(gentle upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier host here in Palo Alto, California. theCUBE's second year covering International Women's Day. It's been a great celebration of all the smart leaders in the world who are making a difference from all kinds of backgrounds, from technology to business and everything in between. Today we've got a great guest, Dominique Bastos, who's the senior Vice President of Cloud at Persistent Systems, formerly with AWS. That's where we first met at re:Invent. Dominique, great to have you on the program here for International Women's Day. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you John, for having me back on theCUBE. This is an honor, especially given the theme. >> Well, I'm excited to have you on, I consider you one of those typecast personas where you've kind of done a lot of things. You're powerful, you've got great business acumen you're technical, and we're in a world where, you know the world's coming completely digital and 50% of the world is women, 51%, some say. So you got mostly male dominated industry and you have a dual engineering background and that's super impressive as well. Again, technical world, male dominated you're in there in the mix. What inspires you to get these engineering degrees? >> I think even it was more so shifted towards males. When I had the inspiration to go to engineering school I was accused as a young girl of being a tomboy and fiddling around with all my brother's toys versus focusing on my dolls and other kind of stereotypical toys that you would give a girl. I really had a curiosity for building, a curiosity for just breaking things apart and putting them back together. I was very lucky in that my I guess you call it primary school, maybe middle school, had a program for, it was like electronics, that was the class electronics. So building circuit boards and things like that. And I really enjoyed that aspect of building. I think it was more actually going into engineering school. Picking that as a discipline was a little bit, my mom's reaction to when I announced that I wanted to do engineering which was, "No, that's for boys." >> Really. >> And that really, you know, I think she, it came from a good place in trying to protect me from what she has experienced herself in terms of how women are received in those spaces. So I kind of shrugged it off and thought "Okay, well I'm definitely now going to do this." >> (laughs) If I was told not to, you're going to do it. >> I was told not to, that's all I needed to hear. And also, I think my passion was to design cars and I figured if I enroll in an industrial engineering program I could focus on ergonomic design and ultimately, you know have a career doing something that I'm passionate about. So yeah, so my inspiration was kind of a little bit of don't do this, a lot of curiosity. I'm also a very analytical person. I've been, and I don't know what the science is around left right brain to be honest, but been told that I'm a very much a logical person versus a feeler. So I don't know if that's good or bad. >> Straight shooter. What were your engineering degrees if you don't mind sharing? >> So I did industrial engineering and so I did a dual degree, industrial engineering and robotics. At the time it was like a manufacturing robotics program. It was very, very cool because we got to, I mean now looking back, the evolution of robotics is just insane. But you, you know, programmed a robotic arm to pick things up. I actually crashed the Civil Engineering School's Concrete Canoe Building Competition where you literally have to design a concrete canoe and do all the load testing and the strength testing of the materials and basically then, you know you go against other universities to race the canoe in a body of water. We did that at, in Alabama and in Georgia. So I was lucky to experience that two times. It was a lot of fun. >> But you knew, so you knew, deep down, you were technical you had a nerd vibe you were geeking out on math, tech, robotics. What happened next? I mean, what were some of the challenges you faced? How did you progress forward? Did you have any blockers and roadblocks in front of you and how did you handle those? >> Yeah, I mean I had, I had a very eye-opening experience with, in my freshman year of engineering school. I kind of went in gung-ho with zero hesitation, all the confidence in the world, 'cause I was always a very big nerd academically, I hate admitting this but myself and somebody else got most intellectual, voted by the students in high school. It's like, you don't want to be voted most intellectual when you're in high school. >> Now it's a big deal. (laughs) >> Yeah, you want to be voted like popular or anything like that? No, I was a nerd, but in engineering school, it's a, it was very humbling. That whole confidence that I had. I experienced prof, ooh, I don't want to name the school. Everybody can google it though, but, so anyway so I had experience with some professors that actually looked at me and said, "You're in the wrong program. This is difficult." I, and I think I've shared this before in other forums where, you know, my thermodynamic teacher basically told me "Cheerleading's down the hall," and it it was a very shocking thing to hear because it really made me wonder like, what am I up against here? Is this what it's going to be like going forward? And I decided not to pay attention to that. I think at the moment when you hear something like that you just, you absorb it and you also don't know how to react. And I decided immediately to just walk right past him and sit down front center in the class. In my head I was cursing him, of course, 'cause I mean, let's be real. And I was like, I'm going to show this bleep bleep. And proceeded to basically set the curve class crushed it and was back to be the teacher's assistant. So I think that was one. >> But you became his teacher assistant after, or another one? >> Yeah, I gave him a mini speech. I said, do not do this. You, you could, you could have broken me and if you would've done this to somebody who wasn't as steadfast in her goals or whatever, I was really focused like I'm doing this, I would've backed out potentially and said, you know this isn't something I want to experience on the daily. So I think that was actually a good experience because it gave me an opportunity to understand what I was up against but also double down in how I was going to deal with it. >> Nice to slay the misogynistic teachers who typecast people. Now you had a very technical career but also you had a great career at AWS on the business side you've handled 'em all of the big accounts, I won't say the names, but like we're talking about monster accounts, sales and now basically it's not really selling, you're managing a big account, it's like a big business. It's a business development thing. Technical to business transition, how do you handle that? Was that something you were natural for? Obviously you, you stared down the naysayers out of the gate in college and then in business, did that continue and how did you drive through that? >> So I think even when I was coming out of university I knew that I wanted to have a balance between the engineering program and business. A lot of my colleagues went on to do their PEs so continue to get their masters basically in engineering or their PhDs in engineering. I didn't really have an interest for that. I did international business and finance as my MBA because I wanted to explore the ability of taking what I had learned in engineering school and applying it to building businesses. I mean, at the time I didn't have it in my head that I would want to do startups but I definitely knew that I wanted to get a feel for what are they learning in business school that I missed out in engineering school. So I think that helped me when I transitioned, well when I applied, I was asked to come apply at AWS and I kind of went, no I'm going to, the DNA is going to be rejected. >> You thought, you thought you'd be rejected from AWS. >> I thought I'd be, yeah, because I have very much a startup founder kind of disruptive personality. And to me, when I first saw AWS at the stage early 2016 I saw it as a corporation. Even though from a techie standpoint, I was like, these people are insane. This is amazing what they're building. But I didn't know what the cultural vibe would feel like. I had been with GE at the beginning of my career for almost three years. So I kind of equated AWS Amazon to GE given the size because in between, I had done startups. So when I went to AWS I think initially, and I do have to kind of shout out, you know Todd Weatherby basically was the worldwide leader for ProServe and it was being built, he built it and I went into ProServe to help from that standpoint. >> John: ProServe, Professional services >> Professional services, right. To help these big enterprise customers. And specifically my first customer was an amazing experience in taking, basically the company revolves around strategic selling, right? It's not like you take a salesperson with a conventional schooling that salespeople would have and plug them into AWS in 2016. It was very much a consultative strategic approach. And for me, having a technical background and loving to solve problems for customers, working with the team, I would say, it was a dream team that I joined. And also the ability to come to the table with a technical background, knowing how to interact with senior executives to help them envision where they want to go, and then to bring a team along with you to make that happen. I mean, that was like magical for me. I loved that experience. >> So you like the culture, I mean, Andy Jassy, I've interviewed many times, always talked about builders and been a builder mentality. You mentioned that earlier at the top of this interview you've always building things, curious and you mentioned potentially your confidence might have been shaken. So you, you had the confidence. So being a builder, you know, being curious and having confidence seems to be what your superpower is. A lot of people talk about the confidence angle. How important is that and how important is that for encouraging more women to get into tech? Because I still hear that all the time. Not that they don't have confidence, but there's so many signals that potentially could shake confidence in industry >> Yeah, that's actually a really good point that you're making. A lot of signals that women get could shake their confidence and that needs to be, I mean, it's easy to say that it should be innate. I mean that's kind of like textbook, "Oh it has to come from within." Of course it does. But also, you know, we need to understand that in a population where 50% of the population is women but only 7% of the positions in tech, and I don't know the most current number in tech leadership, is women, and probably a smaller percentage in the C-suite. When you're looking at a woman who's wanting to go up the trajectory in a tech company and then there's a subconscious understanding that there's a limit to how far you'll go, your confidence, you know, in even subconsciously gets shaken a little bit because despite your best efforts, you're already seeing the cap. I would say that we need to coach girls to speak confidently to navigate conflict versus running away from it, to own your own success and be secure in what you bring to the table. And then I think a very important thing is to celebrate each other and the wins that we see for women in tech, in the industry. >> That's awesome. What's, the, in your opinion, the, you look at that, the challenges for this next generation women, and women in general, what are some of the challenges for them and that they need to overcome today? I mean, obviously the world's changed for the better. Still not there. I mean the numbers one in four women, Rachel Thornton came on, former CMO of AWS, she's at MessageBird now. They had a study where only one in four women go to the executive board level. And so there's still, still numbers are bad and then the numbers still got to get up, up big time. That's, and the industry's working on that, but it's changed. But today, what are some of the challenges for this current generation and the next generation of women and how can we and the industry meet, we being us, women in the industry, be strong role models for them? >> Well, I think the challenge is one of how many women are there in the pipeline and what are we doing to retain them and how are we offering up the opportunities to fill. As you know, as Rachel said and I haven't had an opportunity to see her, in how are we giving them this opportunity to take up those seats in the C-suite right, in these leadership roles. And I think this is a little bit exacerbated with the pandemic in that, you know when everything shut down when people were going back to deal with family and work at the same time, for better or for worse the brunt of it fell on probably, you know the maternal type caregiver within the family unit. You know, I've been, I raised my daughter alone and for me, even without the pandemic it was a struggle constantly to balance the risk that I was willing to take to show up for those positions versus investing even more of that time raising a child, right? Nevermind the unconscious bias or cultural kind of expectations that you get from the male counterparts where there's zero understanding of what a mom might go through at home to then show up to a meeting, you know fully fresh and ready to kind of spit out some wisdom. It's like, you know, your kid just freaking lost their whatever and you know, they, so you have to sort a bunch of things out. I think the challenge that women are still facing and will we have to keep working at it is making sure that there's a good pipeline. A good amount of young ladies of people taking interest in tech. And then as they're, you know, going through the funnel at stages in their career, we're providing the mentoring we're, there's representation, right? To what they're aspiring to. We're celebrating their interest in the field, right? And, and I think also we're doing things to retain them, because again, the pandemic affected everybody. I think women specifically and I don't know the statistics but I was reading something about this were the ones to tend to kind of pull it back and say well now I need to be home with, you know you name how many kids and pets and the aging parents, people that got sick to take on that position. In addition to the career aspirations that they might have. We need to make it easier basically. >> I think that's a great call out and I appreciate you bringing that up about family and being a single mom. And by the way, you're savage warrior to doing that. It's amazing. You got to, I know you have a daughter in computer science at Stanford, I want to get to that in a second. But that empathy and I mentioned Rachel Thornton, who's the CMO MessageBird and former CMO of AWS. Her thing right now to your point is mentoring and sponsorship is very key. And her company and the video that's on the site here people should look at that and reference that. They talk a lot about that empathy of people's situation whether it's a single mom, family life, men and women but mainly women because they're the ones who people aren't having a lot of empathy for in that situation, as you called it out. This is huge. And I think remote work has opened up this whole aperture of everyone has to have a view into how people are coming to the table at work. So, you know, props are bringing that up, and I recommend everyone look at check out Rachel Thornton. So how do you balance that, that home life and talk about your daughter's journey because sounds like she's nerding out at Stanford 'cause you know Stanford's called Nerd Nation, that's their motto, so you must be proud. >> I am so proud, I'm so proud. And I will say, I have to admit, because I did encounter so many obstacles and so many hurdles in my journey, it's almost like I forgot that I should set that aside and not worry about my daughter. My hope for her was for her to kind of be artistic and a painter or go into something more lighthearted and fun because I just wanted to think, I guess my mom had the same idea, right? She, always been very driven. She, I want to say that I got very lucky that she picked me to be her mom. Biologically I'm her mom, but I told her she was like a little star that fell from the sky and I, and ended up with me. I think for me, balancing being a single mom and a career where I'm leading and mentoring and making big decisions that affect people's lives as well. You have to take the best of everything you get from each of those roles. And I think that the best way is play to your strengths, right? So having been kind of a nerd and very organized person and all about, you know, systems for effectiveness, I mean, industrial engineering, parenting for me was, I'm going to make it sound super annoying and horrible, but (laughs) >> It's funny, you know, Dave Vellante and I when we started SiliconANGLE and theCUBE years ago, one of the things we were all like sports lovers. So we liked sports and we are like we looked at the people in tech as tech athletes and except there's no men and women teams, it's one team. It's all one thing. So, you know, I consider you a tech athlete you're hard charging strong and professional and smart and beautiful and brilliant, all those good things. >> Thank you. >> Now this game is changing and okay, and you've done startups, and you've done corporate jobs, now you're in a new role. What's the current tech landscape from a, you know I won't say athletic per standpoint but as people who are smart. You have all kinds of different skill sets. You have the startup warriors, you have the folks who like to be in the middle of the corporate world grow up through corporate, climb the corporate ladder. You have investors, you have, you know, creatives. What have you enjoyed most and where do you see all the action? >> I mean, I think what I've enjoyed the most has been being able to bring all of the things that I feel I'm strong at and bring it together to apply that to whatever the problem is at hand, right? So kind of like, you know if you look at a renaissance man who can kind of pop in anywhere and, oh, he's good at, you know sports and he's good at reading and, or she's good at this or, take all of those strengths and somehow bring them together to deal with the issue at hand, versus breaking up your mindset into this is textbook what I learned and this is how business should be done and I'm going to draw these hard lines between personal life and work life, or between how you do selling and how you do engineering. So I think my, the thing that I loved, really loved about AWS was a lot of leaders saw something in me that I potentially didn't see, which was, yeah you might be great at running that big account but we need help over here doing go to market for a new product launch and boom, there you go. Now I'm in a different org helping solve that problem and getting something launched. And I think if you don't box yourself in to I'm only good at this, or, you know put a label on yourself as being the rockstar in that. It leaves room for opportunities to present themselves but also it leaves room within your own mind to see yourself as somebody capable of doing anything. Right, I don't know if I answered the question accurately. >> No, that's good, no, that's awesome. I love the sharing, Yeah, great, great share there. Question is, what do you see, what do you currently during now you're building a business of Persistent for the cloud, obviously AWS and Persistent's a leader global system integrator around the world, thousands and thousands of customers from what we know and been reporting on theCUBE, what's next for you? Where do you see yourself going? Obviously you're going to knock this out of the park. Where do you see yourself as you kind of look at the continuing journey of your mission, personal, professional what's on your mind? Where do you see yourself going next? >> Well, I think, you know, again, going back to not boxing yourself in. This role is an amazing one where I have an opportunity to take all the pieces of my career in tech and apply them to building a business within a business. And that involves all the goodness of coaching and mentoring and strategizing. And I'm loving it. I'm loving the opportunity to work with such great leaders. Persistent itself is very, very good at providing opportunities, very diverse opportunities. We just had a huge Semicolon; Hackathon. Some of the winners were females. The turnout was amazing in the CTO's office. We have very strong women leading the charge for innovation. I think to answer your question about the future and where I may see myself going next, I think now that my job, well they say the job is never done. But now that Chloe's kind of settled into Stanford and kind of doing her own thing, I have always had a passion to continue leading in a way that brings me to, into the fold a lot more. So maybe, you know, maybe in a VC firm partner mode or another, you know CEO role in a startup, or my own startup. I mean, I never, I don't know right now I'm super happy but you never know, you know where your drive might go. And I also want to be able to very deliberately be in a role where I can continue to mentor and support up and coming women in tech. >> Well, you got the smarts but you got really the building mentality, the curiosity and the confidence really sets you up nicely. Dominique great story, great inspiration. You're a role model for many women, young girls out there and women in tech and in celebration. It's a great day and thank you for sharing that story and all the good nuggets there. Appreciate you coming on theCUBE, and it's been my pleasure. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, John. Thank you so much for having me. >> Okay, theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto getting all the content, check out the other interviews some amazing stories, lessons learned, and some, you know some funny stories and some serious stories. So have some fun and enjoy the rest of the videos here for International Women's Days, thanks for watching. (gentle inspirational music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Supercloud22. This is an open community event, and it's dedicated to tracking the future of cloud in the 2020s. Supercloud is a term that we use to describe an architectural abstraction layer that hides the underlying complexities of the individual cloud primitives and APIs and creates a common experience for developers and users irrespective of where data is physically stored or on which cloud platform it lives. We're now going to explore the nuances of going to market in a world where data architectures span on premises across multiple clouds and are increasingly stretching out to the edge. Paula Hansen is the President and Chief Revenue Officer at Alteryx. And the reason we asked her to join us for Supercloud22 is because first of all, Alteryx is a company that is building a form of Supercloud in our view. If you have data in a bunch of different places and you need to pull in different data sets together, you might want to filter it or blend it, cleanse it, shape it, enrich it with other data, analyze it, report it out to your colleagues. Alteryx allows you to do that and automate that life cycle. And in our view is working to break down the data silos across clouds, hence Supercloud. Now, the other reason we invited Paula to the program is because she's a rockstar female in tech, and since day one at theCube, we've celebrated great women in tech, and in this case, a woman of data, Paula Hansen, welcome to the program. >> Thank you, Dave. I am absolutely thrilled to be here. >> Okay, we're going to focus on customers, their challenges and going to market in this cross cloud, multi-cloud, Supercloud world. First, Paula, what's changing in your view in the way that customers are innovating with data in the 2020s? >> Well, I think we've all learned very clearly over these last two years that the global pandemic has altered life and business as we know it. And now we're in an interesting time from a macroeconomic perspective as well. And so what we've seen is that every company in every industry has had to pivot and think about how they meet redefined customer expectations and an ever evolving competitive landscape. There really isn't an industry that wasn't reshaped in some way over the last couple of years. And we've been fortunate to work with companies in all industries that have adapted to this ever changing environment by leveraging Alteryx to help accelerate their digital transformations. Companies know that they need to unlock the full potential of their data to be able to move quickly to pivot and to respond to their customer's needs, as well as manage their businesses most efficiently. So I think nothing tells that story better than sharing a customer example with you, Dave. We love to share stories of our very innovative customers. And so the one that I'll share with you today in regards to this is Delta Airlines, who we're all very familiar with. And of course Delta's goal is to always keep their airplanes in the air flying passengers and getting people to their destinations efficiently. So they focus on the maintenance of their aircraft as a necessary part of running their business and they need to manage their maintenance stops and the maintenance of their aircraft very efficiently and effectively. So we work with them. They leverage our platform to automate all the processes for their aircraft maintenance centers. And so they've built out a fully automated reporting system on our platform leveraging tons of data. And this gives their service managers and their aircraft technicians foresight into what's happening with their scheduling and their maintenance processes. So this ensures that they've got the right technicians in the service center when the aircrafts land and that everything across that process is fully in place. And previously because of data silos and just complexity of data, this process would've taken them many many hours in each independent service center, and now leveraging Alteryx and the power of analytics and bringing all the data together. Those centers can do this process in just minutes and get their planes back in the air efficiently and delivering on their promises to their customers. So that's just one of many examples that we have in terms of the way the Alteryx analytics automation helps customers in this new age and helping to really unlock the power of their data. >> You know, Paul, that's an interesting example. Because in a previous life I worked with some airlines and people maybe don't realize this but, aircraft maintenance is the mission critical application for carriers. It's not the booking system. Because we've been there before, we show you there's a problem when you're booking or sometimes it's unfortunate, but people they get de booked. But the aircraft maintenance is the one that matters the most and that keeps planes in the air. So we hear all the time, you just mention it. About data silos and how problematic they are. So, specifically how are you seeing customers thinking about busting the data silos? >> Yeah, that's right, it's a big topic right now. Because companies realize that business processes that they run their business with, is very cross-functional in nature and requires data across every department in the enterprise. And you can't keep data locked in one department. So if you think of business processes like pay to procure or quote to cash, these are business processes that companies in every industry run their business. And that requires them to get data from multiple departments and bring all of that data together seamlessly to make the best business decisions that they can make. So what our platform does is, and is really well known for, is being very easy for users number one, and then number two, being really great at getting access to data quickly and easily from all those data silos, really, regardless of where it is. We talk about being everywhere. And when we say that we mean, whether it's on-prem, in your legacy applications and databases, or whether it's in the cloud with of course, all the multiple cloud platforms and modern cloud data warehouses. Regardless of where it is, we have the ability to bring that data together across hundreds of different data sources, bring it together to help drive insights and ultimately help our customers make better decisions, take action, and deliver on the business outcomes that they all are trying to drive within their respective industries. And what's- >> You know- >> Go ahead. >> Please carry on. >> Well, I was just going to say that what I do think has really sort of a tipping point in the last six months in particular is that executives themselves are really demanding of their organizations, this democratization of data. And the breaking down of the silos and empowering all of the employees across their enterprise regardless of how sophisticated they are with analytics to participate in the analytic opportunity. So we've seen some really cool things of late where executives, CEOs, chief financial officers, chief data officers are sponsoring events within their organizations to break down these silos and encourage their employees to come together on this democratization opportunity of democratization of data and analytics. And there's a shortage of data scientists on top of this. So there's no way that you're going to be able to hire enough data scientists to make sense of all this data running around your enterprise. So we believe with our platform we empower people regardless of their skillset. And so we see executives sponsoring these hackathons within their environments to bring together people to brainstorm and ideate on use cases, to share examples of how they leverage our platform and leverage the data within their organization to make better decisions. And it's really quite cool. Companies like Stanley Black & Decker, Ingersoll Rand, Inchcape PLC, these are all companies that the executive team has sponsored these hackathon events and seen really powerful things come out of it. As an example Ingersoll Rand sponsored their Alteryx hackathon with all of their data workers across various different functions where the data exists. And they focused on both top line revenue use cases as well as bottom line efficiency cases. And one of the outcomes was a use case that helped with their distribution center in north America and bringing all the data together across their various applications to reduce the amount of over ordering and under ordering of parts and more effectively manage their inventory within that distribution center. So, really cool to see this is now an executive level board level conversation. >> Very cool, a hackathon bringing people together for collaboration. A couple things that you said I want to comment on. Again, one of the reasons why we invited you guys to come on is, when you think about on-prem data and anybody who follows theCube and my breaking analysis program, knows we're big fans of Zhamak Dehghani's concept of data mesh. And data mesh is supposed to be inclusive. It doesn't matter if it's an S3 bucket, Oracle data base, or data warehouse, or data lake, that's just a note on the data mesh. And so it should be inclusive and Supercloud should include on-prem data to the extent that you can make that experience consistent. We have a lot of technical sessions here at Supercloud22, we're focusing now and go to market and the ecosystem. And we live in a world of multiple partners exploding ecosystems. And a lot of times it's co-opetition. So Paula, when you joined Alteryx you brought a proven go to market discipline to the company. Alignment with the customer, playbooks, best practice of sales, et cetera. And we've seen the results. It's a big reason why Mark Anderson and the board promoted you to president just after 10 months. Summarize how you approached the situation at Alteryx when you joined last spring. >> Yeah, I think first we were really intentional about what part of the market, what type of enterprises get the most benefit from the innovation that we deliver? And it's really clear that it's large enterprises. That the more complex a company is, most likely the more data they have and oftentimes the more decentralized that data is. And they're also really all trying to figure out how to remain competitive by leveraging that data. So, the first thing we did was be very intentional that we're focused on the enterprise and building out all of the capability required to be able to serve the enterprise. Of course, essential to all of that is having a platform capability because enterprises require that. So, with Suresh Vittal our Chief Product Officer, he's been fantastic in building out an end to end analytic platform that serves a wide range of analytic capabilities to a wide range of users. And then of course has this flexibility to operate both on-prem and in the cloud which is very important. Because we see this hybrid environment in this multicloud environment being something that is important to our customers. The second thing that I was really focused on was understanding how do you have those conversations with customers when they all are in maybe different types of backgrounds? So the way that you work with a business analyst in the office of finance or supply chain or sales and marketing, is different than the way that you serve a data scientist or a data engineer in IT. The way that you talk to a business owner who wants not to really understand the workflow level of data but wants to understand the insights of data, that's a different conversation. When you want to have a conversation of analytics for all or democratization of analytics at the executive level with the chief data officer or a CIO, that's a whole different conversation. And so we've built very specific sales plays to be able to have those conversations bring the relevant information to the relevant person so that we're really making sure that we explain the value proposition of the platform. Fully understand their world, their language and can work with them to deliver the value to them. And then the third thing that we did, was really heavily invest in our partnerships and you referenced this day. It's a a broad ecosystem out there. And we know that we have to integrate into that broad data ecosystem. and be a good partner to serve our customers. So, we've invested both in technology integration as well as go to market strategies with cloud data warehouse companies like Snowflake and Databricks, or RPA companies like UiPath and Blue Prism, as well as a wide range of other application and all of the cloud platforms because that's what our customers expect from us. So that's been a really important sort of third pillar of our strategy in making sure that from a go to market perspective, we understand where we fit in the ecosystem and how we collectively deliver on value to our joint customers. >> So that's super helpful. What I'm taking away from this is you didn't come to it with a generic playbook. Frank Lyman always talks about situation leadership. You assess the situation and applied that and a great example of partners is Snowflake and Databricks, these sort of opposites, but trying to solve similar problems. So you've got to be inclusive of all that. So we're trying to sort of squint through this Paula and say, okay, are there nuances and best practices beyond some of the the things that you just described that are unique to what we call Supercloud? Are there observations you can make with respect to what's different in this post isolation economy? Specifically in managing remote employees and of course remote partners, working with these complex ecosystems and the rise of this multi-cloud world, is it different or is it same wine new bottle? >> Well, I think it's both common from the on-prem or pre-cloud world, but there's also some differences as well. So what's common is that companies still expect innovation from us and still want us to be able to serve a wide range of skill sets. So our belief is that regardless of the skill set that you have, you can participate in the analytics opportunity for your company and unlocking the potential of your data. So we've been very focused since our inception to build out a platform that really serves this wide range of capabilities across the enterprise space. What's perhaps changed more or continues to evolve in this cloud world is just the flexibility that's required. You have to be everywhere. You have to be able to serve users wherever they are and be able to live in a multi-cloud or super cloud world. So when I think of cloud, I think it just unlocks a whole bigger opportunity for Alteryx and for companies that want to become analytic leaders. Because now you have users all over the globe, many of them looking for web-based analytic solutions. And of course these enterprises are all in various places on their journey to cloud and they want a partner and a platform that operates in all of those environments, which is what we do at Alteryx. So, I think it's an exciting time. I think that it's still very early in the analytic market and what companies are going to do to leverage their data to drive their transformation. And we're really excited to be a part of it. >> So last question is, I said up front we always like to celebrate women in tech. How'd you get into tech.? You've got a background, you've got somewhat of a technical background of being technical sales. And then of course rose up throughout your career and now have a leadership position. I called you a woman of data. How'd you get into it? Where'd you find the love of data? Give us the background and help us inspire some of the young women out there. >> Oh, well, but I'm super passionate about inspiring young women and thinking about the future next generation of women that can participate in technology and in data specifically. I grew up loving math and science. I went to school and got an electrical engineering degree but my passion around technology hasn't been just around technology for technology's sake, my passion around technology is what can it enable? What can it do? What are the outcomes that technology makes possible? And that's why data is so attractive because data makes amazing things possible. I shared some of those examples with you earlier but it not only can we have effect with data in businesses and enterprise, but governments globally now are realizing the ability for data to really have broad societal impact. And so I think that that speaks to women many times. Is that what does technology enable? What are the outcomes? What are the stories and examples that we can all share and be inspired by and feel good and and inspired to be a part of a broader opportunity that technology and data specifically enables? So that's what drives me. And those are the conversations that I have with the women that I speak with in all ages all the way down to K through 12 to inspire them to have a career in technology. >> Awesome, the more people in STEM the better, and the more women in our industry the better. Paula Hansen, thanks so much for coming in the program. Appreciate it. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Okay, keep it right there for more coverage from Supercloud 22, you're watching theCube. (upbeat music)

(soft upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to this Cube Conversation I'm Lisa Martin. This is going to be a great conversation about corporate social responsibility, and I'm very pleased to have two great guests here with me today. Karen McCloskey joins us the director of internal communications and corporate philanthropy at NETSCOUT and Professor Sally Eaves is here as well the CEO of Aspirational Futures. She's also a professor of emerging tech and a CTO by background. Ladies welcome to the program it's great to have you on today. >> Thank you. >> Absolute pleasure. Thank you, great to join you both. >> We're going to get some great perspectives here. As I mentioned corporate social responsibility we're seeing that emerge across every industry and every company is really focused on that. Karen I want to start with you where tech companies are concerned we see corporate social responsibility really aligning with STEM and STEAM. Why is that? >> There is probably a couple of reasons, I sort of wrap it up as it's what employees do, it's part of their jobs, so they get excited about it and they want to share what they do with the next generation. And the other aspect that helps it align with tech is it involves the educational aspect. So we're teaching and we need up and coming students and employees and entrepreneurs with those skills. And the other part about STEM is when you think of it, it's typically K to 12 and then it rolls into college and it's working with students and the next generation. So the education and the pipeline or the education and the students speak to the pipeline aspect and then you add in people getting excited about their job and what they do and that's the employee engagement aspect so it really brings the two pieces together. >> I want to dig into that employee engagement in a minute but Sally I would like to get your perspective. Tell us a little bit about Aspirational Futures and then let's talk about the alignment between that and STEM and STEAM. >> Absolutely, so yeah, Aspirational Futures, is a non-profit kind of working across tech education and social impact and really looking at kind of opening up opportunities to the industry to a diversity of experience and using tech and data as a force for good. We do projects locally and across the world I'm kind of breaking down those barriers. It's going to be all about democratization of opportunity I would say. And in terms of STEM to STEAM that's where I see the journey going at the moment and effectively with that STEAM focus you're bringing the arts to an equal stage to the tech skills as well. So for me that's really important because it comes down to curiosity, encouraging people to get into the sector, showing what you can do, building creative confidence, emotional intelligence, those types of skills alongside the tech skills to actually build it. So it's that combination There's complimentary factors that come together. So for me STEAM is a great way to get holistic learning for life With the rate of change we've got at the moment kind of gives you that tool set to work from to be empowered and confident for the future. >> That confidence is so critical. >> Its really. >> For anybody of any age, right? But one of the things that we've seen that is in the inaugural ESG report that NETSCOUT just published is this digital divide. We've seen it for quite a while now but we also saw it grow during the pandemic, Sally from your perspective, what is that and how can tech companies help to fill that gap? >> It's a great point. I think one other thing that the pandemic did was made it more visible as well. So I think particularly we're working in certain spaces we've seen it more, but I think for everybody it's affected our daily lives in education from home, for example for the first time it's made gaps more visible. So absolutely huge to focus on that. And I think we're seeing it from the organizational perspective as well. We're seeing gaps around certain types of roles. We're seeing higher churn because of a lack of data literacy skills. So it's becoming something that's becoming a CUBE Conversation, you know, in day-to-day family life but in organizations across the world as well. And also it's about challenging assumptions. And it just a few weeks ago there was some research that came out at the University of Reading in the UK in conglomerate with other universities as well. And it was kind of showing that actually you can't make the assumption, for example, that teenagers that kind of call digital natures all the time actually have full confidence in using data either, It was actually showing there were gaps there too. So we've got to challenge assumptions. So literacy in all its forms whether it's data, whether it's financial is absolutely key and we've got to start earlier. So what I'm seeing more of is better outreach from tech companies and other organizations in the primary schools through to universities as well kind of internships and placements, but also another really interesting area that we do with the nonprofit is looking at data waste as well. You know, 90% of data there's archive isn't touched again after kind of three months, you think about the amount of data we're producing at the moment how can we reuse that as a force for good as a training opportunity? So let's think creatively let's be pragmatic address some of these data literacy gaps, but we have to do it at all levels of the community and also for adult learners too. That's usually important. >> Right, there's no, it knows no age and you're right that the visibility on it I think it can be a very good thing shining that light finally going we've got to do something. Karen talked to us about what NETSCOUT is doing. The digital divide is there you guys are really focused on helping to mitigate that. >> That's right. That's right. So as guardians of the connected world, that's our job with our customers and our products, but also with our people in our communities is getting people connected and how can we do that? And in what ways are we able to do that? And recently we engaged with Tech Goes Home which is based in Boston and they provide those first three pillars that everybody needs access to a device, access to the internet and skills to use that. And they work with families and students and they say their programs go from nine to 90. So they've got everybody covered. And what's exciting for us is it kind of falls from a volunteer perspective right in our wheelhouse. So they had to transition from in-person to distance learning with the pandemic and suddenly their program materials needed to be online and they needed to get people up and running without the benefit of an in-person class. What NETSCOUT volunteers were able to do was create those tutorials and those programs that they needed and we also have people all over the world and then we translated them into a bunch of different languages and they were able to then move forward with their programs. So Tech Goes Home and programs like that are really that first step in bridging the digital divide. And then once you've got the basics, the toolkit and the skills what else can you do? And Sally mentioned visibility it's what are the opportunities? What can I do now? I didn't realize there was a career path here, I need these skills to build a business help me learn more. So then there's that whole other aspect of furthering what they can do now that they have those skills and the learning and something like a hackathon might be a fun way to engage kids in those skills and help them go a little further with the tools they have. >> And NETSCOUT has done a number of hackathon programs last year I know you had an All-Girls Hackathon virtually in 2020. Talk to me about some of that and then I want to get Sally I'm going to get your perspectives on what you're doing as well. So our hackathons and I'll try and keep this brief because we've done a lot. There were actually brought forward as an employee idea. So that also speaks to our culture. It's like, hey, we should do more of this. We have partner with Shooting Star Foundation and one of our employees is one of their, or is their board chair. And the hackathons what they do and these are beginners hackathons. So we're talking middle high school and the theme is civic. So something good for society. And what we do is over a course of 12 hours not to mention all the pre-planning. When we had the in-person ones they were in our office they got to see employees up close run around the building to the extent that they could and build their project. And Sally I think you had also mentioned that creativity in that confidence. I mean what those kids did in a day was amazing. You know, they came in and they're all kind of looking around and they don't really know what to do. And at the end of the they had made new friends, they were standing up in front of executive judges, presenting their idea, and they all felt really good about it and they had fun. So I think it can be a fun impactful way to both engage employees because it's a heck of a team building experience and sort of bring students in and give them that visibility to what's possible in their tech career. >> And that confidence. Sally talked to me about hackathons from your perspective and what you're involved in? >> Absolutely, funny now I've just come from one. So I'm a Cop 26 at the moment and I've been involved in one with a university again, using that talent and building that empowerment around STG challenges. So in this particular case around sustainability, so absolutely love that and really echo Karen's thoughts there about how this is a reciprocal relationship, it's also super rewarding for all the employees as well, we're all learning and learning from each other's, which I think is a fantastic thing. And also another point about visibility. Now seeing someone in a role that you might want to do in the future, I think is hugely important as well. So as part of the nonprofit I run a series called 365 and that's all about putting visibility on role models in tech every single day of the year. So not for example just like International Women's Day or Girls in ICT Day, but every single day and for a diversity of experience, because I think it's really important to interview people for C-suite level. But equally I just did an interview with a 14 year old. He did an amazing project in their community to support a local hospital using a 3D printer. It makes it relatable, you can see yourself in that particular role in the future, and you can also show how tech can be used for good business, but also for good for society at the same time. I think that can challenge assumptions and show there's lots of different roles, there's lots of different skills that make a difference in a tech career. So coding could be really important but so is empathy, and so is communication skills. So again, going back to that STEAM focus there's something for everyone. I think that's really important to kind of knock down those boundaries, challenge assumptions, and drop the the STEM drop off we say make it a little bit more STEAM focused I think that can help challenge those assumptions and get more people curious, creative, confident about tech. >> I couldn't agree more, curious, creative and confident. The three Cs that will help anyone and also to sell it to your point showing the breadth and diversity of roles within tech coding is one of them. >> Sally: Absolutely. >> As might be the one of the ones that's the most known but there's so many opportunities to allow these kids to be able to see what they can be is game-changing, especially in today's climate. Karen talk to me about you mentioned in the beginning of our interview Karen, the employee engagement, I know that that environmental social governance is core to NETSCOUT's DNA but we're talking over 2,400 employees in 35 countries. Your folks really want to be engaged and have a purpose. Talk to me about how you got the employees together, it sounds like it was maybe from within. >> That's absolutely right. We have a to support employees when they bring forth these good ideas and the hackathon was one example of that. And the cool thing about the hackathons is that it leads to all these other community connections and people bring forth other ideas. So we had an in-person hackathon at our Allen office in 2019. Some of the employees there met staff from Collin College who were said, "Hey, we'd like to bring this hackathon to us." So then the employees said, "Hey, can we do a hackathon with Collin College?" It's so really it's employee driven, employee organized, supported by the company with the resources and other employees love to be part of that. And the event at Collin College brought out all those skills from the students. It was on climate change so relatively hot topic. And they did a fantastic job while they were there, but that employee engagement as you said, it comes from within. So they have the idea we have a way and a path that they can find what is needed in their community and deliver on that. And it really becomes a sense of pride and accomplishment that it wasn't a top-down mandate that you must go volunteer or paint this wall. They identified the need in the community, propose the project, get the volunteers, get the corporate support and go forth and do it. And it's really amazing to see what people do in their community. >> Well, it's incredibly rewarding and fulfilling but also very symbiotic. There's one thing that's great about the students or those that are from nine to 90, like you said, having a mentor or mentors and sponsors but it's also another thing for employees to be even more productive and proud of themselves to be able to mentor and sponsor those folks in the next generations coming up. I can imagine that employee productivity would likely increase because the employees are able to fulfill have something fulfilling or rewarding with these programs. Karen talk to me a little bit about employee productivity as a kind of a side benefit of this. >> Well, I was going to say during the hackathons I don't know how productive we are 'cause there's a lot of planning and pre-work that goes into it. But I think what happens is it's an incredible team building experience across the company. So you reaching out to executives hey would you be a judge for this event? And you know you're explaining what it is and where it is. And you're roping your coworkers into spending 12 hours with you on a Sunday. And then you're finding somebody who has access to a speaker. So you're talking to people about it it's outside your day-to-day job. And then when it's over, you're like, "Oh yeah, hey, I know somebody in that group I worked with them on the hackathon or I can go up and talk to this executive because we hung out in the hackathon room for X many hours on a Saturday." So it's another way to build those relationships which in the end make you more or help you be more productive as a whole across the company. >> Absolutely relationship building, networking, those are all critical components to having a successful career. Whether we're talking about STEAM or not. I want to unpack something Sally that you said in our remaining few minutes you talked about challenging assumptions. And I guess suppose I'm one of those ones that always assumes if I see a gen Z or they're going to know way more about how to use my phone than I do but you bring up a really good point that there are these assumptions that we need to focus on, shine the light on, address them and crack them wide open to show these folks from nine to 90 that there are so many opportunities out there, there are limitless out there I would say. >> Absolutely, it's all about breaking down those barriers. And that research I mentioned something like 43% of teenagers about kind of 16 to 21 years of age we're saying they don't feel data literate. And that assumption is incorrect so gain so making sure we include everyone in this conversation. So going as young as possible in terms of introducing people to these opportunities but making sure we don't leave any particular age group behind it's that breadth of engagement with all ages is absolutely key. But again showing there are so many different routes into tech as a career. There isn't one linear path, you can come from a different area and those skills will be hugely valid in a tech career. So absolutely challenging assumptions, changing the narrative about what a tech career looks like, I think is absolutely hugely important hence why I do that series because you want to see someone that's relatable to you, at your next level potentially, it's something you need a three steps ahead. It just makes it so important. So for me democratization of opportunity, breaking down barriers, showing that you can go around different ways and it's absolutely fine. And you know what that would probably you can learn from that experience, you can learn from mistakes all those things make a difference so don't be put off and don't let anyone hold you back and reach out for mentor. You mentioned sponsorship earlier on as well I think that's another thing as well kind of using the sphere of influence we develop in our careers and maybe through social media and can helping people along the way not just through mentorship but through active sponsorship as well. There's so many things we can do together. I think organizations are really listening to this is better embedding around DEI initiatives now than ever before and as Karen has been describing fantastic outreach into communities through hackathons, through linking up with schools. So I think we're getting a real contagion of change that's positive here. And I think the pandemic has helped. It's helped us all to kind of pause and reflect, what we stand for as people, as organizations all the way through and I'm really excited that we can really harness this energy and take it forward and really make a difference here by coming together. >> And that is such a great silver lining all of those points Sally that you mentioned. Karen, I want to wrap with you. There's great momentum within NETSCOUT I mentioned, over 2,400 employees actively so many people in the employee community actively engaging in the hackathons and the opportunities to show from nine year olds to 90 year olds the opportunities that STEAM delivers. So what's next for NETSCOUT, what can we anticipate? >> More hackathons, more focused on the digital divide. I just want to, as Sally was speaking, something occurred to me when you said it's never a clear path on the tech journey. I would love to be listening to one of those conversations 10 years from now and have somebody say, oh, when you were asked that question that you're always asked what got you on your journey? What started? I'd love to hear someone say, "Oh, I went to this hackathon once "and it is something and ever since then I got interested in it." That would be a lot of fun. I would love to see that. And for NETSCOUT we're going to continue to do what we do best. We focus on where we can make a difference, we go in wholeheartedly, we engage with volunteers and we'll just keep doing what we're doing. >> Excellent ladies what a great conversation. I love the lights that you're shining on these very important topics there. You're right, I talked to a lot of people about their career paths and they're very, zig-zaggy. Its the exception to find one, you know, that we're studying computer science or engineering, but Karen I have no doubt with the focus that NETSCOUT's putting that Sally that your organization is putting on things like hackathons, getting people out there, educated becoming data literate that no doubt that the narrative will change in the next few years that I went to this hackathon that NETSCOUT did and here I am now. So great work, very important work. I think the pandemic has brought some silver linings there to what your organizations are both doing and look forward to seeing the next generation that you're inspiring. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you. >> Real pleasure. >> Likewise. For Sally Eaves and Karen McCloskey, I'm Lisa Martin you're watching theCUBE Conversation. (soft upbeat music)

>> (Announcer) From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas. It's theCube covering UiPath FORWARD IV, brought to you by UiPath. >> Good afternoon. Welcome back to theCube's live coverage of UiPath FORWARD IV. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. We're on day two of our coverage. We've been talking a lot about automation, all of the opportunities that it's uncovering across industries. We're now going to be talking about a big company undergoing its own automation-led digital transformation. Joining us next, Mariesa Coughanour, head of Automation Advisory Services at Cognizant. Mariesa, welcome to the program. >> Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here today. >> So let's talk. So Cognizant is a part, both a partner and a customer of UiPath. >> Yes. >> We're going to talk about you in the customer realm today. Cognizant is undergoing its own automation-led digital transformation. Let's talk about that. Talk to me about some of the business outcomes that are, that you're expecting, how it's going to transform the employee experience, the customer experience. >> (Mariesa) Sure, absolutely. We actually started working with automation ourselves back in 2018, where we just put in a CoE, we said we want to drive it into our business operations. But about a year ago, we said, let's go further. I really wanted to play with all of our employees. We wanted to empower them. We talk about citizen development, of robot for every person. And we know that that's really the future. That's where we're going. We're digitally transforming our organizations. And so what we did is we sat down and we worked really closely with UiPath on how do we do this? What kind of training do we need? We're going to need some process, some governance in there. And so we put that in place and, you know, we said, let's get this going this year. So we went out, we did, our first Hackathon, went really well. It was Bring Your Own Bots. So BYOB, so, fun themes. And we got some good savings. We actually drove over 10,000, close to 20,000 hours back into the organization. And we said after that, let's go a bit bigger though. And we did what's called Game of Bots. So obviously we know where that came from, right? And we said, we're going to go a little bit longer and we want to go bigger. So we went and had 2,500 people participate over eight weeks. We built over a thousand bots. And guess what? We drove over 200,000 hours back into the organization in just eight weeks. So super big success story. People loved it. Our teams were excited. We recognized over 200 people out of that with team awards, who submitted the most ideas. And even our top leadership said, let's do a presentation. So the guys and gals who had the top, biggest impact automations got to meet with our top senior leaders and present out to them. It's been awesome. And now we're starting to move that force. We're scaling bigger. We're actually going pretty big in Cognizant. We have some big goals right now. >> That's a gob of hours. Game of Bots, get it? GOB. >> (laughs) >> Come on, with me. >> It is a gob of hours. >> How do you measure the hours? Is it a back of napkin kind of thing? We ask people, Hey, how much, how what, how do you actually measure it? >> No, we actually track it. We could see how many hours people were doing a certain tasks and things that they do every day, whether they're running reports, submitting claims for a customer. And so we're able to see that that time is actually going down. We're faster. We get better quality. People were also able to get hours back in their day so they could do more value added work in the organization. So we actually do track it. And we're able to really measure those tangible outcomes for the teams. >> Sounds like you guys have been moving pretty quickly on this. >> We are. >> So the appetite at Cognizant was there, the culture was there to embrace it. Those are probably, I imagine, two big facilitators of being able to move at the speed and the scale, >> Yeah >> that, with what you're doing. >> Culture was there. We're really digitally savvy. I would say we're digital at heart in Cognizant. We are, we're really a tech company and we really focus on how to be at the forefront of all things when it comes to technology. But we said, we also want to transform how we work. So starting to shift the conversation from, you know, do you want to automate, to why not? How do we actually start talking about, you know, I have this to do list, but you know what, actually, we can improve if we did some of this other stuff instead. So let's free up that time, but use automation there and we can actually grow things. We can add more value. We do all that stuff on your to-do list that I think everybody has and they want to get to, but you get caught up in your day-to-day job all the time. So we're actually getting people to be more excited about and have a real voice. And I actually think that's important. Is that, it's not just about giving people the tool, it's about shifting our culture to really embrace digital, embrace this technology, because we're trying to transform how we all work. And we want to lead by example. >> So we talk about BPO. Business Process Optimization, right? It was kind of the buzz word of the '90s and early 2000s. A lot of times it meant putting in SAP. (chuckles) >> (Mariesa) (laughs) Yeah. >> So that's evolved. And there's some companies that would say, "Hey, we specialize in that," technology companies, obviously, >> (Mariesa) Yep. >> you know, SI's as well. How do you think about the difference between end-to-end enterprise automation and, and sort of traditional BPO? >> I think it has to come together a bit, is one thing. So when you do the BPO, or you do shared services, or you outsource some of the work. We actually put into those contracts, because we do a lot of that for our customers. And we put in automation. The step we took further was we actually started to empower people to actually build the automations themselves, which meant we actually had to work with customers too. So they knew we were doing this. We wanted to make sure they understood, they were comfortable. We put any controls in place that they also needed, to make sure that, you know, we didn't impact any of their services. We want to make it better. We want them to feel nothing but bigger, better results in outcomes. And then as you think about the enterprise side, we have to compliment, because a lot of those processes do feed back into how you run a business. And so we focus on how do you bring both of those stories together so that you're driving synergies across the board. And actually some good lessons learned along the way because some of this stuff becomes reusable. You have best practices you could share across the board. And we want to make sure that we are connecting the dots from the shared services BPO work, back into the enterprise because really a process is end to end, an organization. And we want to help people think that way and also get the results that way too. >> Is that end to end automation, at enterprise automation, more tech heavy, or, or maybe it's tech light in a way, whereas BPO is maybe a lot more, sort of, lean thinking, a lot more chalkboard. Are we deep into the, so I, sometimes, you're saying they have to come together. >> They do yeah. >> But from, from where I guess is, is what I'm trying to better understand. >> So I would think about it this way. When you think about a process, right, from when you even placed an order, the whole way through when you fulfill it for a customer. There's work that we, we do outsource all the time, right? So maybe it's the, the PO process, some of the order transactions from the payment, but you also have the pieces is actually touching the customer, too. You have the pieces that are fulfilling the order. So we say end to end, that is really thinking about that beginning, from a conversation with the customer, the whole way to when we're delivering. And I do think there's a lot of technology. That is something I think everyone gravitates to because there is a lot. Especially if you're going to go end to end, you have to be able to take in documents. You have automation. You're not going to know all the rules, no matter how many times you ask, you're going to need machine learning to be able to help figure it out and get smarter as what, as you go along the way. But as you're putting this into place, what's important is: as you're thinking about, kind of, transforming that business so that they're feeling the results the whole way through, because if you just focus on one, you might create a bottleneck, right? You might've got super fast, but the guy who's going to get the work from you, they're going to feel like, oh my goodness, there's all this work on my plate. So we really want to make sure that we create that seamless experience for everyone across the board, as we put it in. >> And how does UiPath, help facilitate that? >> Across the board, I mean, we were sitting down, we were laying out our program. 'Cause we're actually trying to get to 60,000 strong. So we have 7,000 trained today. We're going to get to 60,000. That's our plan. So we're working very closely with UiPath on what does that training that you need to have in place? What's that model? How do we get people comfortable? Because one thing you'll find is not everyone's in the same spot. Some are going to jump in, dive right in, give me the tool. I want to build. I love this. Others might need a little bit more confidence boost. They might need more handholding. And I think that's really important. And it's probably the one thing I would add too, as you do talk a lot about the technologies, we put it in, but it's the people at the end of the day, it's how you help them adopt, feel comfortable with this technology and really embrace it. That's really going to be the difference on whether, how fast you get down that line for transformation. >> Is it a classic bell curve? You got your 10% early adopters, you got a big fat middle, and then you've got some laggards who come along. >> It kind of is. And I think what's important is that middle is all up in how you do it because 10% are always going to love it. You're always going to have a few people, they're a little extra nervous maybe. But in the middle, if you really think about it, and you're able to put in that culture, you're able to put in your leadership is engaged. You're putting us in gamification, make it fun. That's what we found is, if we got people really having fun up front with it, it gives people a reason to be a part of it. And also, why don't we let people partner up? We can give them the technology, but if someone's not as comfortable, let us do teams. Let's meet people where they're at and then move them along this journey. And let's try to accelerate the best we can. >> How did you gamify it? Crypto. No. (chuckles) >> (laughs) >> (laughs) No, no crypto. But I will say we have some really cool prizes and people were super excited to get to do the presentations because they got to show their, their bots live, their creations, to the team. And I think that was important. Not everyone always is able to capture all the results, but we wanted to actually talk about like, what were the ideas, share it across the board. Cause it also generated ideas. because what you'll find is, when you hear something like, you know what, that's kind of what I do. Wonder if I could do some automation too. At least submit an idea, and then, maybe they're moving down the line, they're getting their hands on the technology. And I think that's how we all push the needle forward and move this along faster. >> One of the most important things about automation is letting people be able to move away from the mundane, the repetitive tasks, that they probably don't enjoy. And being able to focus more on their core competencies or more strategic initiatives that really make them more relevant to themselves and to their company. And it sounds like you guys have achieved that pretty quickly and, and you have an aggressive plan >> (chuckles) We do. >> to go from 7,000 to 60,000. >> Yes. And that's really the power of automation, if you think about it. We all have things in our job we don't like to do. I don't know about you guys, but there's things that I'm like, oh man, like, can we please automate this? Expense reports, for example. All about automated expense reports. (laughs) But it's really about freeing people up. Think about it. These people went to school, they often have degrees and things, and they do get caught in a lot of the manual things, downloading reports, consolidating data, you know, submitting spreadsheets and forms. Imagine if we're able to make that easier for people, we give them what they need to do their job. So that all that stuff you would like to do, that you know would improve things. You know would make the company better. The culture better. Heck, maybe it's a new product that people know would be really awesome to go build, but everyone feels like they're so busy. They don't have the time to do it. I mean, that's one of the big values of automation. Is this value creation conversation that you get to have with people. And you get to start asking 'why not' a little bit more. >> You've mentioned a couple of times the IDC presentation this morning. And we were talking about earlier, and the pie chart of, of, of value benefits was cost savings, which was very large, new revenue, which was very large. And then I think 15% was quality improvements. And that, I think that's an underappreciated slice of the pie. Somebody, I think years ago, of the UiPath FORWARD said to me, I can very inexpensively apply Six Sigma to business process. >> (Mariesa) Yeah. >> And I could never afford to do that before RPA. And, and so I wonder if you could talk to the quality impacts that you're seeing. >> Absolutely. I actually spent a lot of time in Lean Six Sigma in my early career days. And one of the things about it too, is when you're doing automation, we actually asked that question upfront, can we just simplify, can we just stop doing this? Because you don't want to automate a bad process either. So you want to ask some of those questions. >> (Dave) Yeah. >> But you're spot on. There's a ton of quality benefits that you get from automation. And one of the things I've actually seen is if you focus on some of the quality upfront, process gets better. Get better impact, as when you get faster. If you have better quality, and get faster, you also get your cost out targets. And I, that really matters because quality also, beyond being able to drive the cost out, it also helps a lot with the experience that people face. Customers are frustrated if they have poor quality, something doesn't work the way it's supposed to, a site's not working the way it should. And also even employees, they go, how many times, if you try to do something and you try to follow a process and something's hung up or who knows what happened, right. It's frustrating. So if you're able to improve the quality in the process, not only do you get the cost savings, but you get these, it's softer tan, there's still tangible experiences that get better and actually motivates people to want to do more. >> And those motivated people are probably dealing with customers much, much better. >> Yes, yeah. >> I mean, it's, I always think the employee experience is so, is, is a critical component. >> It is. >> But the customer experience. So how has the customer experience improved at Cognizant as a result of building in automation and enabling all these people? >> Yeah, they're loving the results because we're giving them back efficiencies in their process immediately by putting this automation in. These are quick impacts they're feeling and we're able to do more for them as well. So we're actually having conversations now on how do we drive more efficiencies for you and also, you know, how can we do more? Is there more volume of work? Is there more we could be doing to add value back to your organization? And that's what you want to talk about with customers is we're able to give you this value. And by the way, we actually did X for you now as well, because we knew you needed it. And we have the capacity to do this for you. So it's a really positive conversation, but we did have to upfront talk to them about it, to make sure that we, everyone was on board. They're comfortable. And we're continuing to have those conversations because you know, sometimes you're in a regulated business and we did put a little extra control in. Absolutely okay. But we want to be able to drive these efficiencies back for them. So they feel it in their own operations internally too. And it hits their bottom line and oftentimes helps their employees too, because we interact with them. So those downstream benefits and sometimes even upstream get some nice returns there as well. >> We've heard from, well, we're going to have Daniel on soon. He's the CEO. We've of course heard from CFOs. We've, that's kind of one of the main springs of RPA in the early days. We've heard a lot more CIOs at this event and we have a CTO coming on later. Are these C suite executives totally aligned in their objectives? Do they have they have different agendas? What are you seeing in terms of serving the C suite? >> Yeah. They're all going to have a little bit different agendas, right? Cause that's, their roles have different objectives, but they all align back to the strategy, obviously, for their company. But they're going to have portions of it that they're trying to drive and deliver. What we do see is that there's still some merging that needs to happen between the operations, the more business focused side and the more technical side. But we do, we're starting to see that convergence happen. Because what happens is, is that, you have these technologists, who really are going to have to help move you forward. We're, you know, we're applying AI, ML. Very technical technologies, and we want to make sure we do it right, that we put the right governance in. And we think about the security that we have to have in place for this too. And but we also have the business outcomes and coming together is where you really see the results. If you look at all of those that have reached true maturity, it's where you see these agendas aligning a bit more because you also have to shift the culture too. And it's a collaboration point. You need to be able to have the tech savvy folks. It helps bring them along this journey, but you also have to have the business depth as because you're looking at a process and you're going really deep into it to apply the technology. So it's when people partner is when we really see the results become more exponential. >> So digital transformation, you know, we hear that term a lot. And automation-led digital transformation. >> Yep. >> I hear a lot of data led digital transformations are those parallel tracks, or they can talk a lot about convergence. >> Yeah. >> Are they? I mean, they're not competing. They're obviously very much related. How do you see the data agenda and the automation agenda coming together. >> They have to. Because you really need good quality data to be able to enable your automation at the end of the day. And, but they actually play nicely together. You can actually use automation to help go back and improve your master data management too, which is the core of your information because that's actually where a lot of the struggle sometimes comes, is in the quality of the data that everyone has to work with. So you see the data agenda working on, "How do I clean this? How do I get more insightful, predictful information?" And then from an automation standpoint, how do I then use that to go take action? So all we see is you bring it together, to be able to identify where do you need to get in the process? How do I get the right information? So the automation also is proven data behind it, that we drove the outcomes, because that's where you take it to the bank at the end of the day. Is that you see it in the data itself. But I think one of the things I've seen with automation that helps drive the digital transformation conversation is, the business and IT teams are coming together and having a joint conversation now. People are excited. They're understanding it. I think that's why people jumped on with RPA so quickly, was because they're like, I get this, this is rule-based, this is my business process. I just tell it what to do. I'll take that. I want to do that. And so people got excited about that. And then they said, let's do more. How do I make it more intelligent? How do I help it do things in my process that it's harder for me to explain because there's just so much information here. There's so many nuances. Well, we have the technology can help make it more intelligent, smarter, and learn, so that we're able to drive that back into the business itself to transform. >> You mentioned Master Data Management is, is the data agenda as it relates to automation, primarily reporting, is it moving? Is it transcending reporting into the building of data products, for example, data services that can be monetized either within Cognizant or in your customer base? >> So it's really evolving. I would say some start with reports. That's easy. That's where we'll start, but I'll just kind of give you maybe a little example. So we have a customer and we work with them. So they have customers where they need to, when they call in, the sales folks and the contact centers, they have to upsell. So they work with a lot of different restaurants and different, maybe, bars and, you know, different companies that have different type of like beverages and things like that. So we worked with them to show, how are they performing today with all their sales reps? And then we started to use some automation to be able to get them more helpful information the moment the customer's calling in. And we also did some semantic analysis on a voice, how people were, how were they sounding? How was their tone? Were they happy? Were they upset? Were they sad during the call? And we fed that information back to those teams, back to those managers, and went back even to their training programs. What they actually saw was a ton of top line growth. They saw all of their metrics starting to get better, and they also start to get more predictive on ways that they can use more data to drive the support for those teams and their customers. Like for example, if you know holidays are coming up or a certain time of year with weather, we're able to actually put that type of information in and helps those sales reps better serve their customers. >> Last question, some of the announcements that came out yesterday and some of the news today about UiPath, what excites you about the technology and how it's going to continue to enable you to, to foster this new culture that you've shifted? >> I think, so one thing about UiPath that we've always loved to be able to partner with them as we're still customer centric. And you see that in every announcement that they're doing, and also they're focused on this true process transformation, intelligent end to end thinking, because I think a lot of times when we've had conversations most get stuck in kind of point solutions. And that's just because people are trying to solve today's problems. But with where UiPath is moving and where we want to move to, is how do we help you to really transform how people work? We know automation is a part of our future. We know it's going to be how we work in the future. And we love about UiPath is to really think about how do we integrate it? How do we make those connections? So we can drive the bigger results, we can make it easier for people to adopt and really embrace it because we need to bring the people along this journey and we need to be able to actually impact our processes too, so we can transform them. So I think that's one thing that's been really exciting is just watching them in general. Involved with the announcements the last couple of days, we really see them continue to push that needle. >> Excellent. Well, Mariesa, thanks for joining us. Talking to us about the automation-led digital transformation at Cognizant. Good luck raising your trained individuals from 7K to 60K. It sounds like the momentum is there. The culture's there. We can't wait to hear what happens next! >> Awesome. Thanks again for having me today. >> Our pleasure. >> Good to see you. >> Thank you. >> For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin live in Las Vegas at the Bellagio. UiPath FORWARD IV is the event we're covering. We'll be right back with our next guest. >> (bubbly outro music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to San Diego, everybody. This is Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Lisa Martin is also here. Stu, I actually did see Ron Burgundy in the street last night. He was out, he was shaking hands with all the CCIEs. This is day three of Cisco Live 2019, theCUBE's coverage. Joe Malenfant is here, the director of IOT marketing at Cisco. Joe, great to see you in from Colorado Springs. >> Thank you very much. >> First time at theCUBE, welcome. >> It is my first time in theCUBE, thankfully it's not actually just a box, because I have a little claustrophobia going on. >> (laughs) So, IOT, it's got all the momentum. Alisa Tony was up on stage this week, addressing 28,000 press people. What's driving all this momentum, other than the great marketing, what's really happening in the field? >> IOT has been a very nebulous thing for the last few years, and we're finally started to see some solidification and some convergence around what it means. And really for Cisco, we started on this path a few years ago, but Liz took over last year. We've established a new strategy, because customers, organizations and especially organizations that run operational technology, think of refineries in the oil and gas industry, in the electric utilities industry. They run a whole separate network called industrial control systems, and that OT side of the house has traditionally been very siloed. Well, as the economy moves forward, as we digitize, they're trying to connect back with their enterprise side of the house. Well, if you're going to connect your network with the IT side, why not use the incumbent leader in enterprise networking? We know who they are. We're all sitting here right now with Cisco. So they look back to the IT side to say, hey, please help us connect. That's really what's driving the market today. >> So how should we think about the difference between OT networks and IT networks? Are there any things we can learn from Tellco which also had some unique inner attributes to it? But share with us what you guys have learned there. >> So the OT network is very different, right? It's very time sensitive; latency is just something that they can't have. When you think of email going down, what's the worst that happens? You might get a nasty gram eventually. Well, when the power grid falls over, lives are at stake. So, those networks are very critical, they're very sensitive and they've always been kept separate. As they start to make that interconnection, we need to bring together networking technologies that are for that environment. As they make that connection though, there is a very number one concern for them is wait a second, if we're going to connect this stuff, we need to make sure it's secure. If you're a chemical processor for example, and you've got a secret recipe, you don't publish that. You don't patent it, because you don't want the word to get out or else somebody's going to rip you off. So, they don't want to have this side of the house get connected with that side of the house and expose the secret sauce. So security becomes very top of mind for them. Connected but do it securely. >> All right, so, Joe, I've actually been happy with how I've seen the solutions (mumbles) from Cisco, because when I first heard IOT, it was like, well we're the leader in networking. We're going to network everything, and I'm like, okay. But at the device edge, one of the challenges is, often I have limited or no connectivity. So sometimes, I'm going to need to do the processing there. There's lots of different protocol issues that I have there. So talk about some of those new solutions that Cisco's been doing at the edge that are more than just sending bits back and forth. >> That's a great question, Stu. So, of course, everything has to do with networking, right? But networking is merely the vehicle for connectivity, and so we realized very quickly if we're going to create new routers and switches for this environment, there's an opportunity to do a little bit more. So back in February, we did something at DevNet Create called the Hackathon. We have a new router. It's a ruggedized router called the IR1101. I think Liz showed it on stage the other day, and this has a specific module inside of it. So there's a module that can be swapped out. Well, at the DevNet Create Hackathon, one of the teams actually created a machine learning module. Why machine learning at the edge, right? If you have 700 sub stations, you don't want to deploy machine learning on each and every one of them. You want to get all that data back into a central place so you have more data to actually train your algorithms on. Why would you put ML at the edge? Because not everything needs to come back. There's stuff that you can do at the edge, number one, with that machine learning on traffic that doesn't have to go back. When you don't back all traffic, that means you don't have to pay costs over to your LTE carrier for more data. Other times, as well, though, you're looking at compliance as another reason. So, that's one use case, right? Let's look at the other one, which really comes down to, okay, if I'm connecting things, and you can actually do some computing at the edge, how are we going to do it? On all of our new switches and routers that have edge compute capability, they're using native docker containers, so now you can actually deploy your applications at the edge. Again, do the work at the edge as close to where it has to be as possible. Don't bring it back, you don't have to worry about any sort of violation of compliance with local laws, sovereignty clouds. You don't have to worry about costs of back hauling traffic. And then, if anything's time sensitive, it stays as close to the edge as possible. >> So one of the keys here to your strategy is clear, is to allow developers to build new applications at the edge. You're not OT experts; that's not your roots. And those developers, your ultimate clients, are. They're the domain experts, they know what's going on, they know these specialized areas, so talk about the importance of having programmable infrastructure at the edge, and specifically what your strategy is. Where does Cisco leave off? And you're not a pass vendor. You're going to bring that in through partnerships, but help us understand that strategy a little bit better. >> Our ecosystem is incredibly important to us. So we've got, DevNet is incredibly important to Cisco, because as you heard probably yesterday, Susie announced new certifications for IOT. Those certifications allow engineers, whether it's a control systems engineer, whether it's a network engineer, to actually get certified, be it specialist, be it professional, in writing their applications for the edge, for those specific environments. But more importantly, because, let's go back to the environment that we're working in, time sensitive, very critical, low latency networks. You don't want to go and push out something where you're not 100% certain, so IOT certifications that DevNet has created give those engineers a repository, a sandbox and all of the Cisco solutions to actually test with before they do the deployment and ensure, almost guarantee themselves success by pushing the production. >> And one of the key things theirs do is the ability to test things quickly and fail fast. >> Yeah, well one of the things that I was a little bit concerned about when I saw this wave of IOT is every customer's going to have different requirements, so it feels like we at least get some level of maturity and commonality if we can have certification. >> Joe: Exactly. >> What does somebody come out of? What skill set do they have in rank? Because you said from a manufacturing or healthcare, everybody's going to use IOT, but how we use it and where we use it is going to be very different. What's the base layer that we're learning about? >> So, ultimately, the engineer who's actually coding these things, kind of what you said. They're all going to be very vertical specific use cases. There's not a lot of horizontal stuff going on, so we're creating a baseline for the engineer to understand their environments better. They honestly know it better than we do, but we want to make sure that as they go to deploy these things that we give them the infrastructure to do it on, the application and framework within which to do it, and the tools to be able to do it. And so that's the docker, the modules, being able to do edge compute and then lastly having that certification within IOT to how do I code this thing? Can I guarantee that I'm going to be successful and push it out? >> Joe, what's the organizational dynamic like? You always hear the store's OT is not talking to IT. They're different animals. You've got some hardcore engineers that have hardened their infrastructure, and you got IT guys that are trying to build applications and support applications for the business. Those two constituencies don't talk. What can Cisco do? What's the strategy with regard to bringing those constituents together? Do you have to or is it sort of divide and conquer? >> I think the number one thing that we want to do is enable the collaboration between the IT and OT. It's not that people don't want to. They're just trying to figure out how to do it better. So if we can help them number one, connect their networks together, safely and securely, that's number one. Reliable and secure networking, what we're known for. But number two, from the OT side, back to what I said originally was around the security side. So, I don't know if you guys heard, we announced last week our intent to acquire a company called Sentryo. Now, why is this important? Because they do passive network detection, whether it's anomaly detection, but they do asset discovery as well. Now a big thing when you're connecting those OT networks into the IT world is what assets do I even have? Those assets are vastly different from anything IT actually knows so this acquisition will allow us to passively discover and tell them, here's your list of assets that you're going to be connecting. Here's what we need to secure, so they know in scope as they walk into this project, they've got a really good blueprint for what needs to be done and not surprises. And the reason that's important is about only 40% of all IOT projects make it from pilot to production. I mean that's kind of staggeringly low. I actually had an analyst tell me yesterday, I'm shocked you guys said 40%, because I only hear about 30%. >> Yeah, yeah, right. >> And when you're doing it in a lab, you know all the variables, but when you go out to a brown field environment, where you've got 20 year old systems that honestly was probably a system hidden underneath some guy's desk that nobody's actually known about. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. We're actually able to discover all those assets now. That's why we did the acquisitions, so it's really from an asset visibility and a security standpoint. >> And you're saying, Joe, that that discovery is specific to edge assets versus like a stealth watch. We heard a lot about stealth watch this week, which is they do discovery, but you say that's predominantly IT assets, servers, storage, networking, you know, switches, et cetera, routers. >> I mean, listen, so stealth watch is awesome, and I think eventually there's going to be a little bit of a merger between some of these things. But, the operational technology environment is very different. They're not native IP. They don't talk the same protocols. There's thousands of different protocols that exist in an operational technology environment, DMP3, Modbus, Profinet, Profibus. Just very few right there. (laughs) Those IT has never, ever talked them. They don't even know what they mean for the most part. Tell an IT guy, hey can you detect this DMP3 traffic? The answer's no. However, when we move into that environment, our networks need to be able to understand that traffic, and that's where Sentryo comes in with that operational technology expertise to help the IT and the OT really come together. Business all comes at the end of the day. >> So, Joe, give us a little spin around the show from an IOT standpoint. We've got the IOT takeover happening here in the DevNet zone. All the classroom seem packed jammed, as they've been all week for all the takeovers, but give us a little spin around. >> It's been amazing actually so far, this year. Having been at Cisco for a few years now, I walked into this and said, wow, we are definitely in the IOT world. We've got IOT plastered outside; we've got it inside. People are very interested in IOT. They're interested not just in what we're doing, but how they can take the knowledge and what they're going to learn here and really bring it back into a practical use case at their own organizations. So, from an IOT perspective, the world of solutions downstairs is jam packed. I mean, we've got a massive presence down there. We've connected the buses that are outside. If you look at the app, we've actually connected those buses to the app for real time data to say this is when the next bus is actually coming. I mean, what a pain in the butt is it to stand outside and go, where's the shuttle bus? We can tell you where the shuttle bus is. We can tell you when it's coming and how long you're going to have to wait. And yes, don't worry, you've got time to get another coffee. >> Just follow the line you'll find the bus. (laughs) >> You'll find the bus but how long is it going to take to get you there? >> (laughs) Okay, you were mentioning about some of the reasons for apps at the edge. I want to come back and explore that a little bit. You said compliance, I think you threw in cost. There's physics involved, as well. So the cloud guys would say, hey yeah, we know there's a lot of stuff going at the edge, but ultimately the heavy work is going to be done in the cloud and all the modeling. You've got others who are saying, hey, here's the blocks, going to put it at the edge instead of a top down approach. What's your scenario in terms of data at the edge? Why does data need to stay at the edge? You mentioned real time before, but let's double click on that a little bit. >> So I think there's really three key reasons that data and applications are going to be processed at the edge. Number one, compliance, right? So there's certain data that's going to come in that cannot be shipped back to a public cloud. That's part of the rules; you cannot do it. No public cloud for certain private data. Number two is cost, honestly, and this is a really big one. If you can reduce your overall cost, instead of back hauling all that traffic to HQ, to your data center, and you just keep it at the edge, you don't have to back haul it. LTE traffic, not the cheapest, and I can only imagine with 5G how much that's going to increase the cost. They're going to want to just back haul everything, right? Well, we can do that really quickly. We can take everything and put it back. Yes, but your bill every month is going to be monumentally more expensive. And then, lastly, as you mentioned was the time sensitive one. That's really going to be one of the bigger ones from a business standpoint. The engineers are now going to be able to write applications for processing data at the edge, so that they don't lose. In this environment, three seconds is the difference between life and death. I'm kind of exaggerating but kind of not. If you're missing an alert in a couple seconds where you can't shut down a gas-leak valve where there's potential for explosion, those seconds are the difference between boom, or we're all good guys, it was just an alert. >> Another classic example here is autonomous vehicles, as well. You can't run that from the cloud, right? You've got to do that locally. Last question, Joe, is Cisco differentiation. Obviously you come at it from a position of networking strength, you mentioned that in your opening comments but give us the bumper sticker on why Cisco. >> I think that the big reason why Cisco is unique in the IOT world is, number one, we're not trying to be everything to everybody. We're trying to create a safe and secure, reliable network. Number two, though, is our ecosystem. So we have a large partner ecosystem. We're expanding it into the OT world. We've got specific products for those OT partners where they can imbed our networking technology into their solutions and systems that they're putting together. (clears throat) Lastly is, honestly, what we're doing here with DevNet. Nobody in this world other than Cisco has DevNet with the network, with the ecosystem. When you put that trifecta together, it's unstoppable. And so being able to bring together IT and OT, only we can do that with those three things. >> So I think Susie said yesterday, Stu, 600,000 engineers that are trained on coding Cisco infrastructure. It's going to be interesting to see how the OT folks pick up on that, and what the adoption is there. Joe Malenfant, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, it was great to have you. >> Thank you, gentlemen, I appreciate it. >> Really, a pleasure. Okay, Stu and I will be right back. Lisa Martin is also in the house. You're watching theCUBE. We're live from Cisco Live in San Diego. We'll be right back. 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>> Announcer: Live from Washington D.C. It's theCUBE! Covering AWS Public Sector Summit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of AWS Public Sector here in beautiful Washington D.C. Springtime in D.C., there's no better time to be here. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting along with John Furrier, always so much fun to work with you. >> Great to see you. >> And this is a very exciting event for you in particular 'cause you've been doing a lot of great reporting around the modernization of IT in government. I'd love to have you just start riffing, John. What's on your mind right now coming into this show? What are some of the questions that're burning? >> I mean clearly the most important story that needs to be told and is being talked about here in D.C. in the tech world is, for this show specifically, is the JEDI contract, the Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative. It's a word that's not being kicked around at this show because-- >> Rebecca: Nothing to do with Star Wars. >> It's literally the elephant in the room because the contract's been waiting, Oracle's been dragging it on and Oracle's been part of apparently, my opinion from my reporting, is involved in some dirty under-handed tactics against Amazon. But it's being delayed because they're suing it. And Oracle's out. They have no chance of winning the deal, it's really Microsoft and Amazon are going to get a lion's share of the business. So you have, that's the biggest story in tech in D.C. in a long time, is the role of cloud computing is playing in reshaping how government, public sector operates. Combine that with the fact that a new generation of workers are coming in who have no dogma around IT technology, how it's bought or consumed and purchased, and the overcharging that's been going on for many many years, it's been called the Beltway Bandits for a reason because of the waste and sometimes corruption. So a new generation's upon us and Amazon is the leader in making the change happen. The deal they did with the CIA a few years ago really was the catalyst. And since then, public sector and the government has realized that there's advantages to cloud, not only for operating and serving society and its citizens but also competitiveness on a global scale. So a huge transformation, that's the story we're following. That's the story that we got into from the cloud side of the business here in D.C. and that is just raging and expanding and compounded by other factors like Facebook. Irresponsibility in how they managed the data there. Elections were tied in the balance. You're seeing Brexit in the UK. You're seeing counter-terrorism organizations using the dark web and other cyber security challenges at the United States. Literally digital war is happening so a lot of people, smart people, have recognized this and it's now for the first time coming out. >> Right, and I think the other thing that we're also starting to talk much more about is the regulation. I know that you're friendly with Kara Swisher and she bangs on about this all the time. But then she said in a column the other day the problem is is that they're now guns ablazing but do they really understand it? And also, is it too feeble, too little too late? >> I mean, Kara Swisher nailed her story in the New York Times and opinion piece. And I've had similar opinions. Look it. She's been around for a long time, I've been around for a long time. I remember when Bill Clinton was president, that's when the internet was upon us, the Department of Commerce did a good job with the domain name system, they shepherded the technology and they brought it out in a way that was responsible and let government and industry have a nice balancing act with each other and the government really didn't meddle too much. But there was responsibility back then and it wasn't moving as fast. So now you look at what's happening now, the government can't just not ignore the fact that YouTube is, in essence, its own state. And it's acting irresponsibly with how they're handling their situation. You got Facebook run by a 30-something-year-old, which essentially could be as large as a government. So there's no ethics, there's no thinking behind some of the consequences that they've become. So this begs the question, as a technology hock myself, I love tech, never seen tech I didn't like. I mean I love tech. But there's a point where you got to get in there and start shaping impact on ethics and society and we're seeing real examples of how this can wildfire out of control, how tech has just become uncontrollable in a way. >> Yes, no absolutely. And so who is going to be the one to do that? I know that on the show later you're going to be talking to Jay Carney who was obviously in the Obama administration, now here at AWS. It's a well-worn path from the public sector to technology. Susan Molinari, a couple of other, David Plouffe. That is the thing though, that these people really need to get it. Before they can lay down regulations and laws. >> Again, back to why we're here and stories we're trying to tell and uncover and extract is I think the big story that's emerging from this whole world is not just the impact of cloud, we talked about that, we're going to continue to cover that. It's the societal impact and this real there there, there's the intersection of public policy and technology and science where you don't have to be a programmer, you can be an architect of change and know how it works. Then being a coder and trying to codify a government or society. I think you're going to see a new kind of skillset emerge where there's some real critical thinking into how technology can be used for good. You're seeing the trends, Hackathon For Good here, you're seeing a lot of different events where you have inclusion and diversity, bringing more perspectives in. So you got the perfect storm right now for a sea change where it won't be led by the nerds, so to speak, but geeky digital generations will change it. I think that's going to be a big story. Not just workforce changeover but real disciplines around using machine-learning for ethics, societal impact. These are the storylines. I think this is going to be a big long 10-year, 20-year changeover. >> But what will it take though? For the best and the brightest of the nerds to want to go into public service rather than go work for the tech behemoths that are making these changes? I mean that's the thing, it's a war for talent and as we know and we've discussed a lot on theCUBE, there's a big skills gap. >> I think it's been talked about a lot on the web, the millennials want to work for a company that's mission-based. What more mission-based can you look for than so unto our public service right now? John F. Kennedy's famous line, "Ask not what your country can do for you, "what you can do for you country." That might have that appeal for the younger generation because we need it! So the evidence is there and you look at what's going on with our government. There's so many inefficiencies from healthcare to tax reform to policies. There's a huge opportunity to take that waste, and this is what cloud computing and AI and machine-learning can do, is create new capabilities and address those critical waste areas and again, healthcare is just one of many many many others in government where you can really reduce that slack with tech. So it's a great opportunity. >> And where would you say, and I know you've been reporting on this for a long time, where is the government in terms of all of this? I remember not very long ago when healthcare.gov was rolled out and it was revealed that many agencies were still using floppy disks. The government is, first of all is not this monolithic thing, it's many different agencies all with their own tech agendas and with their own processes and policies. So where do you place the government in terms of its modernization right now? >> On the elected officials side, it's weak. They're really not that smart when it comes to tech. Most of the people that are involved in the elected side of the Hill are either lawyers or some sort of major that's not technical. So you can see that with Sundar Pichai from Google and Mark Zuckerberg's testimony when the basic kind of questions they're asking, it's almost a joke. So I think one, the elected officials have to become more tech-savvy. You can't regulate and govern what you don't understand. I think that something that's pretty obvious to most digital natives. And then on the kind of working class, the Defense Department and these other agencies, there's real people in there that have a passion for change and I think there's change agents, Amazon's done really well there. I think that is a piece where you're going to see a movement, where you're going to see this digital native movement where people going to be like, "There's no excuse not to do this right." And I think there's new ways to do it, I think that's going to change. So that's that. On the business side, to how the government procures technology is literally like the '80s, it's like that movie "Hot Tub Time Machine" where you get thrown back. Everything is based on 1980s procurement, 1990s procurement. I mean, shipping manuals. So all these things have to change. How do you procure cloud? If you got to go through a six-month procurement process just to spit up some servers, that's not agility. So procurement's got to change. Competitiveness, what does that mean? This Oracle deal with JEDI highlights a lot of flaws in the government. Which is Oracle's using these rules around procurement to try to stall Amazon, it's kind of like a technicality but it's so irrelevant to the reality of the situation. So procurement has to change. >> Well one of the things you said about how there's a lot of pressure to get it right. And that is absolutely true because we are dealing with national security issues, people's lives, health, these really important topics. And yet the private sector doesn't always get it right the first time either. So how would you describe the government, the federal approach to how they start to implement these new technologies and experiment with other kinds of tools and techniques? >> Well I think there's obviously some agencies that have sensitive things. CIA's a poster child in my opinion of how to do it right. The JEDI, Department of Defense is emulating that and that's a good thing. The Department of Defense is also going multicloud as they put out in their statement. Amazon for the JEDI piece which is for troops in the field. I think that every agency's going to have its own workload and those workloads should decide which cloud to use based upon the architecture of the workload. 'Cause the data needs to be in the cloud, it needs to be real time. And to take the military example, you can't have lag in military, it's not a video game, it's real life, people die. Lag can literally kill people in the field. So technology can be a betterment there but technology to avoid fighting is another one. So you have all these things going on, I think the government's got to really design everything around the workload, their mission, their applications, rather than designing around here's your infrastructure, then decide. >> One of the things we talk about all the time, almost ad nauseam, on theCUBE is digital transformation. And so how do you think about those two, private sector versus public sector? What are the big differences in terms of these institutions on their own journeys of digital transformation? >> I think the government's slower. That's an easy one to talk about. I think there's a lot of moving parts involved, you mentioned some of the procurement things, so a lot of processes. It's the same kind of equation. People process technology, except the people that process is much more complicated on the public sector side than private sector, unless it's a big company. So imagine the biggest company in the private sector side, multiply that times a hundred, that's the government. So in each agency there's a lot of things going on there. But it's getting better. I think cloud has shown that you can actually do that, the people side of things going to be addressed by this new migration of new generation of people coming in saying, "I don't really care how you did it before, "this is how we're going to do it today." The processes are going to be optimized so there's some innovation around process improvement that's going to end on the wayside and the technology everyday is coming faster and faster. Recognition, facial recognition software. Look at that. AI. These are things that are just undeniable now, they have to be dealt with. What do you do to privacy? So again, back to process. So people process technology. >> AWS is a behemoth in cloud computing. What do you want to be hearing here at this conference? They're so far ahead of Google and Microsoft but we cannot count those two companies out, of course not. But what are you looking for for key messaging at this show? >> Well I'm looking forward to seeing Andy Jassy's Fireside Chat with Teresa Carlson tomorrow. I'm interested in some of the use cases coming out of Teresa Carlson's top customers in public sector, again it's global public sector so it's not just in North America here in the United States. I'm interested in also understanding what's real and what's not real around the fear, uncertainty and doubt that a lot of people have been putting on Amazon. Because I see Amazon posturing in a way that's saying go faster, make change and it's not so much that they want to monopolize the entire thing, they're just moving faster. And I think Andy Jassy yesterday saying that they welcome regulation is something that they're trying to push the regulators on. So I think they welcome change. So I want to understand if Amazon really wants to go faster or is there an agenda there. (laughs) What's going on? >> I know, methinks these tech titans are asking for a little too much regulation right now. I mean obviously Mark Zuckerberg has also said, "Please regulate us, I can't do this alone." And here we have Andy Jassy yesterday saying those same things. >> Andy Jassy said on stage yesterday with Kara Swisher, "We can't arrest people." So if their tech goes bad, they're only beholden to the consequences as a private entity. They're not the law so this is where again, back to top story here is that, what is the role of government? This change is here. It's not going away, it's only going to get faster. So the sooner the elected officials and all the agencies get out in front of the digital transformation, the sooner the better. Otherwise it's going to be a wrecking ball. >> Well I cannot wait to dig into more of this over the next two days with you, here at AWS Public Sector. >> All right. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier, you are watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Female Voice: From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering VMware RADIO 2019, brought to you by VMware. >> Welcome to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of VMware RADIO 2019, Lisa Martin with John Furrier in San Francisco, talking all sorts of innovation in this innovation long history culture at VMware, welcoming back to theCUBE, Mornay Van Der Walt, VP of R&D in the Explorer Group. Mornay, thank you for joining John and me on theCUBE today. >> Thank you for having me. >> So, I got to start with Explorer Group. Super cool name. >> Yeah. >> What is that within R&D? >> So the origins of the Explorer Group. I've had many roles at VMware, and I've been fortunate enough to do a little bit of everything. Technical marketing; product development; business development; one of the big things I did before the Explorer group was created was actually EVO:RAIL. I was the founder of that, pitched that idea. Raghu and Ray and Pat were very supportive. We took that to market, took it to (inaudible), handed that off to Dell EMC, the rest is history, right? And then was, "what's next?" So Ray and me look at some special projects, go and look at IoT, go and look at Telemetry, and did some orders for them, and then said "Alright, why don't you look at all our innovation programs." Because beyond RADIO, we actually have four other programs. And everyone, was -- RADIO gets a lot of airtime and press, but it's really the collective. It's the power of those other four programs that support RADIO that allow us to take an idea from inception to an impactful outcome. So hence the name, the Explorer Group. We're going out there, we're exploring for new ideas, new technologies, what's happening in the market. >> Talk about the R&D management style. You've actually got all these-- RADIO's one-- kind of a celebration, it's kind of the best of the best come together, with papers and submissions. Kind of a symposium meets kind of a, you know, successive end for all the top engineers. There's more, as you've mentioned. How does all of it work? Because, in this modern era of distributed teams, decentralization, decisions around business, decisions on allocating to the portfolio, what gets invested, money, spend, how do you organize? Give a quick minute to explain how R&D is structured. >> So, obviously, we have the BUs structured-- well there's PCS, Raghu and Rajeev head that up. And then we've got the OCTO organization, which Ray O'Farrell heads up. And the business, you know, it's innovating every day to get products out the door, right, and that's something that we've got to be mindful of because, I mean, that's ultimately what's allowing us to get products into the hands of our customers, solving tough problems. But then in addition to that, we want to give our engineers an avenue to go and explore, and, you know, tinker on something that's maybe related to their day job, or completely off, unrelated to their day job. The other thing that's important is, we also want to give, because we're such a global R&D, you know, our setup globally, we want to give teams the opportunity to work together, collaborate together, get that diversity of thought going, and so a lot of times, if we do a Hackathon, which we call a Borathon, we actually give bonus points if teams pull from outside of their business units. So you've got an idea, well, let's make it a diverse idea in terms of thought and perspective. If you're from the storage business unit, bring in folks from the network business unit. Bring in folks from the cloud business unit. Maybe you've partnered with some folks that are in IT. It's very, you know, sometimes engineers will go, "Ah, it's just R&D that's innovating." But in reality, there's great innovation coming out of our IT department. There's great innovation coming out of our global support organization. Our SEs that are on the front lines, sometimes are seeing the customers' pain points firsthand, and then they bring that back, and some of that makes it into the product. >> How much of R&D is applied R&D, which is kind of business unit aligned, or somewhat aligned, versus the wacky, crazy ideas: "Go solve a big, hairy problem", that's out there, that's not, kind of, related to the current product sets? >> Ah, that's tough to put an actual number on it, >> John: Well ballpark, I mean. >> But if I just say, like, if I had to just think about budgets and that, it's probably ten to fifteen percent is the wacky stuff, that's, you know, not tied to a roadmap, that's why we call it "off-road innovation", and the five programs that my Explorer Group ultimately leads is all about driving that off-road innovation. And eventually you want to find an on-ramp, >> Yeah. >> to a roadmap, you know, that's aligned to a business unit, or a new emerging, you know, technology. >> How does someone come up with an idea and say, "Hey, you know, I want to do this"? Do they submit, like, a form? Is there a proposal? Who approves it? I mean, do you get involved? How does that process work? >> So that's a good question. It really depends on the engineer, right? You take someone who's just a new college grad, straight out of, you know, college. That's why we have these five programs. Because some of these folks, they've got a good idea, but they don't really know how to frame it, pitch it. And so if you've got a good idea, and let's say, this is your first rodeo, so to speak, We have a program called TechTalks where it allows you to actually go and pitch your idea; get some feedback. And that's sometimes where you get the best feedback, because you go and, you know, present your idea, and somebody will come back and say, "Well, you know, have you met, you know, Johnny and Sue over there, in this group? They're actually working on something similar. You should go and talk to them, maybe you guys can bring your ideas together." Folks that are, you know, more seasoned, you know, longer tenure, sometimes they just come up, and-- "I'm going to pitch an idea to xLabs," and for xLabs, for example --that's an internal incubator-- there is, like, a submissions process. We want to obviously make sure, that, you know, your idea's timing in the market's correct, we've got limited funding there so we're going to make sure we're really investing on the right, you know, type of ideas. But if you don't want to go and pitch your idea and get feedback, go and do a Borathon. Turn an idea into a little prototype. And we see a lot of that happening, and some of the greatest ideas are coming from our Borathons, you know? And it's also about tracking the journey. So, we have RADIO here today, we have mentioned xLabs, TechTalks, we have another program called Flings. Some of our engineers are shipping product, and they've got an idea to augment the product. They put it out as a Fling, and our customers and the ecosystem download these, and it augments the product. And then we get great feedback. And then that makes it back into the product roadmap. So there's a lot of different ways to do it, and RADIO, the process for RADIO, there's a lot of rigor in it. It's, like, it's run as a research program. >> Lisa: It's a call for papers, right? >> Call for papers, you know, there's a strict format, it's got to be, you know, this many pages; if you go over about one line, you're sort of, disqualified, so to speak. And then once you've got those papers, like this year we had 560 papers be submitted, out of those 560, 31 made it onto mainstage, and another 61 made it as posters, as you can see in the room we're sitting in. >> I have an idea. Machine learning should get all those papers. (laughs) I mean, that's-- >> Funny you say that. We actually have, one of our engineers, Josh Simons, is actually using machine learning to go back in time and look at all the submissions. So idea harvesting is something we're paying a lot of attention to, because you submit an idea, >> Interesting. >> the market may not be right for it, or reality is, I just don't have a budget to fund it if it's an xLab. >> John: So it's like a Google search for your, kind of, the indexing all those workers. >> Internally, yeah, and sometimes it's-- there's a great idea here, you merge that with another idea from another group or another geo, and then you can actually go and fund something. >> Well, that's important because timing is critical, in these early-- most stuff can be early in just incubation, gestation period for that tech or concept, could be in play because the computer-- all the new things, right? >> Correct. And, do you actually have the time? You're an engineer working on a release, the priority is getting that release out the door, right? >> (laughs) >> So, put the idea on the back burner, come off the release, and then, you know, get a couple of colleagues together and maybe there's a Borathon being held and you go and move that idea forward that way. Or, it's time for RADIO submissions, get a couple of colleagues together and submit a RADIO paper. So we want to have different platforms for our engineers to submit ideas outside of their day job. >> And it sounds like, the different programs that you're talking about: Flings, xLab, Borathon, RADIO, what it sounds like is, there isn't necessarily a hierarchy that ideas have to go through. It really depends on the teams that have the ideas, that are collaborating, and they can put them forward to any of these programs, >> Correct, yeah. >> and one might get, say, rejected for RADIO, but might be great for a Borathon or a Fling? >> Correct. >> So they've got options there, and there's multiple committees, I imagine? Is that spearheaded out of Ray's OCTO group, >> Yep. >> that's helping to make the selections? Tell us a little bit about that process. >> Sure, so. That's a great point, right? To get an idea out the door, you don't always have to take the same pathway. And so one thing we started tracking was these innovation journeys that all take different pathways. We just published an impact report on innovation for FY19, and we've got the vSAN story in there, right? It was an idea. A group of engineers had an idea, like, in 2009, and they worked on their idea a little bit-- it first made it to RADIO in 2011. And then they came back in 2013, and, sort of, the rest is history, you know. vSAN launched in 2014. We had a press release this week for Carbon Avoidance Meter. It was an idea that actually started as a calculator many years ago. Was used, and then sort of died on the vine, so to speak? One of our SEs said, "You know, this is a good idea. I want to evolve this a little bit further." Came and pitched an xLabs idea, and we said, "Alright, we're going to fund this as an xLabs Lite. Three to six months project, limited funding, work on one objective --you're still doing your day job-- move the project forward a little bit." Then Nicola Acutt, our Sustainability VP, got involved, wanted to move the idea a little bit further along, came back for another round of funding through an xLabs Lite, and then GSS, with their Skyline platform, picked it up, and that's going to be integrated in the coming months into Skyline, and we're going to be able to give our customers a carbon, sort of, readout of their data center. And then they'll be able to, you know, map that, and get a bigger picture, because obviously, it's not just the servers that are virtualized, there's cooling in the data center plants, and all these other factors that you've got to, you know, take into account when you want to look at your carbon footprint for your facility. So, we have lots of examples of how these innovation pathways take different turns, and sometimes it's Team A starting with an idea, Team B joins in, and then there's this convergence at a particular point, and then it goes nowhere for a couple of months, and then, a business unit picks it up. >> One of the things that's come out-- Pat Gelsinger mentioned that a theme outside of the normal product stuff is how people do work. There's been some actual R&D around it, because you guys have a lot of distributed, decentralized operations in R&D because of the global nature. >> Yeah. >> How should companies and R&D be run when the reality is that developers could be anywhere? They could be at a coffee shop, they could be overseas, they could be in any geography, how do you create an environment where you have that kind of innovation? Can you just share some of the best practices that you guys have found? >> I'm not sure if there's 'best practices', per se, but to make sure that the programs are open and inclusive to everybody on the planet. So, I'll give you some stats. For example, when RADIO started in the early days, we were founded in Palo Alto. It was a very Palo Alto-centric company. And for the first few years, if you looked at the percentage of attendees, it was probably over 75% were coming from Palo Alto. We've now over the years shifted that, to where Palo Alto probably represents about 44%, 16% is the rest of North America, and then the balance is from across the globe. And so that shift has been deliberate, obviously that impacts the budget a little bit, but in our programs, like a Borathon, you can hack from anywhere. We've got a lot of folks that are remote office workers, using, you know, collaborative tools, they can be part of a team. If the Borathon's happening in China, it doesn't stop somebody in Palo Alto or in Israel or in Bulgaria, participating. And, you know, that's the beautiful nature of being global, right? If you think about how products get out of the door, sometimes you've got teams and you are literally following the sun, and you're doing handoff, you know, from Team A to B to C, but at the end of the day you're delivering one product. And so that's just part of our culture, I mean, everybody's open to that, we don't say, "Oh, we can't work with those guys because they're in that geo-location." It's pretty open. >> This is also, really, an essential driver, and I think I saw last year's RADIO, there were participants from 25+ countries. But this is an essential-- not only is VMware a global company, but many of your customers are as well, and they have very similar operating models. So that thought diversity, to be able to build that into the R&D process is critical. >> Absolutely. And also, think about, you know, when you're going to Europe. Smaller borders, countries, you deploy technology differently. And so, you want to have that diversity in thought as well, because you don't just want to be thinking, "Alright, we're going to deploy a disaster recovery product in North America where they can fail over from, you know, East Coast to West Coast. You go to Europe, and typically you're failing over from, you know, site A to site B, and they're literally three or four miles apart. And so, just having that perspective as well, is very important. And we see that, you know, when we release certain products, you'll get, you know, better uptick in a certain geo, and then, "Why is it stalling over here?" well it's, sometimes it's cultural, right? How do you deploy that technology? Just because it works in the US, doesn't mean it's going to work in Europe or in APJ. >> How was your team involved in the commercialization? You mentioned vSAN and the history of that, but I'm just wondering, looking at it from an investment standpoint of deciding which projects to invest in, and then there's also the-- if they're ready to go to market, the balance of "How much do we need to invest in sales and marketing to be able to get this great idea-- because if we can't market it and sell it, you know, then there's obviously no point." So what's that balance like, within your organization, about, "how do we commercialize this effectively, at scale"? >> So that is ultimately not the responsibility of my group. We'll incubate ideas, like, for example, through an xLabs project. And, you know, sometimes we'll get to a point and we'll work, collaborate with a business unit, and we'll say, "Alright, we feel this project's probably a 24 months project", if it's an xLabs Full. So these folks are truly giving up their day job. But at the end of the day, you want to have an exit and when we say exit, what does that exit mean? Is that an exit into a business unit? Are you exiting the xLabs project because we're now out of funding? You know, think about a VC, I'm going to fund you to, you know, to a particular point; if there is no market traction, >> Right. >> we may, you know, sunset the project. And, you know, so our goal is to get these ideas, select which ones we want to invest in, and then find a sort of off-ramp into a business unit. And sometimes there'll be an off-ramp into a business unit, and the project goes on for a couple of months, and then we make a decision, right? And it's not a personal decision, it's like, "Well we funded that as an xLabs; we're now going to shut it down because, you know, we're going to go and make an acquisition in this space. And with the talent that's going to come onboard, the talent that was working on this xLab project, we can push the agenda forward." >> John: You have a lot of action going on so you move people around. >> Exactly. >> Kind of like the cloud, elastic resource, yeah? (laughs) >> So, then, some of these things, because xLabs is only a two-year-old, you know, we haven't had things exit yet that are, you know, running within a business unit that we're seeing this material impact. You know, from a revenue point of view. So that's why tracking the journeys is very important. And, you know, stay tuned, maybe in about three or four years we'll have this, similar, you know, interview, and I'll be able to say, "Yeah, you know, that started as an xLab, and now it's three years into the market, and look at the run rate. >> So there's 31-- last question for you-- there's 31 projects that were presented on mainstage. Are there any that you could kind of see, early on, "ooh", you know, those top five? Anything that really kind of sticks out-- you don't have to explain it in detail, but I'm just curious, can you see some of that opportunity in advance? >> Absolutely. There's been some great papers up on mainstage. And covering, you know, things on the networking side, there's a lot of innovation going in on the storage side. If you think about data, right, the explosion of data because of edge computing, how are you going to manage that data? How are you going to take, you know, make informed decisions on that data? How can you manipulate that data? What are you going to have to do from a dedupe point of view, or a replication point of view, because you want to get that to many locations, quickly? So, I saw some really good papers on data orchestration, manipulation, get it out to many places, it can take an informed decision. I saw great-- there was a great paper on, you know, you want to go and put something in AWS. There's a bull that you get at the end of the month, right? Sometimes those bulls can be a little bit frightening, right? You know, what can you do to make sure that you manage those bulls correctly? And sometimes, the innovation has got nothing to do with the product per se, but it has to do with how we're going to develop. So we have some innovation on the floor here where an engineer has looked at a different way of, basically, creating an application. And so, there's a ton of these ideas, so after RADIO, it doesn't stop there. Now the idea harvesting starts, right? So yes, there were 31 papers that made it onto mainstage, 61 that are posters here. During that review process, and you asked that question earlier and I apologize, I didn't answer it-- you know, when we look at the papers, there's a team of over 100 folks from across the globe that are reviewing these papers. During that review process, they'll flag things like "This is not going to make it onto mainstage, but the idea here is very novel; we should send this off to our IP team," you know. So this year at RADIO, there were 250 papers that were flagged for further followup with our IP team, so, do we go and then file an IDF, Invention Disclosure Form, do those then become patents, you know? So if we look at the data last year, it was 210. Out of those 210, 74 patents were filed. So there's a lot of work that now will happen post-RADIO. Some of these papers come in, they don't make it onto mainstage; they might become a poster. But at the same time they're getting flagged for a business unit. So from last year, there were 39 ideas that were submitted that are now being mapped to roadmap across the BUs. Some of these papers are great for academic research programs, so David Tennenhouse's research group will take these papers and then, you know, evolve them a little bit more, and then go and present them at academic conferences around the world. So there's a lot of, like, the "what's next?" aspect of RADIO has become a really big deal for us. >> The potential is massive. Well, Mornay, thank you so much for joining John and me, >> Thank you. >> and I've got to follow xLabs, there's just a lot of >> (laughs) >> really, really, innovative things that are so collaborative, coming forward. We thank you for your time. >> Thank you. >> For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin; you're watching theCUBE, exclusive coverage of VMware RADIO 2019, from San Francisco. Thanks for watching.

>> [Voiceover] From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Radio 2018, brought to you by VMware. (upbeat techno music) >> Okay welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage, and John Furrier, Here in San Fransisco for VMware's Radio 2018 14th year where all the top engineers and R&D folks get together and show their best stuff, ideas, discussions, and have a great time. Our next guest is Nicola Acutt who's the vice president of stability strategy office of the CTO VMware part of the group that puts this event together, really a celebration, but also competitive. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for showing up. >> Thanks, it's great to be here, thank you. >> So, talk about what your role is, because sustainability, we were just talking off camera about blockchain and the energy. Is sustainability an energy thing, is it a society thing, what is your focus? >> John we think about sustainability at VMware in a holistic way, and it's some total of how we run our business, so from an operations perspective, how we do that in a responsible and an environmentally responsible way, but it also includes our people and culture. Sustainability is a lot about culture change, and then most importantly, it's also about what we do, and the impact of our product. And so at VMware, we focus on sustainability and what's unique about our approach is that it's in the business, that we have placed the sustainability function in the office of the CTO, because we believe that the biggest impact that we can have is actually through our technology. >> You guys do a great job, I have to say. And the building, by the way, in Palo Alto, your headquarters, which is voted one of the most best places to work, is very sustainable. I know they got a couple of pens from the trees, and you guys use all the wood, all the stories involving the building. So the culture's there, so I gotta ask you here at Radio, what are some of the sustainability ideas, what are some of the conversations, what are some of the papers, what are some of the core tech off-road map that's exciting you and the team at VMWare on sustainability? >> Right, it's really exciting, and Radio is such a magical event for all those reasons. And the sustainability piece of this is really exciting, and there's a couple of dimensions that we have. We have an expo up in the science fair part of the event where some of our engineers who participated in our recent Borathon, which is like a Hackathon, and the theme was sustainability, and so they're presenting their hacks, some of their crazy cool ideas. On one end there was a project around using block chain technology for microgrids, there was a broken build predictor, there was a project around monitoring real time energy for our service. So fascinating, sort of skunkwork projects in the office of the CTO, and then we also are going to be doing a paper cosponsored with two of our principle engineers looking at, and asking a really big question. And that is around code sustainability, and how we think about sustainability and energy as a metric of success just like we consider performance, quality, and security. So I'm excited about that, because that ultimately is about culture, and it's about thinking about hard problems. And that's what innovation is about, right? It's creativity solving hard problems, and implementing something as a result. >> And the big debate about, oh servers aren't gonna be made 'cause the clouds eating server market, well someone's gotta buy servers, someone's gotta run data, so that's always been the challenge of how do I get more power? And now intermitting things, the IOT devices, are needing power. So you've got solar, not a lot of challenges at the network layer but also our layer. Because it's not connected to the network, it has to transmit, it needs power. How do you guys see that evolving on the R&D front? >> You know, I think that's one of the big horizon issues for our industry, frankly. VMWare celebrating our 20th year anniversary, and recently we had an event where some of our alumni and founders and they were asked the question, "what are the things that "keep you up at night about our industry?" And there were two answers to that, one is security and the other is energy. So we really have to fundamentally think about this question, and that is something that we are taking to heart at VMWare and considering what does that future look like? For some companies sustainability is about innovating around things like, can we make products from plastic pollution in the ocean? And for us, we're asking the question what does the future of energy look like for our customers and for our industry? And that future is going to be a distributed energy future. So what does that mean for computing? I don't have the answers right now, but that's part of, and events like this where we bring our smart people together to start to ask those questions, and that's where innovation begins. >> And you don't know where the spark is gonna come from, that's what's great about these tech events, is that there's no bad ideas, 'cause you can kick it around. There's enough people around you, and then now you go back to the company, digitally connected. So you have the Hackathons and the tech talks, you have cool vibe environment, the question I wanna ask you with that is that, is that distributed energy challenge the number one item on the agenda? What are some of the key things that are shaping the agenda for you guys with sustainability? 'Cause I think that's what folks might wanna know about, "okay, what should I think about, is it energy, "what are some of the things I should "start thinking about in the shower, "thinking about as I'm at work or at play?" >> Right, great question. And you know, sustainability is a complex issue that challenges us as a society. For us at VMware, like I said, we're taking a holistic perspective on sustainability, so that includes environmental, social and governance matters. But to answer your question from a technology perspective, we are focused on energy, that's not the only thing, but it is a priority. So we're looking at that from several dimensions. One is our own processes, so that's where the sustainability code initiative code comes in, so how we make our code and our product. And then the products and features that get built into our products and services to our customers, and then layered on top of that is then the energy mix, and doing our part as a progressive company to drive through renewable energy's markets. So we've made a commitment to 100% renewable energy, to carbon neutrality, to do our fair share, but also to help shift the market. Because the future is about not only the applications and the problems that technology can help solve, but it's also about the nature of energy, and the grid mix, so that's a combination. >> And the empowerment to society is also a big one. Huge focus this year, not this year, but this decade on mission driven initiatives. Sustainability clearly falls in that. We were talking about before we came on camera about block chain, and one of the things I've observed in my reporting is that a lot of energy ideas in block chain. You mentioned one of them, where token economics could be an issue. I know block chain has it's own challenges with energy, but that's a hard problem that could be solved that needs to be solved. So folks watching, solve the energy problem, and the speed problem too on block chain. But these are the new ideas that are growing in India, in Africa, these new areas of the world where the middle class is exploding in growths. More access people to computing, more mobile devices. So you start to see new geographies around the world challenge. >> Absolutely, and I fundamentally share the optimism around technology. I think as technologists, we need to be thoughtful about the impact of technology, and I think that is another topic of the day we could have a separate conversation on that, but when you look at the challenges of the world, and the United Nations has put out the sustainable development framework that really names those big gnarly problems of the world that we need to solve, and at the heart of all of those, I believe, technology plays a role. To me, I think that's where companies like Vmware can have a bigger impact, is to think about where is that sweet spot around which we can help bridge those divides, and enable a better future more globally. >> I know you gotta go, real quick, describe what's going on here at Radio, San Francisco to the folks that are watching could make it, what's the vibe, what's it like, share some color commentary. >> You can just feel the energy. It's like a big science fair, but at the end of the day-- >> [John] It's social, too. >> It's very social, and this event is about technology, but it's actually about community. So we talk a lot about all the cool things and things in our future, off-road maps, but at the end of the day, software is all about people, and you see that here, you feel it, it is a community event, and it is about people connecting, and that's the best part about it. >> It's the social collaborative construct. We love coming here, thanks for inviting us. The engineering's action's happening, it's happening here at Radio in San Francisco for VMware, this is theCUBE coverage, I'm John Furrier, we'll be back with more coverage after this short break. (upbeat techno music)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Narrator: From the VMware campus in Palo Alto, California, it's theCUBE covering Women Transforming Technology. >> Hi, I'm Lisa Martin with theCUBE. We are on the ground at VMware in Palo Alto, with the third annual Women Transforming Technology event and I'm very excited to be joined by the CEO of Women Who Code, Alaina Percival. Alaina, nice to have you here. >> Hi, thank you very much for having me. >> So tell me about Women Who Code. You co-founded it a while ago. Give us a little bit of a background about what your organization is. >> Yeah, Women Who Code is the largest and most active community of technical women in the world. Our mission is to see women excel in technology careers, and that's because we have a vision of women becoming executives, technical executives, founders, board members, and of course through a pathway of being software engineers. >> So Women Who Code started, originally, back in 2011 as a community. Tell me a little bit about the genesis of that and what you've transformed it into, today. >> Yeah, it started off as a local community, and it was just a space to get together with other technologists, and what we started to see is it was this thing that was just fun and kind of our little secret for, you know, that first year, and we realized-- at one point I said, "Hey other women around the world deserve to have this, as well." And, that's really where the focus to grow globally came about and focus on women: building on their skills and building up their leadership skills and if you invite software engineers to a leadership and networking event, they won't come, but we hold an average of five free technical events every single day, throughout the world, and at those events, they're primarily technology events where we weave in a little bit of leadership and networking, but it feels authentic and its an event that software engineers are excited to be. >> Five events per day, that's incredible. So, VMware became a partner back in 2015, when you had around nine or 10,000 members. Now, today, its over 137,000 global members. Talk to us about the strategic partnership with VMware and what that's enabled Women Who Code to achieve. >> Yeah, we can't accomplish what we accomplish without the partners that support us. We try not to charge our members for anything. So, those 1,900 events we put on last year were free. We've given away $2.8 million in our weekly newsletter of scholarships, and conference tickets, encouraging our community to go out there in the broader tech community and we can do those things, we can launch in the cities that we can launch in, we can elevate women as leaders around the world, but we can only do that through partners, and VMware is one of our founding partners and what that took is someone in executive leadership to see who we could be, because we're very small, and we were very local when we came to VMware and talked to them about what our vision was and what we were going to accomplish and I say now, what I said back then, is we've only scratched the surface of what we are going to achieve. >> There's some commonalities, some parallels that Women Who Code has with VMware. You know, this is the third annual Women Transforming Technology event at VMware here and its sold out within hours. Walking into that room it's very empowering. The excitement and the passion are there and you just start to feel a sense of community. Tell me about the parallels that you see with VMware and some of the visions that they share about, not just raising awareness for the diversity gaps and challenges, but also taking a stand to be accountable in that space. And what they announced this morning with Stanford, with this massive $15 million investment in this Innovation Lab of actually wanting to dig deep into these barriers to help identify them to help eradicate them. What are some of the visionary similarities with Women Who Code and VMware? >> Yeah, so what you see with that is you know, you're investing in someone or an organization that already has the potential. Our average age of our community is 30. We have a lot of trouble claiming that you achieve what you achieve in your career, because of us. We know we play a part in it, but we know that potential, that raw power, exists within you, and when someone sees and knows that that's there and gives you what you need to be able to harness that potential, you are able to achieve great things, global things. You're able to change the world, and that's what we do for our members and their careers, and that's what our partners, like VMware do for us. >> I saw on your website: 80% of members experience a positive career impact, after joining Women Who Code. 80% of women, that's huge. >> Yeah, and a lot of that comes from the people that you connect with, the sense of belonging. We had a women at the end of Hackathon, in Manila come up to our leaders, there, and she started crying. She said, "I was about to leave the industry and I realize I have a place." And that sense of belonging that you get from coming to a Women Who Code event that's very welcoming, it can really help to override all of those unconscious biases that you encounter every day, throughout the course of your career, and it helps you to realize, "I'm not alone. There's a lot of really smart, talented women in the tech industry, who want me to be in my job and being in my job isn't just for me. I'm lifting up the people around me, as well." >> So one of the things that we hear a lot about is a lot of focus on STEM programs and getting young girls interested in STEM fields to study in college, but another thing that's huge is the attrition rates. Women are leaving technology at alarming rates, and a lot of people think it's to go off and have children, and it's actually not the case. What are some of the things that have surprised you about women kind of in that, maybe, mid-stage of their career that are leaving, and how can Women Who Code help to impact that, positively? >> Yeah, so what you're speaking to is definitely the data showing that women are leaving their technical careers at a rate of 50% at the mid-career level, and they're leaving their overall careers, if you aggregate women in careers, at a rate of 20% over a 30 year period, so that gap is huge and the industry is a great industry for women. You've got a lot of job security, a lot of job opportunity, a lot of flexibility. All of these things are great for women and their careers, but what you're encountering is often being the only, or one of the only, and you really don't overcome that, until you're getting above 20%, 25%, 30% of that feeling of being the only on a team, and what I think is the biggest issue with women coming into their careers at what kind of wears you down is the unconscious bias. It's something that you encounter on a daily, or multiple times a day basis. That thing that if you complained about a single one of them, you'd be the weird person who complains, at your company. And so, what Women Who Code really does is: one, it helps to create a sense of belonging, it helps to build domain-specific and non-domain-specific skills, it helps you to envision your career, not just the next step in your career, but the step after that, and the step after that, so it's really working to combat those things that you're to, on a daily basis, to provide that sense of community, to remind you, you do belong, and to really help you envision and achieve your career goals, long-term. >> So you have about 137,000 members, globally. And when we had Lily Chang on earlier, she was talking about the Shanghai and Beijing and kind of what that sort of thing meant to her going back there now, on the board. Tell us, maybe give me an example of a real shining star, who joined Women Who Code and was able to get that support, and that guidance, and that camaraderie to continue to be successful, and actually be promoted, and succeed. >> Yeah, so one example that I love is a woman came up to me at an event, last year, and she said, "Hey Alaina, I was going to the Women Who Code Python events, and I now, today, because of what I learned, ended up choosing a path in data science. I'm a senior data scientist, and this year, I'm being flown across country to speak, as an expert in data science. I would not be in this career path, without Women Who Code." Another story that I love is a woman who came up to me at a Hackathon and she told me her story that she had joined Women Who Code, in February, and she was going to our events and kind of figured out what she wanted to do, and by the summer she had transitioned into a new job, gotten a job with The Weather Channel, as a software engineer, and she was making more than double any salary that she had had prior to that. >> Wow. >> And so its career direction, competing job offers, which really increases your likelihood of having a higher salary, those are kind of two examples that I love. The one thing that we haven't talked about is our leadership program. We have a global leadership program, which really actions you to build skill-based volunteering and become a local tech leader. It opens up lines of communication between you and executives at your company. You often get called in as a thought leader at companies. You typically will receive a promotion or a pay increase, at a higher rate than you would otherwise. Some of our leaders get press mentions, get invited to be speakers at conferences, or even advisors on advisory boards. And so, when I look at the stories that are coming from our leaders, one of my favorite stories is a woman in Atlanta. She had a master's in CS. She was inside of the box, you know, the person that every company wants to hire. She was incredibly shy, and when she stepped up as a Women Who Code leader she said, "Oh Alaina, I'm going to be the worst leader." And, okay you've got this. At her first event, she stoop up and she was like, "My name's Erica. Feel free to ask me questions," and kind of sat down, as quickly as possible, but she stood in the front of that room. She began to be perceived by the community, and by herself, as a leader. And in under one year, she was invited, she didn't even apply, to speak at three different tech conferences, and she went from barely being able to say her name in front of a nice community to giving a talk to a standing-room-only crowd. >> Wow, very impactful. And is that for other opportunities that you guys deliver, in terms of public speaking, or was that because she was able to, through Women Who Code, to start to get more confidence in her own capabilities and in her own skin? >> Experience, confidence, self-perception, community-perception, I had one lead at our community tell me that she became a leader at Women Who Code, by regularly attending events. One day, the leader was running late, so she said, "Oh, well, you know I can probably get this started. I've been coming enough," so she went and stood at the front of the room, welcomed everyone, got everything going, said our pitch and she said, by the end of that three-hour event, people thought she was a leader and she began to think, "Oh yeah, I'm a leader," and she says, "Hey, I know that I can get an interview anywhere I want. I know that this opens doors for me." I had one leader tell me that she interviewed with SpaceX, and they specifically told her in the interview that they were impressed with her Women Who Code leadership and that was one of the reasons they were interviewing her. >> Wow, what have been some of the things that have really blown you away, in the few years that this organization has been around? >> It's just the individual stories. It's, every step of the way, the impact that it has in the lives of our leaders in our community. And I honestly feel, everyday, that I get to do this for a job. >> With what VMware announced this morning, with Stanford and this huge investment that they're making into Women's Leadership and Innovation Lab, to look at some significant barriers that women in technology are facing and to identify those barriers that we can then eradicate, what are some of the things that you're looking forward to, from that research and how you think that can actually benefit Women Who Code? >> Yeah, I'm very excited to see what comes out from there. I think we need a lot more research to help us to understand at what point things are happening and what things you can be doing that really help to overcome. I think that combining research with the real-world, in-person action that Women Who Code does and the work that we do with our community would have an even bigger impact. >> I also think what it speaks to is accountability. You know, a very large, very successful, 20-year-old organizations standing up saying, "We actually want to study this," and I think that there's a message there of accountability, which is, I think, a very important one that other organizations can definitely learn from. >> Yeah, I think that also they're going to an organization outside of them and funding that. And so, the research that comes out of there might come back and say, "You're doing this wrong. This is how you can be doing it better." And so, the fact that they're willing to make an investment and say, "Hey, we want to see this better, not only for us. It's not just going to be internal. This data's going out to the world." That's an investment in global change. That's not just holding that in at a personal or organizational level. >> Right, so in addition to that news that came out today, what are some of the things that you're going to walk away, from this third annual Women Transforming Technology event going, "Ah, that was awesome. Now, this gives me even more ideas for Women Who Code." >> Yeah, I think this is a great opportunity to connect with, especially, women who are in leadership positions and figure out how we can better service women at the higher tiers of their career, because you don't stop needing support, and you don't stop growing your career, once you become a director or a vice president. You continue to invest in your career, and you continue to needs support. And so, I'm really looking for ways that we can better serve those women. >> And hopefully, we start to see that attrition number at 50% start to come down. >> Alaina: Definitely. >> Alaina, thanks so much for your time. It was a pleasure to chat with you, and we wish you continued success with Women Who Code. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for watching. I'm Lisa Martin with theCUBE, on the ground at VMware, for the third annual Women Transforming Technology event. Thanks for watching. (funky electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana, it's theCUBE! Covering .NEXT Conference 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage here from Nutanix .Next 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, with my cohost, Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome back to the program, Ben Gibson, who's the Chief Marketing Officer at Nutanix. Ben, nice to have you on your third time now on theCUBE. Couple more, you got one of those VIP badges on our website. (Ben laughs) >> It's getting to be a really good habit. I'm really enjoying it. Thanks for having me here. >> Well, thank you. And You and Keith share something in common. This is the first time you've been to a .NEXT conference. >> Indeed. >> So, I've had the pleasure of actually being at every single one of the US and Europeans. Haven't done the .NEXT On Tours. But give us your impression so far as to, you're heavily involved, but of the show. >> You know, I have to say it's lived up to all my expectations and more. I talked about this, this morning. The first .NEXT back in 2015. You were there, it was in Miami. We had a little over 800 people. Today, we had 5,500 registered to be here. And it's a thrill to see that many of our best customers and partners come together. And for me too being new to this company, I've been here almost six months now. It really brings home the level of energy, and loyalty in excitement that we've engendered within our customer base. It's palpable. And what better way to experience that live than here in New Orleans? >> Yeah, as we say, a lot of shows like this, there sometimes it's like well, I've got all the true believers here. But, you know, there's good customers here. They're poking, they're prodding, they're trying. But they are big fans of the product. Any kind of key things, interactions, you've had so far? >> Yeah, I've had a lot of conversations with customers here. And I am picking up on some common themes. One of them is moving more and more of tier-one applications onto Nutanix. And that's very exciting for us. You know, in our early days, it was all about VDI and that was the sweet spot workload. And now, we're starting to see more and more Oracle and SAP, and other major tier-one applications, being deployed over Nutanix. And customers are excited to do that because we've made things so much radically simple for them in terms of the infrastructure that is being run upon, (laughs), so to speak right? And so that's certainly a key theme that we're hearing. >> Yeah, one of the things that I took out of your opening at the keynote is that we talk about how much change there is in the industry, but in some ways it's a challenge, but another way it's really an opportunity for customers to go through their transformations, change their businesses, and prove their careers. What's Nutanix's positioning? >> Yeah, first of all, my first and Nutanix's first position on this is .NEXT. We see as a place where IT professionals can come, they can learn, they can share, get certified; but also help them position themselves for all this change that's happening in the industry. Public cloud, right? If you're managing and building infrastructure or you're renting it. And we think there's a really interesting opportunity for those who have built, to become those who have advise and lead. As everything moves to be a more hybrid cloud scenario out there. And so, I think that's the opportunity that we have and this show is about how do we empower our attendees to go back out and be that strategic counselor. To build the right type of data center the way they've always wanted to do. And, be that broker almost, between different clouds. And that's a lot about, what you heard Sunil talk about today. >> So Ben, one of the things that I've heard consistently from customers over the past couple of days: Nutanix, humble. Nutanix, not entitled. You're the chief storyteller at Nutanix. How did you get that message out, without eliminating the core of that message? I mean, that's great to hear when I'm here at the show. But how do you expand that message out to the greater audience and future customers? >> That's a great question. It's something I think about every day and every night (chuckles). And for us, you know, we talk about our core values, about being hungry, humble, and honest. And I really think we live up to that. I think, how do we get out that persona of who we are as a company out to the broader marketplace? We have a lot of great early adoptive customers. And now as we move and as hyperconvergence and everything we're doing moves more into mainstream with candidly more conservative customers that may not be ready to try the brand new, then we do have to get that story out there more. So one big way we do it, just this week we've launched our new brand campaign around freedom: Freedom to build. Freedom to run the applications where you want to run them. Freedom to choose the right cloud platform that suit your needs. And so, a big thing we're doing this week is we're rolling out this campaign. And who better to unveil that to you first, than our best and brightest and most loyal customers here at .NEXT? >> Yeah, expand on that, that freedom campaign. It definitely, it struck me when I landed in the airport, here in New Orleans. And I believe it's: "Build, run, cloud, invent, and play." >> Ben: Yeah. >> Some of those themes, I've heard in the past. I remember the first .NEXT conference, it was, "Nutanix gave me my weekends back." And then, you know went a little bit, "Nutanix enabled me to go to "that security project that I couldn't do before." So, why the freedom brand? what have you heard from customers that resonated with that? >> We chose to go down this path, because we wanted to make sure we connected, everything that's wonderful about Nutanix. And, I'm going to brag about my marketing team. What I inherited here is an amazing marketing team. And, we've all recognized that what this team has built in terms of the voice of the company, in terms of the story that we created. A category how, maybe not quite so humbly, say we created with hyperconvergence. We want to connect the past to the present and into the future. And so, yes, give us your weekends back. That's something in common, we have heard from customers. Freedom to play is about building all for that. Freedom to build, is about building on the early success we've had. Now it's freedom to run, Freedom to cloud. As we've moved into multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud management automation and control. These are new elements to our portfolio. So these are new storylines that we need to open up. So, the way I like to think about it, this campaign is connecting everything that's been great about Nutanix to today and then also taking us into a new direction. >> So, Nuich talked earlier about the importance of being able to just go to that website, download Nutanix CE version, kick the tires; A promise Angelo Luciani, who runs the community program-- >> They did a wonderful job. >> Wonderful program, tie that together to their freedom program. How important is your community program? Which gave some big numbers today on stage. How important is that in helping customers discover Nutanix and move their careers in help digital transformation? >> Keith I'm glad you brought this up. Our next community, yeah, so the number I gave today was close to 70,000 active members. And we've drawn almost 20,000 to all of our .NEXT conferences over the past year. The online community to me is fundamental to how we continue to grow and deepen the connection and affinity we have with our customers. And what you going to see us do is really bet on driving more curriculum that's easy to consume, that helps our community members expand their knowledge base in the areas like multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud management. We introduced Nutanix Era today bringing new database services to the floor starting with copy data management. That community needs to be step number one for where our best customers go and learn more about the roadmap. Learn about best tips in trades to be able to embrace this new capabilities and then weed down into the fabric of they are doing with their data center builds. So community, I'm a big believer in it. We are lucky enough to have a vibrant and strong community already. So, now it's like how do we add more to that experience. This place, is kind of like coming to Mecca, it's like coming to-- (laughing) For us, right? It's coming to the event to have a touchstone. But then for the other 51 weeks to the year, that's what NEXT community is all about. >> Yeah, Ben, what type of roles are you trying to reach with your message? We've talked traditionally. We're talking kind of the infrastructure, getting out of the silos, going to the architect, But then we have a product like Beam which doesn't even. It started in the public clouds and working there. Who are you trying to reach with your freedom messaging and as you expand the portfolio to SaaS and beyond. >> You know it's interesting. Our business is diversifying and the audience and the personas that we have reach is definitely diversifying. So, obviously we have great affinity with servers, store admins, infrastructure managers. We are increasingly engaging up the IT stacks so to speak. Application owners and developers, is a significant audience for us. In fact yesterday for the first time in .NEXT, we had our inaugural Hackathon. And we had lot of folks that come from DevOps practices, within their organization, and this is a huge growth area within enterprises, and they came yesterday, they sat down, they had six hours, we fed them cookies, we gave them drink. All sorts of drink, and they came up with some really cool new apps where they developed to our APIs. And that's just one representation of a new audience and building that bridge between whose building an architect in the infrastructure And who's developing these new apps, which by the way need to get to market immediately. Which is why you need such radically simplified infrastructure to make that happen. App developers move up the stack. Before I came here to join you, I was with a room full of CIOs, and we talked a lot about some of the business pressures they're feeling. We talked a lot about governance and cloud. So there's a lot of new topics there, that under the freedom campaign, we talk about freedom to cloud. But then the meat underneath that is really around some of these topics we covered earlier today. >> So, still we've been at other infrastructure shows that have tried to do DevOps and Hackathons and they haven't been successful or they've been successful for a limited amount, you guys actually, quote unquote, sold out the space. What is the message that's resonating with that crowd that's bringing them to a DevOps Hackathon at what is essentially still, an infrastructure-focused audience? >> You know, the way I'll answer that question, one of my favorite early stories since I've joined Nutanix; major retail or customer. The infrastructure team without telling the app dev folks, moved some of their early apps onto Nutanix and didn't tell them. All the sudden, they started getting all these phone calls, and it's like, "what did you do?" "My apps are performing beautifully. "Oh, my Gosh it's so simple." Then they provided them with the portal that we offer through our software, So they could see how everything is moving. Are the SLAs there? Are these Apps humming? And they said, "what did you do?" "Well, we moved it onto Nutanix." And so then all of a sudden this new audience for us started saying we want the Nutanix. (Keith laughs) Which I think is a brilliant tagline, I love it. >> Keith: The Nutanix. We're trying to capture that spirit. So to me it's about. In the past there's been a lot of frustration, candidly, between these app developers who are under extreme pressure to get their new app to market. Customer facing, business facing, or what have you. And it's been so slow to get it done and so then often a crazy CMO of an organization, may work around IT and go throw something out in the public cloud. Well that could still be the model, but with the tools and HCI as a simplified infrastructure. Now there's a big answer, hey, we can move, we can sprint at your speed. And I think that's the key message. And so we're starting to attract that self-fulfilling prophecy to help make that possible. >> All right so, Ben, you are talking about your teams built a really impressive show here. Got the Hackathon as a new thing, one of the things I noticed here in the Expo Hall, there's now a whole area with some of the channel providers. There's always been channel providers here but they've got booths and speaking gigs. What other aspects for those people that didn't attend, in person here would you want to call out, give a little bit of color to what's happening? >> Yeah, Stu thanks for pointing out channel partners. This year over 1,200 representatives from Nutanix's channel are here. And Lou Attanasio, my esteemed colleague and global head of sales, and Rodney Foreman, our head of channels, they are both with me very focused on how do we go bigger and deeper with our channel community. If you think about it, we've moved to a software choice strategy. You can consume Nutanix on our own appliance, you can consume it on our OEM, great OEM partner Dell, but we also have ways that you consume our software with Cisco infrastructure, with HPE servers and the like. Channels is a wonderful way for us to be able to gage and find that new elasticity, candidly, in the market where they have customer relationships we may not have yet, but we have to invest in that, we have to invest in technical enablement, we have to invest in co-marketing with them, and I'd say we've done some on this front in the past. The time is now for us to really go deeper on that front. And that one's a big message we delivered during our partner exchange event just yesterday here in beautiful New Orleans. >> All right, so Ben do we have to wait to the closing keynote till we know where Nutanix .NEXT US is next year? >> Yes, you cannot get it out of me. The announcement will come tomorrow end of day. >> Camera's will lie for their all asking. >> No, I'm not going to betray any body language or anything, but we're looking forward to seeing you there next year. >> All right, well, Ben Gibson, pleasure to catch up with you again. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. Lots more coverage here from Nutanix .NEXT in New Orleans. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(Electronic ambient music) >> Announcer: Live from Nassau in the Bahamas, it's The Cube! Covering Polycon 18, brought to you by PolyMath. >> We are live here with The Cube's exclusive coverage at Polycon 18. It's a securitized token conference, but really, it's about cryptography, cryptocurrency, blockchain, token economics. The whole community's here, investors, entrepreneurs, and startups. We have two great guests here from CryptoChicks, Nataliya Hearn and Natalia Ameline. Pioneers in the industry doing something really compelling, the first ever blockchain hackathon coming up in April. It's historic, it's the first. Welcome to the Cube, thanks for joining me. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us. >> So I love the t-shirts, CryptoChicks, I want one, a few. Can I buy them on the website? Can I get them made? >> Yeah, you can, absolutely >> I want my daughters to have those immediately, so. People in our community know that the Cube's really been... we love women in tech because there are so many smart women out there and it's awesome to showcase. But beyond that, it's this real technology being innovated. Talk about what you guys are doing. You have a really important mission, had great success, with CryptoChicks. This is like a movement inside this community, but it's also happening all around the world. You guys have big plans. Take a minute to explain the group, how you guys are operating, how it's going, and talk about this big event. >> We started this group because we realized that women are underrepresented in the space, and you don't need to go far; look at what's going on at this conference, right? Even though we are pleased towards the increase in turnaround of women, in events like this, but we still have ways to improve. So we started this group CryptoChicks with the sole mission to increase, improve gender balance, and increase participation of women in the community. And we're doing it in a variety of ways, but largely what we try to do is we try to create an environment where women feels safe to learn. It's small classes. Where women come in, they can ask questions, they can feel at ease, and I think it's very important because not every woman feels comfortable getting up in a big crowd and asking questions. And I think what we do is really helpful for a lot of women this way. >> It's very inspiring. Also you guys as co-founders Nataliya we were talking about you were a professor, and education's a big part of it, but also human nature right? So talk about the dynamic and how you guys approached that because there's different styles, both men and women and we got to kind of get it going together, I mean, you guys have got to get critical mass. Now the good news is, people are talking about it, and it's happening, and... >> Absolutely, I think, kind of knowledge. People hear stuff. You know I had kind of interesting... I was talking to a woman who was in tech but her English wasn't great, and all this kind of stuff. So she called it BigCoin, which I love it. (laughs) Because it is kind of a BigCoin you know? Out of all the coins it's the biggest coin. So stuff like this. If you go to meet ups you would have in a room of a hundred, maybe one or two women. And then they'll go, well what's a wallet? What is all this about? Just even the basic, baby-stepping, through the system. And then I think well we're focusing on only one part of it. The other part of it is that we're creating a really new level of democracy. And that element, I think, that's why we need the education. An education probably, while women is great, but we've got to start a little earlier. The interests should come at least in high school level, where you go well, What is debt? What is value? How do you define currency? Actually all the stuff we're doing at the conference here, in terms of securities. Is it a security? Or is it not a security? How do you define? So all of that starts early on. >> I've been having conversations at many levels about this, at Sundance Film Festival we talk about the role of technology. So it used to be, you know, the Boys Club. That's now changing, which is great, but also there's a trend of multidisciplinary things. You mentioned economics and all these things. So the world now is becoming integrated. So math for instance, there's a lot of math geeks out there, male and female. You don't have to be a coder per say, right? There's certainly more coding opportunities, for women, but it's not just one thing. You can do anything. Fifty percent of the population is women. If this is going to change the world, which it is. Fifty percent of it is going to be impacted too. So they have to have a role in what's going on in the community. So it's natural it should happen, I mean... >> Absolutely. And actually one of the reasons the Hackathon, the reason it's first all women Hackathon in Blockchain, and we actually have two streams. And one stream is for hackers, who are into the nitty-gritty of, sort of, the coding part, and we actually have support for them as well, in terms of learning. And then we also have the business track, where if you have an idea, and you think that Blockchain would be a really good avenue to take that idea, so you could pitch your idea during the Hackathon as well. >> And just to clarify, this is the up and coming Hackathon that you guys are doing. All women. What's the date? Share the details. Share the details. >> So it's going to be actually a conference and Hackathon, we're going to run it parallel. Conference will start on the 6th of April and going through the 8th of April, and the Hackathon will happen at the same time. >> And where is the conference going to be attended? >> So the conference is taking place in Toronto, we're partnering with our venue partner MaRS Discovery District. So it's an absolutely amazing venue in Toronto. And also our partner MaRS has a history of, you know, promoting the women in technology. So it's a good partnership for us. And it's going to be, the Hackathon is going to run about thirty hours and hopefully it's going to be a lot of good connections coming out of it. I think one of the things that we want to accomplish in this Hackathon for women is to make it easy for them to get opportunities. So most importantly we want to connect them with employers. And that's a great venue for that, because when we travel, we have a lot of the times owners of the companies will approach us and say you know, we're really looking to diversify our team. Can you help us? Because women just don't apply. I think that's another way we're trying to really infuse more women into the community. >> Open up channels of opportunity, it's not just having it be like a job interview. >> Exactly. >> So networking, demonstrating skills, style. Are you guys seeing the formula that works with people, with women? Because we see different conversations around this, you know. Take a certain approach, posture this way, be different. Eventually, I interview a lot of women that are saying, I'm going to be hardcore and some say, I just want to wear high heels and I'm a fashion person, that's who I am and why would I want to change that just because I'm a woman? So there's different views on this. Is there any pattern, or formula that you would suggest or observe? >> You know I think we live in a really fortunate part of the globe where we can actually do what we want to do. There aren't too many places like that in the world. And I think that we've got to be really thankful for that, and then it really is, you know, we are empowered to create opportunities. And in this space, it's a really young space. I mean it's really fundamental. Some people say well we've been in it for ten years. Really, most of the people have been in it for, you know, couple years. So don't think, women shouldn't think that well, there's all these guy and they know what they're doing. They also don't know what they're doing, everything's changing. Every wallet and every structure that is being created today is going to be a little different tomorrow, it's a process. >> If you say you're an expert about something here, then you're really a pretender because everyone's always learning. And the real pros are humble about that. So that's one observation. But the other one is, and I want to get your reaction on this because I go to a lot of events. Especially in tech. Where a lot of male-dominated, you know, enterprise here and there. This community's very mission oriented and I don't see any signs of lack of inclusion. So I think the door is open at least my perspective, and certainly we've been covering a lot in the space, Bitcoins in 2010 and crypto and everything else. But being here I see open doors. I can say the other verticals, not so much. Here, it seems open. Do you guys agree with that? What's good about that if you do agree, how do people walk through those doors? And if it's not, what needs to happen? What's your observation? >> I think it depends on the personalities a lot. I find that some personalities, the door is open, and will just walk in. Some personalities are, you know, I want someone to bring me and introduce me, I think it's like this everywhere. I think in this space I mostly see that it's friendly space, pretty happy with it, but I also think there could be some improvements, because quite frankly sometimes the culture is not necessarily that welcoming. For example, you go to the chatrooms on Facebook as an example. A woman makes a comment and after that you'll see lines of guys responding, what are you doing here? And why did you say that? >> Really? >> Yeah it's very common >> It's IRC culture, really. >> Yeah, so it's you know, some women are perfectly fine with it, right? And for me, it's like okay, you know, everybody's entitled to opinions. But some next time would not comment, right? And I don't know, maybe guys have a little bit thicker skin, and they take some ridicule better, I don't know, but I think there's still ways to make the culture a little bit more open and I guess comforted. >> Nataliya, do you agree with that? What's your take on that? >> I think it really starts with upbringing, again, and how we raise our children. I have 3 sons, so I raise them in the way I'd want to be treated, in an environment. I'm an engineer, so I've worked with men all my life, and this is not unusual for me. I've gone to conferences all my life, thousands of people, twenty women. >> Yeah you've got a thick skin, you guys have thick skin. >> And you know, in a way yeah, it takes guts, like you said before, to wear high heels and a skirt and really stand out when you're already standing out. So you've got to put your head up you know? And you walk into that room. >> Be yourself! Right? But don't be afraid. I guess what you're saying is, you could have whatever posture you want to have, just be proud, keep your chin up, as they say. Alright, so let's talk about, you mentioned, you guys are moms. So like, I have four kids too. Two daughters, David Vellante has four as well, the same. These kids that are born now are growing with digital natives, some are kind of pre, post Facebook, pre Instagram, Snapchat, it ranges in the spectrum. Certainly gaming has been a big part of the culture of the youth. So people who are digital natives, and or have come on with the connected social world that is, they are doing things differently. So I wanted to get your thoughts as parents, I get asked the question a lot: should I let him game? Should I let him code? What should I do? What's good? What's bad? There's no data other than kind of anecdotal or vision. I personally believe in gaming as a good future of work scenario, as long as you don't OD on it, and overdose on too much gaming. I think coding is the same. So I think this is going to be the tooling of the future, what do you guys think as parents about the exposure of technology? How do you do it? Is there a diet? Is there a recipe? I mean, what do you guys think? >> I think personally it's great. I think the younger kids get exposed to technology, the more comfortable they feel with it, and the more likely they are to become the next, you know, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates etcetera. And I think our society, whether some people like it or not, it's moving in a direction where we're becoming more and more technology addicted and dependent on it. Technology is everywhere, we don't even realize, that it's there. You know, you wake up in the morning and you look at the internet. You may like it or not, but that's the lifestyle these days. So I think for me, with kids, we need to give them freedom, and we need to observe. Because at the end of the day, I think kids are intuitive, they know what they're interested in, and we need to help them nurture their interests, so that they grow up, and they don't need to go to a job that they hate. Instead they do what they love. And that's how we're becoming a more productive society. >> And the learning online too is an opportunity to go nonlinear. Learn things at the scale you don't have to wait for the next class or semester. Your thoughts on this, Nataliya? >> Absolutely, I think every child has a gift, and I think it's parents responsibility to discover that gift. Instead of shoving your ideas, or things you didn't achieve in life into your children. >> That's called snowplow parent or helicopter parenting. >> So absolutely, and we are a technology-driven society, and you know, I'm an engineer so I'm a techie, so I've introduced my sons to a lot of things, but you know what? They've introduced me, and actually they kept me in this sector. >> I think the observational thing is really important. Freedom with observation. That's not monitoring, and surveillance, or helicoptering. It's really like, let him play, let him explore, let them have a good time. Understand it, but be mindful of what you're observing. And that's key. >> And yeah, too much of anything is not good. You know, you have to balance your sleep patterns, and all this kind of stuff, all of that has to come into a child's life. >> Yeah, intervention is required at some point, you know, when you see that the kid is shaking. (laughing) >> I always say to women in tech who are moms like, man, you have it so easy now, because you know how hard it is to raise children. Being a parent is super hard, and a lot of people look at that, need to understand that's how hard it is. It's really a wonderful thing. So thanks for sharing. Looking forward to following the CryptoChicks and covering the Hackathon, so let us know how it goes. Are there going to be any live feeds, or twitter handles, or hashtag, what's going on? >> There will be, and we'll let you know. Thank you for the opportunity >> Thank you very much >> Thank you very much for sharing, CryptoChicks here on The Cube, I'm John Furrier. Live coverage continuing, day two, of SiliconANGLE Media's Cube exclusive coverage at Polycon 18. We'll be right back. (Electronic music).

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi I'm Stu Miniman joined by John Troyer and we're at VMworld 2017. This is SiliconANGLE Media's production of theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. The show's hashtag is #VMworld. There's also a lot of sub-hashtags, so if I was going to make this one the VMworld three word, it's developers, developers, developers. Happy to bring onto the program first time guest Byron Schaller, who is the DevOp's practice lead at RoundTower and Rebecca Fitzhugh, who's Technical Marketing Engineer at Rubrik. Thank you both so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Alright, Byron, I want to start with you. Both of you I've known through the community for a bunch of years but tell ya, how long have you called yourself a developer and, you know, tell us a little bit about what you do these days. >> These days I'm more of a friend to developers, I think, than an actual real developer myself but I started writing code professionally 20 years ago. I've been, kind of in an Ops role, and went back into Dev, and now try to help really bridge that gap and get Ops folks to write better code, and get Dev folks to have some more sympathy and empathy I guess for the Ops side as well. Try to get them to play nice together. >> Yep, but Byron, those of us who haven't been in tech in a while, last time I was coding we called it programming. (Byron laughing) So, I thought that shift happened like 15 years ago. But, Rebecca, tell us a little bit about your background, how you fit into the DevOps community. >> So I would say I am more of Dev adjacent. So I work in Technical Marketing as an Engineer at Rubrik, so while I do write some code and help with some of the integrations, I'm primarily public facing and helping evangelize our software, and work hand-in-hand with the developers as well. >> Absolutely, and maybe talk a little bit about that, you know, we know the Virtualization community, what's different about the developer community, and DevOps versus kind of the traditional administrators? >> One of the things that I've noticed that, in my opinion, is the difference between the events, like comparing VMworld to a DevOpsDay. VMworld is very technically focused, a lot of time. And when I go to DevOpsDays, I always notice they make an effort to show sessions on culture, and to talk a lot about culture of development, and what we can do better as a community. >> What's the connection here, between VMworld and the developer community, right? We're the VMworld has been, I dunno, how many VMworld's have there been Stu? We've been, there's been 15 of them or something? At least. So, very operationally focused, IT people who call themselves IT, operators maybe, even broader than that, Enterprise Architects, and now, we've been talking about DevOps for a few years. So, maybe, Byron, what's the relationship of DevOps to the VMware community? >> It really comes down to the API integration. And at what point do you stops being an Ops person if you're writing a bunch of API code, and you become a developer. That's become a lot fuzzier lately. >> Are you saying Ops people have to become developers? >> They don't have to, but a lot of them are going that way. There's API explorers now that make it really easy to write rest calls and things like that to kick off jobs, and it just makes their lives easier to adopt that trend. It's not that they have to, but if they want to, it's definitely there and moreso than it ever has been. >> Yeah, I definitely think that we're seeing more and more large enterprises, Microsoft, VMware and so on, moving away from kind of this proprietary model, and more into an open model where they want their APIs to be consumed, they want you to help improve their product, and they want you to write code that integrates with their software. >> I have another question about DevOps, right? So, developer plus operations, and breaking down that wall. Can you do DevOps if you don't Dev, right? There are IT shops that just consume packaged software, and they run them, and they do things in the cloud, and they do everything else, but that particular company doesn't make bespoke software, at least they don't think they do. So, can you do DevOps without Dev? >> No. >> Okay. >> So, it really comes down to the fact of most everyone writes code whether they think they do or not. They may not write core business apps, but they could write a lot of other integrations, or they have off-the-shelf software that they write customized reports for, whatever, but there is something going on, something is being created. And as long as you have that thing being created, you can have a DevOps model. But I think it's a lot broader than just in-house applications at this point. >> I mean even if you were writing a script, you're writing code, right? If you're creating Power Serialized scripts or PowerShell scripts to automate something in your environment, that's code. And that would absolutely fall into that DevOps mindset. >> Speaking of the show itself, I know a couple of years ago they had a little breakout with keynotes, and they've done some sessions, my understanding there isn't a dedicated developer track or mini Dev show inside of it. So what do the developers or people do in DevOps, what's attractive to them here at the show? >> There's always the hallway track, right? And then there's the side events like the vBrownBag, things like that where you see a lot people talking about Ansible and other things like that, that you won't see on the show floor itself. And I think with the hackathon tonight, and lots of stuff like that, there's a lot of adjacent activities that are very much worthwhile. >> You mentioned the hackathon, you participated last year, if I remember right, you won, your team won the hackathon. So, tell us a little bit about that experience, this is the third year they're doing it, so-- >> It was great, I mean it was just nice to see a lot of folks in the community come together to build interesting things out of nothing, in like three hours, and that's, doing that itself is just really kind of amazing to me, but then those projects, a lot of them have carried on and gotten adoption, and now there's going to be some things created long term, because of this one interaction. I think that's just really special. >> When I've loved to see the difference between last year and this years, I felt, while last year was amazing, and seeing the people write these scripts and these codes, it felt like it was a lot of shooting from the hip, and what I've noticed this year is that there's been a lot of pre-work done by these teams, these groups, that they've been talking and communicating for weeks, planning what they're going to code tonight. That's very exciting. >> The code program Code by VMware, I think they call it, it actually is expanding, they're doing a lot to touch both developers and kind of the API side of the IT, more traditional IT side. Rebecca, one way to characterize DevOps, or one element is I say part of DevOps would be time to value, right? Rapid time to value, we don't plan for a year, sit in a war room, and like hope we don't lose our jobs when we push the button to launch, you know, the next generation of whatever we're about to launch, right? We've recognized that's a hard way to go about launching something, so instead, we're more iterative, smaller bites, faster time to value. As you go out and talk with IT pros, like again, your commercial side, right? You have a product that has fast time to value, I mean, how much of a mindshift is having to happen inside IT where you can go, "Oh no, I could set this up in an afternoon, "and maybe I could write some code around it "over the next couple weeks," rather than, "I got to plan this out for a year "before I do anything." >> Yes, I mean I think we're definitely moving from kind of a bureaucratic type of development to more of an agile, where we have to iterate, and so, like in my experience, prior to joining Rubrik, I was very involved with VMware and did lots of virtualization stuff, and you would have like one major release a year. Right, and then a couple of updates, and there's a lot of planning that would go into it, and involved, and that gave a lot of lead time. And now, like working with Rubrik, we're on like a quarterly release cycle, and so we're just constantly, so I think a lot of its mindset. So, I don't want to say it's shooting from the hip because it's not, but it's just adapting and moving forward, and then getting ready for the next thing. There's not time to question and plan, it's we're doing this, and let's do it now. >> The thing I'd noticed is just in conversations and in the keynote, APIs were brought up more this year than I remember in previous years, you know you brought up the VMware Code Team, they've been doing the flings now for a couple years, so even if it might not be developer centric, it seems like they're adopting some of the things that you know, are attractive to what the developer community would do. >> Yeah, and there's a lot of really good marketing going on there too, especially around flings. Flings are great, and there are so many useful tools there, that people just don't know about until they get the press, and now that they're talking about it, there's a really great community built up around it, especially with VMware Code, I think is a great initiative, there's an awesome Slack channel that they have, and just getting the word out, more than word of mouth, and getting that stuff in the keynotes is so key to helping reach everybody else who's not already there. Word of mouth only goes so far when you have like the CEOs getting up there and talking about this as a core initiative, that's really important, we need to see more of that. >> Anything specific around the flings you could highlight, like you know, this one was really cool and it turned into something, or? >> The HTML5 client was a fling forever, and it was so much better than the actual web client. >> And now it's becoming the actual official supported client, and the older client is going away, finally. >> Yeah. >> Everyone's happy about that. >> It's very, there's stats feeder, is a super cool one that not many people know about but you can get all this information out of your vCenter, pump it into some kind of like noSQL database, and make these really creative reports, that just, there wasn't a way to do that before that existed, and something like that's really cool. >> Byron, as you go out and talk to IT pros and IT departments, you're trying to be a trusted adviser, you're bringing along a team from your company, are there elements of cultural change or kind of adaptability that when you go into a conference room and start giving your first presentations, and the questions that get asked, do you sometimes you go, what are the signs that you're going to go, "Oh this is going to go well," versus "Hoo boy, these folks are not ready yet." >> So we try to ask some probing questions to kind of pick a fight to be totally, not really pick a fight, but see who's going to take the bait, right? And then how communication resolves itself. And seeing that pattern happen, you know, okay, there's something missing or something as far as how the team constructed that leads to this animosity, right? Find that out as fast as possible, and then find a way to remediate that, is how you get that cultural change. But until you actually see it organically, it's hard to say well you know, just be more empathetic and hug it out, that all sounds nice, but you've got to really find what the dynamic is that's causing the tension or breakdown. >> John: Are there any particular signs that you could point to-- >> Yelling is a good one. (laughing) >> On a positive sign or a negative sign? >> Both sometimes. >> That group's not invited to this meeting, right? >> It's just a lot of finger pointing, it's a lot of you can tell they don't talk. And a lot of it starts with just having a conversation on a daily basis of what do you do, what's your job, how can I understand that, have that empathy, cause until you have that empathy, no one's going to care. And once you build up that, and get this understanding that, "Oh, what you do is valuable to the business as well," then people start to actually, you know, work, or I dunno, be friends or something at work, I don't know, it's really important to build that up. >> Byron, your title has DevOps in it, because you're addressing a function, but should there be people inside IT groups with a DevOps in their title, if you're here at VMware, and you're kind of coding, and you're a little bit interested in that, should you be looking for something, a title of DevOps? >> I think anybody can do DevOps. And I think that's something that we need to change our mindset on. I hear a lot of people say, "Why would I join the VMware Code community, "I don't write code," and it's, anybody can write code. It doesn't have to be the most beautiful elegant code in the world, you just creating a script, you've done it. Now contribute. Put your work on Github, let other people use it. You consume from other people, it's a community of sharing, share. >> That's great. >> It's all about contribution, right? It doesn't have to be code, you can write documentation, you can work on bug reports, there's so many things you can do that are not code related, that people can give back with. That's the important thing there. >> Reminds me a lot of just some of the discussion we've been having about community in general for a while. Rebecca, we're here at a big show, 20,000 plus people, do you spend all your time at meet-ups though, how do you deal with reaching kind of a broad community, or is it kind of smaller, more intimate things? >> I try and balance both, because I have obviously work obligations and I have speaking obligations, and then, but I do try and spend time one-on-one with people as well as at group functions, so I personally like to get out of my comfort zone, so like that was one of the big reasons I attend certain events, like the hackathon last year. My code is rudimentary. I don't want to pretend like I'm some amazing developer, but that was me getting out of my comfort zone and interacting with that community, because I knew that was a community I wanted to be more a part of. >> I guess the question is too, from like, your marketing role-- >> Mm-hmm. >> Do you have to go reach out to those thousands of meet-ups or, you know, how do you balance that kind of small versus large? >> So, yeah, I think like in a large group it becomes sort of an echo chamber in a way, where it's more of you talking at them than talking with them. I personally prefer to be in smaller type sessions, as well as one-on-one type discussions. I think we get more out of it that way. >> You mentioned DevOpsDays, that's a group independently organized, all over the world, kind of a meet-up user group on steroids all day, you've been to some of those as you said and that-- >> Yes, so one of the things I noticed from DevOpsDays that's different than a lot of user groups, is that a lot of user groups will jam pack the schedule, and you might have a 15 minute break there, and you have lunch, and that's it. Maybe a social hour afterwards. DevOpsDays, a lot of them create free spaces, of an hour, two hours, and sometimes, I think the one, I'm attending one in Detroit, in September, and I was looking at the schedule, and I think there's a three hour block of just talk to people, go and find your little community of people, talk to them, spend time with them, and then move onto another community and get to know each other. >> Byron, anything in open source community, and how it is different than, a little bit maybe, than this one here? >> The V community, if you want to call it that, it has been built up, is very unique, from an enterprise software standpoint, no other enterprise software company has what VMware has with that. It is a lot like the open source community, you go to something like OzCon or something, there's the same kind of interactions, the same kind of feel that we have here. >> John: Helping each other. >> Yes, I mean it's all about reaching out saying, "I don't know how to do this, someone help!" And, people saying, "Okay, this worked for me. "This hasn't." And just that feedback loop, and once you pay that forward to five more people, that's just really really great. You see it with the hang space here, the community, the sessions and things here, there are just so many people that want to volunteer and give back, there's not enough time to hear them all speak. And that's awesome. >> That's why we have things like vBrownBag. >> Yeah, right. >> Contribute there. >> There's so many different aspects of what's going on at the show, I'm curious if you have any, if you were talking to VMware and say, "Hey, next year, VMworld, you know, you should do this." Anything you'd like to add? >> Hmm. That's a really good question. >> That is a very good question. >> I mean firstly I'd love to see more developer track type items, especially as VMware is moving towards more consumable APIs in their platform, so I'd like to see more in that realm. >> Yeah, there could always be more work around that. I think I'd like to see more interaction, from the VMware Devs themselves. Talking about stuff going on, inside VMware, as much as they can I guess. That'd be super interesting, you don't see a lot of behind the curtains stuff here. And I think that'd be neat to see more of that. >> Yeah, I always love to look at the kind of similarities and differences between those communities. We do, we've done Red Hat Summit for a number of years, I'm going to be at the Open Source Summit, you know, coming up soon, we're at Amazon re:Invent, where the enterprise folks and the developers always argue about which keynote for them versus the other person, and striking that balance is always tough. Well, Byron, Rebecca, thank you so much for joining us here, really appreciate your insights onto what's happening in the community, and thanks for all you're doing there. For John Troyer, and I'm Stu Miniman, we've got lots more coverage here in three days of theCUBE at VMworld 2017. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Voiceover: Live, from Orlando Florida, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge17, brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back, this is Day 3 of ServiceNow Knowledge17, and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, where we go out to the events and we extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, and my co-host this week has been Jeff Frick. Not only this week, Jeff, but for the last five years, we've been doing ServiceNow Knowledge events, really getting a sense as to what this company is all about, the evolution of the company, the transformation from really early days of IT, help desk, service management, to now just permeating throughout the enterprise. One of the key things, Jeff, that is notable, and that we saw a couple years ago, I think it was three years ago, when they had the first CreatorCon. In fact, actually, in 2013, I think you did a little sidebar, you went out-- >> It was the Hackathon, we went with Allan Leinwand and checked in on the Hackathon. >> The point I want to make is that we work with these events, we come to these events. We see a lot of large company events, And whether it's Oracle or IBM or HPE, even, in the past. Even EMC with its code initative, they are drooling over developers. They can't get enough developer action, and it's like ServiceNow builds this platform, they create, they open it up with this low-code development kit, essentially, throw their glove in the field, and everybody comes to the game. >> Right, right. >> It's just amazing, and so today, Day 3, is about CreatorCon, and it was hosted by Pat Casey, who's the senior vice president of DevOps, and really the closest, I think, to the Fred Luddy DNA. I mean that's really Pat, you know, Fred Luddy's the founder of the company and sort of the icon of ServiceNow, not here, you know? We're entering a new era and it's really underscored culturally by CreatorCon and Pat Casey. You were in there today. What'd you think? >> Was it Fred termed the citizen developer? I can't remember, I'll have to go back and check the tape, because he definitely talked about low code, and I think he may have been the one that said citizen developer. And it's funny, even with CJ Desai, right, when he was thinking about coming over, what was the first thing he did? He downloaded the app, and wanted to create a little app. So everybody here is a developer, and I think, just looking back at some of the interviews yesterday, Donna from Cox Automotive, she built a prototype app. It was her, one business analyst, and an intern to start a whole new perspective, so I think, you know, they're really trying to make everybody a developer. It's a different way to think, and not just the business analyst, then you have to pass it off to development, but using, again, a simple workflow tool, it's still a workflow tool, to let everybody automate processes. And we were just in the CreatorCon. The other piece that really strikes me, and it strikes me every time I look at my phone now, you know, my phone knows I follow the Warriors, and so it just automatically gives me an update. So it's kind of this soft, a push of AI and machine learning into your day-to-day activity without this heavy overlay. And that's really how they do it effectively, and then that's kind of the basis of what they're doing here with integrating the machine learning into the applications to collect the data, build the models, try to take some of the mundane, mind-numbing work off of your plate and get people doing it, real decisions based on the machine giving you better data. >> It's an incredible dynamic to me, Jeff, because it's not like this company has a blank sheet of paper and says, "Okay, let's go after developers." They have this impassioned community of people, and they just keep rolling out new function, and then of course, ServiceNow has some really killer developers, internally, and so they make those people available to inspire and educate other developers, and so, as they say, this platform just permeates throughout the organization. I mean, it's really hard to do platforms. We've seen it so many times, you know, companies saying, "Okay, we're developing a platform," and the platform gets a little traction and it gets bought out, but this company, ServiceNow, really has a foothold here. So 4,500 people at CreatorCon this year, it's up from 2,000 last year, so another example of just super meteoric growth. Pat Casey, I loved, he put up the, you know, he showed a mainframe. It actually looked like a VAX to me, but anyway he put up a mainframe, and then he showed the H-P-U-X, what did he call it, HPUX? And, oh yeah we thought that was better, and then client server, it kind of worked for a while, and then he put up "August of 1995," and of course I was immediately saying, that's Gabe Ryden. >> Right, right. >> And then he showed the NetScape logo, and that really changed the development paradigm. >> Just as a way to, you know, and I'm sure none of us thought of it, it was just kind of web bulletin boards with pictures now, when you saw NetScape back in the day, but really as an application delivery vehicle, when you think of what browsers have become, it's pretty fascinating. I had a friend who was working on Chrome, and they described it as kind of an OS in a browser, and I'm like, who would want an OS in a browser? Well, now we're basically here. It's like the old Sun Ray machine, right? Anytime you log onto your browser, you're basically into everything in your world. Whether it's your phone, your tablet, my computer, your desktop computer. It's pretty fascinating. The other thing that Pat talked about was, you know, these things that we grew up with kind of in our imagination. He talked about flying cars, and then he adjusted it to maybe electronic cars, this vision, and now, you know, electronic cars are here, and Tesla's the highest-selling luxury nameplate out there. But in my old world it was flat TVs. The Jetsons had flat TVs. The concept of a flat TV was completely bizarre, and I remember seeing the first one in Chicago, at the Consumer Electronics show. It was like nine inches, you had to have secret passes to get back to see it, but now look what happened. I can't help but think of a Mar's Law, Dave, and he's Gartner's Trough of Disillusionment. I like a Mar's Law better, which is we overestimate the impact in the short term, but way underestimate the impact in the long term. Look at flat screens now, compared to, well, it didn't even exist now. And that's going to happen in AI, it's going to happen in machine learning, and in a very short period of time, especially with the advances in compute-store, networking, cloud, speed of networks, IOT, it's going to be a phenomenal amount of horsepower driving your interaction with all these various objects. >> Look at even the dot-com, you know, how overhyped that was, when really it was underhyped. >> Jeff: Right, in the long term. >> So, the other thing I loved, we've been talking about data for quite some time, and every time we came to a Knowledge show, we'd say, is there a big data angle here? Eh, well kind of, and it's really now coming into focus what the machine learning and AI and big data angle is, and Pat threw up a really nice infographic. He went back to 1969, he gave some interesting stats that I wasn't aware of. I knew the 2k, the moon landing was done on a computer with 2k of memory, that I knew. What I did not know is that it had two programs: one for docking and one for landing, and there wasn't enough memory on the computer to have both programs, so they had to reprogram the computer after the dock. >> Not even reload, right? They couldn't just put the USB stick into it. >> They had the code, which is kind of cool. So that was 2k, he had an intern download the 1982 census, and it was 182 megabytes. And then the human genome project was 53 gigabytes, which he's right, it wouldn't have fit on your previous iPhone, but it will fit on this one. And then, I didn't know this stat, the spell-checker in all of our phones and the red lines and so forth, the back end of that, that's sitting in the cloud, is four terabytes. So you're seeing this explosion of data. These are just some simple examples. So this company, again, it's not just starting from scratch saying, here's some kind of machine learning tool, apply it. What they're doing is saying, we're going to build this into the platform, take the existing corpus of data that you have, now what is that corpus of data? It's a bunch of incidents, it's a bunch of categories and people and it's going to autocategorize, for example, all these incidents, on an existing corpus of data. That's not how most people are using machine learning today. What many people are talking about is a use case of real time continuous applications and doing machine learning in real time to try to affect an outcome, which means try to get you to buy something, or try to detect fraud, or whatever it is. Some healthcare outcome, even. Although you'd think healthcare could be some more post process, but essentially that's what ServiceNow is doing. They're using a post-process methodology on top of this corpus of data to add instant value that lives inside of the platform. It's very compelling, simple, and practical in my view. >> And that's the part I love the best, Dave, is simple and practical and delivers immediate results. Allen Leinwand, who we'll have on later and we've had on a number of times, made a mention that the other thing that's very different is now the apps are listening in real time, and they're adjusting what they're doing and rejiggering their algorithm based on stuff that's happening in real time. So it's a different way to think about applications. And just a couple of things I wanted to touch on from yesterday, with some of the guests we had, a great reason we love the show is the number of customers we get is so high. And I was just struck by Donna Woodruff from Cox Automotive, how much she understood innately that it's a platform. Yes, she bought some applications, but she really understood the platform component and was able to drive from it. And the other one I just wanted to touch on was Eresh from Vitas Healthcare, and the impact of mobile. All I could think about when he was talking about was delivery service. Where's my truck, I had my fridge fixed the other day, where's the guys he close called me, and then to apply that to something as powerful as the work they're doing around hospice and to enable that nurse to get to one more stop per day. Wow, what an impact, just by getting on mobile. And the funny part, he said, is some of their older nurses, when they saw the mobile device, said, "I'm done, I'm not doing it anymore. I'd rather schlep around 25 pages of case information and then go back and forth to the hub in between every stop." So again it's this combination of all this power, all this coming to bear along the three horses of compute that are now delivering phenomenal transformation to people that are willing to think of things in a slightly different lens. >> Yeah, and when you look at the problems that ServiceNow is solving, they are in the boring but important category. And that's why I think that this company for a long time sort of flew under the radar, and is still misunderstood. I mean, even CJ, who's basically in charge of all the products, when he was first approached by ServiceNow, he's like "Meh, I don't really know." And then he dug into it and said, "Wow." So a lot of people don't understand it. I talked to a lot of people in the software business, software sales, people that just don't understand the power of what this company does, and I would make a prediction, is that like Salesforce before it, and we've been talking about this for years, how these guys are on a collision course, and they'll say "No, no, no" but very clearly, the power of the platform that Salesforce has, for example, and ServiceNow is replicating, in some way is much much different. Because Salesforce has a lot of bulldogs, sorry, we love it, we use it, but my point is, my prediction is that over time this company is going to become a very well-known company because of the impacts that it's having on the business. It's going from boring but important to, you know, fundamental transformation of organizations. And I tell you, CRM, I even put it up there with ERP. I think that what ServiceNow is doing is as big as the ERP trend, potentially bigger when you put in all the IOT stuff and the machine learning capabilities and the like with what is a relatively modern platform. >> Well, we're in an attention game, right? On the consumer side it's about attention. The thing that people have the least amount of anymore is time, so how do you get their attention? Do they spend their time on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, watching TV, looking at YouTube videos? Watch your kids. How do they spend those hours of their day? On the work side, what screen are you interacting with in your day? Are you in Salesforce all day? Are you in email all day? Are you in Salesforce all day? Are you in Marketo all day? That's where the competition is going to come. And there's only going to be two or three primary applications in which you engage and get work done, and they're making a hard play to say, "We are the application that we want basically in your face, that you're using to get stuff done all day long." >> One of the things, too, I wonder, you always wonder, is think about blind spots to a company like this. They're on this amazing ascendancy. What could come in and disrupt ServiceNow? And you think about the millenials, there's no question that ServiceNow is on to the new way to work. I call it the new way to work, I don't think they use that term. And the millenials are going to come in, and they don't want to use email. They're going to be much more open to adopting a platform. Now, is that platform going to be something like ServiceNow or is it going to be too boring but important? Are they going to do something more like Facebook? My feeling is this is enterprise, and as we talked about yesterday, is it possible that enterprise could actually begin adopting a lot of these consumer-like interfaces and user experiences and leapfrog in some regards because of the use of AI and the enterprise nature and the security capabilities that a company like this can bring? I don't know, maybe that's a stretch, but the gap between consumer and enterprise has to close. It is closing, and I think it will continue to close. >> I think it's the automation piece, to automate themselves out of their customer base. As more and more things are automated, there's going to be less and less and less people looking at the screen to do fewer tasks in terms of just an in. Blind spots always come where you're not looking, that's what's going to hit them, but certainly as more and more of this mundane stuff can be automated, if they can actually execute their vision so these autocategorization and autorouting and things are getting solved before they get to a customer service agent, happen, then their C-base licenses, but that's why they're trying to find other places to go. Facilities management, HR management, integration on the human connection across multiple applications, and to even these other systems, like we've heard about on the HR side, etc. So, I think that's, as the nature of work changes, what will people be doing with their work, or are they just going to be getting assigned tasks to go execute what the machines can't do? It's going to be interesting to watch it evolve. >> Well, and then coming back to the top of this segment, the developers, and that's really where the innovation occurs. The developer ecosystem here continues to grow. The importance of developers is very well understood. We've seen it previously with companies like Microsoft. We see all the big enterprise companies trying to appeal to the developer community. Certainly Amazon, Google, having great, very strong developer ecosystems, Apple as well, Facebook, and so forth. Enterprise guys continue to struggle, frankly, in that regard, and IBM's done a good job with Bluemix, but it's been a real heavy lift for IBM, HP. We've talked to, from Kadifa to all their software execs, and they just never were able to figure it out. Oracle kind of lost its developer edge, despite the fact that it owns Java now, and it's trying to get that back, whereas, as they say, ServiceNow just says, "Hey, let's have a game," and they throw their glove in the field and boom, everybody shows up. >> Think of the focus of a SaaS software company, or even like an Amazon, AWS, right? Everyone here in the company is working on platforms and derivative products from that platform. They don't have this hardware group, that hardware group, this software group, that software group. It's a single application at the end of the day. Salesforce is a single application at the end of the day, work day, single application at the end of the day. AWS, infrastructure for customers at the end of the day. So I think that gives them a huge advantage in terms of focus, everybody going in the same direction, and ability to execute. >> Everybody talks about platform as a service, and it's really, a lot of people say that whole market's collapsing. It's IaaS+, think Amazon, and it's SaaS-, think Salesforce and ServiceNow. All right, we've got to wrap. Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest at theCUBE, we're live, Day 3 from Knowledge17. We're right back. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live, from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering ServiceNow, Knowledge17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> We're back. I'm Dave Vellante, this is Jeff Frick. Raja Renganathan is here. He's the Vice President of Cloud Services at Cognizant Technology Solutions. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, Dave. >> So, tell us about Cognizant and what you're doing to sort of support your client's digital transformations. Let's start there. >> Yeah. So Cognizant is, you know, a leading digital technology outsourcing, you know, provider. We help our clients to lead the digital. Okay, so basically customers are going through disruption, that digital disruption, and everybody is going through the digital transformation. So, we help our clients to navigate the digital shift. So, how we do that is via three-pillar, right. We have, you know, imagine a front office, a middle office and a back office. The front office is digital business. Our digital business unit helps our customers to innovate new products and solutions, you know, using data as a new oil, new ad, whatever you want to call it as. Then, the middle office, that is where, getting into the enterprise, we're touching the business processes. How do we create platforms to simplify and modernize those processes. And how do we create business process as a service? That's what we call it, as a middle office. That's our digital operations, you know, pillar. The third one is, how do I modernize the legacy technologies, you know, into the latest turning-towards-digital, thereby providing agile and you know, extensible, you know, things like that. So, that's our digital systems and technology. So, we introduce these three core pillars, and the underlying platform for everything is Cloud. That's where we see, you know, products like, such as ServiceNow. It plays a very critical role towards, you know, fulfilling our customers' value. >> So, what's your strategy with respect to ServiceNow and the partnership? >> If you look at our partnership, you know, back in 2008, this is a small history to that. See, we introduced the Fortune, you know, 1000 enterprises. At the time, you know, The BMC and the HP, you know, those are all providing, it was pervasive those days. >> Sure. >> Then we started hearing from the customers, "Hey, do you guys know a company called ServiceNow?" You know, that is where I think, hey, everybody's talking ServiceNow. So, what is it all about? That is where we started our journey, back in 2008. At the time, we put together, we took some, you know, the BMC and the HP guys, we reskilled them, trained them on ServiceNow. Right? Started with about a 10-people practice. Today we are 700-plus people practice, spread across four delivery centers. And the beauty is all of the 700, 675-plus, are certified in ServiceNow. So, that is what the value people see. That the certification skillset, the implementation, you know, the knowledge that we take to the customer, they see that as a value. >> Then, how are you seeing the implementations evolve inside the customers, once you go in and do an initial project? How is it evolving? We keep hearing about all these different application stacks and kind of service areas. What are you seeing in the field? >> If you look at our customers, I think, you know, we also, the place is valued, we have ServiceNow. Most of them are, you know, they are Cognizant customers. You know, because we know that application. Because we bring the domain knowledge and the application. Everyone starts with the basic thing, ITSM. IT Service Management Model. But, because of the digital shift, they are going beyond ITSM. So, they want to move from systems of records to systems of intelligence. Now, we are going one level above. How do we create a system of action with ServiceNow, workflows and automation and things like that. So, today, if you look at ITSM, yes, it's becoming a commodity. That is where, I think, ServiceNow has really helped us. But, customers want to use the power of the platform. How do I add customer service on top of it? How do I create, you know, HR module and Finance module and Legal and facilities, and use the power of the platform. So, this is how we see the implementation approach. They start with ITSM and then go through, you know, module by module. But there are some customers where they say, "Hey, you know what? "I have so many tools in the ecosystem, "but I want ServiceNow to be the fulcrum "or manager of managers." So that is where we use the ServiceNow platform to integrate. ServiceNow has got a lot of API integretation, you know, mechanics. We use the integration, API integration methodology and then integrate various tools into it. Provide a common, single-pane window. >> Is this allowing your customers to gain a competitive advantage? Or is it cutting costs for them? I mean, what is there, what is your customers' sort of, business case, and the business value? Is there differentiation that's inherent? >> So, traditional ideas sim, they, if you take the legacy, the tools that used to exist, compared to a ServiceNow-based idea sim. We have seen customers who are already reducing call volumes by 30 per cent. Okay? Just an average, incident, call-incident reduction, call reduction, et cetera. However, we are in the AI era, artificial intelligence, you know. We have moved from mobile firsts to artificial intelligence first. Artificial intelligence is no longer in the labs. It is on the street. Customers are looking for, how do we, you know, use artificial intelligence and mission learning to increase the service levels? So, that is why we call it as, modernizing ideas sim. That's what even ServiceNow says, that one of the customer conversations. In the modernization ideas sim, how do we bring the artificial intelligence and mission learning? Your 30 per cent can go up to 40 to 50 per cent. Right, and in the process, with conversational analytics, it makes, you know, again a superior end-user experience. >> And how does Cognizant differentiate in the marketplace? >> That's a great question. The key thing is the people. I would say, I would start with the people because any new technology, okay, whatever, the robots are there. You need the human intellectual capital to implement that. So that is where we realize this problem earlier and we started investing on the people. So we have something called a ServiceNow Academy where we constantly recruit people and reskill our own people to meet the needs of the ServiceNow. So, the ServiceNow Academy, that is where, constantly produces, you know, people, number one. Number two, we have ServiceNow Labs. This is an investment from Cognizant. We call it a center of excellence, whatever the name you want to call. The ServiceNow Labs is the biggest differentiator for our customers, where we constantly, you know, produce you know, the best practices and we take those best practices, you know, to the customer. The third one is, we constantly innovate. Innovation is very critical. So, we used to do something called Hackathon. For the past three years, we have been doing Hackathon. A team from ServiceNow, they go all the way to our delivery centers, in offshore. 4000 people will be part of the Hackathon, across different locations, while we're video conferencing, webex and things like that. Recently we did, about three months back, For 4000 people participating, 80-plus innovation ideas came out. All these 80-plus innovation ideas, we go back to our customer. "Hey, you're in healthcare. "This is something, you know, to track your ambulance. "You know, for 911, et cetera. "These are the things, ideas, you can do that." So, I would say, constantly reskilling the people via our ServiceNow Academy. The second thing is constantly producing best practices via our ServiceNow Labs. And the third one is, you know, powering the innovation by our Hackathon. These three things really help us to, you know, take the value of ServiceNow to our customers. >> Excellent, all right, we've got to wrap before the music starts. Raja, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. >> And thank you, and it's a pleasure in talking to you, guys, thank you. >> Ah, you're welcome. >> Thanks. >> All right, >> keep right there, everybody. We'll be back to wrap, right after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Commentator: Live from Stanford University it's theCUBE covering the Women in Data Science Conference 2017. (jazzy music) >> Hi, welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin live at Stanford University at the second annual Women in Data Science WiDS tech conference. We are here with Ann Rosenberg from SAP. She's the VP head of Global SAP Alliances and SAP Next-Gen. Ann, welcome to the program. >> Thank you so much. >> So SAP is a sponsor of WiDS. Talk to us a little bit about that, and why is it so important for SAP to be involved in this great womens organization. >> So first of all, in my role as working with SAP's relationship to academia and also building up innovation network we see that data science is a very, very key skill set, and we also would like to see many more women get involved into this. Actually (mumbling) right now as we speak we are at the same time in 20 different countries around the world, 24 events we have. So we are both in Berlin, we are in New York, we are all over the world. So it's very important. I call it kind of a movement what we are doing here. It's important that all over the world that we inspire women to go into data science and into tech in general. So it is important thing for SAP. First of all, we need a lot of data science interested people. You also need our entire SAP ecosystem to go out to universities and be able to recruit a data science student both from a diversity perspective, whatever you are a female or a man of course. >> Absolutely, you're right. This is a very inspiring event. It's something that you can really actually feel. You're hearing a lot of applause from the speakers. When you're looking enabling even SAP people to go out and educate and recruit data scientists, what are some of the key skills that you're looking for as the next generation of data scientists? >> This is an interesting thing because you can say that you need like a very strong technical skill set, but we see more and more, and I saw that after I moved to Silicon Valley for two years that also the whole thing about design thinking, the combination of design thinking and data science is becoming something which is extremely important, but also the whole topic about empathy and also, so when you build solution you need to have this whole purpose driven in mindset. So I think what we're seeing more and more is that it's great to be a great data science, but it takes more than that. And that's what I see Stanford and Berkeley are doing a lot, that they're kind of mixing up kind of like the classes. And so you can be a strong data science, but at the same time you also have the whole design thinking background. That's some of the things that we look for at SAP. >> And that's great. We're hearing more and more of that, other skills, critical thinking, being able to not only analyze and interpret the information, but apply it and explain it in a way that really reflects the value. So I know that you have a career, you've been in industry, but you've also been a lecturer. Is this career that you're doing now, this job in alliances and next-gen for SAP sort of a match made in heaven in terms of your background? >> I actually love that question, probably the best question I ever got because it is definitely my dream job. When I was teaching in Copenhagen for some years ago I saw the mind of young people. I saw the thesis, the best of master thesis. I saw what they were able to do, and I'm an old management consultant, and I kept on thinking that the quality of work, the quality of ideas and ideations that the students come with were something that the industry could benefit so much from. So I always wanted to do this matchmaking between the industries and the mind of young people. And it's actually right now I see that it's started kind of, what I at least saw for the last two years that the industries that go to academia, go to universities to educate or to students to work on new ideas. And of course in Silicon Valley this has been going on for some time now, but we see all over the world. And the network that I'm responsible for at SAP, we work in more than 106 countries around the world, with 3,100 universities. And what I really want to do now, I call it the Silicon Valleys of the world where you are mapping the industries with academia with the accelerators and start ups. It's just an incredible innovation network, and this is what I see is just so much growing right now. So it's a great opportunity for academia, but equally also for the industry. >> I love that. Something that caught my eye, I was doing some research, and April 2016 SAP announced a collaboration with the White House's Computer Science for All Initiative. Tell us about that. >> I mean the whole DNA of SAP is in education. And therefore we do support a number of entity around the world. Whatever we talk about building up a skill set within data science, building skill set in design thinking, or in any kind of development skills is really, really important for us. So we do a lot of work together with the governments around the world. Whatever you talk about the host communication, for example, we have programs called Young Thinkers, Beatick, where you go out to high schools or you go into academia, to universities. So when this institute came up, we of course went in and said we want to support this. So if I look at United States, so we have a huge amount of universities part of the network that I'm driving with my team. So we have data curriculums, education material, we have train to train our faculties, boot camps. We do hackathons, coach games. We do around 1,200 to 1,600 hackathon coach games per year around the world. We engage with the industries out to the universities. So therefore it was a perfect match for us to kind of support this institute. >> Fantastic. Are there any things that SAP does as we look at the conference where we are, this Women in Data Science, are there things that you're doing specifically to help SAP, maybe even universities bring in more females into the programs, whether it's a university program or into SAP? >> Yeah, so for SAP in our whole recruiting process we definitely are looking into that. There is a great mix between female and male people who get hired into the company, but we also, it all start with that you actually inspire young women to go into a data science education or into a development education. So my team, we actually go in before SAP recruiting get involved where we, that's why we build up the strong relationships with universities where we inspire young women, like we do at this event here to why should they go in and have a career like this. So therefore you can see there's a lot of pre=work we need to be done for us to be able to go in and go into the recruiting process afterwards. So SAP do a lot of course in the United States, but all over the world to inspire young women to go into tech. And SAP does what we see today all over the world we have huge amount of female from SAP, female speakers at all our events who stand as role models to show that they are women, they are working for SAP, and are very, very strong female speakers and are female role models for all young women to get involved. So we do a lot of stuff to show that to the next generation of data science of whatever it is in tech. >> Yeah, and I can imagine that that's quite symbiotic. It's probably a really nice thing for that female speaker to be able to have the opportunity to share what she's doing, what she's working on, but also probably nice for her to have the opportunity to be a mentor and to help influence someone else's career. So you mentioned accelerators a minute ago, and I wanted to understand a little bit more about SAP Next-Gen Consulting, this collaboration of SAP with accelerators or start ups. How are you partnering to help accelerate innovation, and who is geared towards? Is it geared more towards student? Or is SAP also helping current business leaders to evolve and really drive digital transformation within their companies? >> So the big (mumbling) I'm working on right now too is as mentioned you said SAP Next-Gen is called SAP Next-Gen Innovation With Purpose. So it's linked to the 17 U.N. global goals. We've seen from now in Silicon Valley when you innovate you actually make innovation web purposes included. And that's why we kind of agreed on in SAP why don't we make an innovation network where the main focus is that all the innovation we get out of this is purpose driven linked to the 17 global goals. Like the event here is the goal number five, gender equality. In that network we actually do the matchmaking between academia. We look at all the disrupted new technologies, experience the technologies like machine learning like what's being discussed a lot here, block chain IOT. And then we look at the industry out there because the industries, they need all the new ideas and how to work with all the new opportunities that technology can provide, but then we also look into accelerator start ups. The huge amount, and often when you're in Silicon Valley you kind of think this is the world of the start ups of the world. So when you travel around the world, that's we we looked into a lot the last two years. We call the Silicon Valleys of the world, any big city around the world, or even smaller cities, they have tech hub. So you have Ferline Valley, you have Silicon Roundabout in London, you have Silicon Alley in New York, and that is where there is a huge amount of gravity of start ups and accelerators. And when you begin to link them together with the university network of the world and together with the industry network of the world, you suddenly realize that there is an incredible activity of creativity and ideations and start ups, and you can begin to group that into industries. And that give industries the opportunity not only to develop solution inside the company, but kind of like go in and tap into that incredible innovation network. So we work a lot with seeding in start up, early start ups into corporates, and also crowd source out to academia and the mind of young people all Next-Gen Consulting project where you similar work with students at universities on projects. It could be big data science project. It could be new applications. So I see like as the next generation type of consultancy and research what is happening in that whole network. But that is really what SAP Next-Gen is, but it is linked to the 17 U.N. global goals. It is innovation with purpose, which I'm really happy to see because I think when you build innovation, you really think about in the bigger, the whole (mumbling) thing that we know from singularity. You should think about a bigger purpose of what you're doing. >> Right, right. It sounds like though that this Next-Gen Consulting is built on a foundation of collaboration and sharing. >> It is, it is, and we have three Next-Gen lab types we set up. In this year we built, last year, we are a new year now, we built 20 Next-Gen labs at university campuses and at SAP locations. And here in the new year more labs is being set up. We are opening up a big lab in New York. We just recently opened up one in Valdov at SAP's headquarter. We have one here in Silicon Valley, and then we have a number of universities around the world where SAP's customers go in and work with academia, with educators and students because what do you do today if you're in industry? You need to find students who are strong in machine learning and all the new technologies, right? So there's a huge need for in industry now to engage with academia, an incredible opportunity for both sides. >> Right, and one last question. Who are you, in the spirit of collaboration, who do you collaborate back with at SAP corporate? Who are all the beneficiaries or the influencers of Next-Gen Consulting? >> So I collaborate, inside SAP I collaborate, SAP have a number of, we have ICN, Innovation Center Network. We have our start up focus program. We have a number of innovation, the labs, a number of basically do all our software developments, so they're heavily involved. We have our whole go to market organization with all our SAP customers and industry, I call them clubs. And then externally is of course academia, universities, and then it is the start up communities, accelerators and of course, the industry. So it is really like a matchmaking. That's like, when people ask me what do you do, and I'm a matchmaker. That's really what I am. (Lisa laughs) >> I like that, a matchmaker of technology and people all over. So you're on the planning committee for WiDS. Wrapping things up here, what does this event mean to you in terms of what you've heard today? And what are you excited about for next year's event? >> So for me, one year ago when I heard about this year I kind of said this is important, this is very important. And it's not just an event, it's a movement. And so that was where I went in and said you know, we want to be part of this, but it must be more than just an event here. It's staying for the need to be much more than that. And this is where we all teamed up, all the sponsors together with ISMIE, and we said okay, let us crowd source it out, let us live stream it out much more than ever. And this is also what the assignment is now, that we to so many locations. This is just the beginning. Next year is going to be even bigger, and it's not like that we will wait to next year. We this week announced the SAP Next-Gen global challenges linked to the 17 U.N. global goals. So we are inspiring everybody to go in and work on those global challenges, and one of them is goal number five, which is linked to this event here. So for us and for me this is just the beginning, and next year is going to be even bigger. But we are going to do so many event and activity up to next year. My team in APJ, because of the Chinese New Year, have already been planned coming up here. >> Lisa: Fantastic. >> And we have been doing pre-event, (mumbling) events. So again, it is a movement, and it's going to be big. That's for sure. >> I completely can feel that within you. And you're going to be driving this momentum to make the movement even louder, ever more visible next year. >> Ann: Yeah. >> Well Ann, thank you so much for joining us on The Cube. We're happy to have you. >> Thank you so much for the opportunity. >> And we thank you for watching The Cube. I am Lisa Martin. We are live at Stanford University at the second annual Women in Data Science Conference. Stick around, we'll be right back. (jazzy music)