>>Hey everyone. Lisa Martin here with John farrier. Welcome to the women in tech global event, featuring international women's day. John, this is an exciting day, March 8th, 2022. How did this all get started? >>Well, we started it out when we realized there was more stories to be told with virtual, with COVID. The virtualization of virtual events allowed us to do more stories. So we've been on this new format where we're creating seasons and episodic events, meaning you can still do an event and do 30 interviews like we're doing here for international women's day from around the world. We could have done a hundred there's enough stories out there. There's thousands of stories out there that need to be told, need to be scaled. And so we're just scratching the surface. So we are just starting to do is celebrate international women's day with as many videos we could do in a week, which is 30 and be part of widths and Stanford here in California, as part of their events with Stanford. And we're going to continue with international women's day. >>It's the big celebration, it's the big day, but then when it's over, we're going to continue with more episodes. So this is technically, I guess, season one episode, one of the international women's community site portal is going to be open and open to everyone. Who's going to be a community vibe and, uh, we'll get sponsors, but overall it's about bringing people together, creating tribes, letting people form their own communities and hopefully, uh, making the world a better place and supporting the mission, which is a great mission. Diversity inclusion and equity is a big mission. Uh, it's good for everyone. Everyone wins. >>Everyone does win. What are some of the interesting conversations that you've had with our international women's day guests that really were poignant to you? >>Well, the, one of the things was interesting by region. They had different kind of, um, feelings. The Asia Pacific was heavily skewed on a lot of international diversity around culture. Latin America was just all cloud computing. For instance, I felt that to be very technical, uh, more than agents in the interviews. Um, um, more diversity I study in Asia Pacific and Amy. It was really interesting because you have a lot going on there right now in Europe. So, um, and I'll see from a technical standpoint, data sovereignty and sustainability are two big themes. So from a tech trend standpoint, it was really amazing leaders. We interviewed, um, from technical, uh, folks to analysts, to senior executives in the C-suite. So it really good mix of people in the program. Uh, for today, >>We also had a young girl that I had the chance to speak with her and her father. And it was such a lovely conversation cause it reminded me of my dad's relationship with me. But she was told in high school age, no, you can't do physics. No, you can't do computer science. So the parents pulled her out of school. And so the, and she's brand new in her career path. And it was so nice to hear, to see that, that family, the role models within the family saying she wants to do physics and computer science. Let's find a place for her to be able to do that and have her start being able to, to build her own personal board of directors. At the age of like 22, 23, >>We hit an entrepreneur down in New Zealand. I interviewed she was from indigenous area and she had no milk or food on the table. They were so poor. They could barely get food. She worked her way through it and went to school. Education was number when it goes, she was so persistent, she got her education. And now she's the CEO of an AI company, amazing person. And she's like, Hey, there's no wall I can't run through. So that attitude was just so refreshing. And that was a consistent this year and it wasn't an in your face. It was just more of we're here, we're kicking butt. So let's keep it going. So on the entrepreneurial side, I found that really awesome on the senior leadership side, it was very much, um, community oriented, very open about sharing their experiences and also being a sponsor. So you're going to hear a lot about breaking the bias, but it's also about sponsoring opportunities and then helping people get involved so that they can get understand biases because everyone brings biases to the table. So I personally learned a lot this, this, this, uh, event. >>Yeah. I think the, the light that was shined on the bias was incredibly important. You know, the break, the bias, as you said, is the theme of this year's international women's day. And I, and I asked everybody that I spoke with, what does that mean to you? And where do you think we are on that journey? A world free of bias and stereotypes and discrimination. Obviously we're not there yet, but a lot of the women talked about the fact that that light is shining brightly, that the awareness is there, that for diversity equity and inclusion and having that awareness, there is a great launching launching pad, if you will, for being able to make more progress on actually breaking the bias. >>Yeah. That was a great point. I would also say to add to that by saying a lot of comments were on the same theme of check your bias when you fall, you speak in meetings. And it was just a lot of like protocol tactical, uh, ways to do things like, think about other people in the room versus just barreling ahead. Most guys do that actually. Um, and so that was another instructful thing. I think the other thing too was is that there was, again, more and more sharing. I mean, we had one person that you interviewed, her name was Anne green. Yeah. She's doing her own series. Uh, we're content. She's interviewing people, she's being a mentor and sharing it through content, Manny theory of AWS in Singapore, she's in space and Aero science talking about how the satellites are helping in the Ukraine, give information to everyone on the ground, not just governments and that's helping democracy. And that she's really excited that that contributes to some good there. Um, and she fled from a town where it was bombed. She was in a war zone and she escaped and got educated. So education's a theme. Um, don't let anyone tell you, you can't do it. Uh, and don't think there's only one pathway, right? This is tons of opportunities for participating in the tech economy for good, uh, in, in, in tech. So those are the keys. >>That's always been one of my favorite themes when we do women in tech events, John is that there is no direct pathway necessarily. I always love understanding those stories, but this year, one of the things that also was really clear was that women feeling what can't I do. And that sentiment was really echoed throughout. I think everybody that I spoke with that there was no, can I do this? Why can't I Not confidence? Which is palpable. Even when you're doing an interview by zoom, you can feel it. You can be inspired by, >>Well, at least a year, you do all the, a lot of the interviews. You're the face I had, you know, step aside for you because you're amazing. But one of the things you, you get appreciate this and love to get your reaction. One of the things I observed this year was because it was international focus, there was huge cube demand to be come to their region. We had one of the guests that won from Bahrain. She's like, I'll do the cube here. I'll be the host. So I think there was a real appetite for this kind of open dialogue conversations where they want the cube to come to their area. And so I know anyone watching wants to be a cube host in those areas, let us know, um, we're open. And to me that was more refreshing. Cause you know, me, I always wanna see the cube global go everywhere. But this year people are actually turning on their own cameras. They're doing their own interviews. They're sharing content and content creates community and bonding. And that was the big experience I saw this year was a lot more user generated activity engagement with each other in the group. >>I think that may have even been a product of the last two years of the pandemic of people really understanding the importance of community and collaboration and that it can be done via if you're only limited to video, you can do that. You can build a community and grow it and foster it in that way and create the content that really helps support it. >>That's a great point. That's actually one of the guests said COVID polled the future forward and digital. We see the value and other on the cyber side, um, Sally, as I mentioned there, um, earlier who we interviewed before, she's a cyber policy analyst and she's so smart. She's like, yeah, this is putting fold forward. And people understand cyber now, cyber misinformation, cyber war, the role of working at home, being isolated versus community. These are core societal issues that need to be solved and it's not just code that solves them. So it's going to be solved by the community. And that's really, that was the key. One of the key messages. It was very refreshing. >>It was very refreshing. I always love hearing the stories. I, the more personal the story, the more real it is and the more opportunities I think that it unlocks for the audience watching. Yeah, >>I mean, we had one person said she did a project on the side. It's going to be your big initiative within Amazon. You know, Amazon, one of our sponsors has a slogan think big, but deep dive deep. And she took a project on about educating, um, young girls and young women. And it turned out to be basically a build lab inside schools. And it took off. It is so successful side project, side hustle gone, gone big. So again, sparks of creativity, innovation can come from anywhere. It's just great stories. >>Another thing that came up in several of the conversations that I had was the data, the data that support that organizations that have at least 30% females at the executive level are better performing organizations. They are more profitable as well. So it was fun to kind of call out if we're talking about data science, what not the data that supports why international women's day is what it is, why it's becoming even bigger than that and the importance of showcasing those voices so that she can be what she can see. >>Yeah. Amazing stories. I got to say it again. I think the virtual studios where we have now with the pandemic is going to give us much more opportunities to get those stories out. And Lisa, you've done an amazing job. Your interviews were awesome. Thank you. And we can do a hundred. We'll give you a hundred interviews a week. >>We can, are you setting me up? No, it was fun. The international influence this year was fun. I mean, I think I started one of my interview days at 6:00 AM and it was just exciting to be able to connect to different parts of the world and to hear these stories and for the cube to be able to be the platform that is sharing all of that >>And the diversity of the interviews itself and the diversity of the environments that for instance, in Asia Pacific and your are diverse areas and they see it it's much further along. They live it every day. They know the benefits. So that again, that was another aha moment for us, I think this year. >>So how many, how many segments do we have for international women's day John >>30 segments, uh, 32 counting our little segments here. So 32 interviews. Um, we're going to probably add a section on the site for people to submit stories like a directory, uh, this, a zillion things going on, women of web three, Sandy, Carter's putting on an event. I know there's a security called. She S she scarcity events, she security, uh, going on women in security. Um, there's tons of activities it's vibrant tomorrow. Today. It'll be very much bumping up. So we'll try to curate as much links as possible. >>Awesome. John has been great doing this program with you. I look forward to seeing the interviews and being inspired by the many, many stories. You're going to be watching the cubes coverage of women in tech global event, featuring international women's day for John furrier. I'm Lisa Martin. We'll see you soon.

[Music] okay we're here with ceres vitale who's the chief product officer at alteryx and adam wilson the ceo of trifacta now of course part of alteryx just closed this quarter gentlemen welcome great to be here okay so rush let me start with you in my opening remarks i talked about alteryx's traditional position serving business analysts and how the hyperanna acquisition brought you deeper into the business user space what does trifacta bring to your portfolio why'd you buy the company yeah thank you thank you for the question um you know we see a we see a massive opportunity of helping brands democratize the use of analytics across their business every knowledge worker every individual in the company should have access to analytics it's no longer optional as they navigate their businesses with that in mind you know we know designer and our the products that alteryx has been selling the past decade or so do a really great job addressing the business analysts with hyper rana now kind of renamed alteryx auto insights we even speak with the business owner the line of business owner who's looking for insights that aren't revealed in traditional dashboards and so on um but we see this opportunity of really helping the data engineering teams and i.t organizations to also make better use of analytics and that's where trifacta comes in for us trifacta has the best data engineering cloud in the planet they have an established track record of working across multiple cloud platforms and helping data engineers um do better data pipelining and work better with this massive kind of cloud transformation that's happening in every business um and so trifecta made so much sense for us yeah thank you for that i mean look you could have built it yourself would have taken you know who knows how long you know but uh so definitely a great time to market move adam i wonder if we could dig into trifacta some more i mean i remember interviewing joe hellerstein in the early days you've talked about this as well on thecube coming at the problem of taking data from raw refined to an experience point of view and joe in the early days talked about flipping the model and starting with data visualization something jeff herr was expert at so maybe explain how we got here we used to have this cumbersome process of etl and you maybe and some others change that model with you know el and then t explain how trifacta really changed the data engineering game yeah that's exactly right uh dave and it's been a really interesting journey for us because i think the original hypothesis coming out of the campus research at berkeley and stanford that really birthed trifacta was you know why is it that the people who know the data best can't do the work you know why is this become the exclusive purview the highly technical and you know can we rethink this and make this a user experience problem powered by machine learning that will take some of the more complicated things that people want to do with data and really help to automate those so so a broader set of users can can really see for themselves and help themselves and and i think that um there was a lot of pent up frustration out there because people have been told for you know for a decade now to be more data driven and then the whole time they're saying well then give me the data you know in the shape that i can use it with the right level of quality and i'm happy to be but don't tell me to be more data driven and they'll don't then and and not empower me um to to get in there and to actually start to work with the data in meaningful ways and so um that was really you know what you know the origin story of the company and i think as as we saw over the course of the last five six seven years that um you know a real uh excitement to embrace this idea of of trying to think about data engineering differently trying to democratize the the etl process and to also leverage all these exciting new uh engines and platforms that are out there that allow for you know processing you know ever more diverse data sets ever larger data sets and new and interesting ways and that's where a lot of the push down or the elt approaches uh you know i think it really won the day um and that and that for us was a hallmark of the solution from the very beginning yeah this is a huge point that you're making this is first of all there's a large business probably about a hundred billion dollar tam uh and and the the point you're making is we look we've contextualized most of our operational systems but the big data pipelines hasn't gotten there but and maybe we could talk about that a little bit because democratizing data is nirvana but it's been historically very difficult you've got a number of companies it's very fragmented and they're all trying to attack their little piece of the problem to achieve an outcome but it's been hard and so what's going to be different about alteryx as you bring these puzzle pieces together how is this going to impact your customers who would like to take that one yeah maybe maybe i'll take a crack at it and adam will add on um you know there hasn't been a single platform [Music] for analytics automation in the enterprise right people have relied on different products to solve kind of smaller problems across this analytics automation data transformation domain and i think uniquely alteryx has that opportunity we've got 7000 plus customers who rely on analytics for data management for analytics for ai and ml for transformations for reporting and visualization for automated insights and so on and so by bringing trifecta we have the opportunity to scale this even further and solve for more use cases expand the scenarios where angles gets applied and serve multiple personas um and now we just talked about the data engineers they are really a growing stakeholder in this transformation of data analytics yeah good maybe we can stay on this for a minute because you're right you bring it together now at least three personas the business analyst the end user size business user and now the data engineer which is really out of an i.t role in a lot of companies and you've used this term the data engineering cloud what is that how is it going to integrate in with or support these other personas and and how's it going to integrate into the broader ecosystem of clouds and cloud data warehouses or any other data stores yeah you know that's great uh you know i think for us we really looked at this and said you know we want to build an open and interactive you know cloud platform for data engineers you know to collaboratively profile pipeline um and prepare data for analysis and and that really meant collaborating with the analysts that were in the line of business and so this is why a big reason why this combination is so magic because ultimately if we can get the data engineers that are creating the data products together with the analysts that are in the line of business that are driving a lot of the decision making and allow for that what i would describe as collaborative curation you know of the data together so that you're starting to see um uh you know increasing returns to scale as this uh as this rolls out i just think that is an incredibly uh powerful combination and frankly something that the market has not cracked the code on yet and so um i think when we when i sat down with surash and with mark and and the team at ultrix that was really part of the the big idea the big vision that that was painted and and got us really energized um about the acquisition and about the the potential of the combination yeah and you're really you're obviously riding the cloud and the cloud native wave um and but specifically we're seeing you know i almost don't even want to call it a data warehouse anyway because when you look at what princeton snowflake is doing of course their marketing is around the data cloud but i i actually think there's real justification for that because it's not like the traditional data warehouse right it's it's simplified get there fast don't necessarily have to go through this central organization to share data uh and and but it's really all about simplification right isn't that really what the democratization comes down to yeah it's simplification and collaboration right i don't want to i want to kind of just uh what what adam said resonates with me deeply um analytics is one of those massive disciplines inside an enterprise that's really had the weakest of tools um and weakest of interfaces to collaborate with and i think truly this was alteryx's end of superpower was helping the analysts get more out of their data get more out of the analytics like imagine a world where these people are collaborating and sharing insights in real time and sharing workflows and getting access to new data sources understanding data models better i think curating those insights i borrowing adam's phrase again i think that creates a real value inside the organization because frankly in scaling analytics and democratizing analytics and data we're still in such early phases of this journey so how should we think about designer cloud which is from alteryx it's really been the on-prem the server or desktop you know offering and of course trifecta is about cloud cloud data warehouses right um how should we think about those two products yeah i think i think you should think about them and as very complementary right designer cloud really shares a lot of dna and heritage with designer desktop the low code tooling and the interface that really appeals to the business analysts and gets a lot of the things that they do well we've also built it with interoperability in mind right so if you started building your workflows in designer desktop you want to share that with designer cloud we want to make it super easy for you to do that and i think over time now we're only a week into this alliance with uh with trifacta i think we have to get deeper and start to think about what does the data engineer really need what business analysts really need and how to design a cloud and try factor really support both of those requirements uh while kind of continue to build on the trifecta on the amazing trifecta cloud platform you know and i think let's go ahead i'm just to say i think that's one of the things that um you know creates a lot of opportunity as we go forward because ultimately you know trifacta took a platform uh first mentality to everything that we built so thinking about openness and extensibility and um and how over time people could build things on top of trifacta that are a variety of analytic tool chain or analytic applications and so when you think about um alteryx now starting to uh to move some of its capabilities or to provide additional capabilities uh in the cloud um you know trifacta becomes uh a a platform that can accelerate you know all of that work and create a cohesive set of of cloud-based services that share a common platform and that maintains independence because both companies um have been uh you know fiercely independent uh in really giving people choice um so making sure that whether you're uh you know picking one cloud platform another whether you're running things on the desktop uh whether you're running in hybrid environments that no matter what your decision you're always in a position to be able to get out your data you're always in a position to be able to cleanse transform shape structure that data and ultimately to deliver uh the analytics that you need and so i think in in that sense um uh you know this this again is another reason why the combination you know fits so well together giving people um the choice um and as they as they think about their analytics strategy and and their platform strategy going forward you know i make a chuckle but one of the reasons i always liked alteryx is because you kind of did did a little end run on i.t i.t can be a blocker sometimes but that created problems right because the organization said wow this big data stuff is taken off but we need security we need governance and and it's interesting because you got you know etl has been complex whereas the visualization tools they really you know really weren't great at governance and security it took some time there so that's not not their heritage you're bringing those worlds together and i'm interested you guys just had your sales kickoff you know what was the reaction like uh maybe suresh you could start off and maybe adam you could bring us home yeah um thanks for asking about our sales kickoff so we met uh for the first time in kind of two years right for as it is for many of us um in person uh um which i think was a was a real breakthrough as alteryx has been on its transformation journey uh we had a try factor to um the the party such as it were um and getting all of our sales teams and product organizations um to meet in person in one location i thought that was very powerful for us as a company but then i tell you um the reception for trifecta was beyond anything i could have imagined uh we were working adam and i were working so hard on on the the deal and the core hypotheses and so on and then you step back and kind of share the vision with the field organization and it blows you away the energy that it creates among our sellers our partners and i'm sure adam and his team were mobbed every single day with questions and opportunities to bring them in but adam maybe you should share yeah no it was uh it was through the roof i mean uh the uh the amount of energy the uh when so certainly how welcoming everybody was uh you know just i think the story makes so much sense together i think culturally the companies are very aligned um and uh it was a real uh real capstone moment uh to be able to complete the acquisition and to and to close and announce you know at the kickoff event and um i think you know for us when we really thought about it you know when we and the story that we told was just you have this opportunity to really cater to what the end users you know care about which is a lot about interactivity and self-service and at the same time and that's and that's a lot of the goodness that um that alteryx is has brought you know through you know you know years and years of of building a very vibrant community of you know thousands hundreds of thousands of users and on the other side you know trifecta bringing in this data engineering focus that's really about uh the governance things that you mentioned and the openness that that it cares deeply about and all of a sudden now you have a chance to put that together into a complete story where the data engineering cloud and analytics automation you know come together and um and i just think you know the lights went on um you know for people instantaneously and you know this is a story that um that i think the market is really hungry for and and certainly the reception we got from from the broader team at kickoff was uh was a great indication of that well i think the story hangs together really well you know one of the better ones i've seen in this space um and and you guys coming off a really really strong quarter so congratulations on that gents we have to leave it there really appreciate your time today yeah take a look at this short video and when we come back we're going to dig into the ecosystem and the integration into cloud data warehouses and how leading organizations are creating modern data teams and accelerating their digital businesses you're watching the cube your leader in enterprise tech coverage [Music]

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

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, covering Fortinet Security Summit brought to you by Fortinet. >> Welcome to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin. We are live at the Fortinet Championship, the PGA Tour Kickoff to the 2021-2022 FedEx Regular Season Cup. And this is so exciting to be here with Fortinet, to be at an in-person event, and to be talking about a very important topic of cybersecurity. One of our alumni is back with me, Sandra Wheatley is here, the SVP of Marketing, Threat Intelligence, and Influencer Communications at Fortinet. Sandra, it's great to see you. >> You too, Lisa. Thank you for having me. >> This is a great event. >> Yeah, it's awesome, yeah. >> Great to be outdoors, great to see people again, and great for Fortinet for being one of the first to come back to in-person events. One of the things I would love to understand is here we are at the PGA tour, what's the relationship with Fortinet and the PGA Tour? >> Well, first of all, I think the PGA tour is an amazing brand. You just have to look around here and it's extremely exciting, but beyond the brand, there's a lot of synergies between the PGA tour and Fortinet CSR initiatives, particularly around STEM, diversity inclusion, as well as veterans rescaling. And so some of the proceeds from the Fortinet Championship will go to benefit local nonprofits and the local community. So that's something we're very excited about overall. >> Lisa: Is this a new partnership? >> It is a new partnership and we will be the Fortinet Championship sponsor for about the next five years. So we're looking forward to developing this partnership and this relationship, and benefiting a lot of nonprofits in the future. >> Excellent, that's a great cause. One of the things, when you and I last saw each other by Zoom earlier in the summer, we were talking about the cybersecurity skills gap. And it's in its fifth consecutive year, and you had said some good news on the front was that data show that instead of needing four million professionals to fill that gap, it's down to three, and now there's even better news coming from Fortinet. Talk to me about the pledge that you just announced to train one million people in the next five years. >> Absolutely, we're very excited about this. You know, Fortinet has been focused on reducing the skills gap for many years now. It continues to be one of the biggest issues for cybersecurity leaders if you think about it. You know, we still need about 3.1 million professionals to come into the industry. We have made progress, but the need is growing at about 400,000 a year. So it's something that public and private partnerships need to tackle. So last week we did announce that we are committed to training a million professionals over the next five years. We're very excited about that. We're tackling this problem in many, many ways. And this really helps our customers and our partners. If you really think about it, in addition to the lack of skills, they're really tackling cybersecurity surface that's constantly changing. In our most recent FortiGuard's threat report, we saw that ransomware alone went up 10 times over the last year. So it's something that we all have to focus on going forward. And this is our way of helping the industry overall. >> It's a huge opportunity. I had the opportunity several times to speak with Derek Manky and John Maddison over the summer, and just looking at what happened in the first half, the threat landscape, we spoke last year, looking at the second half, and ransomware as a service, the amount of money that's involved in that. The fact that we are in this, as Fortinet says, this work from anywhere environment, which is probably going to be somewhat persistent with the attack surface expanding, devices on corporate networks out of the home, there's a huge opportunity for people to get educated, trained, and have a great job in cybersecurity. >> Absolutely, I like to say there's no job security like cybersecurity, and it is. I mean, I've only been in this industry about, I'm coming up on six years, and it's definitely the most dynamic industry of all of the IT areas that I've worked in. The opportunities are endless, which is why it's a little bit frustrating to see this big gap in skills, particularly around the area of women and minorities. Women make up about 20%, and minorities are even less, maybe about 3%. And so this is a huge focus of ours. And so through our Training Advancement Agenda, our TAA initiative, we have several different pillars to attack this problem. And at the core of that is our Network Security Expert Training or NSC training and certification program. We made that freely available to everybody at the beginning of COVID. It was so successful, at one point we we're seeing someone register every five minutes. And that was so successful, we extended that indefinitely. And so to date, we've had about almost 700,000 certifications. So it's just an amazing program. The other pillars are Security Academy Program, where we partner with nonprofits and academia to train young students. And we have something like 419 academies in 88 countries. >> Lisa: Wow. >> And then the other area that's very important to us is our Veterans Program. You know, we have about 250,000 veterans every year, transfer out of the service, looking for other jobs in the private sector. And so not only do we provide our training free, but we do resume building, mentoring, all of these types of initiatives. And we've trained about 2,000 veterans and spouses, and about 350 of those have successfully got jobs. So that's something we'll continue to focus on. >> That's such a great effort. As the daughter of a Vietnam combat veteran, that really just hits me right in the heart. But it's something that you guys have been dedicated for. This isn't something new, this isn't something that is coming out of a result of the recent executive order from the Biden administration. Fortinet has been focused on training and helping to close that gap for a while. >> That's exactly true. While we made the commitment to train a million people on the heels of the Biden administration at Cybersecurity Summit about two weeks ago, we have been focused on this for many years. And actually, a lot of the global companies that were part of that summit happened to be partners on this initiative with us. For example, we work with the World Economic Forum, IBM, and Salesforce offer our NSC training on their training platforms. And this is an area that we think it's really important and we'll continue to partner with larger organizations over time. We're also working with a lot of universities, both in the Bay Area, local like Berkeley, and Stanford and others to train more people. So it's definitely a big commitment for us and has been for many years. >> It'll be exciting to see over the next few years, the results of this program, which I'm sure will be successful. Talk to me a little bit about this event here. Fortinet is 100% partner driven company, more than 300 or so partners and customers here. Tell me a little bit about what some of the interesting topics are that are going to be discussed today. >> Sure, yeah, so we're delighted to bring our partners and customers together. They will be discussing some of the latest innovations in cybersecurity, as well as some of the challenges and opportunities. We are seeing, you know, during COVID we saw a lot of change with regards to cybersecurity, especially with remote working. So we'll discuss our partnership with LYNX that we just announced. We'll also be talking about some of the emerging technologies like CTNA, 5G, SASE, cloud, and really understanding how we can best help protect our customers and our partners. So it's very exciting. In addition to our Technology Summit, we have a technology exhibition here with many of our big sponsors and partners. So it's definitely going to be a lot of dynamic conversation over the next few days. >> We've seen so much change in the last year and a half. That's just an understatement. But one of the things that you touched on this a minute ago, and we're all feeling this is is when we all had to shift to work from home. And here we are using corporate devices on home networks. We're using more devices, the edge is expanding, and that became a huge security challenge for enterprises to figure out how do we secure this. Because for some percentage, and I think John Maddison mentioned a few months ago to me, at least 25% will probably stay remote. Enterprises have to figure out how to keep their data secure as people are often the weakest link. Tell me about what you guys announced with LYNX that will help facilitate that. >> Well, we're announcing an enterprise grade security offering for people who are working remotely. And the nice thing about this offering is it's very easy to set up and implement, so consumers and others can easily set this up. It also provides a dashboard for the enterprise, IT organization to, they can see who's on the network, devices, everything else. So this should really help because we did see a big increase in attacks, really targeting remote workers. As cyber criminals try to use their home as a foothold into the enterprise. So we're very excited about this partnership, and definitely see big demand for this going forward. >> Well, can you tell me about the go-to market for that and where can enterprises and people get it? >> Well, we're still working through that. I know you'll talk with John later on, he'll have more details on that. But definitely, we'll be targeting both of our different sets of customers and the channel for this. And I definitely think this is something that will, it's something that enterprises are definitely looking for, and there'll be more to come on this over the next few months. >> It's so needed. The threat landscape just exploded last year, and it's in a- >> Sandra: Yeah, absolutely. >> Suddenly your home. Maybe your kids are home, your spouse is working, you're distracted, ransomware, phishing emails, so legitimate. >> Sandra: They do. >> Lisa: But the need for what you're doing with LYNX is absolutely essential these days. >> Sandra: Yeah, these threats are so sophisticated. They're really difficult. And the other thing we did in addition to LYNX was as we got into COVID, we saw that, or the most successful organizations were really using this as an opportunity to invest for the longterm in cybersecurity. We also saw that, and this continues to be the case that, the insider threat continues to be one of the biggest challenges, where an employee will accidentally hit on a phishing email. So we did roll out an infosec awareness training, and we made that free for all of our customers and partners. So we're trying to do everything we can to really help our customers through this demanding time. >> Lisa: Right, what are some of the feedback that you're hearing from customers? I'm sure they're very appreciative of the education, the training, the focus effort from Fortinet. >> Sandra: Absolutely, it's definitely huge. And more and more we're seeing partners who want to work with us and collaborate with us on these initiatives. We've had a really positive response from some of the companies that I mentioned earlier, some of the big global names. And we're very excited about that. So we feel like we have some key initiatives on pillars, and we'll continue to expand on those and bring more partners to work with us over time. >> Lisa: Expansion as the business is growing amazingly well. Tell me a little bit about that. >> Sandra: Yeah, I think, in our last quarter we announced our largest billings growth for many, many years. And so, Fortinet, we're been very fortunate over the last few years, has continued to grow faster than the market. We now have half a million customers, and I think our platform approach to security is really being adopted heavily. And we continue to see a lot of momentum, especially around our solutions like SD-WAN. I think we're the only vendor who provides security in SD-WAN appliance. And so that's been a key differentiator for us. The other thing that's increasingly important, especially with the rollout of 5G is performance. And, you know, Fortinet, from the very beginning, created its own customized ASX or SPU, which really provides the best performance in security compute ratings in the industry. So all of this is really helping us with our growth, and we're very excited about the opportunities ahead. >> Lisa: And last question, on that front, what are some of the things that you're excited about as we wrap up 2021 calendar year and go into 2022? >> Sandra: Well, this been very exciting year for Fortinet. And I think we're in a great position to take advantage of many of the different growth areas we're seeing in this new and changing space. And, you know, we're all on board and ready to take advantage of those opportunities, and really fire ahead. >> Lisa: Fire ahead, I like that. Sandra, thank you so much for joining me today, talking about the commitment, the long standing commitment that Fortinet has to training everybody from all ages, academia, veterans, to help close that cybersecurity skills gap. And such an interesting time that we've had. There's so much opportunity, and it's great to see how committed you are to helping provide those opportunities to people of all ages, races, you name it. >> Sandra: Thank you, Lisa, I really appreciate it. >> Lisa: Ah, likewise. For Sandra Wheatley, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCube at the Fortinet Championship Security Summit. (soft bright music)

>>Hello everyone. Thank you, add appreciating the studio. We're here at the cube here in cloud city telco DRS Cloud city. I'm Jeffrey Day Volonte. We're here for the next three days. Wall to wall live coverage. It's a physical event with a virtual program. It's hybrid. We're here with Daniel Royston, the Ceo of telco D. R. And the acting Ceo Toby, which is announced today. Great >>to see you. It's awesome to see you guys. >>Awesome to see how you doing, how you >>Feeling? I'm feeling congratulations. Right. 101 days ago, I didn't even think this doesn't exist. Right. And we got in contact with you guys and we said we knew there was always going to be a big virtual component and we invited you guys and here we are together. It's insane. >>Well we did the preview videos, but we're kind of walking through and document in the early stages. It all came together beautifully spectacular For the folks watching behind us is the most spectacular build out clouds. It's an ecosystem open concept. It feels like the Apple store meets paradise. Of course. We got the cube here in the set and we got the studio with all the command and control of adam there. So I gotta ask you with the connected keynotes going on right now. The connected world. Yeah. It's connected. We all know that everyone knows that what's, what's different now real quick before we get into the program, what's going on? >>Yeah. I think a big part of my messages and advocating it's more than just the network, Right? And I think telcos forever have relied on. That's all it is. That's what it's about. And I'm like, nope, you guys got to start focusing on your subscribers, right? And so the over the top players keep coming in and siphoning away their revenue and it's time for them to start focusing on us, right and making experience great. And I think that's what this is all about. >>So we're gonna get the news but I want to toss it to Katie. The roving reporter is going to give it a detail on how it all came together. So Katie take it away. >>Mhm We're here in Barcelona and so excited to be back in this beautiful city over at the convention center. The team is working hard putting the finishing touches to tell Cody are amazing cloud city booth at MwC Barcelona 2021. I'm sure you know the story of how this all came together as one of the biggest vendors Erickson pulled out of M. W. C. With just over 100 days until the start of the event. When this happened last year, it kicked off a tidal wave of departures and MwC was called off this year. We all wondered if MWC was going to be cancelled again and that's when Daniel Royston Ceo of Telco D. R. And Tito G swooped in and took over the booth all 6000 square meters of it. The plan turn the booth into cloud city, the epicenter of public cloud innovation at MWC crews have been working around the clock. Over 100 and 50 people have been on this construction site for over three weeks with covid testing every day to prevent outbreaks during the build and in 100 days, it's become just that Cloud city has over 30 vendors presenting over 70 demos with 24 private meeting areas. Cloud City Live is a virtual showcase and live broadcast studio featuring 50 guests from cloud Thought leaders around the world. They have telepresence robots for a more personalized experience and the Cloud city quest game with a chance to win more than $100,000 to gain access to live streams of our nightly concerts with rosario flores and rock legend Jon bon Jovi. And don't forget to visit cloud city dot telco D R dot com to join in on the fun Daniel Royston and Nacho Gomez, founder and Ceo of one of the key vendors in the construction of the booth gave us a behind the scenes tour of the booth. >>Nacho. We did it. Yeah, we did. It can't even touch because of Covid. Yeah, but look what we did. But right, 100 days ago I called and I said I'm taking over the Ericsson booth. What did you think? I know you were crazy but just a little bit crazy, realized that you were mortgages than I thought. So at the very, at the very beginning I thought, yeah, she's crazy. But then I couldn't sleep that night. But the next uh then I realized that it was a very good it's a great idea. Yeah super smart. So yeah we're gonna show everyone toward the booth. Yeah let's go. Let's go. Okay So how do we build such an amazing, beautiful building now? So this is we've made building inside a book. So it was very hard to find a glassful of facade. The roof is around 24 tones. Yeah so it's crazy crazy but we made it work and it's totally amazing. Yeah. Do you want to go to tragedy life? Do let's go. Okay so here we are Cloud city live. I know we're producing a whole live streaming tv show. We always knew because of covid that not everyone will be able to come to Mwc as we wanted to make sure that people can learn about the public cloud. So over here we have the keynote stage, we're gonna have awesome speakers talking all throughout M. W. C. People from AWS Microsoft, google vendors companies. So really really great content. And then over there we have the cube interviewing people again 15 minute segments, live streaming but also available on demand. And you can find all of this content on cloud city. Tell Cody are calm and it's available for anyone to you. Well, a lot of content. And what about the roberts? I never get them out. Come on. We remember 100 days ago we were locked down. So we came up with the idea of having robots for the people who cannot attend in person. I know right. We always knew that there was gonna be a big virtual component to MWC this year. So we bought 100 telepresence robots. It's a great way to have a more personal experience inside the boot. Just sign up for one on cloud city dot telco D r dot com and you can control it yourself. Right? So today we have Nikki with us, who's dialing in from the Philippines in Manila? Hello, Nicky. Hi there, how are you? I were great. Can you show us a twirl all gaining on us? Super cool. Yeah, it is. What an experience. So Nikki robots are not the only cool thing we have in cloud city. We also have super awesome concert. We have rosario flores on monday. Who's a latin grammy award winner. We have Jon bon Jovi, Jon bon Jovi on Tuesday, can't be changing telephone that a little bit of rock n roll and that's Tuesday. And on Wednesday we have DJ official, it's going to be a super party. Now if you play our cloud city quest on cloud city telco D R dot com you can participate in a live streaming concert and so I know a lot of people out there have been a lockdown. Haven't been able to be going to concerts. Things from austin texas, which is the live music capital of the world, How to have music. It would be so exciting is gonna be great. I'm getting hungry. Why don't we go to the restaurant? Let's go eat. Let's go. Yeah, Here is our awesome restaurant. I know it's called Cloud nine. Right? It's a place to come and sit down and relax now. Barcelona is known for its great food and I'm a foodie. So we had to have a restaurant. Should we go check out my secret bar? Let's go. Mhm. Yeah, here >>thanks to a R. And thank you Nacho if you're watching this at home, I'm so sorry you can't join us in person. However, let's not forget this is a hybrid event meaning we're bringing all the public cloud action right to you wherever in the world you might be. This includes the Pact cloud city live program. We've partnered with the cube Silicon angle Media's live streaming video studio to make sure that all of the keynotes, panel discussions, demos, case studies interviews and way more are available on demand so you can watch them whenever and wherever you want or you can live stream and enjoy all things cloud city as and when they happen. So for those of you not able to join us in, Barcelona, be sure to log in to cloud city live and catch all the action and don't miss the awesome concert Tuesday night with Jon bon Jovi available for free. If you participate in our cloud city quest game, I'll be here throughout MWc bringing you reports and updates. Stay >>tuned. Yeah. >>Mhm. Okay, we're back here on the cube on the floor at mobile world congress in cloud city telco DRS clouds. They were here with D. R. Of telco, D R. Danielle Rice and great to see you back, we're back. So the keynotes going on connected world, the big news here, I'll see the open shift that's happening is going open. Open ran, it's been a big thing. Open ran alliance. You're starting to see the industry come together around this clear mandate that applications are gonna be cloud native and the public cloud is just coming in like a big wave and people are gonna be driftwood or they'll be surfing the wave. Yeah, this is what's happening. >>Yeah, I think public cloud is an unstoppable megatrend. It's hit every other industry regulated industries like banking, right? Top secret industries like government. They all use the public cloud tells us the last, you know, standing old school industry and it's coming and I don't think we could have had an MWc without talking about open man. That's the other major shift. And so we're bringing both of those ideas here together in cloud city. So >>the big theme is telco transformation. Maybe we could start with the basics like paint a picture of what the telco infrastructure looks like, particularly the data center stuff because they all have big data centers >>because that's >>those are the candidates to go into the cloud explained to the audience. >>Well, do you have a time machine? I think if any of us were in tech in the late 90s and early 2000s, that's what telcos like today. Right. So for people outside of the industry don't know right there mostly still managing their own data centers, they're just sort of adopting virtualization. Some of the more advanced telcos are mostly virtualized public cloud. Is this idea that like this advanced thought and so yeah, I mean things are on premise, things are in silom, things don't use a P. I. S there all integrated with custom code. And so the transformation, we can all see it because we've lived it in other industries. And I'm bringing that to telco and say come along for the ride. It totally works and it's gonna be amazing. >>So it's hardened purpose built infrastructure. Okay. That ultimately parts of that need to go to the public cloud. Right. What parts do you see going first? >>I think all of it. Really. Yeah. And I think when you look at like dish in the W. S. Which was an announcement that came out about two months ago. Right. I mean dish was doing all these are FPs. Everyone knew about it. They were looking for a cloud native software and no one knew what they were. They knew a big part was open man. But their coupling open ran with AWS and deploying their parts of their network onto the public cloud and the whole industry is like wait we thought this was years away, right? Or number two, you're crazy. And I'm saying this is what I've been talking about guys. This is exactly what you can do, leverage the Capex over. Let's see. I think Amazon did $100 billion 2020 right, leverage that Capex for yourself. Get that infinite scalability right? It's going to, well we >>have, we have a saying here in the queue, we just made this up called D. R. That's your initial tucker. The digital revolution and the three Rs reset re platform and re factor. I think the observation we're seeing is that you're coming in with the narrative what everyone's kind of like they're waking up because they have to reset and then re platform with the cloud. But the opportunity is gonna be the re factoring, You're seeing the public cloud, do that already with the Enterprise Enterprises. Already re factoring has done that. Already done that now. Telcos the last area to be innovated by the cloud. >>Yeah, I think there's old school big, we're kind of on a hollowed ground here in the Ericsson booth that I took over, right? They bailed and I kind of made fun of them. I was like, they don't have anything to say, right, They're not going to go to the show. I'm like, this is this is a revolution that's happening in telco and I don't think the big guys are really interested in rewriting their software that frankly makes them billions and billions of dollars of revenue. And I'm like to use the public cloud. All of the software needs to be rewritten needs to be re factored and you've got to start training your teams on how to use it. They don't have any capability. The telcos, in terms of those skills hire the right people, retrain your teams, move your applications, rewrite them. And I think that's what we're talking, this is not a short journey, this is a 10 year journey. So >>let's fast forward to the future a little bit because when I look around cloud city, I see ecosystem everywhere. So as you well know, the telcos have generally done a poor job of attacking adjacent seas. So my question is can they go beyond should they go beyond connectivity or is that going to be the role of the ecosystem? >>Yeah, I think it's time that the telco starts to focus on their subscriber, right? It's been really easy for them to rely on the oligopoly of the network, Right? The network, we live in the United States, we see the 18 T Verizon T mobile five G network, five G network. Like what about us? Right. And it's really easy for the over the top players right, that come in and they're always, telcos are always complaining about being coming dumb pipes and I'm like, you don't focus on the customer, we would rather buy from an Apple and amazon if they provided a mobile service because the customer experience will be better. Right? They need to start focusing on us. They have great businesses but they want to make them better. They need to start focusing on the subscriber, so >>it's a partnership with the ecosystem then for them to go beyond just straight connectivity because you're right, those are the brands that we want to do business >>with. You know, there was a great survey, Peter Atherton who will be talking as a speaker I think um I can't remember when he's talking but he was talking about how there was a survey done, where would you rather get your mobile service from? And it had a couple of big names in telco and then of course the obvious, you know, consumer brands, the ones that we all know and it was like overwhelmingly would rather buy from an amazon or an apple. And I'm like, this is like if you guys don't change, right, if telco doesn't change they keep rolling out 60 and blah blah blah. It's about the network and I don't start making about the subscriber right? Those revenues are going to continue to erode and they just sit there and complain about the O. T. T. Players. Like it's time to fight back. Yeah, I own the subscriber >>relationship. It's a digital revolution and I think This event really encapsulates in my mind this hybrid world here because it's physical events back. It's been since 2019 winter that this event actually happened. >>Well no it was even longer than, well I guess winter it was February of 19, right? And so like you look at ericsson and some of the big names that dropped out of the show, the time they come back, three years will have passed three years, right? This is how you feel your sales funnel is how you connect with your customers right? Tokyo is a very global, you know experience and so you gotta, you gotta get in front of people and you got to talk a >>lot of change to its happened, look at just what public clouds done in 2.5 years. You imagine three years being just >>gone, right? And I think a lot of people back to edition A. W. S. I think the industry was a little bit surprised by that announcement. So I've been telling executives if you were surprised by that, if you think that's, you know, if you don't know how that's gonna work, you need to come to cloud cities, you start meeting all the vendors are here. We have over 30 vendors, 70 demos, right? People who are pushing the technology forward, you need to learn what's going on here. We have several dish vendors here. Come learn about open rand, come learn about public cloud. So >>we're tight on time today, but we're going to have you back and we want to get into the tech, Get it to open, ran a little bit, get into what 5G and beyond and how we're going to take advantage of that and monetize it and what that all means. >>And also we want to hear what's going on the hallways. I know you got a lot of your key noting, you're gonna be a lot of events, the yacht. You've got a lot of briefings, >>yep. Yeah, I've already had two meetings this morning. I shot a video. Um, I met with one of the world's largest groups and I met with a tiny little super app company. Right? So running the gamut, doing everything reporter >>now, we could be like our roaming >>reporter. You know, I love, I love talking to execs and telco getting their perspective on what is public cloud and where are they going, what are they thinking about? And you talked to people who really, really get it and you get people who are just nascent and everywhere in between and I love mwc it's going great. >>Daniel Rose and you are a digital revolution telco DDR. There's amazing. Davis has been fantastic. Again for the folks watching, this is a hybrid events, there's an online component and we're reaching out with our remote interviews to get people brought in and we're shipping this content out to the masses all over the world. It's gonna be really amazing cube coverages here. It's gonna be rocking you guys are doing great. I just want to give you a compliment that you guys just did an amazing job. And of course we've got adam in the studio with the team. So adam, I'm gonna pass it off back to you in the studio

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital Experience Brought to You by Dell Technologies. >>Welcome to the Cubes Coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020. The Digital Experience. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm pleased to welcome back a Cube alumni and a new Cube member to the program today. China. My Mondal is back with US Director of Solutions Marketing for Dell Technologies China. But it's great to see you at Dell Technologies world, even though we're very specially death. >>Happy to be back. Thank you, Lisa. >>And Thomas Henson is joining us for the first time. Global business development manager for a I and analytics. Thomas, Welcome to the Cube. >>I am excited to be here. It's my first virtual cube. >>Yeah, well, you better make it a good one. All right. I said we're talking about a I so so much has changed John to me. The last time I saw you were probably were sitting a lot closer together. So much has changed in the last 67 months, but a lot has changed with the adoption of Ai Thomas. Kick us off. What are some of the big things feeling ai adoption right now? >>Yeah, I >>would have to >>say the two biggest things right now or as we look at accelerated compute and by accelerated compute we're not just talking about the continuation of Moore's law, but how In Data Analytics, we're actually doing more processing now with GP use, which give us faster insights. And so now we have the ability to get quicker insights in jobs that may have taken, you know, taking weeks to months a song as we were measuring. And then the second portion is when we start to talk about the innovation going on in the software and framework world, right? So no longer do you have toe know C plus plus or a lower level language. You can actually do it in Python and even pull it off of Get Hub. And it's all part of that open source community. So we're seeing Mawr more folks in the field of data science and deep learning that can actually implement some code. And then we've got faster compute to be able to process that. >>Tell me, what are your thoughts? >>Think I want to add? Is the explosive growth off data on that's actually are fulfilling the AI adoption. Think off. Like all the devices we have, the i o t. On age devices are doing data are pumping data into the pipeline. Our high resolution satellite imagery, all social media generating data. No. All of this data are actually helping the adoption off a I because now we have very granular data tow our friend the AI model Make the AI models are much better. Besides, so the combination off both in, uh, data the power off Like GPU, power surfers are coupled with the inefficient in the eye after and tools helping off. Well, the AI growth that we're seeing today >>trying to make one of the things that we've known for a while now is that it's for a I to be valuable. It's about extracting value from that. Did it? You talked about the massive explosion and data, but yet we know for a long time we've been talking about AI for decades. Initiatives can fail. What can Dell Technologies do now to help companies have successfully I project? >>Yeah, eso As you were saying, Lisa, what we're seeing is the companies are trying to add up AI Technologies toe Dr Value and extract value from their data set. Now the way it needs to be framed is there is a business challenge that customers air trying to solve. The business challenge gets transformed into a data science problem. That data scientist is going toe work with the high technology, trained them on it. That data science problem gets to the data science solution on. Then it needs to be mapped to production deployment as a business solution. What happens? Ah, lot off. The time is the companies do not plan for output transition from all scale proof of concept that it a scientists are playing with, like a smaller set of data two, when it goes toe the large production deployment dealing with terabytes toe terabyte self data. Now that's where we come in. At their technologies, we have into end solutions for the, uh for the ai for pollution in the customers journeys starting from proof of concept to production. And it is all a seamless consular and very scalable. >>So if some of the challenges there are just starting with iterations. Thomas question for you as business development manager, those folks that John um I talked about the data scientists, the business. How are you helping them come together from the beginning so that when the POC is initiated, it actually can go on the right trajectory to be successful? >>No, that's a great point. And just to kind of build off of what Shonda my was talking about, You know, we call it that last mile, right? Like, Hey, I've got a great POC. How do I get into production? Well, if you have executive sponsorship and it's like, Hey, everybody was on board, but it's gonna take six months to a year. It's like, Whoa, you're gonna lose some momentum. So where we help our customers is, you know, by partnering with them to show them how to build, you know, from an i t. And infrastructure perspective what that ai architectural looks like, right? So we have multiple solutions around that, and at the end of the day, it's about just like Sean. Um, I was saying, You know, we may start off with a project that maybe it's only half a terabyte. Maybe it's 10 terabytes, but once you go into production, if it turns out to be three petabytes four petabytes. Nobody really, you know, has the infrastructure built unless they built on those solid practices. And that's where our solutions come in. So we can go from small scale laboratory all the way large scale production without having to move any of that data. Right? So, you know, at the heart of that is power scale and giving you that ability to scale your data and no more data migration so that you can handle one PC or multiple PCs as those models continue to improve as you start to move into production >>and I'm sticking with you 1st. 2nd 0, sorry. Trying to go ahead. >>So I was going to add that, uh, just like posthumous said right. So if you were a data scientist, you are working with this data science workstations, but getting the data from, uh, L M c our scales thes scale out platform and, uh, as it is growing from, you see two large kills production data can stay in place with the power scale platform. You can add notes, and it can grow to petabytes. And you can add in not just the workstations, but also our They'll power it, solve our switches building out our enter A I ready solutions are already solution for your production. Giving are very seamless experience from the data scientist with the i t. >>So China may will stick with you then. I'm curious to know in the last 6 to 7 months since 2020 has gone in a very different direction thing we all would have predicted our last Dell Technologies world together. What are you seeing? China. My in terms of acceleration or maybe different industries. What our customers needs, how they changed. I guess I should say in the in 2020. >>So in 2020 we're seeing the adoption off a I even more rapidly. Uh, if you think about customers ranging from like say, uh, media and entertainment industry toe, uh, the customer services off any organization to, uh the healthcare and life sciences with lots off genome analysts is going on in all of these places where we're dealing with large are datasets. We're seeing ah, lot off adoption foster processing off A. I R. Technologies, uh, giving with, say, the all the research that the's Biosciences organizations are happening. Uh, Thomas, I know like you are working with, like, a customer. So, uh, can you give us a little bit more example in there? >>Yes, one of the areas. You know, we're talking about 2021 of the things that we're seeing Mawr and Mawr is just the expansion of Just look at the need for customer support, right arm or folks working remotely their arm or folks that are learning remote. I know my child is going through virtual schools, So think about your I t organization and how Maney calls you're having now to expand. And so this is a great area where we're starting to see innovation within a I and model building to be ableto have you know, let's call it, you know, the next generation of chatbots rights. You can actually build these models off the data toe, augment those soup sports systems >>because you >>have two choices, right? You can either. You know, you you can either expand out your call center right for for we're not sure how long or you can use AI and analytics to help augment to help maybe answer some of those first baseline questions. The great thing about customers who are choosing power scale and Dell Technologies. Their partner is they already have. The resource is to be able to hold on to that data That's gonna help them train those models to help. >>So, Thomas, whenever we're talking about data, the explosions it brings to mind compliance. Protection, security. We've seen ransom where really skyrocket in 2020. Just you know, the other week there was the VA was hit. Um, I think there was also a social media Facebook instagram ticktock, 235 million users because there was an unsecured cloud database. So that vector is expanding. How can you help customers? Customers accelerate their AI projects? Well, ensuring compliance and protection and security of that data. >>Really? That's the sweet spot for power scale. We're talking with customers, right? You know, built on one FS with all the security features in mind. And I, too, came from the analytics world. So I remember in the early days of Hadoop, where, you know, as a software developer, we didn't need security, right? We you know, we were doing researching stuff, but then when we took it to the customer and and we're pushing to production, But what about all the security features. We needed >>the same thing >>for artificial intelligence, right? We want toe. We want to make sure that we're putting those security features and compliance is in. And that's where you know, from from an AI architecture perspective, by starting with one FS is at the heart of that solution. You can know that you're protecting for you know, all the enterprise features that you need, whether it be from compliance, thio, data strategy, toe backup and recovery as well. >>So when we're talking about big data volumes Chanda, mind we have to talk about the hyper scale er's talk to us about, you know, they each offer azure A W s Google cloud hundreds of AI services. So how does DEL help customers use the public cloud the data that's created outside of it and use all of those use that the right AI services to extract that value? >>Yeah. Now, as you mentioned, all of these hyper scholars are they differentiate with our office is like a i m l r Deep Learning Technologies, right? And as our customer, you want toe leverage based off all the, uh, all the cloud has to offer and not stuck with one particular cloud provider. However, we're talking about terabytes off data, right? So if you are happy with what doing service A from cloud provider say Google what you want to move to take advantage off another surface off from Asia? It comes with a very high English p a migration risk on time it will take to move the data itself. Now that's not good, right? As the customer, we should be able to live for it. Best off breed our cloud services for AI and for that matter, for anything across the board. Now, how we help customers is you can have all of your data say, in a managed, uh, managed cloud service provider running on power scale. But then you can connect from this managed cloud service provider directly toe any off the hyper scholars. You can connect toe aws, azure, Google Cloud and even, like even, uh, the in place analytics that power scale offers you can run. Uh, those, uh I mean, run those clouds AI services directly on that data simultaneously from these three, and I'll add like one more thing, right? Thes keep learning. Technologies need GPU power solvers, right? and cloud even within like one cloud is not homogeneous environment. Like sometimes you'll find a US East has or gp part solvers. But like you are in the West and the same for other providers. No, with our still our technologies cloud power scale for multi cloud our scale is sitting outside off those hyper scholars connected directly to our any off this on. Then you can burst into different clouds, take advantage off our spot. Instances on are like leverage. All the GP is not from one particular service provider part. All of those be our hyper scholars. So those are some examples off the work we're doing in the multi cloud world for a I >>So that's day. You're talking about data there. So powers failed for multi cloud for data that's created outside the public club. But Thomas, what about for data that's created inside the cloud? How does Del help with that? >>Yes. So, this year, we actually released a solution, uh, in conjunction with G C. P. So within Google Cloud, you can have power scale for one fs, right? And so that's that native native feature. So, you know, goes through all the compliance and all the features within being a part of that G c p natively eso counts towards your credits and your GP Google building as well. But it's still all the features that you have. And so we've been running some, actually, some benchmarks. So we've got a couple of white papers out there, that kind of detail. You know what we can do from an artificial intelligence perspective back to Sean Demise Example. We were just talking about, you know, being able to use more and more GPU. So we we've done that to run some of our AI benchmarks against that and then also, you know, jumped into the Hadoop space. But because you know, that's 11 area from a power scale, prospective customers were really interested. Um, and they have been for years. And then, really, the the awesome portion about this is for customers that are looking for a hybrid solution. Or maybe it's their first kickoff to it. So back Lisa to those compliance features that we were talking about those air still inherent within that native Google G C P one fs version, but then also for customers that have it on prim. You can use those same features to burst your data into, um, your isil on cluster using all the same native tools that you've been using for years within your enterprise. >>God, it's so starting out for power. Skill for Google Cloud Trying to get back to you Kind of wrapping things up here. What are some of the things that we're going to see next from Dell from an AI Solutions perspective? >>Yes. So we are working on many different interesting projects ranging from, uh, the latest, uh, in video Salford's that they have announced d d x a 100. And in fact, two weeks ago at GTC, uh, Syria announced take too far parts with, uh, it takes a 100 solvers. We're part off that ecosystem. And we are working with, uh, the leading, uh uh, solutions toe benchmark, our ai, uh, environments, uh, for all the storage, uh, ensuring, like we are providing, like, all the throughput and scalability that we have to offer >>Thomas finishing with you from the customer perspective. As we talked about so many changes this year alone as we approach calendar year 2021 what are some of the things that Dell is doing with its customers with its partners, the hyper scale er's and video, for example, Do you think customers are really going to be able to truly accelerate successful AI projects? >>Yeah. So the first thing I'd like to talk about is what we're doing with the D. G. S A 100. So this month that GTC you saw our solution for a reference architecture for the G s, a 100 plus power scale. So you talk about speed and how we can move customers insights. I mean, some of the numbers that we're seeing off of that are really a really amazing right. And so this is gives the customers the ability to still, you know, take all the features and use use I salon and one f s, um, like they have in the past, but now combined with the speed of the A 100 still be ableto speed up. How fast they're using those building out those deep learning models and then secondly, with that that gives them the ability to scale to. So there's some features inherent within this reference architecture that allow for you to make more use, right? So bring mawr data scientists and more modelers GP use because that's one thing you don't see Data scientist turning away right there always like, Hey, you know, I mean, this this project here needs needs a GPU. And so, you know, from a power scale one fs perspective, we want to be able to make sure that we're supporting that. So that as that data continues to grow, which, you know we're seeing is one of the large factors. Whenever we're talking about artificial intelligence is the scale for the data. We wanna them to be able to continue to build out that data consolidation area for all these multiple different workloads. That air coming in. >>Excellent, Thomas. Thanks for sharing that. Hopefully next time we get to see you guys in person and we can talk about a customer who has done something very successful with you guys. Kind of me. Always great to talk to you. Thank you for joining us. >>Thank you. Thank you >>for China. May Mandel and Thomas Henson. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes Coverage of Dell Technologies, World 2020

>>From around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of DockerCon live 2020 brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. >>Hello everyone. Welcome to Docker con 2020 I'm John furrier with the cube. I'm in our Palo Alto studios with our quarantine crew. We have a great lineup here for DockerCon con 2020 virtual event. Normally it was in person face to face. I'll be with you throughout the day from an amazing lineup of content over 50 different sessions, cube tracks, keynotes, and we've got two great co-hosts here with Docker, Jenny Marcio and Brett Fisher. We'll be with you all day, all day today, taking you through the program, helping you navigate the sessions. I'm so excited, Jenny. This is a virtual event. We talk about this. Can you believe it? We're, you know, may the internet gods be with us today and hope everyone's having an easy time getting in. Jenny, Brett, thank you for being here. Hey, >>Yeah. Hi everyone. Uh, so great to see everyone chatting and telling us where they're from. Welcome to the Docker community. We have a great day planned for you >>Guys. Great job. I'm getting this all together. I know how hard it is. These virtual events are hard to pull off. I'm blown away by the community at Docker. The amount of sessions that are coming in the sponsor support has been amazing. Just the overall excitement around the brand and the, and the opportunities given this tough times where we're in. Um, it's super exciting. Again, made the internet gods be with us throughout the day, but there's plenty of content. Uh, Brett's got an amazing all day marathon group of people coming in and chatting. Jenny, this has been an amazing journey and it's a great opportunity. Tell us about the virtual event. Why DockerCon virtual. Obviously everyone's cancelling their events, but this is special to you guys. Talk about Docker con virtual this year. >>Yeah. You know, the Docker community shows up at DockerCon every year and even though we didn't have the opportunity to do an in person event this year, we didn't want to lose the time that we all come together at DockerCon. The conversations, the amazing content and learning opportunities. So we decided back in December to make Docker con a virtual event. And of course when we did that, there was no quarantine. Um, we didn't expect, you know, I certainly didn't expect to be delivering it from my living room, but we were just, I mean we were completely blown away. There's nearly 70,000 people across the globe that have registered for Docker con today. And when you look at backer cons of past right live events, really and more learning are just the tip of the iceberg. And so thrilled to be able to deliver a more inclusive vocal event today. And we have so much planned. Uh, I think Brett, you want to tell us some of the things that you have planned? >>Well, I'm sure I'm going to forget something cause there's a lot going on. But, uh, we've obviously got interviews all day today on this channel with John the crew. Um, Jenny has put together an amazing set of all these speakers all day long in the sessions. And then you have a captain's on deck, which is essentially the YouTube live hangout where we just basically talk shop. Oh, it's all engineers, all day long, captains and special guests. And we're going to be in chat talking to you about answering your questions. Maybe we'll dig into some stuff based on the problems you're having or the questions you have. Maybe there'll be some random demos, but it's basically, uh, not scripted. It's an all day long unscripted event, so I'm sure it's going to be a lot of fun hanging out in there. >>Well guys, I want to just say it's been amazing how you structured this so everyone has a chance to ask questions, whether it's informal laid back in the captain's channel or in the sessions where the speakers will be there with their, with their presentations. But Jenny, I want to get your thoughts because we have a site out there that's structured a certain way for the folks watching. If you're on your desktop, there's a main stage hero. There's then tracks and Brett's running the captain's tracks. You can click on that link and jump into his session all day long. He's got an amazing set of line of sleet, leaning back, having a good time. And then each of the tracks, you can jump into those sessions. It's on a clock. It'll be available on demand. All that content is available if you're on your desktop, if you're on your mobile, it's the same thing. >>Look at the calendar, find the session that you want. If you're interested in it, you could watch it live and chat with the participants in real time or watch it on demand. So there's plenty of content to navigate through. We do have it on a clock and we'll be streaming sessions as they happen. So you're in the moment and that's a great time to chat in real time. But there's more, Jenny, you're getting more out of this event. We, you guys try to bring together the stimulation of community. How does the participants get more out of the the event besides just consuming some of the content all day today? >>Yeah. So first set up your profile, put your picture next to your chat handle and then chat. We have like, uh, John said we have various setups today to help you get the most out of your experience are breakout sessions. The content is prerecorded so you get quality content and the speakers and chat. So you can ask questions the whole time. Um, if you're looking for the hallway track, then definitely check out the captain's on deck channel. Uh, and then we have some great interviews all day on the queue so that up your profile, join the conversation and be kind, right. This is a community event. Code of conduct is linked on every page at the top and just have a great day. >>And Brett, you guys have an amazing lineup on the captain, so you have a great YouTube channel that you have your stream on. So the folks who were familiar with that can get that either on YouTube or on the site. The chat is integrated in, so you're set up, what do you got going on? Give us the highlights. What are you excited about throughout your day? Take us through your program on the captains. That's going to be probably pretty dynamic in the chat too. >>Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, I'm sure we're going to have less, uh, lots of, lots of stuff going on in chat. So no concerns there about, uh, having crickets in the, in the chat. But we're going to, uh, basically starting the day with two of my good Docker captain friends, uh, Nirmal Mehta and Laura taco. And we're going to basically start you out and at the end of this keynote, at the end of this hour, and we're going to get you going. And then you can maybe jump out and go to take some sessions. Maybe there's some cool stuff you want to check out in other sessions that are, you want to chat and talk with the, the instructors, the speakers there, and then you're going to come back to us, right? Or go over, check out the interview. So the idea is you're hopping back and forth and throughout the day we're basically changing out every hour. >>We're not just changing out the, uh, the guests basically, but we're also changing out the topics that we can cover because different guests will have different expertise. We're going to have some special guests in from Microsoft, talk about some of the cool stuff going on there. And basically it's captains all day long. And, uh, you know, if you've been on my YouTube live show you, you've watched that, you've seen a lot of the guests we have on there. I'm lucky to just hang out with all these really awesome people around the world, so it's going to be fun. >>Awesome. And the content again has been preserved. You guys had a great session on call for paper sessions. Jenny, this is good stuff. What are the things can people do to make it interesting? Obviously we're looking for suggestions. Feel free to, to chirp on Twitter about ideas that can be new. But you guys got some surprises. There's some selfies. What else? What's going on? Any secret, uh, surprises throughout the day. >>There are secret surprises throughout the day. You'll need to pay attention to the keynotes. Brett will have giveaways. I know our wonderful sponsors have giveaways planned as well in their sessions. Uh, hopefully right you, you feel conflicted about what you're going to attend. So do know that everything is recorded and will be available on demand afterwards so you can catch anything that you miss. Most of them will be available right after they stream the initial time. >>All right, great stuff. So they've got the Docker selfie. So the Docker selfies, the hashtag is just Docker con hashtag Docker con. If you feel like you want to add some of the hashtag no problem, check out the sessions. You can pop in and out of the captains is kind of the cool, cool. Kids are going to be hanging out with Brett and then all they'll knowledge and learning. Don't miss the keynote. The keynote should be solid. We got changed governor from red monk delivering a keynote. I'll be interviewing him live after his keynote. So stay with us and again, check out the interactive calendar. All you gotta do is look at the calendar and click on the session you want. You'll jump right in. Hop around, give us feedback. We're doing our best. Um, Brett, any final thoughts on what you want to share to the community around, uh, what you got going on the virtual event? Just random thoughts. >>Yeah. Uh, so sorry, we can't all be together in the same physical place. But the coolest thing about as business online is that we actually get to involve everyone. So as long as you have a computer and internet, you can actually attend DockerCon if you've never been to one before. So we're trying to recreate that experience online. Um, like Jenny said, the code of conduct is important. So, you know, we're all in this together with the chat, so try to try to be nice in there. These are all real humans that, uh, have feelings just like me. So let's, let's try to keep it cool and, uh, over in the Catherine's channel be taking your questions and maybe playing some music, playing some games, giving away some free stuff. Um, while you're, you know, in between sessions learning. Oh yeah. >>And I gotta say props to your rig. You've got an amazing setup there, Brett. I love what your show you do. It's really bad ass and kick ass. So great stuff. Jenny sponsors ecosystem response to this event has been phenomenal. The attendance 67,000. We're seeing a surge of people hitting the site now. So, um, if you're not getting in, just, you know, just wait going, we're going to crank through the queue, but the sponsors on the ecosystem really delivered on the content side and also the sport. You want to share a few shout outs on the sponsors who really kind of helped make this happen. >>Yeah, so definitely make sure you check out the sponsor pages and you go, each page is the actual content that they will be delivering. So they are delivering great content to you. Um, so you can learn and a huge thank you to our platinum and gold authors. >>Awesome. Well I got to say, I'm super impressed. I'm looking forward to the Microsoft Amazon sessions, which are going to be good. And there's a couple of great customer sessions there and you know, I tweeted this out last night and let them get you guys' reaction to this because you know, there's been a lot of talk around the covert crisis that we're in, but there's also a positive upshot to this is Cambridge and explosion of developers that are going to be building new apps. And I said, you know, apps apps aren't going to just change the world. They're gonna save the world. So a lot of the theme years, the impact that developers are having right now in the current situation, you know, if we get the goodness of compose and all the things going on in Docker and the relationships, this real impact happening with the developer community. And it's pretty evident in the program and some of the talks and some of the examples how containers and microservices are certainly changing the world and helping save the world. Your thoughts. >>Yeah. So if you, I think we have a, like you said, a number of sessions and interviews in the program today that really dive into that. And even particularly around coven, um, Clemente is sharing his company's experience, uh, from being able to continue operations in Italy when they were completely shut down. Uh, beginning of March, we have also in the cube channel several interviews about from the national Institute of health and precision cancer medicine at the end of the day. And you just can really see how containerization and, uh, developers are moving in industry and, and really humanity forward because of what they're able to build and create, uh, with advances in technology. Yeah. >>And first responders and these days is developers. Brett compose is getting a lot of traction on Twitter. I can see some buzz already building up. There's huge traction with compose, just the ease of use and almost a call for arms for integrating into all the system language libraries. I mean, what's going on with compose? I mean, what's the captain say about this? I mean, it seems to be really tracking in terms of demand and interest. >>Yeah, it's, it's a, I think we're over 700,000 composed files on GitHub. Um, so it's definitely beyond just the standard Docker run commands. It's definitely the next tool that people use to run containers. Um, just by having that we just by, and that's not even counting. I mean, that's just counting the files that are named Docker compose Yammel so I'm sure a lot of you out there have created a gamma file to manage your local containers or even on a server with Docker compose. And the nice thing is, is Docker is doubling down on that. So we've gotten some news recently, um, from them about what they want to do with opening the spec up, getting more companies involved, because compose is already gathered so much interest from the community. You know, AWS has importers, there's Kubernetes importers for it. So there's more stuff coming and we might just see something here in a few minutes. >>Well, let's get into the keynote. Guys, jump into the keynote. If you missed anything, come back to the stream, check out the sessions, check out the calendar. Let's go. Let's have a great time. Have some fun. Thanks for enjoy the rest of the day. We'll see you soon..

>> 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)

>> Live from the MIT Campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering the 12th Annual MIT chief data officer and Information Quality Symposium. Brought to you by: SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of MITCDOIQ here in Cambridge, Massachusetts on the MIT Campus. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Peter Burris. Peter, it's a pleasure to be here with you. Thanks for joining me. >> Absolutely, good to see you again, Rebecca. >> These are my stomping grounds. >> Ha! >> So welcome to Massachusetts. >> It's an absolutely beautiful day in Cambridge. >> It is, it is, indeed. I'm so excited to be hosting this with you, what do you think, this is about chief data officer information quality. We're really going to get inside the heads of these chief data officers, find out what's on their minds, what's keeping them up at night, how are they thinking about data, how are they pricing it, how are they keeping it clean, how are they optimizing it, exploiting it, how are they hiring for it? What do you think is the top issue of the day, in your mind. There's a lot to talk about here, what's number one? >> Well, I think the first thing, Rebecca, is that if you're going to have a chief in front of your name then, at least in my mind, that means the Board has directed you to generate some return on the assets that you've been entrusted with. I think the first thing that the CDO, the chief data officer, has to do is start to do a better job of pricing out the value of data, demonstrating how they're turning it into assets that can be utilized and exploited in a number of different ways to generate returns that are actually superior to some of the other assets in the business because data is getting greater investment these days. So I think the first thing is, how are you turning your data into an asset, because if you're not, why are you achieve anything? >> (laughs) No, that's a very good point. The other thing we were talking about before the cameras were rolling, is the role of the CDO, chief data officer, and the role of the CIO, chief information officer, and how those roles differ. I mean is that something that we're going to get into today? What do you think? >> I think it's something certainly to ask a lot of the chief data officers that are coming on, there's some confusion in the industry about what the relationship should be and how the roles are different. The chief data officer as a concept, has been around for probably 10-12 years, something like that. I mean, the first time I heard it was probably 2007-2008. The CIO role has always been about information, but it ended up being more about the technology, and then the question was, what does a Chief Technology Officer does? Well it was a Chief Technology Officer could have had a different role, but they also seem to be increasing the responsible for the technology. So if you look at a lot organizations that have a CDO, the CIO looks more often to be the individual in charge of the IT assets, the technology officer tends to be in charge of the IT infrastructure, and the CDO tends to be more associated with, again, the role that the data plays, increasingly associated with analytics. But I think, over the next few years, that set of relationships is going to change, and new regimes will be put in place as businesses start to re-institutionalize their work around their data, and what it really means to have data as an asset. >> And the other role we've not mentioned is the CDO, Chief Digital Officer, which is the convergence of those two roles as well. How do you see, you started out by saying this is really about optimizing the data and finding a way to make money from it. >> Or generate a return. >> Generate a return, exactly! Find value in it, exactly. >> One of the things about data, and one of the things about IT, historically, is that it often doesn't generate money directly, but rather indirectly, and that's one of the reasons why it has been difficult to sustain investments in. The costs are almost always direct, so if I invest in an IT project, for example, the costs show up immediately but the benefits come through whatever function I just invested in the application to support. And the same thing exists with data. So if we take a look at the Chief Digital Officer, often that's a job that has been developed largely close or approximate to the COO to better understand how operations are going to change as a consequence of an increasing use of data. So, the Chief Digital Officer is often an individual whose entrusted to think about as we re-institutionalize work around data, what is that going to mean to our operations and our engagement models too? So, I think it's a combination of operations and engagement. So the Chief Digital Officer is often very proximate to the COO thinking about how data is going to change the way organization works, change the way the organization engages, from a strategic standpoint first, but we're starting to see that role move more directly into operations. I don't want to say compete with the COO, but work much more closely with them in an operational level. >> Right, and of course, depending organization to organization. >> It's always different, and to what degree are your assets historically data-oriented, like if you're a media company or if you're a financial services company, those are companies that are very strong lineages of data as an asset. If you're a manufacturing company, and you're building digital twins, like a GE or something along those lines, then you might be a little bit newer to the game, but still you have to catch up because data is going to mush a lot of industries together, and it's going to to be hard to parse some of these industries in five to ten years. >> Well, precisely, one of the things you said was that the CDO, as a role, is really only 11-12 years old. In fact that this conference is in its 12th year, so really it started at the very beginning of the CDO journey itself, and we're now amidst the CDO movement. I mean, what do you think, how is the CDO thinking about his or her role within the larger AI revolution? >> Well, that's a great question, and it's one of the primary reasons why it's picking up pace. We've had a number of different technology introductions over the past 15 - 20 years that have bought us here. The notion of virtualizing machines changed or broke that relationship between applications and hardware. The idea of very high speed, very flexible, very easy to manage data center networking broke the way that we thought about how resources could be bought together. Very importantly, in the last six or seven years, the historical norm for storage was disc, which was more emphasized how do I persist the data that results from a transaction, and now we're moving to flash, and flash-based systems, which is more about how can I deliver data to new types of applications. That combination of things makes it possible to utilize a lot of these AI algorithms and a lot of these approaches to AI, many of which the algorithms have been around for 40-50 years, so we're catalyzing a new era in which we can think about delivering data faster with higher fidelity, with lower administrative costs because we're not copying everything and putting it in a lot of different places. That is making it possible to do these AI things. That's precisely one of the factors that's really driving the need to look at data as an asset because we can do more with it than we ever have before. You know, it's interesting, I have a little bromide, when people ask me what's really going on in the industry, what I like to say is for the first 50 years of the industry, it was known process, unknown technology. We knew we were going to do accounting, we knew we were going to do HR, there was largely given to us legal or regulatory or other types of considerations, but the unknown was, do we put it on a mainframe? Do we put it on a (mumbles) Do we use a database manager? How distributed is this going to be? We're now moving into an era where it's unknown process because we're focused on engagement or the role that data can play in changing operations, but the technology is going to be relatively common. It's going to be Cloud or Cloud-like. So, we don't have quite as, it's not to say that technology questions go away entirely, they don't, but it's not as focused on the technology questions, we can focus more on the outcomes, but we have a hard time challenging those outcomes or deciding what those outcomes are going to be, and that's one of the interesting things here. We're not only using data to deliver the outcomes, we're also using data to choose what outcomes to pursue. So it's an interesting recursive set of activities where the CDO is responsible for helping the business decide what are we going to do and also, how are we going to do it? >> Well, exactly. That's an excellent point, because there are so many, one of the things that we've heard about on the main stage this morning is the difficulty a lot of CDOs get with just buy-in, and really understanding, this is important, and this is not as important or this is what we're going to do, this is what we're saying the data is telling us, and these are the actions we're going to take. How do you change a culture? How do you get people to embrace it? >> Well, this is an adoption challenge, and an adoption challenges are always met by showing returns quickly and sustainably. So one of the first things, which is why I said, one of the first things that a CDO has to do is show the organization how data can be thought of as an asset, because once you do that, now you can start to describe some concrete returns that you are able to help deliver as a consequence of your chief role. So that's probably the first thing. But, I think, one of the other things to do is to start doing things like demonstrating the role that information quality plays within an organization. Now, information quality is almost always measured in terms of the output or the outcomes that it supports, but there are questions of fidelity, there are questions of what data are we going to use, what data are we not going to use? How are we going to get rid of data? There's a lot of questions related to information quality that have process elements to them, and those processes are just now being introduced to the organization, and doing a good job of that, and acculturating people to understanding the role of equality plays, information quality plays, is another part of it. So I think you have to demonstrate that you have conceived and can execute on a regime of value, and at the same time you have to demonstrate that you have particular insight into some of those on-going processes that are capable of sustaining that value. It's a combination of those two things that, I think, the chief data officer's going to have to do to demonstrate that they belong at the table, on-going. >> Well, today we're going to be talking to an array of people, some from MIT who study this stuff >> I hear they're smart people. >> Yeah, maybe. A little bit. We'll see, we'll see. MIT, some people from the US Government, so CDOs from the US Army, the Air Force, we've got people from industry too, we've also got management consultants coming on to talk about some best practices, so it's going to be a great day. We're going to really dig in here. >> Looking forward to it. >> Yes. I'm Rebecca Knight, for Peter Burris, we will have more from MITCDOIQ in just a little bit. (techno music)

(several people talking in tandem) >> Narrator: theCUBE Alumni. (upbeat music) Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Informatica World 2018. Brought to you by Informatica. >> Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier for theCUBE; we are here live in Las Vegas for Informatica World 2018. My co-host, the next two days, wall-to-wall coverage is Peter Burris, head of research at Wikibon sitting on theCUBE. We're here for Informatica World, here in Vegas. We were in San Francisco previous years. Big table being set here with the role of data we've covered in the past, in the role of data. Certainly, we've been talking about on SiliconANGLE and researching it on Wikibon. Security, data, IoT, center of cloud infracture, AI and then, emerging technologies like Blockchain and other things. This is where the action is. Peter, we've been looking at Informatica over a couple of years and the arc and change is around data, cloud; you've got the international component with the GDPR, booming front and center this month. And then you've got data as a competitive advantage You're seeing companies organized around data, but you can't ignore the explosion of AWS putting the stake in the ground with the numbers they're getting with the cloud. Microsoft as yours dominance with the install base of Microsoft now making a play in cloud. And you've got Google Cloud, and then international volley by a variety of cloud players. Huge cloud scale, IoT Edge, data. I mean these guys are...I mean are they caught in the crosswinds, do they have a tailwind, headwind? Informatica, are they positioned? What's your take? >> Well, Informatica is amongst that handful of companies that was on a knife's edge as the marketplace started moving towards the cloud. And when the move to the cloud, from a software company standpoint, is also associated with a move from a traditional business model, which is we sell our software or you give us money up front and that's how we pay our sales guys, to a services orientation which is we're going to work with you in a services mentality and expect that we're going to operate over time. So, Informatica was on that knife's edge, they had a good product set in the sense that they foresaw that data was going to become more important and they are a good data company. They've got a great suite of data management tools that's very relevant to today's marketplace. But in a manner of respects, the question was were they going to step up and be one of the companies that successfully transitioned to the cloud and a services model or were they going to try to fight against it with product set and they have been making that transition and it seems to be going quite well. We first heard about it a couple of years ago, last year we saw it accelerate with some of the new initiates that they had and their incorporation of AI into their suite and our expectations this year we'll see, it's already even further. >> It's interesting, time is a great equalizer to who is right on the vision. We hear a lot of visions and people putting out statements of intent with their organization. You see who pivots and who shifts and who zigs and who zags. Informatica a few years ago, really understood the horizontal scalability of the cloud and the data needs to move around very freely, but they also understood the challenges of governance. So, as we look at applications and the cloud and potentially de-centralized applications, data is more critical than ever that it be exposed and be addressable but yet compliant. This is a hard challenge. You're researching this and it reveals itself in the IoT Edge, to the data center and hybrid multicloud. How are companies thinking about data as it has to be frictionless horizontally, but yet, managed with compliance? >> Well, we wrote a piece a couple years ago that clearly stated that a digital business is one that uses data as an asset, and that's it. All this other transformation stuff is noise unless you're focused on the role that data is playing in your business. In fact, we believe pretty strongly, that the whole notion of digital business transformation is the process by which your organization acknowledges, recognizes what it means to have data as an asset. You're culturally setup to do it. You're organized to take advantage of it and very importantly, you're institutionalizing your work around what it means to use data as an asset. So, that's been our perspective for a long time. Companies today continue to be half-and-half. Certainly, companies like Amazon, AWS, those digital native companies, absolutely have got this. They are very much focused on the role that data is playing as the centerpiece asset for their businesses. A lot of the incumbents that are trying to move into and take on some of those digital threats, are also starting to recognize this. We've heard at a number of different CUBE events over the past few months, that an acceleration in the, at least the talk track, about the role that data's going to play out of a variety of different big companies. So, right now, most of the enterprises that we're working with are still a little bit behind, you get some arguments about it. You know, well what about this, what about that? But increasingly there's at least an acknowledgement that data as an asset, generating returns on that asset, the differences in how you generate returns on that asset, is going to become a feature of all enterprise strategies. >> I've been hearing in hallway conversations, that over a variety of the events that we've gone to, and a patter's kind of merging when it comes to data. Whether you're talking to a CEO of a company or the Chief Data Officer or even a CIO, the questions that come up, certainly on GDPR exposes this and the law that's going to be enacted this month, where's the data, what's it worth, and how do I organize around it? So, again to your point about you've identified the digital business transformation... And a lot of times the conversation is, I don't know all of them. So, this is the question I want to explore with you, here this week: where's the data, is it important, is it worth anything, and how do I organize my business around it, both architecturally because you've got the cloud right there as an accelerant potentially or it's a double-edged sword, it could hurt you. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So, John what we've been talking about with our clients is this notion of data zoning, and the idea basically is kind of an architectural construct. Do you say, okay, what is the value proposition, what activities are essential to delivering that value proposition, and then where is that activity going to be located and what do I need to get data processed with that activity. So it's kind of a forced process and this notion of data zoning presumes that increasingly businesses have to think about the physical realities of data; latency, bandwidth, intellectual property, governance, legal considerations, as you mentioned like GDPR, but also the costs of moving data are very real and when you start talking about public cloud, can be off the charts expensive. So, those five considerations are going to be essential to how companies think about their data and how they start institutionalizing work around it. So, it's a absolute crucial focus that people have to emphasize and there's going to be some technologies that alleviates some of the pressures that they have, but the bottom line is the issues of cost, regulation and law, the latency and bandwidth, and intellectual property control are not going to go away and they will guide people's data choices. >> Intellectual property, zoning of data, these are things that scare me if I'm a data person and let me throw something at you. So, everyone's talking about the ecosystem. Oh we've got to have an ecosystem strategy. Certainly with cloud you have now diverse sets of sharing, we've seen the security, they're sharing data. So, this notion of sharing, which gives the collective intelligence, and makes data worth more and have more context, as we talk about in theCUBE all the time. At the same time, more sources of data are coming in from potentially customers, partners; this is a mashup, this is a fusion of data. This is a challenge. What are you hearing from companies on how they're posturing for ecosystem partnerships? Is it just APIs, is it just...? I mean, how are they thinking about this and is Informatica poised for that? >> Informatica, let's start with the second question, Informatica's poised for it, but every company's going to face some challenges. There are a lot of different sectors of the industry that are looking at this and saying, and licking their chops saying, man, I can make a lot of money there. But if we step back a little bit, the first thing is that, you're right, there is a mish mash and that's a feature of data. Data can be combined, it can be copied, you can do things with data without destroying data. It's like a biological catalyst, right? >> Yeah. >> It's very important to remain very cognizant of that, but when we think ultimately about where this is going, there's going to be a relationship between data protection, being able to locate data where it needs to be, at the same time, protect it; being able to move data with some degree of facility, stage it predictably around the enterprise so it's in the zone where it needs to be to support an action. And our expectation ultimately is that we're going to see an increasing merging of the issue of security and data management because ultimately, the challenge of data is not, it is how do you privatize because it is so easy to share. So, one of the key concepts is going to be moving a security orientation from restricting access to appropriately sharing as you mentioned with business worlds, and security becomes kind of the mindset, the approach of how you go about privatizing your data assets and then subsequently, protecting them and then, putting them where they need to be within the enterprise so you can support the abilities. >> And it's also enabling developers, in AI for instance, you see with the trend in machine learning which is a gateway to AI, which we're all seeing. Next generation analytics are dependent upon this. Fundamental, whether whatever architecture. Whether its cloud infrastructure or edge of network, next generation analytics have to have a feed, have to have the ability to use machine learning. I mean look at... >> It's not just next generation analytics. >> Today. >> It's next generation applications, right? >> Bingo, yeah. >> So, it's how do we incorporate some of those new capabilities within applications so that what we talk about, is we talk about systems of agency. And the idea is how am I going to let technology act on my behalf? So, we can think in terms of automation which is a process oriented, but IoT, with its models and what we call, or augmentation, with its human data interaction, human application interaction, new styles of it, are very data first. And so ultimately what we're talking about again is these new styles of applications where either we're doing something based on a model at the edge or human beings are given options to choose from and those options are crafted by the system itself. And that is an enormous set of implications, so for example we talk about Blockchain. Blockchain means a lot of things to a lot of people, but fundamentally, one of the things that becomes interesting about Blockchain is the degree to which in a computing system, an accounting system doesn't need incentives. You tell it to do something, it does it. An edge application also doesn't need incentives, it operates according to the model and the specific conditions. But when you talk about some of these high value applications with human beings, you have to incorporate incentives into how that they work. And Blockchain has the potential to provide a very powerful way of conceptualizing how you make human beings strong agents within these systems without undermining that notion of agency with the appropriate set of incentives. >> And also the ability to disrupt, intelligently, the inefficient systems. You always talk about inefficiency is an opportunity to make it more efficient with intelligent data and insights this is essentially the theme at Informatica. Twenty-five years they've been doing data, but now, more than ever, supporting kind of these use cases that are emerging very quickly. Intelligent data and insights drive ton of value from analytics to applications. >> Well let's go back 25 years, Informatica started on the basis of acknowledging or recognizing that OLAP, that new class of analytic systems was going to require new technologies. This is a company that's always had good data jobs and good data people. It's a magnet for smart people with an orientation towards data and that's why it's remained relevant. Now again, this is not a given, there's still a lot of change on the horizon. The world does not have enough data scientists, the tooling for supporting some of these rich applications has a long way to go, there's a lot of net computer science that has yet to be developed. But if you think about the handful of companies that are going to be likely in the mix, making some of these changes, leading the way, Informatica's in that group. >> We got to wrap it up for the kick off. We're going to start day one. Final question, well I'll start it by saying, I think that Informatica has a great opportunity ahead and they've got challenges. They've got great product people, they have to engage the ecosystem; if they can effectively bring the product into the market with a robust ecosystem while enabling intelligent data for insights in a way that applications, machine learning can take advantage of it and scale it, I think they've got a great opportunity. If they don't forge those relationships, and take the draft of the cloud, then I think they might have some challenges. >> I think that's accurate. One thing I'd add to that John, is that they will have to demonstrate to the ecosystem they have and they want to build, that the transition front product to service is good for everybody. >> Yeah. >> If they can do that, if they can move that, because that's a big part of the cloud, if they can be a, again, a magnet within the cloud for attracting data related companies and innovation and entrepreneurs, then this is definitely a company to watch. >> We said it last year, whoever can crack the code on letting data grow organically and be intelligent, while maintaining governance and compliance which could slow things down, that is the secret sauce. Whoever cracks that code will certainly go to the next level. This is theCUBE, breaking down Informatica World starting day one of two days of wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris. More live coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas, it's the CUBE, covering Magento Imagine 2018, brought to you by Magento. (upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome to the CUBE, we are live in Las Vegas at the Wynn for Magento Imagine 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host John Furrier, and John, we have a really exciting day planned, talking all things digital commerce innovation. What are you most excited about? >> Well Magento's one of those companies that people know about, but it's the rocket ship in eCommerce, mainly because they've cracked the code on a few things, Lisa, that I'm really impressed with. One is, they've modernized eCommerce. ECommerce has been around 25 plus years on the web, with internet, but you think of it like the old Amazon, eBay, database world, but now we're living in a cloud world, cloud native's big, and there's still money to be made in retail as everything goes online. The digital transformation is impacting retail more than ever, smart phones is over 10 years old, so the question I've always asked is, where's the modern stack? So these guys have cracked the code on that. Two, and they're powering a lot of impressive sites, and the growth is phenomenal, but they have an ecosystem partner network that you can see behind us, if you can look at the camera you'll see hundreds of partners. So I mean, eCommerce obviously isn't going away, look at the growth of digital, digital natives are coming online, people want to do things digitally, but also it's changing the offline consumer experience. So there's a gap, traditionally, between online, offline, that's coming together. This is only going to get more acute as cloud, mobile, decentralized, block chain, there's still eCommerce in our future, and it's just never going away, and these guys have a really interesting approach, so we're excited to find out more here on what they're doing, their success, and how eCommerce is going to evolve. To me, that's the number one story is, can people leverage turnkey, scalable digital technologies to do business? >> So Magento has built their reputation on helping retailers to target online shoppers. You talked about online and offline, but they're now moving into the B2B space. As consumers, we expect, Amazon set the bar obviously very high, we expect to be able to get whatever we want as consumers, we're channel agnostic, we don't care, we just want to be able to find whatever we want when we want it, have it shipped to us, have it shipped to the store, and that is spilling over into the B2B space. And Magento's data suggests that 93% of B2B buyers want to be able to buy online, which not only changes the sales model, it changes the marketing model as well. >> I mean, they're taking the charge, that's the slogan here, and the thing that's interesting is that it used to be nice little buckets, B2C, business to consumer, B2B, business to business, but really it's a consumer to consumer role, and one of the things that you see right now social media is consumers are directly involved in either the content development process, or the engagement process. And if you look at no further than the side effects of what we see with Facebook, the downside of this whole data conversation is that the users want to be in control, and they are in control. So you're seeing almost a blurring of the lines between B2B, B2B, and C2C, where people need to tailor the eCommerce experience and have the data insights, either realtime, and or intelligent wise to know that the consumer is participating offline, they're online, but also peer to peer. The consumer to consumer relationship is to me going to be the cutting edge forward innovation area that a lot of these companies are going to innovate on because a lot of referrals are going on organically now as it's not so much audience anymore, because the audience is online digitally, it's about the network connection. So as people have a network connection with their friends, and you're seeing Facebook proving this, and LinkedIn, and others, is that you're going to start to see that data be very important. So I see a future where eCommerce stacks have to support consumer to consumer in any context, business to business, B2C, business to consumer, consumer to consumer, this is the holy grail, and whoever can scale that, again at large scale, while creating a money making opportunity, value creation opportunity for ecosystems is the winning formula. >> One of the themes that popped up during the keynote this morning with a number of folks that were on stage, including their CEO, and the Pittsburgh Steelers, was personalization. That's something that we expect as consumers, and as well as business buyers, we want to be able to have something where we know they know us, but we don't want to be marketed to. So Magento has done an interesting job and we're going to have a number of guests on the show today talking about how they're enabling this more personalized customized, you mentioned the word tailored, experience as a consumer to be able to get what I want when I want it, but also, through a now omnichannel. We're going to hear a lot about omnichannel today and how that's enabling new revenue streams, reduction in attrition, they talked about one of their newest features, Magento did, with the instant purchase. We want to be able to click once, buy it, and have it, something that means something to us, be able to buy it again, and again, and again. >> I mean this is the challenge right, in eCommerce, is table stakes are some of these features like instant click buying, having the kind of personalization, but the real angle to me is bringing in the personalization so that the consumer's involved. So what you see with the Steelers for instance, they do realtime shooting of the game and incorporate the fan experience into the eCommerce experience really seamlessly and in realtime, and so what you have is a change of a methodology. And so, eCommerce used to be a very one directional monologue, you'd put content out there, people browse and consume. Now you have a realtime interactivity piece, which changes the content production perspective, and the Steelers pointed that out. In the tech world, we used to call this agile programming, when you write software development. So you start to see the concept of agile come into eCommerce where, whether it's an entrepreneur, Melissa, baking goods, or a business, they want to focus on the business at hand, not provisioning technology. So you've got to have a partner like a Magento or someone who can build all that tech turnkey so that people can focus on the business at hand and that's agile. So if they decide to incorporate something really fast, you can't have this waterfall process, and that's the problem with the content market, and that is a legacy baggage of eCommerce, where hey, we built it, we ship it, but we got to go back and decide what to change, and we got to push it through the code base. You're provisioning technology, that is an old way of doing things, that's not ideal for the modern era. You need to be very agile, very scrum like, to use that term, and content people need that to be successful because the difference between realtime and having that right experience is a matter of seconds and or context specifics. So agile content, can't be waterfall. >> Exactly, agile content that's data driven. You mentioned data earlier, we're going to actually be talking with Anita Andrews, who's going to be talking about what Magento can facilitate and deliver their users with respect to BI, the Steelers talked about that, they actually see when the Steelers aren't doing well, they see a reduction in merchandise, merch that's actually purchased on site. So they have the data to be able to make the decisions to deliver this personalized content in a way that they can see, how can we adjust our sales structure to be able to capitalize on revenue opportunities. >> I mean responding to data is really critical, so the Steelers example is great. When they lose, there's no sales, 'cause everyone's kind of bummed out. When they win, they sell everything out. So you know, in sports world, which is that big part of Magento's base, managing the assets of running the franchise, for instance, becomes a real big thing. Whether it's food, or apparel, or any kind of fan experience, they can adjust either dynamic pricing, these are the things that the content owners want. They want to be able to say, hey, we can understand sentiment from the data, and then adjust the marketing mix and content mix based on what's going on in realtime. That's a game changer, and if you can do that on a form factor for web, mobility, and future formats, whether it's cryptocurrency, that is going to be to me the tell sign of who's innovating. >> And speaking of innovation, this is the eighth event that Magento, the eighth Imagine event, our first time here, but you mentioned their partner ecosystem, there's 1150 solutions and technology partners you can see quite a few of them behind us here, a lot of people are needing this type of technology to be able to better merge the online and offline worlds, across consumers, across businesses. We have some great guests here who are going to talk to us about how they're doing that, enabling multi-retail, enabling multi-channel, and really enabling this true globalization of commerce to allow businesses to go, we actually have a guy from Coca Cola who's going to be on today, talking about the project that they are, where they're personalizing the Coke bottles, it's such an interesting topic of discussion because it's very personal and very relatable, and I think. >> Marketing's always, market to the persona of one, but now you have a brand relationship that's online and offline, and this is changing how companies are building their assets. So an offline retail outlet, whether it's a mall or a superstore, or whatever, that can be configured in a way that's complementary to the online, and then having the merging of the data, and then having that relationship with the consumer. To me, omnichannel is a huge retail challenge, it's super important, because at the end of the day, do you want to have that insight into the customer, but also have the great experience, that's key. >> Exactly, so we're going to be talking with the Accent Group, who's an award nominee for their awards here, and they're going to be talking about how they are merging multiple brands, hundreds of thousands of SKUs to be able to facilitate, and also give them the insight that retailers need on inventory, giving them fulfillment options, there's so much positive business outcomes that can be generated from this. We talked about reducing attrition, getting us faster check outs, we want to have something that's very simple, very seamless, and as you pointed out, really interesting to understand, what is the modern technology stack that can facilitate that? >> Yeah, great user experience, retail intelligence is something I think that's going to be something that's fascinating, and again, it's all about scale and the technology stack, and taking that complexity away from the customer, because at the end of the day, the digital storefront is what people are going to be interfacing with on a primary basis, that's also very complementary to the offline. So I'm super excited, I'm totally pumped to get into it. >> Me too, well looking forward to hosting with you all day John, and again, we are live in Las Vegas at the Wynn at Magento Imagine 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with John Furrier, we're going to be here all day, stick around. We're going to be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think 2018, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome to theCUBE, we are live at the inaugural IBM Think 2018. I'm Lisa Martin joined by John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Guys this is first day of three days of coverage from theCUBE but this is a combination of six different IBM events from the past. Tell me a little bit about your perspective about what you think that means or they're projecting to have about 40,000 plus people here. Big change. >> Yeah, I mean, this is, we've been covering IBM how many years? Was since 2011 we've been to? Pretty much every single event they've had. They had IOD, information on demand on and on and on but really. >> Impact, pulse edge. >> All coming together. I mean this is IBM looking at the market saying, it's better to run a big tent event as a kind of coming together, a global celebration global information gathering a global sales partnership ecosystem development, and I think it's finally IBM's taking a play out of what others have done. Sales Force does it, Oracle's done it, Amazon does it with reinvent, they pull all their resources into one event. Now here's the problem, IBM is massively huge so, you know the cube goes to all those events now it's 5x the demand for cube content, 5x the demand for keynotes so, they're here at the Mandalay Bay, they're probably going to have to, need to a bigger job next year. But it's a good move for IBM and I love the fake logo, I love the Think branding. That's a throwback to the old Tom Watson generation which the roots of IBM were all about, just think, solve problems and really market the best solutions to customers. To me, if they can bring back those old IBM ethos and the roots and really get back into the cloud game which they've been falling behind on but their last earnings were up Dave. So they've had a nice little break of the negative streak, but AI is a tailwind for them, IOT is a tailwind, blockchain is potentially an enabler down the road, I mean Dave your thoughts on just that the business aspect of that. >> Well, so first on Think they have consolidated six shows they used to have really deep dives into things like infrastructure or analytics, et cetera. Now, they've said okay, let's make the big ched, as John was saying. What's interesting is every one of those drill down events Lisa you had big themes whether it was cognitive or cloud or digital transformation so, I think it's a smart move. Michele Paluso, Bob Lord came in, said, hey, we're going to change things up a little bit and we're going to play in the big leagues with, as John said, Sales Force, et cetera. You're right John, IBM sort of finally after Jenny Rimetti came on in 2012 and had some number of the trade press reports and number of quarters of revenue declining. >> It was double digit like 17 consecutive quarters. >> But remember IBM we've said it for years IBM's got to shrink to grow and in the growth they eat down one percent growth in constant currency. Currency is finally now a tailwind for IBM. It's a $79 billion company, a lot smaller, remember, IBM used to be well over a $100 billion company. And its got a $140, a $150 billion market cap. So it's trading at about 2x, almost 2x revenue and it's because IBM has an eclectic mix they've got mainframe, they've got other hardware. They got rid of their x86 business which was a low margin business. They've got services, which is a great business for them, huge cash flow. You get a $120 billion services backlog right now. So amazing potential future earnings but service is a lower margin business. IBM has this huge software business, you know 10s of billions of dollars in software which is a very high margin business. So put it all together and IBM's trying to get back to a 50% gross margin model. They're throwing off a lot of cash. They threw off $13 billion in free cash flow last year. Interestingly, about 80% of that went back to shareholders in the form of share purchase and the like. And that's how IBM, sort of, kept the stock price up and continues, and now we'll see what happens next year they're being very conservative about growth, so tepid growth. Huge advantage from the tax reform. IBM is one of these companies that is going to benefit in a big way from tax reform, gives it a lot of flexibility. >> And I would also, if I was advising IBM, I'm not, but if I was advising Michele Paluso I'd basically, look at, you're too big to have one big show. I would do one big business show, like Think, then also have a separate event on technical. Because one of the things we look at their schedule here it's business and AI, cloud and data, modern infrastructure, security and resilience. That alone could stack the deck for three, four days of business conversations business transformation, digital transformation, future transformation with blockchain among other things, power of the data and IOT. That's a full packed set of content. IBM's got a huge R&D organization Dave, they have a huge services organization and technology's the enabler for them to get those margins up and I think they should have a separate technical Think. Now. we're going to ask them directly with try to get Michele Paluso on but. >> I want to make some comments about the Jenny Rametti tenure because I first met her around 2007, 2008, when she was running strategy actually. She had run a large business for Palmasano so this is a while before she took over in 2012. And she was running strategy and then she came on in 2012. At that time IBM had no cloud really clear cloud strategy. They were talking cloud but they didn't have any cloud, public cloud options so they had to go out and pay two billion dollars for software. And then they put in Blue Mix, John you're hearing some changes on Blue Mix so we're going to talk about that. But she's had to architect a massive transition. But when you look at IBM's core business cloud is really one of the new drivers. So, $17 billion business. But the drivers' profitability are mainframe, storage, services, a lot of the same without a large cloud business which they've taken a lot of different components and pushed it through the cloud and done with Blue Mix what they did with Websphere, their middleware piece. Kind of what Oracle tried to do and has done with Fusion but a different strategy. All done sort of in the cloud. Now, the big question is okay is that going to drive growth for IBM in the next 10 years? The other big question is, what about Watson? You hear a lot about Watson. They don't really clearly breakout, okay this is how much business we do with Watson and Wall Street has been clamoring to see that, so. >> Well I mean to me cloud is the big story I think their opportunity is data. That's where Watson kind of ties in. They have a huge client base, the digital transformation style, I think they're going to do really well there. But the at the end of the day the cloud story has always been weak for IBM in the sense of, comparing it to what Amazon web services has been doing. So you know I really want to see how they're differentiating their cloud story because they have to. They cannot compete with Amazon head to head. Google's differentiating, Microsoft's differentiating. IBM needs to be in the same league as Microsoft and Amazon. They got to beat Google out for that third spot. To me if I was marching giving marching orders as a theme, said, we got to be in the top three cloud providers, and define it in a way that adds values to customers, and they're not in that top three today. That is a huge story. That's going to keep dragging them down on the Wall Street numbers, in my opinion, unless they do something different. >> Well, I got to counter that because the big difference between IBM cloud and Amazon cloud is IBM's got a giant software portfolio. IBM's as a service software portfolio's many 10s of billions of dollars. So they have a ratable revenue model and a very, very, software's, 85%, zero marginal cost business. Amazon doesn't have that yet and they may they're going up the stack. But that's huge. The other piece to watch is IBM calls strategic imperatives, which is cloud and security and IOT and the new stuff basically which is now just under 50% of the revenue model. But that's where companies like IBM and Oracle differentiate from Amazon is they have the deep software. Now the challenge for IBM is their software is very bespoke. Their software business is very, very fragmented. They've been trying to bring it together through middleware for what, John, four or five years? When did they announce Blue Mix? We were there. >> It seems like five years ago, I mean yeah, maybe even six. >> Dave: Yeah. >> Blue Mix was a great approach I think soft layer might have been, to me at least, the one I think the thing that held Blue Mix back. Just soft layer, to me, just it's just infrastructure didn't really kind of make it blend in the Blue Mix the way I thought it would and hoped it would. We'll see what they say this week. >> Yeah but that was the right move. The two billion dollar acquisition of soft layer, had they not done that, they would be like Dell EMC, no cloud. They'd be Dell EMC with a huge software business on prim software business. >> Well Dave the market share numbers on cloud, I mean shows, IBM not making it so like, to me, that story has to be >> I disagree with that I disagree. So you got the big three, right? And then you got Oracle and IBM. There sort of a distant, I don't know what order I guess IBM would be a little ahead of Oracle but you got one, two, three and then distant four and five, excluding Alibaba and the China cloud which is huge. But IBM is-- >> In China, not the U.S. though. >> In China, but IBM's strategy to me is the right one. Drive software revenue as, Oracle as well because that's the ace in the hole relative to the infrastructure clouds. They don't want to compete head to head in infrastructures and service. That would be a disaster. >> I mean look at, I'm tracking the cloud heavily you know that so, I look at IBM a little bit differently than you. My view is simple. In the cloud game right now they're not making it. However, we know that everyone's defining cloud differently. I mean Microsoft throws Azure in there the software included. Amazon doesn't. Oracle does so again that's just-- >> Dave: It's a $17 billion business. >> Hold on, hold on that's just mangling the numbers. >> And granted they may be >> So, so they. puts some hosting in there. >> They have to have to have it's not about the cloud story it's about the cloud value. IBM has a lot of piece parts that they can actually put together for a cloud package. Infrastructure instead of software services. Blue Mix tried to do that. So I think, they, if they can look at cloud in a way that's helps IBM, that gives them a way to move the goal post the way to change the game to me that's what I'm looking for. Because IBM should not be out of the cloud business. If they don't go down-- >> But they're not out of the cloud business, it's a $17 billion cloud business, how can you say they're out of the cloud business? That's an insane >> I'm not saying that they're. insertion to make. >> I'm not saying they're out of the cloud business but look what happened to VM ware, they were in the cloud business and-- >> Yeah but VM ware was BS, we all know that. They had fake cloud, at least IBM's got a real cloud built upon softlayer and yes they transformed a hosting business in bare metal cloud into what is ultimately come the IBM cloud where they're now rebranding. It takes a long time. This is kind of the point I was making about about Jenny earlier. There's it's a little messy. Seeing that sausage made. But at least they have strategy around that. They're in the cloud game. Dell EMC isn't in the cloud game. HPE isn't in the cloud game. I'm talking public cloud. These were companies that both VM ware all three of those companies announced they were going into the cloud, they're out. At least IBM, Oracle, obviously the big three are in it. That's my contention. >> So let's talk it. Do you disagree? >> No, of course they're in the cloud game. They're tracking the market share numbers but again they're not winning in the cloud Dave, okay? So like in relative to other players. >> Dave: Alright so let's define winning. >> Well, I mean >> Define winning. it depends on how you look at the marketplace. So, right now, by quote, today's standard, there are the top three are Amazon, Microsoft some say Google, Oracle and IBM would be below that. That's defined by a bunch of stuff so IBM counts it I mean Microsoft counts it differently than Amazon. I look at cloud as simply this. How many sets of services do you have? And how many people are using those services? So it's kind of two dimensions of access there. Plus the breadth of services and how many people are using those breadth of services so it's kind of like a quadrant not a magic quadrant but like Amazon blows away everybody okay so that's like, they're so far ahead. IBM, if they try to compete that way, my point was that I was trying to make was if you compete on trying to match Amazon you're not going to win. Google's already tapped out of the cloud by that standard. They're going in all in on cloud scale, sensor flow, AI targeting the developer community. They're not out of the cloud game. They're taking a different path. That's not their cloud story. That's their cloud plan. They're executing it. Oracle, it's just, everything's cloud. They'll count anything that moves is cloud right? So that's Oracle. Microsoft throws 365 in there to bump their numbers up but what do they have? Azure and it's doing well by quote Wall Street. But some people criticize the technology with Microsoft. So, it's kind of a rat race. It's fundamentally at the infrastructure it's the number of services and who's using those services and then above say the Kubernetes line if you will, it's what applications are driving value. So if you separate applications from under the Kubernetes line orchestration, then you got two different pictures. You can't blend them in. That's my contention that the blending of apps revenue and infrastructure revenue really makes it a real messy way to squint through who's winning. >> So let's define leadership, although that was good, good analysis. I'll give you, I'll add some color to that. To me you've got to be in the cloud game because in order to succeed in the digital economy you got to have cloud economics. You got to have you got to have the ability to to do analytics and data you got to have AI and you got to have cloud economics. What does that mean? You got to have, you know, an API platform. You got to have zero marginal costs. You got to have network effects is scaled and you got to be able to track startups. Okay, so those are the sort of components that I look at as a cloud momentum. The question I have for IBM is if the strategic imperatives are now almost 50% of the business and their higher margin and you're achieving those cloud economics why are gross margins under pressure? Right? They should be showing gross margin momentum and that's something to look at. >> Well, I mean-- >> Alright guys. >> Because cloud should drive huge gross margins. >> Hold on I got to add one more point because this fundamentally frames it. If you look at cloud and what DevOps has done where you can actually have programmable infrastructure that's changed the game. Would you think DevOps has changed the game? >> Changing? >> Yeah, changing. Yeah, sure. >> The notion of programming It certainly has for the cloud native guys, absolutely. >> So the ability to program the infrastructure takes away the infrastructure being the dependency of what applications can do. >> Dave: Agreed. >> Okay, okay, great. So now that the infrastructure's programmable the apps kind of are running the show. The successful people that are using the cloud today are the ones that nailed the business model logic. So that's what the application does it's due diligence. Whoever can come up with the applications and nail the business model that's where the switching costs are extremely high that's where the risk is. The risk is no longer in the plumbing because the plumbing, switching costs of the plumbing are a lot lower because there's a lot more technology and sets the services you can provision in and out of that so you're starting to see the entire strategy chain where it's the applications that'll be driving the value and that's where the mistakes if made there that's where the cloud game ends. >> And machine intelligence is going to drive that value and that's where Watson versus you know the consumer guys and IBM Jenny, I guarantee tomorrow will make the point that we're not trying to collect your data and sell you ads. You will make that point. >> Whoever. >> I guess unless you go to the weather company's website. >> Whoever can build the application, it builds value. The business logic is now the new devops because everything else is programmable. That's my contention. >> Dave: Alright. >> Alright guys wow. As you can tell lots of passion for all things cloud, AI and now you're going to hear all of it today on theCUBE. This is day one of three days of coverage as John mentioned. We've so many great guests on over the next few days and hopefully a few more with our pop-up CUBE. Keep watching, I'm Lisa Martin with John Furrier and Dave Vallante. We're going to be back with our first guest after a short break. (funky digital music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. (peppy digital music) >> Veritas Vision 2017 everybody. We're here at The Aria Hotel. This is day two of theCUBE's coverage of Vtas, #VtasVision, and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with Stuart Miniman who is my cohost for the week. Stu, we heard Richard Branson this morning. The world-renowned entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson came up from the British Virgin Islands where he lives. He lives in the Caribbean. And evidently he was holed out during the hurricane in his wine cellar, but he was able to make it up here for the keynote. We saw on Twitter, so, great keynote, we'll talk about that a little bit. We saw on Twitter that he actually stopped by the Hitachi event, Hitachi NEXT for women in tech, a little mini event that they had over there. So, pretty cool guy. Some of the takeaways: he talked a lot about- well, first of all, welcome to day two. >> Thanks, Dave. Yeah, and people are pretty excited that sometimes they bring in those marquee guests, someone that's going to get everybody to say, "Okay, wait, it's day two. "I want to get up early, get in the groove." Some really interesting topics, I mean talking about, thinking about the community at large, one of the things I loved he talked about. I've got all of these, I've got hotels, I've got different things. We draw a circle around it. Think about the community, think about the schools that are there, think about if there's people that don't have homes. All these things to, giving back to the community, he says we can all do our piece there, and talking about sustainable business. >> As far as, I mean we do a lot of these, as you know, and as far as the keynote speakers go, I thought he was one of the better ones. Certainly one of the bigger names. Some of the ones that we've seen in the past that I think are comparable, Bill Clinton at Dell World 2012 was pretty happening. >> There's a reason that Bill Clinton is known as the orator that he is. >> Yeah, so he was quite good. And then Robert Gates, both at ServiceNow and Nutanics, Condi Rice at Nutanics, both very impressive. Malcolm Gladwell, who's been on theCUBE and Nate Silver, who's also been on theCUBE, again, very impressive. Thomas Friedman we've seen at the IBM shows. The author, the guy who wrote the Jobs book was very very strong, come on, help me. >> Oh, yeah, Walter Isaacson. >> Walter Isaacson was at Tableau, so you've seen some- >> Yeah, I've seen Elon Musk also at the Dell show. >> Oh, I didn't see Elon, okay. >> Yeah, I think that was the year you didn't come. >> So I say Branson, from the ones I've seen, I don't know how he compared to Musk, was probably the best I think I've ever seen. Very inspirational, talking about the disaster. They had really well-thought-out and well-produced videos that he sort of laid in. The first one was sort of a commercial for Richard Branson and who he was and how he's, his passion for changing the world, which is so genuine. And then a lot of stuff on the disaster in the British Virgin Islands, the total devastation. And then he sort of went into his passion for entrepreneurs, and what he sees as an entrepreneur is he sort of defined it as somebody who wants to make the world a better place, innovations, disruptive innovations to make the world a better place. And then had a sort of interesting Q&A session with Lynn Lucas. >> Yeah, and one of the lines he said, people, you don't go out with the idea that, "I'm going to be a businessman." It's, "I want to go out, I want to build something, "I want to create something." I love one of the early anecdotes that he said when he was in school, and he had, what was it, a newsletter or something he was writing against the Vietnam War, and the school said, "Well, you can either stay in school, "or you can keep doing your thing." He said, "Well, that choice is easy, buh-bye." And when he was leaving, they said, "Well, you're either going to be, end up in jail or be a millionaire, we're not sure." And he said, "Well, what do ya know, I ended up doing both." (both laughing) >> So he is quite a character, and just very understated, but he's got this aura that allows him to be understated and still appear as this sort of mega-personality. He talked about, actually some of the interesting things he said about rebuilding after Irma, obviously you got to build stronger homes, and he really sort of pounded the reducing the reliance on fossil fuels, and can't be the same old, same old, basically calling for a Marshall Plan for the Caribbean. One of the things that struck me, and it's a tech audience, generally a more liberal audience, he got some fond applause for that, but he said, "You guys are about data, you don't just ignore data." And one of the data points that he threw out was that the Atlantic Ocean at some points during Irma was 86 degrees, which is quite astounding. So, he's basically saying, "Time to make a commitment "to not retreat from the Paris Agreement." And then he also talked about, from an entrepreneurial standpoint and building a company that taking note of the little things, he said, makes a big difference. And talking about open cultures, letting people work from home, letting people take unpaid sabbaticals, he did say unpaid. And then he touted his new book, Finding My Virginity, which is the sequel to Losing My Virginity. So it was all very good. Some of the things to be successful: you need to learn to learn, you need to listen, sort of an age-old bromide, but somehow it seemed to have more impact coming from Branson. And then, actually then Lucas asked one of the questions that I put forth, was what's his relationship with Musk and Bezos? And he said he actually is very quite friendly with Elon, and of course they are sort of birds of a feather, all three of them, with the rocket ships. And he said, "We don't talk much about that, "we just sort of-" specifically in reference to Bezos. But overall, I thought it was very strong. >> Yeah Dave, what was the line I think he said? "You want to be friends with your competitors "but fight hard against them all day, "go drinking with them at night." >> Right, fight like crazy during the day, right. So, that was sort of the setup, and again, I thought Lynn Lucas did a very good job. He's, I guess in one respect he's an easy interview 'cause he's such a- we interview these dynamic figures, they just sort of talk and they're good. But she kept the conversation going and asked some good questions and wasn't intimidated, which you can be sometimes by those big personalities. So I thought that was all good. And then we turned into- which I was also surprised and appreciative that they put Branson on first. A lot of companies would've held him to the end. >> Stu: Right. >> Said, "Alright, let's get everybody in the room "and we'll force them to listen to our product stuff, "and then we can get the highlight, the headliner." Veritas chose to do it differently. Now, maybe it was a scheduling thing, I don't know. But that was kind of cool. Go right to where the action is. You're not coming here to watch 60 Minutes, you want to see the headline show right away, and that's what they did, so from a content standpoint I was appreciative of that. >> Yeah, absolutely. And then, of course, they brought on David Noy, who we're going to have on in a little while, and went through, really, the updates. So really it's the expansion, Dave, of their software-defined storage, the family of products called InfoScale. Yesterday we talked a bit about the Veritas HyperScale, so that is, they've got the HyperScale for OpenStack, they've got the HyperScale for containers, and then filling out the product line is the Veritas Access, which is really their scale-out NAS solution, including, they did one of the classic unveils of Veritas Software Company. It was a little odd for me to be like, "Here's an appliance "for Veritas Bezel." >> Here's a box! >> Partnership with Seagate. So they said very clearly, "Look, if you really want it simple, "and you want it to come just from us, "and that's what you'd like, great. "Here's an appliance, trusted supplier, "we've put the whole thing together, "but that's not going to be our primary business, "that's not the main way we want to do things. "We want to offer the software, "and you can choose your hardware piece." Once again, knocking on some of those integrated hardware suppliers with the 70 point margin. And then the last one, one of the bigger announcements of the show, is the Veritas Cloud Storage, which they're calling is object storage with brains. And one thing we want to dig into: those brains, what is that functionality, 'cause object storage from day one always had a little bit more intelligence than the traditional storage. Metadata is usually built in, so where is the artificial intelligence, machine learning, what is that knowledge that's kind of built into it, because I find, Dave, on the consumer side, I'm amazed these days as how much extra metadata and knowledge gets built into things. So, on my phone, I'll start searching for things, and it'll just have things appear. I know you're not fond of the automated assistants, but I've got a couple of them in my house, so I can ask them questions, and they are getting smarter and smarter over time, and they already know everything we're doing anyway. >> You know, I like the automated assistants. We have, well, my kid has an Echo, but what concerns me, Stu, is when I am speaking to those automated assistants about, "Hey, maybe we should take a trip "to this place or that place," and then all of a sudden the next day on my laptop I start to see ads for trips to that place. I start to think about, wow, this is strange. I worry about the privacy of those systems. They're going to, they already know more about me than I know about me. But I want to come back to those three announcements we're going to have David Noy on: HyperScale, Access, and Cloud Object. So some of the things we want to ask that we don't really know is the HyperScale: is it Block, is it File, it's OpenStack specific, but it's general. >> Right, but the two flavors: one's for OpenStack, and of course OpenStack has a number of projects, so I would think you could be able to do Block and File but would definitely love that clarification. And then they have a different one for containers. >> Okay, so I kind of don't understand that, right? 'Cause is it OpenStack containers, or is it Linux containers, or is it- >> Well, containers are always going to be on Linux, and containers can fit with OpenStack, but we've got their Chief Product Officer, and we've got David Noy. >> Dave: So we'll attack some of that. >> So we'll dig into all of those. >> And then, the Access piece, you know, after the apocalypse, there are going to be three things left in this world: cockroaches, mainframes, and Dot Hill RAID arrays. When Seagate was up on stage, Seagate bought this company called Dot Hill, which has been around longer than I have, and so, like you said, that was kind of strange seeing an appliance unveil from the software company. But hey, they need boxes to run on this stuff. It was interesting, too, the engineer Abhijit came out, and they talked about software-defined, and we've been doing software-defined, is what he said, way before the term ever came out. It's true, Veritas was, if not the first, one of the first software-defined storage companies. >> Stu: Oh yeah. >> And the problem back then was there were always scaling issues, there were performance issues, and now, with the advancements in microprocessor, in DRAM, and flash technologies, software-defined has plenty of horsepower underneath it. >> Oh yeah, well, Dave, 15 years ago, the FUD from every storage company was, "You can't trust storage functionality "just on some generic server." Reminds me back, I go back 20 years, it was like, "Oh, you wouldn't run some "mission-critical thing on Windows." It's always, "That's not ready for prime time, "it's not enterprise-grade." And now, of course, everybody's on the software-defined bandwagon. >> Well, and of course when you talk to the hardware companies, and you call them hardware companies, specifically HPE and Dell EMC as examples, and Lenovo, etc. Lenovo not so much, the Chinese sort of embraced hardware. >> And even Hitachi's trying to rebrand themselves; they're very much a hardware company, but they've got software assets. >> So when you worked at EMC, and you know when you sat down and talked to the guys like Brian Gallagher, he would stress, "Oh, all my guys, all my engineers "are software engineers. We're not a hardware company." So there's a nuance there, it's sort of more the delivery and the culture and the ethos, which I think defines the software culture, and of course the gross margins. And then of course the Cloud Object piece; we want to understand what's different from, you know, object storage embeds metadata in the data and obviously is a lower cost sort of option. Think of S3 as the sort of poster child for cloud object storage. So Veritas is an arms dealer that's putting their hat in the ring kind of late, right? There's a lot of object going on out there, but it's not really taking off, other than with the cloud guys. So you got a few object guys around there. Cleversafe got bought out by IBM, Scality's still around doing some stuff with HPE. So really, it hasn't even taken off yet, so maybe the timing's not so bad. >> Absolutely, and love to hear some of the use cases, what their customers are doing. Yeah, Dave, if we have but one critique, saw a lot of partners up on stage but not as many customers. Usually expect a few more customers to be out there. Part of it is they're launching some new products, not talking about very much the products they've had in there. I know in the breakouts there are a lot of customers here, but would have liked to see a few more early customers front and center. >> Well, I think that's the key issue for this company, Stu, is that, we talked about this at the close yesterday, is how do they transition that legacy install base to the new platform. Bill Coleman said, "It's ours to lose." And I think that's right, and so the answer for a company like that in the playbook is clear: go private so you don't have to get exposed to the 90 day shock lock, invest, build out a modern platform. He talked about microservices and modern development platform. And create products that people want, and migrate people over. You're in a position to do that. But you're right, when you talk to the customers here, they're NetBackup customers, that's really what they're doing, and they're here to sort of learn, learn about best practice and see where they're going. NetBackup, I think, 8.1 was announced this week, so people are glomming onto that, but the vast majority of the revenue of this company is from their existing legacy enterprise business. That's a transition that has to take place. Luckily it doesn't have to take place in the public eye from a financial standpoint. So they can have some patient capital and work through it. Alright Stu, lineup today: a lot of product stuff. We got Jason Buffington coming on for getting the analyst perspective. So we'll be here all day. Last word? >> Yeah, and end of the day with Foreigner, it feels like the first time we're here. Veritas feels hot-blooded. We'll keep rolling. >> Alright, luckily we're not seeing double vision. Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back right after this short break. This is theCUBE, we're live from Vertias Vision 2017 in Las Vegas. We'll be right back. (peppy digital music)

>> Narrator: Live from Washington, DC, It's The Cube, covering .NEXT Conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, everybody. This is day 2 of the Nutanix .NEXT Conference, #NEXTConf. This is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage and my name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, Stu Miniman. As I said, this is day 2 and today, the keynotes were in the morning. Yesterday, they were in the afternoon. So, when we left you yesterday we went right in the keynotes with CEO Dheeraj Pandey, who gave a very, as he always does, Stu, a very philosophical deep discussion, a lot of commentary from thought leaders and some customers. Somewhat long, although shorter than last year, but that's Nutanix likes to do things. They want you to bake and savor what's going on in their community and their ecosystem. Today, it was all about product. Sunil Potti got up and he basically took us through the products, the new innovations, the strategies, and that's what we're going to unpack this morning in the next couple of minutes and then go deeper throughout the day. So, Stu, it's all about cloud. Two years ago, at the first, the inaugural .NEXT Conference, Nutanix laid out a strategy of moving beyond hyper-converged infrastructure. This is at a time when everybody was pivoting to hyper-converged from the traditional converged, or the legacy infrastructure. And they laid this long term, little bit fuzzy vision about supporting cloud and multi-cloud. At the time, it was really focused on migrating off of VMware onto other platforms, but they sort of teased us with a vision of cloud. Today, we saw that vision come into a little bit more clarity, but there's still a lot of questions. Give me your summary on the keynote today and specifically, this Nutanix strategy of being the cloud operating system. >> And Dave, I think vision is the right term because unlike previous announcements by Nutanix, a lot of what they laid out here are things that in development. The two big announcements that they talked about yesterday and went through a little bit more today, Calm, which was an acquisition that they had made last year really, to be able to help them try to be that management across multi-clouds. That's in process I believe, if I remember right, it's the second half of this year, it will be shipping. I got a note from a friend of mine, and they're like, okay this is the 687th product in the industry that's trying to solve this problem because everybody is trying to solve this problem. Microsoft wants to be the player here. Companies like CA want to be in the lead here. Of course, Amazon would like to manage everything because just put it on Amazon. So, why is Nutanix position to be the control playing layer of a multi-cloud world. Nutanix is a small player. They've got some good pieces. They're starting to touch some of the environment, but I'm not sure. In the second one, the zee or jee cloud services, that's not- >> Zee, Si, jee (laughs) ... >> It's spelled X-I and we've heard multiple pronunciations. We'll get Sunil on this and get him- >> X-I is, as you told me this morning, the last two letters of Nutanix flipped. >> Yeah, so, it's a DR service that they're going to deploy. It's in development right now. I don't think we know anything about pricing yet. It's not going to ship until the first half of next year, is the target for that. But really lays out, as to, I think we really want to get to the Google relationship and beyond. How does Nutanix get to be more than just an on premises infrastructure layer. They've already sold to service providers. I've talked to companies that not only build their infrastructure, but sell services based on using Nutanix as an infrastructure, but they're going to take that full Nutanix stack and make it available in Google data centers around the world, and we expect them to expand those partnerships and what Sunil was hitting on at the end of his keynote is, the terminology they used is your cloud native, your mode one applications, a lot of times those start in the public cloud, and sometimes those come back to an infrastructure like in Nutanix, where I can run it in a similar operational model. And then, do we take our mode two applications, the big legacy, the thousands of applications that we have, do we try to shove those in to the public cloud? And the challenge there is if it's not the same stack on both ends, it's not the same operating model, there's challenges and I know we wanted to use that out a little bit. >> So, Stu, I had a conversation with Paul Moritz in 2009, where he said to me, "The advantage that Amazon and Google and Facebook have is that they have homogeneity in their data centers." And he said, "For us to succeed in cloud, we have to have homogeneity in both on prim and in the cloud." And so he, at that point, indicated that the VMware strategy was going to be putting, essentially, VMware in these clouds and the cloud service providers, as we all know, that manifested itself in vCloud Air. We've heard the story before. How is this different? >> First of all, vCloud Air, most people would agree, a failed strategy. >> Who would not agree with that? (laughs) >> Right. The biggest challenges we saw on vCloud Air when I talked to the community is VMware said, "Wait, we're going to build it ourselves and run it," and customers were like well, I've got lots of partners, and they're like, well, we'll partner with Savvis. And Savvis made no margin on this. Couldn't do anything else. They tried to go to lots of other service providers, and they were, I don't know how I add services, I don't know how I add value. >> So, how is this different? >> You look at this and say okay, well, Nutanix is going to start with building it themselves because they want to understand it. I've talked to service providers here that say, "Hey Nutanix, we have experience and we know how to do this. We could advise you on this." Of course, Nutanix, they didn't come out and say this is the future, everybody run every service on this. They say, hey, we're working on a DR solution, we're a little bit measured. This is where we're going. I think there's time for it to mature, time for Nutanix to work with their partner Ecosystems. The Google announcement gives Nutanix credibility, but a lot of it is pressure leased slideware, if you will. You say, "Okay, great, I'm going to take Z and run it on GCP." Well, this is a product next year that, maybe, will probably run somewhere with Google. Where's the details? >> Okay, talk about lift and shifts, too. >> Thanks Dave. We talked yesterday to one of the doers, one of the practitioners of Nutanix, and they said, "Hey, I'm looking at containers." And we said, "Hey, are you looking at Nutanix for this?" They say, "Well, now that I hear they're working with Google, who's obviously a thought leader in driving that, that will drive them closer to us." So, question is, the Z cloud service is based on AHV. So, if I bought in, there are some customers who say "I want a virtualized environment that I can mirror," but most of us look at it and say virtualization is kind of heavy for taking something to more the public cloud. If I containerized, then I can use kubernetes, and I can move applications a little more. Debate we're having internally, Dave, often is how much of the stack do I have to have to complete hardware all the way through on both ends? Do I have something like kubernetes, which allows me to take containerized applications and move them, because lift and shift, I was at the Cloud Foundry Summit, and it said let me build my new applications on the platform, and then I'll start migrating some over so I have that shared management platform to hold the environment. But, it's challenging. The same thing we've had discussions. Amazon, there's certain applications we build there, Amazon would love you to take all of your applications, but it's not trivial. Porting something over is not easy, is one of the points that Nutanix was making, and we've heard from the community that Amazon really doesn't want you just to trying to lift the whole thing and shift it. You should be doing some refactoring, or start pulling apart your application- >> They want you to pull change the operating model. So, Stu, is this a blind spot for Nutanix? Let me back up. We asked Pat Gelsinger, when Docker and Core OS came on the scene, what does that mean for you? He said, "Hey, we've got the best container in the world. It's VMware." And we all kind of went, mm, I don't know. Is this a similar head wind potentially? Is this a threat that Nutanix is so VM focused versus containerize? Or can they just embrace containers? >> Great question. Something I want to pose to the Nutanix executives, Dave, because there's multiple paths forward. When we asked Amazon a similar question, they said to get from your legacy data centers to public cloud, here are the eight R's, as to refactor, re-platform, redo this, things like that. There's more than one solution. As we know, customers have lots of applications. There's some that you're going to leave them sitting on. That old hardware in the back corner and run it until that thing burns into the ground. >> Running on CMS. >> Absolutely, Dave. Many of those things got moved into VM environments and are going to stay there for awhile. So, unfortunately, everything in IT tends to be additive, and we've got all of the debt of ... >> Don Tapscott. God created the world in six days, but he didn't have an install base. The technical debt. >> Technical debt. >> All right, Stu, we got to wrap. This is day two of Nutanix. We're going all day long. Today, heavy executive, partner and customer day. We have Sunil coming on. We're going to go deep on products. Chad Sakac coming on from Dell-EMC. We got Dheeraj, of course, the CEO. Stay tuned, everybody. Stu Minima, Dave Vellante. We'll be right back after this short break.

(Exciting Techno Music) >> Live from the Computer History Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE covering food IT: Fork to Farm. Brought to you by Western Digital. >> Hi, welcome to theCUBE. We are live at the fourth annual food IT Fork to Farm Event. I am Lisa Martin with my Co-Host Jeff Frick. Jeff, this is a really interesting event. The first time we've been here with The Cube, and one of the first things I said to you this morning was "Fork to Farm - we always kind of think of it as "farm to fork, right, farm to table." But it's really interesting mix of investors here, people that are very educated in food and agriculture and one of the things they're focused on is connecting people who are feeding the world, billions and billions of people, with the people who are changing the world through technologies. And nowadays we're all this tech enabled food consumer which has really flipped farm to fork from fork to farm which I found really interesting. >> It's pretty interesting, our first kickoff call with Michael Rose from The Mixing Bowl and we were talking about the Conference. I'm like, "Michael didn't you get that mixed up? "Isn't it supposed to be Farm to Fork?" But as you said it's really now the tech enabled consumer and what they want to eat, like everything else, is being so consumer driven that we see in our other shows is driving now what the food producers have to create. And what's interesting is they don't necessarily think of all the ramifications of those decisions upstream and downstream. And so that's a big topic of the theme here. The other thing that struck me is some of the sponsors: Yamaha is here >> Yes. >> And one of the main sponsors. Google is here as one of the main sponsors. And we just had one of the opening keynotes from one of the guys from Google talking about how they've taken really just the task of feeding the employees to a much greater responsibility in both what people eat, how it gets produced, and really more sustainable longterm food kind of as a circle he called it. So it's pretty interesting, I'm excited. We've got Deans from a lot of big schools, we've got, of course, like I said, Yamaha. I'm really curious to find out what they're doing in this space. And it's fun to get, you know, out of the tech infrastructure space to see what's really happening on the front lines. I really want to get into edge computing, I really want to get into cloud, data, you know, all of the themes that we follow over and over and over again, but now a real specific application. And doing some of the research, you know, we have to feed 10 billion people in just a couple years and we're not growing any more land. So how are those challenges being addressed with technology? How are cloud, mobile, data helping solve those problems? And then how are the consumer driven prioritization impacting all of this? So it should be a great day. >> Absolutely, like you said, a great spectrum of guests on the show today. And we think of food and agriculture as one of the largest industries globally and as you said, there's a daunting responsibility feeding billions of people in a very short period of time. Having to deal with environmental sustainability, we're going to be talking about that on the program today, climate change, and also the consumer. But there's tremendous potential for big data and IOT and analytics to improve farming efficiencies from planting to weeding to fertilizing to the post-harvest supply chain logistics, traceability. There's, you know, opportunities for GPS sensors on tractors and columbines, as well as robotics and automation. We're going to be talking to a guy, the CEO Chell Botics, who invented Sally, a robot that makes salads. So there's a tremendous amount of opportunity and I'm really curious to see how these, from the University Folks, the Deans, to the investors, how Venture Capital is really seeing big data as revolutionary, the potential to be revolutionary, for the entire food supply, the food chain. >> Right, right. And another topic that's come up is really transparency and enabling consumers to see kind of where their food comes from, how it was raised, but as come up again in one of the earlier Keynotes, there's no perfect solution, right? There's always trade offs. So how are people creating values, making trade offs based on those values, and how are the food producers now being able to deliver to those values? So it should be, like I said, a fantastic day. We're going to go wall to wall. We'll be here till 5 o'clock today, full slate of guests, a lot of two guests, so we're going to pack them in. And it should be fantastic. >> Absolutely, I'm excited. >> Alright. >> A lot of great topics. >> So she's Lisa Martin, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE from Food IT: from Fork to Farm. We'll be right back with our first guest after this short break. Thanks for watching.