy challenge. That goes back to the people process side of it. >> Well, right. I bet you if I asked Jim Cavanaugh what's IBM's data strategy, I bet you he'd have a really coherent answer. But I bet you if I asked Scott Hebner, the CMO of the data and AI group, I bet you I'd get a somewhat different answer. And so, there's multiple data strategies, but I guess it's (mumbles) job to make sure that they are coherent and tie in, right? >> Absolutely. >> Am I getting this? >> Absolutely. >> Quick study. >> So, what's IBM's data strategy? (laughs) >> Data is good. >> Data is good. Bring AI to the data. >> Look, I mean, data and AI, that's the name of the business, that's the name of the portfolio that represents our philosophy. No AI without data, increasingly, not a lot of value of data without AI. We have to help our customers understand this, that's a skill, education, point of view problem, and we have to deliver technology that actually works in the wild, in their environment, not as we want them to be, but as they are. Which is often messy. But I think that's our fun. It's the reason we've been here for a while. >> All right, I'll give you guys a last word, we got to run, but both Scott and Daniel, take aways from the event today, things that you're excited about, things that you learned. Just give us the bumper sticker. >> For me, you talk about whether people recognize the need for a data strategy in their role. For me, it's people being pumped about that, being excited about it, recognizing it, and wanting to solve those problems and leverage the capabilities that are out there. >> We've seen a lot of that today. >> Absolutely. And we're at a great time and place where the capabilities and the technologies with machine learning and AI are applicable and real, that they're solving those problems. So, I think that gets everybody excited, which is cool. >> Bring it home, Daniel. >> Excitement, a ton of experimentation with AI, some real issues that are getting in the way of full-scale deployments, a methodology data ops, to deal with those real hardcore data problems in the enterprise, resonating, a technology stack that allows you to implement that as a company is, through Cloud Pak for Data, no matter where they want to run is what they need, and I'm happy we're able to deliver it to them. >> Great. Great segment, guys. Thanks for coming. >> Awesome. Thank you. >> Data, applying AI to that data, scaling with the cloud, that's the innovation cocktail that we talk about all the time on The Cube. Scaling data your way, this is Dave Vellante and we're in Miami at the AI and Data Forum, brought to you by IBM. We'll be right back right after this short break. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this special Cube Conversation. We're here in Palo Alto, California with a special guest. Dialing in remotely Paul Martino, the founder of Bullpen Capital and also the producer of an upcoming film called The Inside Game. It's a story about a true story about an NBA betting scandal. It's really, it's got everything you want to know. It's got sports, it's got gambling, it's got fixing of games. Paul Martino, known for being a serial entrepreneur and then an investor, investing in some great growth companies, and now running his own firm called Bullpen Capital, which bets on high-growth companies and takes them to the next level. Paul, great to see you. Thanks for spending the time. Good to see you again. >> John, always good to see you. Thanks for having me on the show. >> So, you're a unique individual. You're a computer science whiz, investor, entrepreneur, now film producer. This story kind of crosses over your interests. Obviously in Philly, you're kind of like me, kind of a blue collar kind of guy. You know hot starters when you see it. You also were an investor in a lot of the sports, gambling, betting, kind of online games, we've talked about in the past. But now you're crossing over into filming movies. Which is, seems like very cool and obviously we're living in a date of digital media where code is software, code is content, obviously we believe that. What's this movie all about? All the buzz is out there, Inside Game. You get it on sports radio all the time. Give us the scoop. Why Inside Game? What's it about? Give us the 411. >> Yeah, so John, I mean, this is a story that picked me. My producing partner in this is a guy named Michael Pierce who made a bunch of great movies, including The Cooler, one of the best gambling movies, with William H Macy. And he says sometimes the movie picks you and sometimes you pick the movie. And I wasn't sitting around one day going wow I want to be a movie producer, it was just much more that my cousin is the principal in the story. My cousin was the go-between between the gambler and the referee. The three of them were friends ever since they were kids. And when they all got out of jail Tommy called me, Tommy Martino. He said hey Paulie, you're about the only legitimate business guy I know. Could you help me with my life rights? And that's how this started almost six years ago. >> And what progressed next? You sat down, had a couple cocktails, beers, said okay here's how we're going to structure it. Was it more brainstorming and then it kind of went from there? Take us through that progression. >> It was a pure intellectual property exercise, and this is where being a startup guy was helpful. I was like, Tommy, I'll buy your life rights. Maybe we'll get a script written, we'll put it on the shelf, so that if anybody ever wants to make this story they have to go through us. Almost like a blocking patent or a copyright. And he's like okay cool. And so I said I have no delusions of ever making this movie. I actually don't know that, I don't know anybody to make a movie. This is not my skill set. But if anybody ever wants to make the movie, they're going to have to come deal with us. And then the lucky break happens, like anything in a startup. I have this random meeting with a guy named Michael Pierce, who was at a firm called WPS Challenger out of London. And we're down in Hillstone in Santa Monica, and I say to him, I say I've got this script written about this NBA betting scandal, would you do me a favor? He literally laughs in my face. He goes a venture guy from Silicon Valley is going to hand me a script. What a bad, anyway, I was like look dude, I'm a good guy to have owe you a favor so just read this dang thing. About 8 hours later my phone rings, he says who the hell is Andy Callahan? This is the best script I've ever read in my entire life. Let's go make a movie. Andy Callahan was a friend of a friend from high school who wrote the script. He actually once beat Kobe Bryant when he was a center at Haverford when Kobe Bryant played at Lower Merion here in the Philly suburbs. So, it's kind of this local Philly story. I'm a local Philly blue collar guy, we put the pieces together, and I'll be danged and now six years later the film is in the can and you're probably going to see it during the NBA finals this year in June. >> All right, so there's some news out there it's on the cover on ESPN Magazine, the site is now launched. I've been hearing buzz all morning on this in the sports radio world. A lot of buzz, a lot of organic virality around it. Reminds of the Crazy, Rich Asians, which kind of started organically, similar kind of community behind it. This has really got some legs to it. Give us some taste of what's some of the latest organic growth here around the buzz. >> Yeah so, think about this. This happened in, primarily '06 and '07. They were sentenced in 2010 and were in jail in 2011. It is 2019 and the front page story on ESPN is What Tim, Tommy, and Jimmy Battista Did. Those were the three guys, the gambler, the ref, and the go-between. And this is a front page story on ESPN all these years later. So we know this story has tremendous legs. We know this movie has a tremendous built-in audience. And so now it's just our job to leverage all those marketing channels, places we pioneered, like Zynga and FanDuel to get people who care about the story into the theaters. And we're hoping we can really show people how to do a modern way to market a film using those channels we've pioneered at places like FanDuel and Zynga. >> You and I have had many conversations privately and here on the Cube in the past around startups disruption, and it's the same pattern right? No one thinks it's a great idea, you get the rights to it, and you kind of got to find that inflection point, that magical moment which comes through networking and just hard work and hustle. And then you've got everything comes together. And then it comes together. And then it grows. As the world changes, you're seeing digital completely change the game on Hollywood. For instance, Netflix, you've got Prime, you've got Hulu. This is, essentially, a democratization, I'm not saying, well first of all you've made some money so you had some dough to put into it, but here's a script from a friend. You guys put it together. This is now the new startup model going to Hollywood. Talk about that dynamic, what's your vision there? Because this, I think, is an important signal in how digital content, whether it's guys in the Cube doing stuff or Cube Studios, which we'll, we have a vision for. This is something that's real. Talk about the dynamic. How do you see the entrepeneurial vision around how movies are made, how content's made, and then, ultimately, how they're merchandised in the future. >> Right, there's a whole, there's a whole bunch of buckets. There's the intellectual property bucket of the story, the script, etc. Then there's the bucket of getting the movie made. You know, that's the on the set and that's the director and that's post-production, and then there's the marketing. And what was really interesting is even though I'd never made a movie, two of those three buckets I knew a tremendous amount about from my experience as a startup investor. The marketing and the IP side I understood almost completely, even though I'd never made a film. And so all of the disruptive technologies that we learn for doing disruptive things like marketing a new thing called Daily Fantasy Sports, we were able to bring to bear to this film. Now, I had fun on the set and meeting all the actors, etc. But I had no delusion that I knew about the making of the movie part. So I plead ignorance there, but of the three buckets that you need to go make something in the media space 66% of what I knew as a startup guy overlapped and I think this is what the future of the media is. Because guys like me and you, John, we actually know a lot about this because we're startup people as opposed to we have to learn about it in terms of how to market and how to get an audience. I mean, my last company Aggregate Knowledge designs custom audiences for ad targeting. So we know how to find gamblers to go see this movie. That's literally the company I started. And so that's a thing that I'm very, very comfortable with and it's exciting to then work with the producer who did the creative and the director and I say hey guys, I've got this marketing thing under control, I know how to do it, oh by the way, the old Head of Marketing from FanDuel, he's a consultant to the project. Right, so, we got that. >> You got that, and the movie's being made. That's also again, back to entrepreneurship, risk. You got to take risks, right? This is all about risk management at the end of the day and you know, navigating as the lead entrepreneur, getting it done, there's heavy lifting and costs involved in making the movie, >> Right >> How did you, that's like production, right? You got to build a product. That is ultimately the product when it has to get to market. How did that go, what's your thoughts on your first time running a movie like this, from a production standpoint, learnings, observations? >> I learned a tremendous amount. I must admit, I was along for the ride on that piece of the puddle, puzzle. The product development piece of this was all new to me. But then again, I mean think about it, John, I started four companies, a social network, an ad targeting company, a game company, and a security company. I didn't know anything about those four companies when I started them either in terms of what the product needed to do. So learning a new product called make a movie was kind of par for the course, even though I didn't really know anything about it. You know, if you're going to be a startup person you got to have no fear. That's the real attribute you need to have in these kinds of situations. >> So I got to >> And so, witnessed that first-hand and, you know what, now, if I ever make a movie again I kind of know how to make that product. >> Yeah, well looking forward. You've got great instincts as an entrepreneur. I love hanging out with you. I got to ask you a question. I talk to a lot of young people, my son and his friends and I see people coming out of business school, all this stuff. You know, every college has an entrepreneurial program. Music, film, you know, whatever, they all have kind of bolted on entrepreneurship. You're essentially breaking down that kind of dogma of that you have to have a discipline. Anyone can do this, right? So talk about the folks that are out there, trying to be entrepreneurial, whether you're a musician. This is direct to consumer. If you have skills as an entrepreneur it translates. Talk about what it takes to be an entrepreneur, if you're a musician or someone who has, say, content rights or has content story. What do they do? What's your advice? >> We have lived through, perhaps the most awesome period of the last five to 10 years, where it got cheap to do a startup. You know, when we're doing our first startups 20 years ago, it cost 5 million bucks to go get a license from Oracle and go hire a DBA and do all that stuff. You know what, for 5 grand you can get your website up, you can build, you can use your iPhone, you can film your movie. That's all happened in the last five to 10 years. And what it's done is exactly the word you used. It's democratized who can become an entrepreneur. Now people who never thought entrepreneurship was for them, are able to do it. One of our great examples of this is Ipsy, our cosmetics company. You know, Michelle Phan was a cocktail waitress working in Florida, but she had this YouTube following around watching her videos of her putting her makeup on. And you know when we met her, we're like you know what? You're the next generation of what entrepreneurs look like. Because no, she didn't go to Stanford. She didn't have a PhD in computer science, but she knew what this next generation of content marketing was going to look like. She knew what it was to be a celebrity influencer. You know, that company Ipsy makes hundreds of millions of dollars every year now, and I don't think most people on Sand Hill would've necessarily given Michelle the chance because she didn't look like what the traditional entrepreneur looked like. So it's so cool we live in a time where you don't need to look like what you think an entrepreneur needs to look like or went to the school you had to think you'd go to to become an entrepreneur. It's open to everybody now. >> And the key to success, you know, again, we've talked about those privately all the time when we meet, but I want to get your comment on the record here. But I mean, there's some basic blocking and tackling that's independent of where you went to school that's being creative, networking, networking, networking, you know, and being, good hustle. And being, obviously good judgment and being smart. Do your thoughts on the keys to success for as those folks saying hey you know I didn't have to go to these big, fancy schools. I want to go out there. I want to test my idea. I want to go push the envelope. I want to go for it. What's the tried and true formula from your perspective? >> So when you're in the early stage of hustling and you want to figure out if you're good at being an entrepreneur, I tell entrepreneurs this all the time. Every meeting is a job interview. Now, you might not think it's a job interview, but you want to think about every meeting, this might be the next person I start my company with. This might be the person I end up hiring to go run something at my company. This might be the person I end up getting money for, from to start my company. And so show up, have some skills, have some passion, have a vision, and impress the person on the other side of the table. Every once in a while I get invited to a college and they're like well Paul, life's easy for you, you started a company with Mark Pinkus and you're friend with Reid Hoffman and this... Well how the hell do you think I met those people? I did the same thing I'm telling you to do. When I was nobody coming out of school, I went and did stuff for these guys. I helped them with a business plan. I wrote the code of Tribe, and then now all of the sudden we've got a whole network of people you can go to. Well, that didn't happen by accident. You had to show up and have some skills, talent, and passion and then impress the person on the other side of the table. >> Yeah >> And guess what? If you do that enough times in a row, you're going to end up having your own network. And then you're going to have kids come in and say, wow, how can I impress you? >> Be authentic, be genuine, hustle, do networking, do the job interview, great stuff. All right, back to final point I want to get your thoughts on because I think this is your success and getting this movie out of the gate. Everyone, first, everyone should go see Inside Game. Insidegamemovie.com is the URL. The site just went up. This should be a great movie. I'm looking forward to it, and knowing the work that went in, I followed your journey on this. It should be great. I'm looking forward to seeing it. Uh, digital media, um, your thoughts because we're seeing a direct to consumer model. You've got the big companies, YouTube, Amazon, others. There's kind of a, a huge distribution of those guys. The classic Web 2.0 search kind of paradigm and portal. But now you've got a whole 'nother set of distribution or network effects. Your thoughts, because you were involved in, again, social networking before it became the monster that it is now. How is digital media changing? What's your vision of how that's happening and how does someone jump on that wave and be successful? >> Yeah, we're in the midst of disruption. I mean, I'm in the discussions and final negotiations right now on how we're going to end up ultimately doing the film distribution. And I am very disappointed with the quality of the thinking of the people on the other side of the table. Because they come from very traditional backgrounds. And I'm talking to them about, I want to do a site takeover across Zynga. I want to do a digital download on FanDuel of a 20 minute clip of the film. And they're like what's FanDuel? Who's Zynga? And I'm sitting there, I'm like guys, this is the new media. Oh, by the way, there's a sports app called Wave and Wave is where the local influencers in the markets who want to write the stories are, and we want to do a deal with those guys. And oh, by the way, the CEO of that company is a buddy of mine I met years ago, right? One of those kids I gave advice to, and now I'm going to ask him for a favor from, right, that's how it works. But, it's amazing when you have these conversations with traditional old line media companies. They don't understand any of the words coming out of your mouth. They're like Paul, here's how much I'll give you for your film. Thank you, we'll go market it. I'm like, really? Seriously? I got the former CMO of FanDuel going to help out on this. You don't want to talk to him? >> Yeah >> And so this is where the industry is really ripe for disruption. Because the people from the startup world have already disrupted the apple cart and now we've just got to demonstrate that this model is going to continue to work for the future and be ready when the next new kind of digital transmedia thing comes along and embrace that, as opposed to be scared to death of it or not even know how to talk the language of the people on it. >> Well, you're doing some amazing venturing in your, kind of, unique venture capital model on Bullpen Capital. Certainly isn't your classic venture capital thing, so I'm sure people are going to be talking to you about oh, Paul, are all VCs going to be doing movies? I'm sure that's a narrative that's out there. But you're not just a normal venture capital. You certainly invest. So, venture capitals have reputation issues right now. People talk about, well, you know, they're group think. You know, they only invest in who they see themselves. You mentioned that comment there. The world's changing in venture. Your thoughts on that, how you guys started your firm, and your evolution of venture capital. And is this a sign that you'll see venture capitalists go into movies? >> Well, I don't know about that part. There have been a couple venture people who have done movies. But the part I will talk about is the you got to know somebody, it's an inside game, ha ha, we'll play double entendre on Inside Game here. You know, 20% of the deal we've done at Bullpen, we've done over 100. 20% of them were cold emails on something like LinkedIn or business plans at bullpen.com. 20%, now there's this old trope in venture if you don't get a warm intro I won't even talk to you. Well 20% of our deals came in and we had no idea who the person on the other side was. That's how we run the firm. And so if you're out there going I'm one of those entrepreneurs in the Midwest and no one, I don't know anyone. I'm not in a network, send me a plan. I'm someone who's going to look at it. It doesn't mean I'm going to be an investor, but you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to give you a shot. And I don't care where you're from or what school you went to or what social clique you're in or what your political persuasion is. Matter of fact, I literally don't care. I'm going to give you a shot. Come into my office and that, I think, is what was missing in a lot of firms, where it's a we only do security and we only look at companies that spun out of Berkeley and Stanford. And yeah, there can be an old boys network in that. But you know what, we like to talk to everybody. And the more blue collar the CEO is, the more we love them at Bullpen. >> That's awesome. Talk about the movie real quick on terms of how Hollywood's handling it. Um, expectations, in terms of reaction, was it positive, is it positive, what's the vibe going on in Hollywood, is this going to be a grassroots kind of thing around the FanDuels and your channels? What's your plan for that and what's the reaction of Hollywood? >> So it's going to be a lot of all of the above. But PR is going to be a huge component, I mean, part of the reason we're on today is there's a huge front page story on ESPN about Tim Donaghy and the NBA betting scandal of 2007. And so the earned media is going to be a huge component of this. And I think this is where the Hollywood people do understand the language we're speaking. We're like, look, we have a huge built-in audience that we know how to market to. We have a story. Actually, in the early days, you asked about risk? Back when I was thinking about if I would do this project I would do the following little market research. I'd walk into a sports bar, it didn't matter what town I was in. I could be in Dallas, I could be in Houston, I could be in Boston. I would literally walk up to the bar and say, hey, uh, six of you at the bar, ever hear of Tim Donaghy? It'd be amazing. About seven out of 10 people would go yeah he was the referee, crooked referee in the NBA. I'm like, this is amazing. Seven out of 10 people I meet in a bar know about the story I want to go tell. That sounds like a good chance to make a movie, as opposed to a movie that has no built-in audience. And so, a built-in audience with PR channels that we know work, I think we can really show Hollywood how to do this in a different way if this all works. >> And this comes back to my point around built-in audiences. You know, YouTube has got a million subscribers. That's kind of an old metric. That means they, like an RSS feed kind of model. That's a million people that are, could be, amplifying their network connections. It is a massive built-in audience. The iteration, the DevOps kind of mindset, we talk about cloud computing, can be applied to movies. It's agile movie making. That's what you're talking about. >> Yeah, and by the way, so we have a social network of all the actors and people in the film. So when it's ready, let's go activate our network of all the actors that are in the film. Each of them have a couple million followers. So let's go be smart. Let's, two weeks before the movie, let's send some screenshots. A week before the movie let's show some exclusive videos. Two days before the film, go see it, it's now out in the theaters. You know what, that's pretty, that's 101. We've got actors. We've got producers. Like, let's go use the influencer network we built that actually got the movie made. Let's go on Sports Talk, talk about the movie. Let's go on places like this and talk about how a venture guy made a movie. This is the confluence of all of the pieces all coming together at once. And I just don't think enough people in the film business or in the media business think big enough about going after these audiences. It's oh, we're going to take ads out on TV and I'm going to see my trailer and we're going to do this and that's how we do it. There's so many better ways to get your audience now. >> And this is going to change, just while I've got you here, it's just awesome, awesome conversation. Bringing it back to kind of the CMO in big companies, whether it's consumer or B to B or whatever, movies, the old model of here's our channels. There's certainly this earned media kind of formula and it's not your classic we've got a website, we're going to do all this instrumentation, it's a whole 'nother mechanism. So talk about, in your opinion, the importance of earned media, vis a vis the old other buckets. Owned media, paid media, well-defined Web 1.0, Web 2.0 tactics, earned media is not just how good is our PR? It's actually infrastructure channels, it's networks, a new kind of way to do things. How relevant and how important will this be going forward? Because there's no more website. It's a, you're basically building a media company for this movie. >> That is exactly right. We're building an ad hoc media business. I think this is what the next generation of digital agencies are going to look like. And there are some agencies that we've talked to that really understand all of what you've just said. They are few and far between, unfortunately. >> Yeah, well, Paul, this was theCube. We love talking to people, making it happen. Again, our model's the same as yours. We're open to anyone who's got signal, and you certainly are doing a great job and great to know you and follow your entrepreneur journey, your investment journey, and now your film making journey. Paul Martino, General Pen on Bullpen Capital, with the hot film Inside Game. I'm definitely going to see it. It should be really strong and it's going to be one of those movies like Crazy, Rich Asians, where not looking, not really well produced, I mean not predicted to be great and then goes game buster so I think this is going to be one of those examples. Paul, thanks for coming on. >> Love it, thank you! >> This Cube Conversation, I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto, California, bringing ya all the action. Venture capitalist turned film maker Paul Martino with the movie Inside Game. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (triumphant music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite, I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Stu Miniman. We're joined by Michael Smith, he is the director of infrastructure at HKS, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Hey thanks for having me, excited to be here. >> So Mike, HKS, tell us, you're based in Dallas you're an architecture firm, tell us about some of the big projects that you have worked on. >> Sure, yeah, so I've been with the firm since April. Really excited to get on board and really kind of understand the rich history, we actually turn 80 this year so we'll have a really big celebration of the company. So yeah, HKS, we do a lot of sports entertainment so Dallas Cowboys, AT&T stadium, the Vikings home, L.A. Rams, so about 30% of our mix is sports entertainment so you may not know the company but you certainly know the buildings we design. >> Some well known buildings, exactly. >> Actually when you talk an 80 year old firm, and I think of those two buildings, well I'm a techie, I'm a geek, there's a lot of technology that goes into that. I'd love just a viewpoint as to how the company looks because 80 years ago I'm sure they didn't have the tech people in there, design is very much there, how does that you know the culture and inside the company a little bit? >> Sure, yeah so that's really the neat thing right, so everyone thinks that it's a company full of architects right and for the most part it is, but we have nurses on staff right, why? Because we build hospitals. We have people that understand how buildings work. So part of our five stakeholders, the community, is actually one of those stakeholders. So we're not just listening to the client who's asking us how to build it, we're seeing how that building is going to fit into the community, into its surroundings, and how it's really going to interoperate right cause these buildings are going to be around for what, you know 10, 15, 20 years until the next one gets built. >> So what are you doing here at this conference? What are the kinds of people you want to meet, the kind of connections you want to make? >> Sure, yeah, so first off I made some great connections. And that's one of the things I love about coming to things like Ignite. This is my first time here but I've loved it. I tell ya I really enjoy hearing people and hearing about the same challenges that I'm facing and then there's understanding how they're using the various pieces of technology to kind of piece that together. >> Alright so Mike, you're director of infrastructure, so we know infrastructure well, it is our first time at this show but we have been doing infrastructure shows for many years, maybe give us a little bit about your background and what's under your domain at HKS? >> Sure, yeah, so yeah I've worked for the last 20 years mainly for architectural engineering firms right, and so and there's a lot to be said for understanding the specific industry that you're working in right, so obviously it's not just about Word documents and Excel files, you're talking about very large CAD files and having to traverse from office to office right, and so you have to have a very robust infrastructure. So I've got basically the entire networking servers, WAN, LAN, Internet, VoIP, oh yeah and I've got cyber security under my profile as well. We run a small shop at HKS, but yeah so the company's doing really really well and we've got 24 offices globally, 19 here in the US and like I said we manage that really a 24/7 shop. >> Alright so you've got a number of locations, when we talked to infrastructure people the role of data and how do I manage it, how do I do things like disaster recovery and like usually are pretty important, how is it in your world? >> Yeah so obviously disaster recovery, to me that's the backbone of IT right, specifically of my group, and if we can't do that right, if we can't do a data protection correctly then to me we really shouldn't be working on any other project. And that's really where Cohesity comes into the equation right, so when I came on board we had a legacy solution, it was working right, it just and talking with the business really partnering and understanding what their expectations were, we realize that there were some gaps. And ended up talking to Cohesity through a vendor did an amazing whiteboarding session with just some folks that I really felt like cared about and understood our business and then yeah so we've been I guess since about mid-July, we've been implemented on our Cohesity solution for data protection globally, we're about 75% of the way there in what, just a month and a half? So from a speed of implementation standpoint right. But we've really made some leaps and bounds, gains and kind of those requirements that our customers are asking of us and kind of returning, you know basically returning them back to work. >> Yeah, can you paint a little picture of kind of the before and after for us? >> Sure yeah so we've always had a cloud strategy, so we've been partnered with Microsoft for several years, great Office 365, we've used Azure for backup, but I wouldn't say that it was really an optimized solution. And so if we had an actual outage, what we were talking about is you know a fairly long time to pull those resources back down to on-prem and so what we've implemented with our Cohesity solution is basically a system now where when our customers come in and 95% of the time they can get their files back on the phone with the first level technician. So before I was going to a third level sysadmin, basically requiring them to stop what they're doing, work on their restore right, and in some instances it may have been a day before we returned that customer back to work so if you can think about the ability to really just return them back into their normal work process, almost instantaneously, I mean the RTO is really incalculable when you start talking about soft dollars like that. >> Talk about, you mentioned how coming here you talked with lot of people in your industry or people maybe not even in your industry, but you realize you all share similar challenges, and you just talked about the disaster recovery and how that can really keep you up at night. Can you talk about a few of the other problems and challenges that you encounter and how Cohesity has helped you? >> Sure, yeah, so you know I think obviously in the forefront of everybody's mind is security right, and the fact that I have security within my group so understanding that in the topics of data in motion, data in rest right, topics of encryption so you know all of our data as it's pulled into Cohesity is encrypted and so obviously and then as that sits in Azure that's encrypted so that transaction is secure. You know I think the overall management of the infrastructure really having that single pane of glass that Cohesity can offer, that was huge challenge when I came onboard because the solution that we were using was really meant for file replication and so in order to find out if something worked we had to go to 81 disparate sources to see if that worked right. And so today I can come in in the morning, I got a guy that starts at 6 a.m. God bless him, and by the time I get in anything that happened overnight is completely remediated, I can look at one single pane of glass, I can see a bunch of green and honestly if there's red I can see it and I know that something failed and I can pinpoint exactly what we need to do to fix it. >> Mike you said you were about 75% of the way deployed. Walk us through where you're going with it, what you've been learning along the way, and any lessons learned along the way that you could share with your peers, as to how the experience has been, what they might want to do to optimize things. >> Sure, yeah, so I think we're about 75% of the way, we've got a lot of our international sites that are coming onboard now, we're learning a lot about our network. We're learning a lot about different things and so I would say before you do an implementation of this size, really make sure that you have a good handle on patching. Making sure that all of your resources are patched. The last thing you want to do is find out you have a resource problem with slow latency and it's due to a patch not being applied right. And then just understanding you know the time frames involved right? So we've targeted about 75 days to get fully onboard but we're talking almost a petabyte of data across one gigabit connectivity right, and so when you start talking about that there's lot of, we're doing a lot of mix and mashing, bandwidth throttling and all that kind of fun stuff in order to get up and running. >> Yeah so I'm kind of laughing a little bit over here because it's been a punchline in the Microsoft community, it's like oh well you know is it patch Tuesday yet or things like that. We've come so far yet there's still some things that hold us back, that leads me to my next question is you know what's exciting you in the industry in tech and your job, what's working great and what on the other hand are you asking your vendors, what would make your job and your group's job even better whether that be Cohesity, Microsoft, or others? >> Yeah so I think as a company that, we have a lot of data right, and at first as the role of the person responsible for that data, you know it was oh my gosh we have a lot of data. And it was actually a couple of months ago, something clicked in my head and I said, we have a lot of data. (hosts laughing) And guess what? We can do analytics on that data. And so you know I think machine learning is going to be huge right. I think being able to do a lot of those tasks that we count on, you know I have people that are doing things two to three times a week, maybe between eight and five. Well those are things that with machine learning we can have those algorithms basically running 24/7 and so we can start making leaps and bounds progress over what we're doing today. HKS is really big into understanding what the value add is in building a building right? It's not just about the architecture. There's value to that, and so what other value items can we provide to our customers that because you know to be honest technology is becoming a commodity right? How much longer before core services like your architecture and your engineering start to become commodities? And so that's really where I think analyzing that data. And so I was at VMworld a few weeks ago and I was talking to a Cohesity engineer and I really expected him, I said what's next on the road map from data analytics? And I expected to hear x, y, and z. And he looked at me and he goes, What do you want to see next? What do you want to do with your data? Let's partner with you and make that happen right. Now I'm smart enough to go, I don't know what that next thing is but we have really smart PhD-type people that do so we're really looking forward to that next phase. >> I'm interested in teams because you talked about the very diverse employee base at HKS. You said you've got nurses on the team, I'm imagining you have hospitality experts, you've got the PhD types, you've got the science people, and the architects. So how do you get all these people with very different functional expertise to work together and pull together and all be on the same page? >> That's actually a great question. So interestingly enough, I sit right next to a librarian and she's in IT right, and they work in our Global Knowledge Management group which does SharePoint so who better to understand how to start to classify and organize information than someone who's a trained librarian right? So I think what we're really excited about is our IT team has really been really rebuilt say over the last two years and it's been rebuilt with people who have a real passion for their industry but also kind of a broad understanding of how everything interconnects and so we're really kind of building a culture that says if there's information there, it's shareable. We're not holding anything close to the vest. If you want to understand, if I use too many acronyms when I talk, then ask me what they are right. And so I think that right there, that fosters a lot more involvement and people give more of themselves incrementally when they understand that hey there's skin in the game and yes I'm a librarian and I may not know the technological things that you do, but if I say well hey what if we do it this way, we're not just going to blow that idea off and we're going to actually incorporate that into the greater solution. >> Great, Mike we talk a lot about AI at the show and IoT and you're doing buildings, I'm curious how things like all the censors and everything impact what you're doing, how you partner with your clients on that. >> Sure, yeah, so we've got a great team that really focuses on that entire extended set of technologies so obviously drone technologies, sensor technologies, and so I think a lot of those, those are I won't even say that they are even forward looking anymore. Those are, especially sensor technology, so I mean I've worked in environments where we had 24 by seven cameras on a job site so general contractor probably hates it but a PM from anywhere in the world can look at his project, his or her project, and they can see their progress right? Well you know then at what point does that extend to, well I'm going to launch a drone here and I'm going to go look at a very specific piece and a very part of that technology. And so yeah I think it's one of those things if you ever start sitting on your laurels in IT, if your feet ever get off of the toes moving forward, you're already behind. So you know I think things like AI, machine learning, you know I've talked to some people that'll go, well we're two to three years away from that. And I said, in two to three years those will be things of the past right? You have to, you don't have to be bleeding edge, but you have to understand where you can leverage those technologies for your business. >> Give us a little candy here. Paint a picture of what the building of the future is, whether it's the stadium of the future, the hotel of the future, just get us excited here. What are some of the things >> Sure yeah. that you're looking at? >> So I actually talked to a gentleman a couple weeks back and they're building a hotel and this hotel has Bluetooth sensors in the room right, can't do any kind of cameras or anything like that but basically what it can do is based upon the signal saturation of the Bluetooth, it can tell you how many people are in that room cause it understands the dissipation of the signal through the normal human body right. So take that down to your typical occupancy sensor that so you leave the room, maybe you're sleeping late, well the room doesn't think anybody's in there so it turns the temperature up, turns the lights on, does whatever it does right. Well with this new technology it can't do that. So fast forward on and maybe it's a little bit more scary. So now you go from your room and you walk down to the lobby bar, you walk past the lobby bar. Well the wireless devices know the MAC address of your phone because you used that number when you checked in, so as you get close it pops you a hey, you want to 15% or how much do you want to free drink at the bar if you come in here? So I think understanding the connectiveness of everything and then really not being afraid of it. There is a Big Brother aspect to all of this, but just kind of understanding that you know, kind of in the Elon Musk vein is that we have to understand and we have to control where that technology is going but I think if you're afraid of it like that and you know, I'm not going to, I'm never going to stay at that hotel because of the things that they do, then I think you're missing out. >> Right, exactly. Well thank you so much Mike, it's been a pleasure having you on the show. >> Thank you so much >> A lot of fun talking to you. I appreciate the opportunity. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we will have more from Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando, Florida coming up just after this. (light techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back everyone, we are wrapping up three big days of the CUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Dave Vellante and Jeffrick. It has been such fun co-hosting with you both. It's always a ghast to be with you so three days, what have we learned? We've learned we're making the world of work work better for people. Beyond that what do you think? >> New branding you know there which I think underscores ServiceNow's desire to get into the C-Suite. Become a strategic partner. Some of the things we heard this week, platform of platforms. The next great enterprise software company is what they aspire to, just from a financial standpoint. This company literally wants to be a hundred billion dollar valuation company. I think they got a reasonable shot at doing that. They're well on their way to four billion dollars in revenue. It's hard to be a software company and hit a billion. You know the number of companies who get there ar very limited and they are the latest. We're also seeing many products, one platform and platforms in this day and age beat products. Cloud has been a huge tailwind for ServiceNow. We've seen the SaaSification of industries and now we're seeing significant execution on the original vision at penetration into deeply into these accounts. And I got to say when you come to events like this and talk to customers. There's amazing enthusiasm as much of if not more than any show that we do. I mean I really got, what's your take? >> We go to so many shows and it's not hard to figure out the health of a show. Right you walk around the floor, what's the energy, how many people are there? What's the ecosystem I mean, even now as I look around we're at the very end of the third day and there is action at most of the booths still. So it's a super healthy ecosystem. I think it grew another 4,000 people from this year of the year of year growth. So it's clearly on the rise. SaaS is a big thing, I think it's really interesting play and the kind of simple workflow. Not as much conversation really about the no code and the low code that we've heard in the past. Maybe they're past that but certainly a lot of conversation about the vertical stack applications that they're building and I think at the end of the day. We talked about this before, it's competition for your screen. You know what is it that you work in everyday. Right if you use, I don't care what application. SalesForce or any SaaS application which we all have a lot of on our desktop today. If you use it as a reporting tool it's a pain. It's double entry, it's not good. But what is the tool that you execute your business on everyday? And that's really a smart strategy for them to go after that. The other thing that I just think is ripe and we talked about a little bit. I don't know if they're down playing it because they're not where they want to be at or they're just downplaying it but the opportunity for machine learning and artificial intelligence to more efficiently impact workflows with the data from the workflow is a huge opportunity. So what was a bunch of workflows and approvals and this and that should all get, most of it should just get knocked out via AI over a short period of time. So I think they're in a good spot and then the other thing which we hear over and over. You know Frank Slootman IT our homies I still love that line. But as has been repeated IT is everywhere so what a great way to get into HR. To get into legal, to get into facilities management, to get into these other things. Where like hey this is a really cool efficient little tool can I build a nice app for my business? So seemed to be executing on that strategy. >> Yeah CJ just said IT will always be at our core. Rebecca the keynote was interesting. It got mixed reviews and I think part of that is they're struggling we heard tat from some of our guests. There's a hybrid audience now. You got the IT homies, you got the DevOps crowd and then you got the business leaders and so the keynote on day one was really reaching an audience. Largely outside of the core audience. You know I think day two and day three were much more geared toward that direct hit. Now I guess that's not a bad thing. >> No and I think that I mean as you noted it's a hybrid audience so you're trying to reach and touch and inspire and motivate a lot of different partners, customers, analysts. People who are looking at your business in a critical way. The first day John Donahoe it struck me as very sort of aspirational. Really talking about what is our purpose, what do we do as an organization. What are our values, what problems are we trying to solve here and I think that that laying out there in the way that he did was effective because it really did bring it back to, here's what we're about. >> Yeah the other thing I learned is succession has been very successful. Frank Slootman stepped down last year as CEO. He's maintained his chairman title, he's now stepped down as chairman. Fred kind of you know went away for a little while. Fred's back now as chairman. John Donahoe came in. People don't really put much emphasis on this but Fred Luddy was the chief product officer. Dan McGee was the COO, CJ Desai took over for both of them. He said on the CUBE. You know you texted me, you got big shoes to fill. He said I kept that just to remind me and he seems to have just picked up right where those guys left off. You know Pat Casey I think is understated and vital to the culture of this company. You know Jeff you see that, he's like a mini Fred you know and I think that's critical to maintain that cultural foundation. >> But as we said you know going the way that Pat talked about kind of just bifurcation in the keynote and the audiences in the building and out of the building. Which I've never heard before kind of an interesting way to cut it. The people that are here are their very passionate community and they're all here and they're adding 4,000 every single year. The people that are outside of the building maybe don't know as much about it and really maybe that aspirational kind of messaging touched them a little bit more cause they're not into the nitty gritty. It's really interesting too just cause this week is such a busy week in technology. The competition for attention, eyeballs and time. I was struck this morning going through some of our older stuff where Fred would always say. You know I'm so thankful that people will take the time to spend it with us this week. And when people had choices to go to Google IO, Microsoft build, of course we're at Nutanix next, Red Hat Summit I'm sure I'm missing a bunch of other ones. >> Busy week. >> The fact that people are here for three days of conference again they're still here is a pretty good statement in terms of the commitment of their community. >> Now the other thing I want to mention is four years ago Jeff was I think might have been five years ago. We said on the CUBE this company's on a collision course with SalesForce and you can really start to see it take shape. Of the customer service management piece. We know that SalesForce really isn't designed for CSM. Customer Service Management. But he talked about it so they are on a collision course there. They've hired a bunch of people from SalesForce. SalesForce is not going to rollover you know they're going to fight hard for that hard, Oracle's going to fight hard for that. So software companies believe that they should get their fair share of the spend. As long as that spend is a 100%. That's the mentality of a software company. Especially those run by Marc Benioff and Larry Ellis and so it's going to be really interesting to see how these guys evolve. They're going to start bumping into people. This guy's got pretty sharp elbows though. >> Yeah and I think the customer relation is very different. We were at PagerDuty Summit last right talked to Nick Meta who just got nominated for entrepreneur of the year I think for Ink from GainSight and he really talked about what does a customer management verses opportunity management. Once you have the customer and you've managed that sale and you've made that sale. That's really were SalesForce has strived in and that's we use it for in our own company but once you're in the customer. Like say you're in IBM or you're in Boeing. How do you actually manage your relationship in Boeing cause it's not Boeing and your sales person. There's many many many relationships, there's many many many activities, there's somewhere you're winning, somewhere you're losing. Somewhere you're new, somewhere you're old and so the opportunity there is way beyond simply managing you know a lead to an opportunity to a closed sale. That' just the very beginning of a process and actually having a relationship with the customer. >> The other thing is so you can, one of the measurements of progress in 2013 this company 95% of its business was in IT. Their core ITSM, change management, help desk etc. Today that number's down to about two thirds so a third of the business is outside of IT. We're talking about multi-hundreds of millions of dollars. So ITOM, HR, the security practice. They're taking these applications and they're becoming multi-hundred million dollar businesses. You know some of them aren't there yet but they're you know north of 50, 75 we're taking about hundreds of customers. Higher average price, average contract values. You know they don't broadcast that here but you know you look at peel back the numbers and you can see just tremendous financial story. The renewal rates are really really high. You know in the mid 90s, high 90s which is unheard of and so I think this company is going to be the next great enterprise software company and their focus on the user experience I think is important because if you think about the great enterprise software companies. SalesForce, Oracle, SAP, maybe put IBM in there because they sort of acquired their way to it. But those three, they're not the greatest user experiences in the world. They're working on the UI but they're, you know Oracle, we use Oracle. It's clunky, it's powerful. >> They're solving such different problems. Right when those companies came up they were solving a very different problem. Oracle on their relational database side. Very different problem. You know ARP was so revolutionary when SAP came out and I still just think it's so funny that we get these massive gains of efficiency. We had it in the ARP days and now we're getting it again. So they're coming at it from a very different angle. That they're fortunate that there are more modern architecture, there are more modern UI. You know unfortunately if you're legacy you're kind of stuck in your historical. >> In your old ways right? >> Paradigm. >> So the go to market gets more complicated as they start selling to all these other divisions. You're seeing overlay, sales forces you know it's going to be interesting. IBM just consolidated it's big six shows into one. You wonder what's going to happen with this. Are they going to have to create you know mini Knowledges for all these different lines of business. We'll see how that evolves. You think with the one platform maybe they keep it all together. I hope they don't lose that core. You think of VM world, rigt there's still a core technical audience and I think that brings a lot of the energy and credibility to a show like this. >> They still do have some little regional shows and there's a couple different kind of series that they're getting out because as we know. Once you get, well just different right. AWS reinvents over $40,000 last year. Oracle runs it I don't even know what Oracle runs. A 65,000, 75,000. SalesForce hundred thousand but they kind of cheat. They give away lot of tickets but it is hard to keep that community together. You know we've had a number of people come up to us while we're off air to say hi, that we've had on before. The company's growing, things are changing, new leadership so to maintain that culture I think that's why Pat is so important and the key is that connection to the past and that connection to Fred. That kind of carried forward. >> The other thing we have to mention is the ecosystem when we first started covering ServiceNow Knowledge it was you know fruition partners, cloud Sherpas I mean it. Who are these guys and now you see the acquisitions, it's EY is here, Deloitte is here, Accenture is here. >> Got Fruition. >> PWC you see Unisys is here. I mean big name companies, Capgemini, KPMG with big install bases. Strong relationships it's why you see the sales guys at ServiceNow bellying up to these companies because they know it's going to drive more business for them. So pretty impressive story I mean it's hard to be critical of these guys, your price is too high. Okay I mean alright. But the value's there so people are lining up so. >> Yeah I mean it's a smoking hot company as you said. What do they needed to do next? What do you need to see from them next? >> Well I mean the thing is they laid out the roadmap. You know they announced twice a year at different cities wit each a letter of the alphabet. They got to execute on that. I mean this is one of those companies that's theirs to lose. It really is, they got the energy. They got to retain the talent, attract new talent, the street's certainly buying their story. Their free cash flow is growing faster than their revenue which is really impressive. They're extremely well run company. Their CFO is a rockstar stud behind the scenes. I mean they got studs in development, they got a great CEO they got a great CFO. Really strong chief product officer, really strong general managers who've got incredible depth in expertise. I mean it's theirs to lose, I mean they really just have to keep executing on that roadmap keeping their customer focus and you know hoping that there's not some external factor that blows everything up. >> Yeah good point, good point. What about the messaging? We've heard as you said, it's new branding so it's making the world of work work better, there's this focus on the user experience. The idea that the CIO is no longer just so myopic in his or her portfolio. Really has to think much more broadly about the business. A real business leader, I mean is this. Are you hearing this at other conferences too? Is it jiving with the other? >> You know everyone talks about the new way to work, the new to work, the new way to work and the consumers they sort of IT and you know all the millennials that want to operate everything on their phone. That's all fine and dandy. Again at the end of the day, where do people work? Because again you're competing everyone has, excuse me many many applications unfortunately that we have to run to get our day job done and so if you can be the one that people use as the primary way that they get work done. That's the goal... >> Rebecca: That's where the money is. >> That's the end game right. >> Well I owe that so the messaging to me is interesting because IT practitioners as a community are some of the most under appreciated. You know overworked and they're only here from the business when things go bad. For decades we've seen this the thing that struck me at ServiceNow Knowledge 13 when we first came here was wow. These IT people ar pumped. You know you walk around a show the IT like this, they're kind of dragging their feet, heads down and the ServiceNow customers are excited. They're leading innovation in their companies. They're developing new applications on these platforms. It's a persona that I think is being reborn and it sound exciting to see. >> It's funny you bring up the old chest because before it was a lot about just letting IT excuse me, do their work with a little bit more creativity. Better tools, build their own store, build an IT services Amazon likened store. We're not hearing any of that anymore. >> Do more with less, squeeze, squeeze. >> If we're part of delivering value as we've talked about with the banking application and link from MoonsStar you know now these people are intimately involved with the forward facing edge of the company. So it's not talking about we'll have a cool service store. I remember like 2014 that was like a big theme. We're not hearing that anymore, we've moved way beyond that in terms of being a strategic partner in the business. Which we here over and over but these are you know people that header now the strategic partner for the business. >> Okay customers have to make bets and they're making bets on ServiceNow. They've obviously made a bunch of bets on Oracle. Increasingly they're making bets on Amazon. You know we're seeing that a lot. They've made big bets on VM ware, obviously big bets on SAP so CIOs they go to shows like this to make sure that they made the right bet and they're not missing some blind spots. To talk to their peers but you can see that their laying the chips on the table. I guess pun intended, I mean they're paying off. >> That's great, that's a great note to end on I think. So again a pleasure co-hosting with both of you. It's been a lot of fun, it's been a lot of hard work but a lot of fun too. >> Thank you Rebecca and so the CUBE season Jeff. I got to shout out to you and the team. I mean you guys, it's like so busy right now. >> I thought you were going to ask if we were going next. I was going to say oh my god. >> Next week I know I'm in Chicago at VMON. >> Right we have VMON, DON, we've got a couple of on the grounds. SAP Sapphire is coming up. >> Dave: Pure Accelerate. >> Pure Accelerate, OpenStack, we're going back to Vancouver. Haven't been there for a while. Informatica World, back down here in Las Vegas Pure Storage, San Francisco... >> We got the MIT's CTO conference coming up. We got Google Next. >> Women Transforming Technology. Just keep an eye on the website upcoming. We can't give it all straight but... >> The CUBE.net, SiliconAngle.com, WikiBon.com, bunch of free content.- you heard it here first. >> There you go. >> For Rebecca Knight and Jeffrick and Dave Vellante this has been the CUBE's coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18. We will see you next time. >> Thanks everybody, bye bye.

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge18. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We are theCUBE. We are the leader in live tech coverage. I'm joined by Landon Cook. He is a director of Customer Service for the State of Tennessee. It's your first time on theCUBE. You're going to live it. >> Okay, great, I hope so. Brand new. >> So, you're a director of Customer Service, before the cameras were rolling, we were talking. Does every state have such a department? >> Not exactly, and even in our department, the idea of customer service being a focal point and the creation of an office for us, it's all brand new. So, my office of customer service didn't even exist until five years ago, and I've had one predecessor in that time. And this all came from a new focus and state government on the Customer Service Delivery Model. And usually we had been focused on federal rules and regulations, audit findings, always being good stewards of taxpayers dollars, but service delivery hadn't come from the mouth of the governor, usually itself. So, this is all pretty new for us, and from peers I talk with in other areas, I may have a contact who is maybe the lead of customer service in their area, but the idea of an office that exclusively exists to improve customer service throughout our department, and eventually throughout the state, I believe we're in new territory here. >> So this is really the baby of your governor, Bill Haslam, who has really said he wanted, what was it, Customer Focus Government. So what does that mean? >> So, Customer Focus Government started right after Governor Haslam came to office, in 2011. The idea behind it, he created an initiative, and he stated that our goal was to provide the best possible customer service, at the lowest possible cost. And again, that may not seem that new in many industries, but in state government, state operations, that was kind of ground breaking. And that's what's led to us talking, actually, about the customer experience, the agent experience, and how can we actually redefine customer service in government? And my department, we are one of 47 state agencies. In my department, I talked just briefly about the history, going back there five years, and you see this slowly popping up in all these different departments, and the idea is that we're all going to, at some point, be able to come together and deliver customer service as a state, instead of as each individual department. We're actually going to be able to share the scope of services, and really tailor service delivery to each citizen's need through a log in portal, there's all sorts of stuff we talk about now that's brand new, I'm sorry. >> So it's helping citizens do their citizenship duties. So this is helping them register to vote, registering at the DMV, getting fishing licenses, building permits, that kinds of thing. So, how do you do it? How do you service now? >> So, we're babies, here. So ServiceNow is, the new CSM solution, for the entire enterprise, for the state of Tennessee. My department, the Department of Human Services, we are the pilot agency for all those 47 I described. And we're about seven months in, so it's all been pretty fresh for us. But how this works right now, is we're using it primarily for inquiry management, phone calls, emails, web forms and chat, things people typically think of as customer service. And so, what we're doing with service now, and we started very carefully, very small, we had a very tiny pilot to start with, but once we launched, after October, we very quickly realized that ServiceNow was so collaborative and cooperative with us, and they were just as engaged in our success as we were, that we were building a partnership with CSM. It's kind of new to ServiceNow, too, right? So, it was new to us, new to them, and we're really kind of intertwining and growing together here. Even though we're using it, just now, for inquiry management and typical customer service delivery, once our department has it fully integrated through all of our various, we have 12 divisions just within our department, once we have it integrated there, we're going to take that model, and we're going to go to other state agencies. We've actually already had, there are three other state agencies that are probably going to be joining on board, if they haven't already. This has been a very fast standup for us. And we're going to, eventually it's going to go from, "Well, wow, DHS delivers great customer service," and then instead, DHS is partnering with the Department of Health to deliver customer service to people who need it. And we'll start, slowly, just putting everyone together so in the future citizens of Tennessee can just ask for assistance with something, and the state knows what they need, and the state knows how to deliver it, and can do all that assignment and sharing in the responsibilities behind the scenes, through ServiceNow. >> Anything you can do to improve the DMV experience. So, I mean, that is the thing. You're trying to make people's lives easier, better, simpler, more streamlined, but what was Haslam's goal? What was his impetus for starting this? >> You know, that's actually a hard one for me to say. I've gathered that, you know, he came from a corporate background. I think he had a different perspective on customer service than what is typical of state government. So he brought something new along with all of his prior experience. And I think he was the first who really made it a priority, because I think he understood that the expectation of the customer is different nowadays, and it's different today than it was yesterday and last year, and it's always growing and changing. And people of my generation, and the generation following me, they're always expecting something to be simpler, faster, and more based on their needs, right? And we, state agencies, have been so slow to react, we still use a log of legacy systems, before we launched with ServiceNow, all of our inquiry management was through Excel spreadsheets and Outlook emails. Those are great tools, but their not designed for CSM. And so, we had done a really deep dive within DHS and within state government, to look at okay, where does customer service need to be focused on? Is it the people? It's not the people, we found out very quickly we have passionate people in the state of Tennessee. It's not the processes, because people are doing what they can, but we needed a tool. So, with Governor Haslam's initiative, and our understanding that we had to find a tool to better deliver service, we came on to ServiceNow, just a year ago. So, I've been smiling ever since. I feel it in my face. >> You're a good advertisement. So, what are some of the improvements that you have seen? >> Even when we were doing just our pilot phase, we launched on October 2nd, and I was talking with a lot of people from ServiceNow then, and from the governor's office, and they said, "Try "to get a snapshot of the before, "and be sure to compare it with the snapshot of afterwards." So I figured two months would be actually sufficient, and we were still in our kind of test and pilot stages, but we knew pretty quickly we wanted to continue on with ServiceNow. So, the two months prior, we were averaging inquiry assignment time, so if you filled out an application or you submitted an inquiry to my unit, the Office of Customer Service, the amount of time it would take to get from the time you submitted it, to a person in the field, or in program, who could actually help with it, that was taking about 36 hours average. Some were faster, some were slower, some reached up to three days, and that's not even a resolution. Sometimes that's just for us to even acknowledge that we got it, that someone's working on it. Afterwards, I looked at those two months following, so October and November, and we were at like eight or nine minute average. And it's because, we knew we wanted something enterprise wide, but we didn't quite anticipate the difference that workflow management would provide us. So all the parts that normally were all these handoffs, and I looked at it last Friday, it was 100 seconds. You know, we've entered new measurement criteria, every time I go back and look at it. >> So it's lightening speed, lightening fast changes. >> Yes, and our resolution time on this has come right on board along side that. We've cut it down to about 30% of what it used to be. We're able to just do our jobs faster, so we can get back to what people coming to DHS to do is, they come here to serve, they come here to try to help people, and this has taken away all that administrative responsibility, so we can do what we're actually good at. >> Well, we're going to look forward to hearing what it is, next year at Knowledge19. Thanks so much for joining us, Landon it was great having you on theCUBE >> I appreciate it >> I'm Rebecca Knight. We'll have more from ServiceNow Knowledge18, and theCUBE's live coverage just after this. (electronic music)