(bright music) >> Welcome back everyone. theCube's live coverage here. Day two, of two sets, three days of theCube coverage here at VMware Explore. This is our 12th year covering VMware's annual conference, formerly called VM World. I'm John Furrier, with Dave Vellante. We'd love seeing the progress and we've got great security comes Tom Gill, senior vices, president general manager, networking and advanced security business group at VMware. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks. for having me. >> Yeah, really happy we could have you on. >> I think this is my sixth edition on the theCube. Do I get frequent flyer points or anything? >> Yeah. >> You first get the VIP badge. We'll make that happen. You can start getting credits. >> Okay, there we go. >> We won't interrupt you. Seriously, you got a great story in security here. The security story is kind of embedded everywhere, so it's not called out and blown up and talked specifically about on stage. It's kind of in all the narratives in the VM World for this year. But you guys have an amazing security story. So let's just step back and to set context. Tell us the security story for what's going on here at VMware and what that means to this supercloud, multi-cloud and ongoing innovation with VMware. >> Yeah, sure thing. So probably the first thing I'll point out is that security's not just built in at VMware. It's built differently. So, we're not just taking existing security controls and cut and pasting them into our software. But we can do things because of our platform, because of the virtualization layer that you really can't do with other security tools. And where we're very, very focused is what we call lateral security or East-West movement of an attacker. 'Cause frankly, that's the name of the game these days. Attackers, you've got to assume that they're already in your network. Already assume that they're there. Then how do we make it hard for them to get to the stuff that you really want? Which is the data that they're going after. And that's where we really should. >> All right. So we've been talking a lot, coming into VMware Explore, and here, the event. About two things. Security, as a state. >> Yeah. >> I'm secure right now. >> Yeah. >> Or I think I'm secure right now, even though someone might be in my network or in my environment. To the notion of being defensible. >> Yeah. >> Meaning I have to defend and be ready at a moment's notice to attack, fight, push back, red team, blue team. Whatever you're going to call it. But something's happening. I got to be able to defend. >> Yeah. So what you're talking about is the principle of Zero Trust. When I first started doing security, the model was we have a perimeter. And everything on one side of the perimeter is dirty, ugly, old internet. And everything on this side, known good, trusted. What could possibly go wrong. And I think we've seen that no matter how good you make that perimeter, bad guys find a way in. So Zero Trust says, you know what? Let's just assume they're already in. Let's assume they're there. How do we make it hard for them to move around within the infrastructure and get to the really valuable assets? 'Cause for example, if they bust into your laptop, you click on a link and they get code running on your machine. They might find some interesting things on your machine. But they're not going to find 250 million credit cards. >> Right. >> Or the script of a new movie or the super secret aircraft plans. That lives in a database somewhere. And so it's that movement from your laptop to that database. That's where the damage is done and that's where VMware shines. >> So if they don't have the right to get to that database, they're not in. >> And it's not even just the right. So they're so clever and so sneaky that they'll steal a credential off your machine, go to another machine, steal a credential off of that. So, it's like they have the key to unlock each one of these doors. And we've gotten good enough where we can look at that lateral movement, even though it has a credential and a key, we're like wait a minute. That's not a real CIS Admin making a change. That's ransomware. And that's where you. >> You have to earn your way in. >> That's right. That's right. Yeah. >> And we're all kinds of configuration errors. But also some user problems. I've heard one story where there's so many passwords and username and passwords and systems that the bad guys scour, the dark web for passwords that have been exposed. >> Correct. >> And go test them against different accounts. Oh one hit over here. >> Correct. >> And people don't change their passwords all the time. >> Correct. >> That's a known vector. >> Just the idea that users are going to be perfect and never make a mistake. How long have we been doing this? Humans are the weakest link. So people are going to make mistakes. Attackers are going to be in. Here's another way of thinking about it. Remember log4j? Remember that whole fiasco? Remember that was at Christmas time. That was nine months ago. And whoever came up with that vulnerability, they basically had a skeleton key that could access every network on the planet. I don't know if a single customer that said, "Oh yeah, I wasn't impacted by log4j." So here's some organized entity had access to every network on the planet. What was the big breach? What was that movie script that got stolen? So there wasn't one, right? We haven't heard anything. So the point is, the goal of attackers is to get in and stay in. Imagine someone breaks into your house, steals your laptop and runs. That's a breach. Imagine someone breaks into your house and stays for nine months. It's untenable, in the real world, right? >> Right. >> We don't know in there, hiding in the closet. >> They're still in. >> They're watching everything. >> Hiding in your closet, exactly. >> Moving around, nibbling on your cookies. >> Drinking your beer. >> Yeah. >> So let's talk about how this translates into the new reality of cloud-native. Because now you hear about automated pentesting is a new hot thing right now. You got antivirus on data is hot within APIs, for instance. >> Yeah. >> API security. So all kinds of new hot areas. Cloud-native is very iterative. You know, you can't do a pentest every week. >> Right. >> You got to do it every second. >> So this is where it's going. It's not so much simulation. It's actually real testing. >> Right. Right. >> How do you view that? How does that fit into this? 'cause that seems like a good direction to me. >> Yeah. If it's right in, and you were talking to my buddy, Ahjay, earlier about what VMware can do to help our customers build cloud native applications with Tanzu. My team is focused on how do we secure those applications? So where VMware wants to be the best in the world is securing these applications from within. Looking at the individual piece parts and how they talk to each other and figuring out, wait a minute, that should never happen. By almost having an x-ray machine on the innards of the application. So we do it for both for VMs and for container based applications. So traditional apps are VM based. Modern apps are container based. And we have a slightly different insertion mechanism. It's the same idea. So for VMs, we do it with a hypervisor with NSX. We see all the inner workings. In a container world we have this thing called a service mesh that lets us look at each little snippet of code and how they talk to each other. And once you can see that stuff, then you can actually apply. It's almost like common sense logic of like, wait a minute. This API is giving back credit card numbers and it gives five an hour. All of a sudden, it's now asking for 20,000 or a million credit cards. That doesn't make any sense. The anomalies stick out like a sore thumb. If you can see them. At VMware, our unique focus in the infrastructure is that we can see each one of these little transactions and understand the conversation. That's what makes us so good at that East-West or lateral security. >> You don't belong in this room, get out or that that's some weird call from an in memory database, something over here. >> Exactly. Where other security solutions won't even see that. It's not like there algorithms aren't as good as ours or better or worse. It's the access to the data. We see the inner plumbing of the app and therefore we can protect the app from. >> And there's another dimension that I want to get in the table here. 'Cause to my knowledge only AWS, Google, I believe Microsoft and Alibaba and VMware have this. >> Correct >> It's Nitro. The equivalent of a Nitro. >> Yes. >> Project Monterey. >> Yeah. >> That's unique. It's the future of computing architectures. Everybody needs a Nitro. I've written about this. >> Yeah. >> Right. So explain your version. >> Yeah. >> It's now real. >> Yeah. >> It's now in the market, right? >> Yeah. >> Or soon will be. >> Here's our mission. >> Salient aspects. >> Yeah. Here's our mission of VMware. Is that we want to make every one of our enterprise customers. We want their private cloud to be as nimble, as agile, as efficient as the public cloud. >> And secure. >> And secure. In fact, I'll argue, we can make it actually more secure because we're thinking about putting security everywhere in this infrastructure. Not just on the edges of it. Okay. How do we go on that journey? As you pointed out, the public cloud providers realized five years ago that the right way to build computers was not just a CPU and a graphics process unit, GPU. But there's this third thing that the industry's calling a DPU, data processing unit. And so there's kind of three pieces of a computer. And the DPU is sometimes called a Smartnic. It's the network interface card. It does all that network handling and analytics and it takes it off the CPU. So they've been building and deploying those systems themselves. That's what Nitro is. And so we have been working with the major Silicon vendors to bring that architecture to everybody. So with vSphere 8, we have the ability to take the network processing, that East-West inspection I talked about, take it off of the CPU and put it into this dedicated processing element called the DPU and free up the CPU to run the applications that Ahjay and team are building. >> So no performance degradation at all? >> Correct. To CPU offload. >> So even the opposite, right? I mean you're running it basically Bare Metal speeds. >> Yes, yes and yes. >> And you're also isolating the storage from the security, the management, and. >> There's an isolation angle to this, which is that firewall, that we're putting everywhere. Not just that the perimeter, but we put it in each little piece of the server is running when it runs on one of these DPUs it's a different memory space. So even if an attacker gets to root in the OS, they it's very, very, never say never, but it's very difficult. >> So who has access to that resource? >> Pretty much just the infrastructure layer, the cloud provider. So it's Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and the enterprise. >> Application can't get in. >> Can't get in there. Cause you would've to literally bridge from one memory space to another. Never say never, but it would be very. >> But it hasn't earned the trust to get. >> It's more than barbwire. It's multiple walls. >> Yes. And it's like an air gap. It puts an air gap in the server itself so that if the server is compromised, it's not going to get into the network. Really powerful. >> What's the big thing that you're seeing with this supercloud transition. We're seeing multi-cloud and this new, not just SaaS hosted on the cloud. >> Yeah. >> You're seeing a much different dynamic of, combination of large scale CapEx, cloud-native, and then now cloud-native drills on premises and edge. Kind of changing what a cloud looks like if the cloud's on a cloud. >> Yeah. >> So we're the customer, I'm building on a cloud and I have on premise stuff. So, I'm getting scale CapEx relief from the hyperscalers. >> I think there's an important nuance on what you're talking about. Which is in the early days of the cloud customers. Remember those first skepticism? Oh, it'll never work. Oh, that's consumer grade. Oh, that's not really going to work. Oh some people realize. >> It's not secure. >> Yeah. It's not secure. >> That one's like, no, no, no it's secure. It works. And it's good. So then there was this sort of over rush. Let's put everything on the cloud. And I had a lot of customers that took VM based applications said, I'm going to move those onto the cloud. You got to take them all apart, put them on the cloud and put them all back together again. And little tiny details like changing an IP address. It's actually much harder than it looks. So my argument is, for existing workloads for VM based workloads, we are VMware. We're so good at running VM based workloads. And now we run them on anybody's cloud. So whether it's your east coast data center, your west coast data center, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Alibaba, IBM keep going. We pretty much every. >> And the benefit of the customer is what. >> You can literally VMotion and just pick it up and move it from private to public, public to private, private to public, Back and forth. >> Remember when we called Vmotion BS, years ago? >> Yeah. Yeah. >> VMotion is powerful. >> We were very skeptical. We're like, that'll never happen. I mean we were. This supposed to be pat ourselves on the back. >> Well because alchemy. It seems like what you can't possibly do that. And now we do it across clouds. So it's not quite VMotion, but it's the same idea. You can just move these things over. I have one customer that had a production data center in the Ukraine. Things got super tense, super fast and they had to go from their private cloud data center in the Ukraine, to a public cloud data center out of harm's way. They did it over a weekend. 48 hours. If you've ever migrated a data center, that's usually six months. Right. And a lot of heartburn and a lot of angst. Boop. They just drag and dropped and moved it on over. That's the power of what we call the cloud operating model. And you can only do this when all your infrastructures defined in software. If you're relying on hardware, load balancers, hardware, firewalls, you can't move those. They're like a boat anchor. You're stuck with them. And by the way, they're really, really expensive. And by the way, they eat a lot of power. So that was an architecture from the 90's. In the cloud operating model your data center. And this comes back to what you were talking about is just racks and racks of X86 with these magic DPUs, or smart nics, to make any individual node go blisteringly fast and do all the functions that you used to do in network appliances. >> We just had Ahjay taking us to school, and everyone else to school on applications, middleware, abstraction layer. And Kit Culbert was also talking about this across cloud. We're talking supercloud, super pass. If this continues to happen, which we would think it will happen. What does the security posture look like? It feels to me, and again, this is your wheelhouse. If supercloud happens with this kind of past layer where there's vMotioning going on. All kinds of spanning applications and data across environments. >> Yeah. Assume there's an operating system working on behind the scenes. >> Right. >> What's the security posture in all this? >> Yeah. So remember my narrative about the bad guys are getting in and they're moving around and they're so sneaky that they're using legitimate pathways. The only way to stop that stuff, is you've got to understand it at what we call Layer 7. At the application layer. Trying to do security to the infrastructure layer. It was interesting 20 years ago, kind of less interesting 10 years ago. And now it's becoming irrelevant because the infrastructure is oftentimes not even visible. It's buried in some cloud provider. So Layer 7 understanding, application awareness, understanding the APIs and reading the content. That's the name of the game in security. That's what we've been focused on. Nothing to do with the infrastructure. >> And where's the progress bar on that paradigm. One to ten. Ten being everyone's doing it. >> Right now. Well, okay. So we as a vendor can do this today. All the stuff I talked about, reading APIs, understanding the individual services looking at, Hey, wait a minute this credit card anomalies, that's all shipping production code. Where is it in customer adoption life cycle? Early days 10%. So there's a whole lot of headroom for people to understand, Hey, I can put these controls in place. They're software based. They don't require appliances. It's Layer 7, so it has contextual awareness and it's works on every single cloud. >> We talked about the pandemic being an accelerator. It really was a catalyst to really rethink. Remember we used to talk about Pat as a security do over. He's like, yes, if it's the last thing I do, I'm going to fix security. Well, he decided to go try to fix Intel instead. >> He's getting some help from the government. >> But it seems like CISOs have totally rethought their security strategy. And at least in part, as a function of the pandemic. >> When I started at VMware four years ago, Pat sat me down in his office and he said to me what he said to you, which is like, "Tom," he said, "I feel like we have fundamentally changed servers. We fundamentally change storage. We fundamentally change networking. The last piece of the puzzle of security. I want you to go fundamentally change it." And I'll argue that the work that we're doing with this horizontal security, understanding the lateral movement. East- West inspection. It fundamentally changes how security works. It's got nothing to do with firewalls. It's got nothing to do with Endpoint. It's a unique capability that VMware is uniquely suited to deliver on. And so Pat, thanks for the mission. We delivered it and it's available now. >> Those WET web applications firewall for instance are around, I mean. But to your point, the perimeter's gone. >> Exactly. >> And so you got to get, there's no perimeter. so it's a surface area problem. >> Correct. And access. And entry. >> Correct. >> They're entering here easy from some manual error, or misconfiguration or bad password that shouldn't be there. They're in. >> Think about it this way. You put the front door of your house, you put a big strong door and a big lock. That's a firewall. Bad guys come in the window. >> And then the windows open. With a ladder. >> Oh my God. Cause it's hot, bad user behavior trumps good security every time. >> And then they move around room to room. We're the room to room people. We see each little piece of the thing. Wait, that shouldn't happen. Right. >> I want to get you a question that we've been seeing and maybe we're early on this or it might be just a false data point. A lot of CSOs and we're talking to are, and people in industry in the customer environment are looking at CISOs and CSOs, two roles. Chief information security officer, and then chief security officer. Amazon, actually Steven Schmidt is now CSO at Reinforce. They actually called that out. And the interesting point that he made, we had some other situations that verified this, is that physical security is now tied to online, to your point about the service area. If I get a password, I still got the keys to the physical goods too. >> Right. So physical security, whether it's warehouse for them or store or retail. Digital is coming in there. >> Yeah. So is there a CISO anymore? Is it just CSO? What's the role? Or are there two roles you see that evolving? Or is that just circumstance. >> I think it's just one. And I think that the stakes are incredibly high in security. Just look at the impact that these security attacks are having on. Companies get taken down. Equifax market cap was cut 80% with a security breach. So security's gone from being sort of a nuisance to being something that can impact your whole kind of business operation. And then there's a whole nother domain where politics get involved. It determines the fate of nations. I know that sounds grand, but it's true. And so companies care so much about it they're looking for one leader, one throat to choke. One person that's going to lead security in the virtual domain, in the physical domain, in the cyber domain, in the actual. >> I mean, you mention that, but I mean, you look at Ukraine. I mean that cyber is a component of that war. I mean, it's very clear. I mean, that's new. We've never seen. this. >> And in my opinion, the stuff that we see happening in the Ukraine is small potatoes compared to what could happen. >> Yeah. >> So the US, we have a policy of strategic deterrence. Where we develop some of the most sophisticated cyber weapons in the world. We don't use them. And we hope never to use them. Because our adversaries, who could do stuff like, I don't know, wipe out every bank account in North America. Or turn off the lights in New York City. They know that if they were to do something like that, we could do something back. >> This is the red line conversation I want to go there. So, I had this discussion with Robert Gates in 2016 and he said, "We have a lot more to lose." Which is really your point. >> So this brand. >> I agree that there's to have freedom and liberty, you got to strike back with divorce. And that's been our way to balance things out. But with cyber, the red line, people are already in banks. So they're are operating below the red line line. Red line meaning before we know you're in there. So do we move the red line down because, hey, Sony got hacked. The movie. Because they don't have their own militia. >> Yeah. >> If their were physical troops on the shores of LA breaking into the file cabinets. The government would've intervened. >> I agree with you that it creates tension for us in the US because our adversaries don't have the clear delineation between public and private sector. Here you're very, very clear if you're working for the government. Or you work for an private entity. There's no ambiguity on that. >> Collaboration, Tom, and the vendor community. I mean, we've seen efforts to try to. >> That's a good question. >> Monetize private data and private reports. >> So at VMware, I'm very proud of the security capabilities we've built. But we also partner with people that I think of as direct competitors. We've got firewall vendors and Endpoint vendors that we work with and integrate. And so coopetition is something that exists. It's hard. Because when you have these kind of competing. So, could we do more? Of course we probably could. But I do think we've done a fair amount of cooperation, data sharing, product integration, et cetera. And as the threats get worse, you'll probably see us continue to do more. >> And the government is going to trying to force that too. >> And the government also drives standards. So let's talk about crypto. Okay. So there's a new form of encryption coming out called processing quantum. >> Quantum. Quantum computers have the potential to crack any crypto cipher we have today. That's bad. Okay. That's not good at all because our whole system is built around these private communications. So the industry is having conversations about crypto agility. How can we put in place the ability to rapidly iterate the ciphers in encryption. So, when the day quantum becomes available, we can change them and stay ahead of these quantum people. >> Well, didn't NIST just put out a quantum proof algo that's being tested right now by the community? >> There's a lot of work around that. Correct. And NIST is taking the lead on this, but Google's working on it. VMware's working on it. We're very, very active in how do we keep ahead of the attackers and the bad guys? Because this quantum thing is a, it's an x-ray machine. It's like a dilithium crystal that can power a whole ship. It's a really, really, really powerful tool. >> Bad things will happen. >> Bad things could happen. >> Well, Tom, great to have you on the theCube. Thanks for coming on. Take the last minute to just give a plug for what's going on for you here at VMWorld this year, just VMware Explore this year. >> Yeah. We announced a bunch of exciting things. We announced enhancements to our NSX family, with our advanced load balancer. With our edge firewall. And they're all in service of one thing, which is helping our customers make their private cloud like the public cloud. So I like to say 0, 0, 0. If you are in the cloud operating model, you have zero proprietary appliances. You have zero tickets to launch a workload. You have zero network taps and Zero Trust built into everything you do. And that's what we're working on. Pushing that further and further. >> Tom Gill, senior vices president, head of the networking at VMware. Thanks for coming on. We do appreciate it. >> Thanks for having us. >> Always getting the security data. That's killer data and security of the two ops that get the most conversations around DevOps and Cloud Native. This is The theCube bringing you all the action here in San Francisco for VMware Explore 2022. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of Postgres Vision 2021, brought to you by EDB. >> Well, good day, everybody. John Walls here on theCUBE, and continuing our CUBE conversation as part of Postgres Vision 2021, sponsored by EDB, with EDB Chief Technology Officer, Mr. Mark Linster. Mark, good morning to you. How are you doing today? >> I'm doing very fine, very good, sir. >> Excellent. Excellent. Glad you could join us. And we appreciate the time, chance, to look at what's going on in this world of data, which, as you know, continues to evolve quite rapidly. So let's just take that 30,000-foot perspective here to begin with here, and let's talk about data, and management, and what Postgres is doing in terms of accelerating all these innovative techniques, and solutions, and services that we're seeing these days. >> Yeah, so I think it's really... It's a fantastic confluence of factors that we've seen in Postgres, or are seeing in Postgres today, where Postgres has really, really matured over the last couple of years, where things like high availability, parallel processing, use of very high core counts, et cetera, have come together with the drive towards digital transformation, the enormous amounts of data that businesses are dealing with today, so, and then the third factor's really the embracing of open source, right? I mean, Linux has shown the way, and has shown that this is really, really possible. And now we're seeing Postgres as, I think, the next big open source innovation, after Linux, achieving the same type of transformation. So it's really, it's a maturing, it's an acceptance, and the big drive towards dealing with a lot more data as part of digital transformation. >> You know, part of that acceptance that you talk about is about kind of accepting the fact that you have a legacy system that maybe, if you're not going to completely overhaul, you still have to integrate, right? You've got to compliment and start this kind of migration. So in your perspective, or from your perspective, what kind of progress is Postgres allowing in the mindset of CTOs among your client base, or whatever, that their legacy systems can function in this new environment, that all is not lost, and while there is some, perhaps, catching up to do, or some patching you have to do here and there, that it's not as arduous, or not as complex, as might appear to be on the face. >> Well, I think there's, the maturing of Postgres that has really really opened this up, right? Where we're seeing that Postgres can handle these workloads, right? And at the same time, there's a growing number of success cases where companies across all industries, financial services, insurance, manufacturing, retail are using Postgres. So, so you're no longer, you're no longer the first leader who's taken a higher risk, right? Like, five or 10 years ago, Postgres knowledge was not readily available. So if you want Postgres, it was really hard to find somebody who could support you, right? Or find an employee that you could hire who would be the Postgres expert. That's no longer the case. There's plenty of books about Postgres. There's lots of conferences about Postgres. It's a big meetup topic. So, getting know how and getting acceptance amongst your team to use Postgres has become a lot easier, right? At the same time, over 90% of all enterprises today use open source in one way or the other. Which basically means they have open source policies. They have ways to bring open source into the development stream. So that makes it possible, right? Whereas before it was really hard, you had to have an individual who would be evangelized to go, get open source, et cetera, now open source is something that almost everybody is using. You know, from government to financing services, open sources use all over the place, right? So, so now you have something that really matured, right? There's a lot of references out there and then you have the policies that make it possible, right? You have the success stories and now all the pieces have come together to deal with this onslaught of data, right? And then maybe the last thing that that really plays a big role is the cloud. Postgres runs everywhere, right? I mean, it runs from an Arduino to Amazon. Everywhere. And so, which basically means if you want to drive agile business transformation, you call Postgres because you don't have to decide today where it's going to run. You're not locking into a vendor. You're not locking into a limited support system. You can run this thing anywhere. It'll run on your laptop. It'll run on every cloud in the world. You can have it managed, you can have it hosted. You can add have every flavor you want and there's lots of good Postgres support companies out there. So all of these factors together is really what makes us so interesting, right? >> Kubernetes and this marriage, this complimentary, you know relationship right now with Kubernetes, what has that done? You think in terms of providing additional services or at least providing perhaps a new approach or new philosophies, new concepts in terms of database management? >> Well, it's maybe the most the most surprising thing or surprising from the outside. Probably not from the inside, but you think that that Postgres this now 25 year old, database twenty-five year old open source project would be kind of like completely, you know, incompatible with Kubernetes, with containers. But what really happens is Postgres in containers today is the number one database, after Engine X. It is the number two software that is being deployed in containers. So it's really become the workhorse of the whole microservices transformation, right? A 25 year old software, well, it has a very small footprint. It has a lot of interesting features like GIS, document processing, now graph capabilities, common table expressions all those things that are really like cool for developers. And that's probably what leads it to be the number one database in containers. So it's absolutely compatible with Kubernetes. And the whole transformation towards microservices is is like, you know, there's nothing better out there. It runs everywhere and has the most innovative technologies in it. And that's what we're seeing. Also, you go to the annual stack overflow survey of developers, right? It's been consistently number one or number two most loved and most used database, right? So, so what's amazing is that it's this relatively old technology that is, you know, beating everybody else in this digital transformation and then the adoption by developers. >> Just like old dog new tricks, right? It's still winning, right? >> Yeah, yeah, and, and, you know, the elephant is the symbol and this elephant does dance. >> Still dancing that's right. You know, and this is kind of a loaded question but there are a lot of databases out there, a lot of options, obviously from your perspective, you know, Postgres is winning, right? And, and, and from the size of the marketplace it is certainly leading RA leader. In your opinion, you know, what, what is this confluence of factors that have influenced this, this market position if you will, of Postgres or market acceptance of Postgres? >> It's, I mean, it's the, it's a maturing of the core. As I said before, that the transaction rates et cetera, Postgres can handle, are growing every year and are growing dramatic, right? So that's one thing. And then you have it, that Postgres is really, I think, the most reliable and relational database out there as what is my opinion, I'm biased, I guess. And, and it's, it's super quality code but then you add to that the innovation drive. I mean, it was the first one out there with good JSONB support, right? And now it's brought in JSON Path as as part of the new SQL standard. So now you can address JSON data inside your database and the same way you do it inside your browser. And that's pretty cool for developers. Then you combine that with PostGIS, right, which is, I think the most advanced GIS system out there in database. Now, now you got relations, asset compliant, GIS and document. You may say what's so cool about that. Well, what's cool about it is I can do absolutely reliable asset compliant transactions. I can have a fantastic personalization engine through JSONB, and then all my applications need to know where is the transaction? Where is the next store? How far away I'm a form of the parking spot? Right? So now I got a really really nice recipe to put the applications of the future together. You add onto that movements toward supporting graph and supporting other capabilities inside the database. So now you got, you got capability, you've got reliability and you got fantastic innovation. I mean, there's nothing better out there. >> Let's hit the security angle here, 'cause you talked about the asset test, and certainly, you know, those, that criteria is being met. No question about that, whether it's isolation, durability, consistency, whatever, but, but security, I don't have to tell you what a growing concern this is. It's already paramount, but we're seeing every day write stories about, about intrusions and and invasions, if you will. So in terms of providing that layer of security that everybody's looking for right now, you know, this this ultra impenetrable force, if you will, what in your mind, what's Postgres allowing for, in that respect in terms of security, peace of mind, and maybe a little additional comfort that everybody in your space is looking for these? >> So, so look at, look at security with a database like, like multiple layers, right? There's not just, you don't do security only one place. It's like when you go into a bank branch, right? I mean, they do lock the door, they have a camera, there is a gate in front of the safe, there's a safe door. And inside the safe, there is still, again safety deposit boxes with individual locks. The same applies to Postgres, right? Where let's say we start at the heart of it where we can secure and protect tables and data. We're using access control lists and groups and usernames, et cetera. Right? So that's, that's at the heart of it. But then outside of that, we can encrypt the data when on disk or when it's in transit on disk. Most people use the Linux disc encryption systems but there's also good partners out there, like like more metric or others that we work with, that that provide security on disk. And then you go out from there and then you have the securing of the database itself again through the log-ins and the groups. You go out from there and now you have the securing of the hosts that the database is sitting on. Then you'll look at securing the data on the networks through SSL and certificates, et cetera. So that basically there's a multi-layer security model layer that positions Postgres extremely well. And then maybe the last thing is to say it certainly integrates very well with ELDAP, active directory, Kerberos, all the usual suspects that you would use to secure technology inside the enterprise or in an open network, like where people work from home, et cetera. >> You talked about the history about this 25 year old technology, you know, founded back at Cal Berkeley, you know, probably almost some 30 years ago and certainly has evolved. And, and as you have pointed out now as a very mature technology, what do you see though in terms of growth from here? Like, where does it go from here in the next 18 months, 24 months, what what do you think is that next barrier, that challenge that that you think the technology and this open source community wants to take on? >> Well, I think there's there's the continuous effort of making it faster, right? That always happens, right? Every database wants to be faster do more transactions per second, et cetera. And there's a lot of work that has been done there. I mean, just in the last couple of years, Postgres performance has increased by over 50%. Right? So, so transactions per second and that kind of scalability that is going to continue to be, to be a focus, right? And then the other one is leading the implementation of the SQL standards, right? So there'd be the most advanced database, the most innovative database, because, remember for many years now, Postgres has come up with a new release on an annual basis. Other database vendors are now catching up to that, but Postgres has done that for years. So innovation has always been at the heart of it. So we started with JSONB, Key value pair came even before that, PostGis has been around for a long time, graph extensions are going to be the next thing, ingestion of time series data is going to, is going to happen. So there's going to be an ongoing stream of innovations happening. But one thing that I can say is because Postgres is a pure open source project. There's not a hard roadmap, like where it's going to go but where it's going to go is always driven by what people want to have, right? There is no product management department. There's no, there's no great visionary that says, "Oh, this is where we're going to go." No, no. What's going to happen is what people want to have, right? If companies or contributors want to have a certain feature because they need it, well, that's how it's going to happen. And that's really been at the heart of this since Mike Stonebraker, who's an advisor to EDB today, invented it. And then, you know, the open source project got created. This has always been the movement to only focus on things that people actually want to have because if nobody wants to have it, we're just not going to build it because nobody wants it. Right? So when you asked me for the roadmap I believe it's going to be, you know, faster, obviously, always faster, right? Everybody wants faster. And then there's going to be innovation features like making the document stored even better, graph ingestion of large time series, et cetera. That's really what I believe is going to drive it forward. >> Wow. Yeah, the market has spoken and as you point out the market will continue to speak and, and drive that bus. So Mark, thank you for the time today. We certainly appreciate that. And wish EDB continued success at Postgres vision 2021. And thanks for the time. >> Thanks John, it was a pleasure. >> You bet. Mark Linster, joining us, the CTO at EDB. I'm John Walls, you've been watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>>Hello, everyone, and welcome to track three off beyond. My name is being in Yemen and I am an account executive here at Thought spot based out of our London office. If the accents throwing you off I don't quite sound is British is you're expecting it because the backgrounds Australian so you can look forward to seeing my face. As we go through these next few sessions, I'm gonna be introducing the guests as well as facilitating some of the Q and A. So make sure you come and say hi in the chat with any comments, questions, thoughts that you have eso with that I mean, this whole track, as the title somewhat gives away, is really about everything that you need to know and all the tips and tricks when it comes to adoption and making sure that your thoughts what deployment is really, really successful. We're gonna be taking off everything from user training on boarding new use cases and picking the right use cases, as well as hearing from our customers who have been really successful in during this before. So with that, though, I'm really excited to introduce our first guest, Kathleen Maley. She is a senior analytics executive with over 15 years of experience in the space. And she's going to be talking to us about all her tips and tricks when it comes to making the most out of your center of excellence from obviously an analytics perspective. So with that, I'm going to pass the mic to her. But look forward to continuing the chat with you all in the chat. Come say hi. >>Thank you so much, Bina. And it is really exciting to be here today, thanks to everyone for joining. Um, I'll jump right into it. The topic of evolving your analytics center of excellence is a particular passion of mine on I'm looking forward to sharing some of my best practices with you. I started my career, is a member of an analytic sioe at Bank of America was actually ah, model developer. Um, in my most recent role at a regional bank in the Midwest, I ran an entire analytics center of excellence. Um, but I've also been on the business side running my own P and l. So I think through this combination of experiences, I really developed a unique perspective on how to most effectively establish and work with an analytic CEO. Um, this thing opportunity is really a two sided opportunity creating value from analytics. Uh, and it really requires the analytics group and the line of business Thio come together. Each has a very specific role to play in making that happen. So that's a lot of what I'll talk about today. Um, I started out just like most analysts do formally trained in statistics eso whether your data analyst or a business leader who taps into analytical talent. I want you to leave this talk today, knowing the modern definition of analytics, the purpose of a modern sioe, some best practices for a modern sioe and and then the role that each of you plays in bringing this Kuito life. So with that said, let me start by level, setting on the definition of analytics that aligns with where the discipline is headed. Um, versus where it's been historically, analytics is the discovery, interpretation and communication of meaningful patterns in data, the connective tissue between data and effective decision making within an organization. And this is a definition that I've been working under for the last, you know, 7 to 10 years of my career notice there is nothing in there about getting the data. We're at this amazing intersection of statistics and technology that effectively eliminates getting the data as a competitive advantage on this is just It's true for analysts who are thinking in terms of career progression as it is for business leaders who have to deliver results for clients and shareholders. So the definition is action oriented. It's purposeful. It's not about getting the data. It's about influencing and enabling effective decision making. Now, if you're an analyst, this can be scary because it's likely what you spend a huge amount of your time doing, so much so that it probably feels like getting the data is your job. If that's the case, then the emergence of these new automated tools might feel like your job is at risk of becoming obsolete. If you're a business leader, this should be scary because it means that other companies air shooting out in front of you not because they have better ideas, necessarily, but because they can move so much faster. According to new research from Harvard Business Review, nearly 90% of businesses say the more successful when they equipped those at the front lines with the ability to make decisions in the moment and organizations who are leading their industries and embracing these decision makers are delivering substantial business value nearly 50% reporting increased customer satisfaction, employee engagement, improve product and service quality. So, you know, there there is no doubt that speed matters on it matters more and more. Um, but if you're feeling a little bit nervous, I want you to think of it. I want you think of it a little differently. Um, you think about the movie Hidden figures. The job of the women in hidden figures was to calculate orbital trajectories, uh, to get men into space and then get them home again. And at the start of the movie, they did all the required mathematical calculations by hand. At the end of the movie, when technology eliminated the need to do those calculations by hand, the hidden figures faced essentially the same decision many of you are facing now. Do I become obsolete, or do I develop a new set of, in their case, computer science skills required to keep doing the job of getting them into space and getting them home again. The hidden figures embraced the latter. They stayed relevant on They increase their value because they were able to doom or of what really mattered. So what we're talking about here is how do we embrace the new technology that UN burdens us? And how do we up skill and change our ways of working to create a step function increase in data enabled value and the first step, really In evolving your analytics? Dewey is redefining the role of analytics from getting the data to influencing and enabling effective decision making. So if this is the role of the modern analyst, a strategic thought partner who harnesses the power of data and directs it toward achieving specific business outcomes, then let's talk about how the series in which they operate needs change to support this new purpose. Um, first, historical CEOs have primarily been about fulfilling data requests. In this scenario, C always were often formed primarily as an efficiency measure. This efficiency might have come in the form of consistency funds, ability of resource is breaking down silos, creating and building multipurpose data assets. Um, and under the getting the data scenario that's actually made a lot of sense for modern Sealy's, however, the objective is to create an organization that supports strategic business decision ing for individuals and for the enterprises the whole. So let's talk about how we do that while maintaining the progress made by historical seaweeds. It's about really extending its extending what, what we've already done the progress we've already made. So here I'll cover six primary best practices. None is a silver bullet. Each needs to fit within your own company culture. But these air major areas to consider as you evolve your analytics capabilities first and foremost always agree on the purpose and approach of your Coe. Successfully evolving yourself starts with developing strategic partnerships with the business leaders that your organization will support that the analytics see we will support. Both parties need to explicitly blocked by in to the objective and agree on a set of operating principles on bond. I think the only way to do that is just bringing people to the table, having an open and honest conversation about where you are today, where you wanna be and then agree on how you will move forward together. It's not about your organization or my organization. How do we help the business solve problems that, you know, go beyond what what we've been able to do today? So moving on While there's no single organizational model that works for everyone, I generally favor a hybrid model that includes some level of fully dedicated support. This is where I distinguish between to whom the analyst reports and for whom the analyst works. It's another concept that is important to embrace in spirit because all of the work the analyst does actually comes from the business partner. Not from at least it shouldn't come from the head of the analytic Center of excellence. Andan analysts who are fully dedicated to a line of business, have the time in the practice to develop stronger partnerships to develop domain knowledge and history on those air key ingredients to effectively solving business problems. You, you know, how can you solve a problem when you don't really understand what it is? So is the head of an analytic sioe. I'm responsible for making sure that I hire the right mix of skills that I can effectively manage the quality of my team's work product. I've got a specialized skill set that allows me to do that, Um, that there's career path that matters to analysts on all of the other things that go along with Tele management. But when it comes to doing the work, three analysts who report to me actually work for the business and creating some consistency and stability there will make them much more productive. Um, okay, so getting a bit more, more tactical, um, engagement model answers the question. Who do I go to When? And this is often a question that business partners ask of a centralized analytics function or even the hybrid model. Who do I go to win? Um, my recommendation. Make it easy for them. Create a single primary point of contact whose job is to build relationships with a specific partner set of partners to become deeply embedded in their business and strategies. So they know why the businesses solving the problems they need to solve manage the portfolio of analytical work that's being done on behalf of the partner, Onda Geun. Make it make it easy for the partner to access the entire analytics ecosystem. Think about the growing complexity of of the current analytics ecosystem. We've got automated insights Business Analytics, Predictive modeling machine learning. Um, you Sometimes the AI is emerging. Um, you also then have the functional business questions to contend with. Eso This was a big one for me and my experience in retail banking. Uh, you know, if if I'm if I'm a deposits pricing executive, which was the line of business role that I ran on, I had a question about acquisitions through the digital channel. Do I talk Thio the checking analyst, Or do I talk to the digital analyst? Um, who owns that question? Who do I go to? Eso having dedicated POC s on the flip side also helps the head of the center of excellence actually manage. The team holistically reduces the number of entry points in the complexity coming in so that there is some efficiency. So it really is a It's a win win. It helps on both sides. Significantly. Um, there are several specific operating rhythms. I recommend each acting as a as a different gear in an integrated system, and this is important. It's an integrated decision system. All of these for operating rhythms, serves a specific purpose and work together. So I recommend a business strategy session. First, UM, a portfolio management routine, an internal portfolio review and periodic leadership updates, and I'll say a little bit more about each of those. So the business strategy session is used to set top level priorities on an annual or semiannual basis. I've typically done this by running half day sessions that would include a business led deep dive on their strategy and current priorities. Again, always remembering that if I'm going to try and solve all the business problem, I need to know what the business is trying to achieve. Sometimes new requester added through this process often time, uh, previous requests or de prioritized or dropped from the list entirely. Um, one thing I wanna point out, however, is that it's the partner who decides priorities. The analyst or I can guide and make recommendations, but at the end of the day, it's up to the business leader to decide what his or her short term and long term needs and priorities are. The portfolio management routine Eyes is run by the POC, generally on a biweekly or possibly monthly basis. This is where new requests or prioritize, So it's great if we come together. It's critical if we come together once or twice a year to really think about the big rocks. But then we all go back to work, and every day a new requests are coming up. That pipeline has to be managed in an intelligent way. So this is where the key people, both the analyst and the business partners come together. Thio sort of manage what's coming in, decking it against top priorities, our priorities changing. Um, it's important, uh, Thio recognize that this routine is not a report out. This routine is really for the POC who uses it to clarify questions. Raised risks facilitate decisions, um, from his partners with his or her partner so that the work continues. So, um, it should be exactly as long as it needs to be on. Do you know it's as soon as the POC has the information he or she needs to get back to work? That's what happens. An internal portfolio review Eyes is a little bit different. This this review is internal to the analytics team and has two main functions. First, it's where the analytics team can continue to break down silos for themselves and for their partners by talking to each other about the questions they're getting in the work that they're doing. But it's also the form in which I start to challenge my team to develop a new approach of asking why the request was made. So we're evolving. We're evolving from getting the data thio enabling effective business decision ing. Um, and that's new. That's new for a lot of analysts. So, um, the internal portfolio review is a safe space toe asks toe. Ask the people who work for May who report to May why the partner made this request. What is the partner trying to solve? Okay, senior leadership updates the last of these four routines, um, less important for the day to day, but significantly important for maintaining the overall health of the SIOE. I've usually done this through some combination of email summaries, but also standing agenda items on a leadership routine. Um, for for me, it is always a shared update that my partner and I present together. We both have our names on it. I typically talk about what we learned in the data. Briefly, my partner will talk about what she is going to do with it, and very, very importantly, what it is worth. Okay, a couple more here. Prioritization happens at several levels on Dive. Alluded to this. It happens within a business unit in the Internal Portfolio review. It has to happen at times across business units. It also can and should happen enterprise wide on some frequency. So within business units, that is the easiest. Happens most frequently across business units usually comes up as a need when one leader business leader has a significant opportunity but no available baseline analytical support. For whatever reason. In that case, we might jointly approach another business leader, Havenaar Oi, based discussion about maybe borrowing a resource for some period of time. Again, It's not my decision. I don't in isolation say, Oh, good project is worth more than project. Be so owner of Project Be sorry you lose. I'm taking those. Resource is that's It's not good practice. It's not a good way of building partnerships. Um, you know that that collaboration, what is really best for the business? What is best for the enterprise, um, is an enterprise decision. It's not a me decision. Lastly, enterprise level part ization is the probably the least frequent is aided significantly by the semi annual business strategy sessions. Uh, this is the time to look enterprise wide. It all of the business opportunities that play potential R a y of each and jointly decide where to align. Resource is on a more, uh, permanent basis, if you will, to make sure that the most important, um, initiatives are properly staffed with analytical support. Oxygen funding briefly, Um, I favor a hybrid model, which I don't hear talked about in a lot of other places. So first, I think it's really critical to provide each business unit with some baseline level of analytical support that is centrally funded as part of a shared service center of excellence. And if a business leader needs additional support that can't otherwise be provided, that leader can absolutely choose to fund an incremental resource from her own budget that is fully dedicated to the initiative that is important to her business. Um, there are times when that privatization happens at an enterprise level, and the collective decision is we are not going to staff this potentially worthwhile initiative. Um, even though we know it's worthwhile and a business leader might say, You know what? I get it. I want to do it anyway. And I'm gonna find budget to make that happen, and we create that position, uh, still reporting to the center of excellence for all of the other reasons. The right higher managing the work product. But that resource is, as all resource is, works for the business leader. Um, so, uh, it is very common thinking about again. What's the value of having these resource is reports centrally but work for the business leader. It's very common Thio here. I can't get from a business leader. I can't get what I need from the analytics team. They're too busy. My work falls by the wayside. So I have to hire my own people on. My first response is have we tried putting some of these routines into place on my second is you might be right. So fund a resource that's 100% dedicated to you. But let me use my expertise to help you find the right person and manage that person successfully. Um, so at this point, I I hope you see or starting to see how these routines really work together and how these principles work together to create a higher level of operational partnership. We collectively know the purpose of a centralized Chloe. Everyone knows his or her role in doing the work, managing the work, prioritizing the use of this very valuable analytical talent. And we know where higher ordered trade offs need to be made across the enterprise, and we make sure that those decisions have and those decision makers have the information and connectivity to the work and to each other to make those trade offs. All right, now that we've established the purpose of the modern analyst and the functional framework in which they operate, I want to talk a little bit about the hard part of getting from where many individual analysts and business leaders are today, uh, to where we have the opportunity to grow in order to maintain pain and or regain that competitive advantage. There's no judgment here. It's simply an artifact. How we operate today is simply an artifact of our historical training, the technology constraints we've been under and the overall newness of Applied analytics as a distinct discipline. But now is the time to start breaking away from some of that and and really upping our game. It is hard not because any of these new skills is particularly difficult in and of themselves. But because any time you do something, um, for the first time, it's uncomfortable, and you're probably not gonna be great at it the first time or the second time you try. Keep practicing on again. This is for the analyst and for the business leader to think differently. Um, it gets easier, you know. So as a business leader when you're tempted to say, Hey, so and so I just need this data real quick and you shoot off that email pause. You know it's going to help them, and I'll get the answer quicker if I give him a little context and we have a 10 minute conversation. So if you start practicing these things, I promise you will not look back. It makes a huge difference. Um, for the analyst, become a consultant. This is the new set of skills. Uh, it isn't as simple as using layman's terms. You have to have a different conversation. You have to be willing to meet your business partner as an equal at the table. So when they say, Hey, so and so can you get me this data You're not allowed to say yes. You're definitely not is not to say no. Your reply has to be helped me understand what you're trying to achieve, so I can better meet your needs. Andi, if you don't know what the business is trying to achieve, you will never be able to help them get there. This is a must have developed project management skills. All of a sudden, you're a POC. You're in charge of keeping track of everything that's coming in. You're in charge of understanding why it's happening. You're responsible for making sure that your partner is connected across the rest of the analytics. Um, team and ecosystem that takes some project management skills. Um, be business focused, not data focused. Nobody cares what your algorithm is. I hate to break it to you. We love that stuff on. We love talking about Oh, my gosh. Look, I did this analysis, and I didn't think this is the way I was gonna approach it, and I did. I found this thing. Isn't it amazing? Those are the things you talk about internally with your team because when you're doing that, what you're doing is justifying and sort of proving the the rightness of your answer. It's not valuable to your business partner. They're not going to know what you're talking about anyway. Your job is to tell them what you found. Drawing conclusions. Historically, Analyst spent so much of their time just getting data into a power 0.50 pages of summarized data. Now the job is to study that summarized data and draw a conclusion. Summarized data doesn't explain what's happening. They're just clues to what's happening. And it's your job as the analyst to puzzle out that mystery. If a partner asked you a question stated in words, your answer should be stated in words, not summarized data. That is a new skill for some again takes practice, but it changes your ability to create value. So think about that. Your job is to put the answer on page with supporting evidence. Everything else falls in the cutting room floor, everything. Everything. Everything has to be tied to our oi. Um, you're a cost center and you know, once you become integrated with your business partner, once you're working on business initiatives, all of a sudden, this actually becomes very easy to do because you will know, uh, the business case that was put forth for that business initiative. You're part of that business case. So it becomes actually again with these routines in place with this new way of working with this new way of thinking, it's actually pretty easy to justify and to demonstrate the value that analytic springs to an organization. Andi, I think that's important. Whether or not the organization is is asking for it through formalized reporting routine Now for the business partner, understand that this is a transformation and be prepared to support it. It's ultimately about providing a higher level of support to you, but the analysts can't do it unless you agree to this new way of working. So include your partner as a member of your team. Talk to them about the problems you're trying to sell to solve. Go beyond asking for the data. Be willing and able to tie every request to an overarching business initiative on be poised for action before solution is commissioned. This is about preserving. The precious resource is you have at your disposal and you know often an extra exploratory and let it rip. Often, an exploratory analysis is required to determine the value of a solution, but the solution itself should only be built if there's a plan, staffing and funding in place to implement it. So in closing, transformation is hard. It requires learning new things. It also requires overriding deeply embedded muscle memory. The more you can approach these changes is a team knowing you won't always get it right and that you'll have to hold each other accountable for growth, the better off you'll be and the faster you will make progress together. Thanks. >>Thank you so much, Kathleen, for that great content and thank you all for joining us. Let's take a quick stretch on. Get ready for the next session. Starting in a few minutes, you'll be hearing from thought spots. David Coby, director of Business Value Consulting, and Blake Daniel, customer success manager. As they discuss putting use cases toe work for your business

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube Conversation. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto Studios today, having a Cube Conversation, you know, with the COVID situation going on we've had to change our business and go pretty much 100% digital. And as part of that process, we wanted to reach out to our community, and talk to some of the leaders out there, because I think leadership in troubling times is even more amplified in it's importance. So we're excited to be joined today by two leaders in our community. First one being John Chambers, a very familiar face from many, many years at Cisco, who's now the founder and CEO of JC2 Ventures. John, great to see you. >> Jeff, it's a pleasure to be with you again. >> Absolutely. And joining him is Umesh Sachdev, he's the co-founder and CEO of Uniphore. First time on theCUBE, Umesh, great to meet you. >> Jeff, thank you for having me, it's great to be with you. >> You as well, and I had one of your great people on the other day, talking about CX, and I think CX is the whole solution. Why did Uber beat cabs, do you want to stand on a corner and raise your hand in the rain? Or do you want to know when the guy's going to come pick you up, in just a couple minutes? So anyway, welcome. So let's jump into it. John, one of your things, that you talked about last time we talked, I think it was in October, wow how the world has changed. >> Yes. >> Is about having a playbook, and really, you know, kind of thinking about what you want to do before it's time to actually do it, and having some type of a script, and some type of direction, and some type of structure, as to how you respond to situations. Well there's nothing like a disaster to really fire off, you know, the need to shift gears, and go to kind of into a playbook mode. So I wonder if you could share with the viewers, kind of what is your playbook, you've been through a couple of these bumps. Not necessarily like COVID-19, but you've seen a couple bumps over your career. >> So it's my pleasure Jeff. What I'll do is kind of outline how I believe you use an innovation playbook on everything from acquisitions, to digitizing a company, to dealing with crisis. Let's focus on the playbook for crisis. You are right, and I'm not talking about my age, (John laughing) but this is my sixth financial crisis, and been through the late 1990s with the Asian financial crisis, came out of it even stronger at Cisco. Like everybody else we got knocked down in the 2001 tech bubble, came back from it even stronger. Then in 2008, 2009, Great Recession. We came through that one very, very strong, and we saw that one coming. It's my fourth major health crisis. Some of them turned out to be pretty small. I was in Mexico when the bird pandemic hit, with the President of Mexico, when we thought it was going to be terrible. We literally had to cancel the meetings that evening. That's why Cisco built the PLAR Presence. I was in Brazil for the issue with the Zika virus, that never really developed much, and the Olympics went on there, and I only saw one mosquito during the event. It bit me. But what I'm sharing with you is I've seen this movie again and again. And then, with supply chain, which not many people were talking about yet, supply chain crisis, like we saw in Japan with the Tsunami. What's happening this time is you're seeing all three at one time, and they're occurring even faster. So the playbook is pretty simple in crisis management, and then it would be fun to put Umesh on the spot and say how closely did you follow it? Did you agree with issues, or did you disagree, et cetera, on it. Now I won't mention, Umesh, that you've got a review coming up shortly from your board, so that should not affect your answer at all. But the first playbook is being realistic, how much was self-inflicted, how much was market. This one's largely market, but if you had problems before, you got to address them at the same time. The second thing is what are the five to seven things that are material, what you're going to do to lead through this crisis. That's everything from expense management, to cash preservation. It's about how do you interface to your employees, and how do you build on culture. It's about how do you interface to your customers as they change from their top priority being growth and innovation, to a top priority being cost savings, and the ability to really keep their current revenue streams from churning and moving. And it's about literally, how do make your big bets for what you want to look like as you move out of this market. Then it's how do you communicate that to your employees, to your shareholders, to your customers, to your partners. Painting the picture of what you look like as you come out. As basic as that sounds, that's what crisis management is all about. Don't hide, be visible, CEOs should take the role on implementing that playbook. Umesh to you, do you agree? And have fun with it a little bit, I like the give and take. >> I want to see the playbook, do you have it there, just below the camera? (Jeff laughing) >> I have it right here by my side. I will tell you, Jeff, in crisis times and difficult times like these, you count all the things that go right for you, you count your blessings. And one of the blessings that I have, as a CEO, is to have John Chambers as my mentor, by my side, sharing not just the learning that he had through the crisis, but talking through this, with me on a regular basis. I've read John's book more than a few times, I bet more than anybody in the world, I've read it over and over. And that, to me, is preparation going into this mode. One of the things that John has always taught me is when times get difficult, you get calmer than usual. It's one thing that when you're cruising on the freeway and you're asked to put the brakes, but it's quite another when you're in rocket ship, and accelerating, which is what my company situation was in the month of January. We were coming out of a year of 300% growth, we were driving towards another 300% growth, hiring tremendously, at a high pace. Winning customers at a high pace, and then this hit us. And so what I had to do, from a playbook perspective, is, you know, take a deep breath, and just for a couple of days, just slow down, and calmly look at the situation. My first few steps were, I reached out to 15 of our top customers, the CEOs, and give them calls, and said let's just talk about what you're seeing, and what we are observing in our business. We get a sense of where they are in their businesses. We had the benefit, my co-founder works out of Singapore, and runs our Asia business. We had the benefit of picking up the sign probably a month before everyone else did it in the U.S. I was with John in Australia, and I was telling John that "John, something unusual is happening, "a couple of our customers in these countries in Asia "are starting to tell us they would do the deal "a quarter later." And it's one thing when one of them says it, it's another when six of them say it together. And John obviously has seen this movie, he could connect the dots early. He told me to prepare, he told the rest of the portfolio companies that are in his investment group to start preparing. We then went to the playbook that John spoke of, being visible. For me, culture and communication take front seat. We have employees in ten different countries, we have offices, and very quickly, even before the governments mandated, we had all of them work, you know, go work from home, and be remote, because employee safety and health was the number one priority. We did our first virtual all-hands meeting on Zoom. We had about 240 people join in from around the world. And my job as CEO, usually our all-hands meeting were different functional leaders, different people in the group talk to the team about their initiatives. This all-hands was almost entirely run by me, addressing the whole company about what's going to be the situation from my lens, what have we learned. Be very factual. At the same time, communicating to the team that because of the fact that we raised our funding the last year, it was a good amount of money, we still have a lot of that in the bank, so we going to be very secure. At the same time, our customers are probably going to need us more than ever. Call centers are in more demand than ever, people can't walk up to a bank branch, they can't go up to a hospital without taking an appointment. So the first thing everyone is doing is trying to reach call centers. There aren't enough people, and anyways the work force that call centers have around the world, are 50% working from home, so the capacity has dropped. So our responsibility almost, is to step up, and have our AI and automation products available to as many call centers as we can. So as we are planning our own business continuity, and making sure every single employee is safe, the message to my team was we also have to be aggressive and making sure we are more out there, and more available, to our customers, that would also mean business growth for us. But first, and foremost is for us to be responsible citizens, and just make it available where it's needed. As we did that, I quickly went back to my leadership team, and again, the learning from John is usually it's more of a consensus driven approach, we go around the table, talk about a topic for a couple of hours, get the consensus, and move out of the room. My leadership meetings, they have become more frequent, we get together once a week, on video call with my executive leaders, and it's largely these days run by me. I broke down the team into five different war rooms, with different objectives. One of them we called it the preservation, we said one leader, supported by others will take the responsibility of making sure every single employee, their families, and our current customers, are addressed, taken care of. So we made somebody lead that group. Another group was made responsible for growth. Business needs to, you know, in a company that's growing at 300%, and we still have the opportunity, because call centers need us more than ever, we wanted to make sure we are responding to growth, and not just hunkering down, and, you know, ignoring the opportunity. So we had a second war room take care of the growth. And a third war room, lead by the head of finance, to look at all the financial scenarios, do the stress tests, and see if we are going to be ready for any eventuality that's going to come. Because, you know, we have a huge amount of people, who work at Uniphore around the world, and we wanted to make sure their well being is taken care of. So from being over communicative, to the team and customers, and being out there personally, to making sure we break down the teams. We have tremendous talent, and we let different people, set of people, run different set of priorities, and report back to me more frequently. And now, as we have settled into this rhythm, Jeff, you know, as we've been in, at least in the Bay area here, we've been shelter in place for about a month now. As we are in the rhythm, we are beginning to do virtual happy hours, every Thursday evening. Right after this call, I get together with my team with a glass of wine, and we get together, we talk every but work, and every employee, it's not divided by functions, or leadership, and we are getting the rhythm back into the organization. So we've gone and adjusted in the crisis, I would say very well. And the business is just humming along, as we had anticipated, going into this crisis. But I would say, if I didn't have John by my side, if I hadn't read his book, the number of times that I have, every plane ride we've done together, every place we've gone together, John has spoken about war stories. About the 2001, about 2008, and until you face the first one of your own, just like I did right now, you don't appreciate when John says leadership is lonely. But having him by our side makes it easier. >> Well I'm sure he's told you the Jack Welch story, right? That you've quoted before, John, where Jack told you that you're not really a good leader, yet, until you've been tested, right. So you go through some tough stuff, it's not that hard to lead on an upward to the right curve, it's when things get a little challenging that the real leadership shines through. >> Completely agree, and Jack said it the best, we were on our way to becoming the most valuable company in the world, he looked me in the eye and said "John, you have a very good company." And I knew he was about to give me a teaching moment, and I said "What does it take to have a great one?" He said a near death experience. And I thought I did that in '97, and some of the other management, and he said, "No, it's when you went through something "like we went through in 2001, "which many of our peers did die in." And we were knocked down really hard. When we came back from it, you get better. But what you see in Umesh is a very humble, young CEO. I have to remember he's only 34 years old, because his maturity is like he's 50, and he's seen it before. As you tell, he's like a sponge on learning, and he doesn't mind challenging. And what what he didn't say, in his humbleness, is they had the best month in March ever. And again, well over 300% versus the same quarter a year ago. So it shows you, if you're in the right spot, i.e. artificial intelligence, i.e. cost savings, i.e. customer relationship with their customers, how you can grow even during the tough times, and perhaps set a bold vision, based upon facts and a execution plan that very few companies will be able to deliver on today. So off to a great start, and you can see why I'm so honored and proud to be his strategic partner, and his coach. >> Well it's interesting, right, the human toll of this crisis is horrible, and there's a lot of people getting sick, and a lot of people are dying, and all the estimations are a lot more are going to die this month, as hopefully we get over the hump of some of these curves. So that aside, you know, we're here talking kind of more about the, kind of, the business of this thing. And it's really interesting kind of what a catalyst COVID has become, in terms of digital transformation. You know, we've been talking about new ways to work for years, and years, and years, and digital transformation, and all these kind of things. You mentioned the Cisco telepresence was out years, and decades ago. I mean I worked in Mitsubishi, we had a phone camera in 1986, I looked it up today, it was ridiculous, didn't work. But now, it's here, right. Now working from home is here. Umesh mentioned, you know, these huge call centers, now everybody's got to go home. Do they have infrastructure to go home? Do they have a place to work at home? Do they have support to go home? Teachers are now being forced, from K-12, and I know it's a hot topic for you, John, to teach from home. Teach on Zoom, with no time to prep, no time to really think it through. It's just like the kids aren't coming back, we got to learn it. You know I think this is such a transformational moment, and to your point, if this goes on for weeks, and weeks, and months, and months, which I think we all are in agreement that it will. I think you said, John, you know, many, many quarters. As people get new habits, and get into this new flow, I don't think they're going to go back back to the old ways. So I think it's a real, you know, kind of forcing function for digital transformation. And it's, you can't, you can't sit on the sidelines, cause your people can't come to the office anymore. >> So you've raised a number of questions, and I'll let Umesh handle the tough part of it. I will answer the easy part, which is I think this is the new normal. And I think it's here now, and the question is are you ready for it. And as you think about what we're really saying is the video sessions will become such an integral part of our daily lives, that we will not go back to having to do 90% of our work physically. Today alone I've done seven major group meetings, on Zoom, and Google Hangouts, and Cisco Webex. I've done six meetings with individuals, or the key CEOs of my portfolio. So that part is here to stay. Now what's going to be fascinating is does that also lead into digitization of our company, or do the companies make the mistake of saying I'm going to use this piece, because it's so obvious, and I get it, in terms of effectiveness, but I'm not going to change the other things in my normal work, in my normal business. This is why, unfortunately, I think you will see, we originally said, Jeff, you remember, 40% maybe as high as 45% of the Fortune 500 wouldn't exist in a decade. And perhaps 70% of the start-ups wouldn't exist in a decade, that are venture capital backed. I now think, unfortunately, you're going to see 20-35% of the start-ups not exist in 2 years, and I think it's going to shock you with the number of Fortune 500 companies that do not make this transition. So where you're leading this, that I completely agree with, is the ability to take this terrible event, with all of the issues, and again thank our healthcare workers for what they've been able to do to help so many people, and deal with the world the way it is. As my parents who are doctors taught me to do, not the way we wish it was. And then get your facts, prepare for the changes, and get ready for the future. The key would be how many companies do this. On the area Umesh has responsibility for, customer experience, I think you're going to see almost all companies focus on that. So it can be an example of perhaps how large companies learn to use the new technology, not just video capability, but AI, assistance for the agents, and then once they get the feel for it, just like we got the feel for these meetings, change their rhythm entirely. It was a dinner in New York, virtually, when we stopped, six weeks ago, traveling, that was supposed to be a bunch of board meetings, customer meetings, that was easy. But we were supposed to have a dinner with Shake Shack's CEO, and we were supposed to have him come out and show how he does cool innovation. We had a bunch of enterprise companies, and a bunch of media, and subject matter expertise, we ended up canceling it, and then we said why not do it virtually? And to your point, we did it in 24 different locations. Half the people, remember six weeks ago, had never even used Zoom. We had milk shakes, and hamburgers, and french fries delivered to their home. And it was one of the best two hour meetings I've seen. The future is this now. It's going to change dramatically, and Umesh, I think, is going to be at the front edge of how enterprise companies understand how their relationship with their customers is going to completely transform, using AI, conversational AI capability, speech recognition, et cetera. >> Yeah, I mean, Umesh, we haven't even really got into Uniphore, or what you guys are all about. But, you know, you're supporting call centers, you're using natural language technology, both on the inbound and all that, give us the overview, but you're playing on so many kind of innovation spaces, you know, the main interaction now with customers, and a brand, is either through the mobile phone, or through a call center, right. And that's becoming more, and increasingly, digitized. The ability to have a voice interaction, with a machine. Fascinating, and really, I think, revolutionary, and kind of taking, you know, getting us away from these stupid qwerty keyboards, which are supposed to slow us down on purpose. It's still the funniest thing ever, that we're still using these qwerty keyboards. So I wonder if you can share with us a little bit about, you know, kind of your vision of natural language, and how that changes the interaction with people, and machines. I think your TED Talk was really powerful, and I couldn't help but think of, you know, kind of mobile versus land lines, in terms of transformation. Transforming telecommunications in rural, and hard to serve areas, and then actually then adding the AI piece, to not only make it better for the front end person, but actually make it for the person servicing the account. >> Absolutely Jeff, so Uniphore, the company that I founded in 2008. We were talking about it's such a coincidence that I founded the company in 2008, the year of the Great Recession, and here we are again, talking in midst of the impact that we all have because of COVID. Uniphore does artificial intelligence and automation products, for the customer service industry. Call centers, as we know it, have fundamentally, for the last 20, 30 years, not have had a major technology disruption. We've seen a couple of ways of business model disruption, where call centers, you know, started to become offshore, in locations in Asia, India, and Mexico. Where our calls started to get routed around the world internationally, but fundamentally, the core technology in call centers, up until very recently, hadn't seen a major shift. With artificial intelligence, with natural language processings, speech recognition, available in over 100 languages. And, you know, in the last year or so, automation, and RPA, sort of adding to that mix, there's a whole new opportunity to re-think what customer service will mean to us, more in the future. As I think about the next five to seven years, with 5G happening, with 15 billion connected devices, you know, my five year old daughter, she the first thing she does when she enters the house from a playground, she goes to talk to her friend called Alexa. She speaks to Alexa. So, you know, these next generation of users, and technology users will grow up with AI, and voice, and NLP, all around us. And so their expectation of customer service and customer experience is going to be quantum times higher than some of us have, from our brands. I mean, today when a microwave or a TV doesn't work in our homes, our instinct could be to either go to the website of the brand, and try to do a chat with the agent, or do an 800 number phone call, and get them to visit the house to fix the TV. With, like I said with 5G, with TV, and microwave, and refrigerator becoming intelligent devices, you know, I could totally see my daughter telling the microwave "Why aren't you working?" And, you know, that question might still get routed to a remote contact center. Now the whole concept of contact center, the word has center in it, which means, in the past, we used to have these physical, massive locations, where people used to come in and put on their headsets to receive calls. Like John said, more than ever, we will see these centers become dispersed, and virtual. The channels with which these queries will come in would no more be just a phone, it would be the microwave, the car, the fridge. And the receivers of these calls would be anywhere in the world, sitting in their home, or sitting on a holiday in the Himalayas, and answering these situations to us. You know, I was reading, just for everyone to realize how drastic this shift has been, for the customer service industry. There are over 14 million workers, who work in contact centers around the world. Like I said, the word center means something here. All of them, right now, are working remote. This industry was never designed to work remote. Enterprises who fundamentally didn't plan for this. To your point Jeff, who thought digitization or automation, was a project they could have picked next year, or they were sitting on the fence, will now know more have a choice to make this adjustment. There's a report by a top analyst firm that said by 2023, up to 30% of customer service representatives would be remote. Well guess what, we just way blew past that number right away. And most of the CEOs that I talked to recently tell me that now that this shift has happened, about 40% of their workers will probably never return back to the office. They will always remain a permanent virtual workforce. Now when the workforce is remote, you need all the tools and technology, and AI, that A, if on any given day, 7-10% of your workforce calls in sick, you need bots, like the Amazon's Alexa, taking over a full conversation. Uniphore has a product called Akira, which does that in call centers. Most often, when these call center workers are talking, we have the experience of being put on hold, because call center workers have to type in something on their keyboard, and take notes. Well guess what, today AI and automation can assist them in doing that, making the call shorter, allowing the call center workers to take a lot more calls in the same time frame. And I don't know your experience, but, you know, a couple of weekends ago, the modem in my house wasn't working. I had a seven hour wait time to my service provider. Seven hour. I started calling at 8:30, it was somewhere around 3-4:00, finally, after call backs, wait, call back, wait, that it finally got resolved. It was just a small thing, I just couldn't get to the representative. So the enterprises are truly struggling, technology can help. They weren't designed to go remote, think about it, some of the unique challenges that I've heard now, from my customers, is that how do I know that my call center representative, who I've trained over years to be so nice, and empathetic, when they take a pee break, or a bio break, they don't get their 10 year old son to attend a call. How do I know that? Because now I can no more physically check in on them. How do I know that if I'm a bank, there's compliance? There's nothing being said that isn't being, is, you know, supposed to be said, because in a center, in an office, a supervisor can listen in. When everyone's remote, you can't do that. So AI, automation, monitoring, supporting, aiding human beings to take calls much better, and drive automation, as well as AI take over parts of a complete call, by the way of being a bot like Alexa, are sort of the things that Uniphore does, and I just feel that this is a permanent shift that we are seeing. While it's happening because of a terrible reason, the virus, that's affecting human beings, but the shift in business and behavior, is going to be permanent in this industry. >> Yeah, I think so, you know it's funny, I had Marten Mickos on, or excuse me, yeah, Marten Mickos, as part of this series. And I asked him, he's been doing distributed companies since he was doing MySQL, before Sun bought them. And he's, he was funny, it's like actually easier to fake it in an office, than when you're at home, because at home all you have to show is your deliverables. You can't look busy, you can't be going to meetings, you can't be doing things at your computer. All you have to show is your output. He said it's actually much more efficient, and it drives people, you know, to manage to the output, manage to what you want. But I want to shift gears a little bit, before we let you go, and really talk a little bit about the role of government. And John, I know you've been very involved with the Indian government, and the French government, trying to help them, in their kind of entrepreneurial pursuits, and Uniphore, I think, was founded in India, right, before you moved over here. You know we've got this huge stimulus package coming from the U.S. government, to try to help, as people, you know, can't pay their mortgage, a lot of people aren't so fortunate to be in digital businesses. It's two trillion dollars, so as kind of a thought experiment, I'm like well how much is two trillion dollars? And I did the cash balance of the FAANG companies. Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Alphabet, just looking at Yahoo Finance, the latest one that was there. It's 333 billion, compared to two trillion. Even when you add Microsoft's 133 billion on top, it's still shy, it's still shy of 500 billion. You know, and really, the federal government is really the only people in a position to make kind of sweeping, these types of investments. But should we be scared? Should we be worried about, you know, kind of this big shift in control? And should, do you think these companies with these big balance sheets, as you said John, priorities change a little bit. Should it be, keep that money to pay the people, so that they can stay employed and pay their mortgage, and go buy groceries, and maybe get take out from their favorite restaurant, versus, you know, kind of what we've seen in the past, where there's a lot more, you know, stock buy backs, and kind of other uses of these cash. As you said, if it's a crisis, and you got to cut to survive, you got to do that. But clearly some of these other companies are not in that position. >> So you, let me break it into two pieces, Jeff, if I may. The first is for the first time in my lifetime I have seen the federal government and federal agencies move very rapidly. And if you would have told me government could move with the speed we've seen over the last three months, I would have said probably not. The fed was ahead of both the initial interest rate cuts, and the fed was ahead in terms of the slowing down, i.e. your 2 trillion discussion, by central banks here, and around the world. But right behind it was the Treasury, which put on 4 trillion on top of that. And only governments can move in this way, but the coordination with government and businesses, and the citizens, has been remarkable. And the citizens being willing to shelter in place. To your question about India, Prime Minister Modi spent the last five years digitizing his country. And he put in place the most bandwidth of any country in the world, and literally did transformation of the currency to a virtual currency, so that people could get paid online, et cetera, within it. He then looked at start-ups and job creation, and he positioned this when an opportunity or problem came along, to be able to perhaps navigate through it in a way that other countries might struggle. I would argue President Macron in France is doing a remarkable job with his innovation economy, but also saying how do you preserve jobs. So you suddenly see government doing something that no business can do, with the scale, and the speed, and a equal approach. But at the same time, may of these companies, and being very candid, that some people might have associated with tech for good, or with tech for challenges, have been unbelievably generous in giving both from the CEOs pockets perspective, and number two and three founders perspective, as well as a company giving to the CDC, and giving to people to help create jobs. So I actually like this opportunity for tech to regain its image of being good for everybody in the world, and leadership within the world. And I think it's a unique opportunity. For my start-ups, I've been so proud, Jeff. I didn't have to tell them to go do the right thing with their employees, I didn't have to tell them that you got to treat people, human lives first, the economy second, but we can do both in parallel. And you saw companies like Sprinklr suddenly say how can I help the World Health Organization anticipate through social media, where the next spread of the virus is going to be? A company, like Bloom Energy, with what KR did there, rebuilding all of the ventilators that were broken here in California, of which about 40% were, out of the stock that they got, because it had been in storage for so long, and doing it for all of California in their manufacturing plant, at cost. A company like Aspire Foods, a cricket company down in Texas, who does 3D capabilities, taking part of their production in 3D, and saying how many thousand masks can I generate, per week, using 3D printers. You watch what Umesh has done, and how he literally is changing peoples lives, and making that experience, instead of being a negative from working at home, perhaps to a positive, and increasing the customer loyalty in the process, as opposed to when you got a seven hour wait time on a line. Not only are you probably not going to order anything else from that company, you're probably going to change it. So what is fascinating to me is I believe companies owe an obligation to be successful, to their employees, and to their shareholders, but also to give back to society. And it's one of the things I'm most proud about the portfolio companies that I'm a part of, and why I'm so proud of what Umesh is doing, in both a economically successful environment, but really giving back and making a difference. >> Yeah, I mean, there's again, there's all the doctor stuff, and the medical stuff, which I'm not qualified to really talk about. Thankfully we have good professionals that have the data, and the knowledge, and know what to do, and got out ahead of the social distancing, et cetera, but on the backside, it really looks like a big data problem in so many ways, right. And now we have massive amounts of compute at places like Amazon, and Google, and we have all types of machine learning and AI to figure out, you know, there's kind of resource allocation, whether that be hospital beds, or ventilators, or doctors, or nurses, and trying to figure out how to sort that all out. But then all of the, you know, genome work, and you know, kind of all that big heavy lifting data crunching, you know, CPU consuming work, that hopefully is accelerating the vaccine. Because I don't know how we get all the way out of this until, it just seems like kind of race to the vaccine, or massive testing, so we know that it's not going to spike up. So it seems like there is a real opportunity, it's not necessarily Kaiser building ships, or Ford building planes, but there is a role for tech to play in trying to combat this thing, and bring it under control. Umesh, I wonder if you could just kind of contrast being from India, and now being in the States for a couple years. Anything kind of jump out to you, in terms of the differences in what you're hearing back home, in the way this has been handled? >> You know, it's been very interesting, Jeff, I'm sure everyone is concerned that India, for many reasons, so far hasn't become a big hot spot yet. And, you know, we can hope and pray that that remains to be the case. There are many things that the government back home has done, I think India took lessons from what they saw in Europe, and the U.S, and China. They went into a countrywide lockdown pretty early, you know, pretty much when they were lower than a two hundred positive tested cases, the country went into lockdown. And remember this is a 1.5 billion people all together going into lockdown. What I've seen in the U.S. is that, you know, California thankfully reacted fast. We've all been sheltered in place, there's cabin fever for all of us, but you know, I'm sure at the end of the day, we're going to be thankful for the steps that are taken. Both by the administration at the state level, at the federal level, and the medical doctors, who are doing everything they can. But India, on the other hand, has taken the more aggressive stance, in terms of doing a country lockdown. We just last evening went live at a University in the city of Chennai, where Uniphore was born. The government came out with the request, much like the U.S., where they're government departments were getting a surge of traffic about information about COVID, the hospitals that are serving, what beds are available, where is the testing? We stood up a voice bot with AI, in less than a week, in three languages. Which even before the government started to advertise, we started to get thousands of calls. And this is AI answering these questions for the citizens, in doing so. So it goes back to your point of there's a real opportunity of using all the technology that the world has today, to be put to good use. And at the same time, it's really partnering meaningfully with government, in India, in Singapore, in Vietnam, and here in the U.S., to make sure that happens on, you know, John's coaching and nudging, I became a part of the U.S.-India Strategic Partnership Forum, which is truly a premier trade and commerce body between U.S. and India. And I, today, co-chaired the start-up program with, you know, the top start-ups between U.S. and India, being part of that program. And I think we got, again, tremendously fortunate, and lucky with the timeline. We started working on this start-up program between U.S. and India, and getting the start-ups together, two quarters ago, and as this new regulation with the government support, and the news about the two trillion dollar packages coming out, and the support for small businesses, we could quickly get some of the questions answered for the start-ups. Had we not created this body, which had the ability to poll the Treasury Department, and say here are questions, can start-ups do A, B, and C? What do you have by way of regulation? And I think as a response to one of our letters, on Monday the Treasury put out an FAQ on their website, which makes it super clear for start-ups and small businesses, to figure out whether they qualify or they don't qualify. So I think there's ton that both from a individual company, and the technology that each one of us have, but also as a community, how do we, all of us, meaningfully get together, as a community, and just drive benefit, both for our people, for the economy, and for our countries. Wherever we have the businesses, like I said in the U.S., or in India, or parts of Asia. >> Yeah, it's interesting. So, this is a great conversation, I could talk to you guys all night long, but I probably would hear about it later, so we'll wrap it, but I just want to kind of close on the following thought, which is really, as you've talked about before John, and as Umesh as you're now living, you know, when we go through these disruptions, things do get changed, and as you said a lot of people, and companies don't get through it. On the other hand many companies are birthed from it, right, people that are kind of on the new trend, and are in a good position to take advantage, and it's not that you're laughing over the people that didn't make it, but it does stir up the pot, and it sounds like, Umesh, you're in a really good position to take advantage of this new kind of virtual world, this new digital transformation, that's just now waiting anymore. I love your stat, they were going to move X% out of the call center over some period of time, and then it's basically snap your fingers, everybody out, without much planning. So just give you the final word, you know, kind of advice for people, as they're looking forward, and Umesh, we'll get you on another time, because I want to go deep diving in natural language, I think that's just a fascinating topic in the way that people are going to interact with machines and get rid of the stupid qwerty keyboard. But let me get kind of your last thoughts as we wrap this segment. Umesh we'll let you go first. >> Umesh, you want to go first? >> I'll go first. My last thoughts are first for the entrepreneurs, everyone who's sort of going through this together. I think in difficult times is when real heroes are born. I read a quote that when it's a sunny day, you can't overtake too many cars, but when it's raining you have a real opportunity. And the other one that I read was when fishermen can't go out fishing, because of the high tide, they come back, and mend their nets, and be ready for the time that they can go out. So I think there's no easy way to say, this is a difficult time for the economy, health wise, I hope that, you know, we can contain the damage that's being done through the virus, but some of us have the opportunity to really take our products and technology out there, more than usual. Uniphore, particularly, has a unique opportunity, the contact center industry just cannot keep up with the traffic that it's seeing. Around the world, across US, across Asia, across India, and the need for AI and automation would never be pronounced more than it is today. As much as it's a great business opportunity, it's more of a responsibility, as I see it. There can be scale up as fast as the demand is coming, and really come out of this with a much stronger business model. John has always told me in final words you always paint the picture of what you want to be, a year or two out. And I see Uniphore being a much stronger AI plus automation company, in the customer service space, really transforming the face of call centers, and customer service. Which have been forced to rethink their core business value in the last few weeks. And, you know, every fence sitter who would think that digitalization and automation was an option that they could think of in the future years, would be forced to make those decisions now. And I'm just making sure that my team, and my company, and I, am ready to gear to that great responsibility and opportunity that's ahead of us. >> John, give you the final word. >> Say Jeff, I don't know if you can still hear me, we went blank there, maybe for me to follow up. >> We gotcha. >> Shimon Peres taught me a lot about life, and dealing with life the way it is, not the way you wish it was. So did my parents, but he also taught me it always looks darkest just before the tide switches, and you move on to victory. I think the challenges in front of us are huge, I think our nation knows how to deal with that, I do believe the government has moved largely pretty effectively, to give us the impetus to move, and then if we continue to flatten the curve on the issues with the pandemic, if we get some therapeutic drugs that dramatically reduce the risk of death, for people that get the challenges the worst, and over time a vaccine, I think you look to the future, America will rebound, it will be rebounding around start-ups, new job creation, using technology in every business. So not only is there a light at the tunnel, at the end of the tunnel, I think we will emerge from this a stronger nation, a stronger start-up community. But it depends on how well we work together as a group, and I just want to say to Umesh, it's an honor to be your coach, and I learn from you as much as I give back. Jeff, as always, you do a great job. Thank you for your time today. >> Thank you both, and I look forward to our next catch up. Stay safe, wash your hands, and thanks for spending some time with us. >> And I just want to say I hope and pray that all of us can get together in Palo Alto real quick, and in person, and doing fist bumps, not shake hands or probably a namaste. Thank you, it's an honor. >> Thank you very much. All right, that was John and Umesh, you're watching theCUBE from our Palo Alto Studios, thanks for tuning in, stay safe, wash your hands, keep away from people that you're not that familiar with, and we'll see you next time. Thanks for watching. (calm music)

>>live from Barcelona, Spain. It's the Cube covering Cisco Live 2020 right to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners >>back. This is the Cube's coverage >>of Cisco Live 2020 here in Barcelona, doing about three and 1/2 days of wall to wall coverage here. Stew Minimum. My co host for this segment is Dave Volante. John Furrier is also here, scaring the floor and really happy to welcome to the program. Two first time guests. I believe so. Uh, Derek is the product manager of product marketing for Cloud Computing with Cisco, and sitting to his left is Matt Ferguson, who's director of product development, also with the Cisco Cloud Group. David here from Boston. Matt is also from the Boston area, and customers is coming over from London. So thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. All right, so obviously, cloud computing something we've been talking about many years. We've really found fascinating relationship. Cisco's had, with its customers a zealous through the partner ecosystem, had many good discussions about some of the announcements this week. Maybe start a little bit, you know, Cisco's software journey and positioning in the cloud space right now. >>So it's a really interesting dynamic when we started transitioning to multi cloud and we actually deal with Cloud and Compute coming together and we've had whether you're looking at three infrastructure ops organization or whether you're looking at the APS up operations or whether you're looking at, you know, your DEV environment, your security operations. Each organization has to deal with their angle, which they view, you know, multi cloud. Or they view how they actually operate within those the cloud computing context. And so whether you're on the infrastructure side, you're looking at compute. You're looking at storage. You're looking at resources. If you're on an app operator, you're looking at performance. You're looking at visibility assurance. If you are in the security operations you're looking at, maybe governance. You're looking at policy, and then when you're a developer, you really sort of thinking about see I CD. You're talking about agility, and there's very few organizations like Cisco that actually is looking at from a product perspective. All those various angles >>of multi cloud >> is definitely a lot of pieces. Maybe up level it for us a little bit. There's so many pieces way talk for so long. You know you don't talk to any company that doesn't have a cloud. Strategy doesn't mean that it's not going to change over time. And it means every company's got a known positioning. But talk about the relationship Cisco has with its customers and really the advisory condition that you want to have with >>its actually a very relevant question. To what? To what Matt is talking about, because Wei talked a lot about multi cloud as a trend and hybrid clouds and this kind of relationship between the traditional view of looking at computing data centers and then expanding to different clouds. You know, public cloud providers have now amazing platform capabilities. And if you think about it, the it goes back to what Matt said about I t ops and development kind of efforts. Why is this happening? Really, there's There's the study that we did with with an analyst, and there was an amazing a shocking stats around how within the next three years, organizations will have to support 50% more applications than they do now. And we have been trying to test this, that our events that made customer meetings etcetera, that is a lot of a lot of change for organizations. So if you think about why are they use, why do they need to basically let go and expand to those clouds? Is because they want to service. I T ops teams want to servers with capabilities, their developers faster, right? And this is where you have within the I T ops kind of theme organization. You have the security kind of frame through the compute frame, the networking where, you know Cisco has a traditional footprint. How do you blend all this? How do you bring all this together in a linear way to support individual unique application modernization efforts? I think that's what we're hearing from customers in terms of the feedback. And this is what influences our >>strategy to converts the different business units. And it's an area engineering effort, right? >>I want to poke at that a little bit. I mean, a couple years ago, I have to admit I was kind of a multi cloud skeptic. I always said that I thought it was more of a symptom that actually strategy a symptom of shadow I t and different workloads and so forth, but now kind of buying in because I think I t in particular has been brought in to clean up the crime scene. I often say so I think it is becoming a strategy. So if you could help us understand what you're hearing from customers in terms of their strategy towards multi cloud and how Cisco it was mapping into that, >>yeah, so So when we talk to customers, it comes back to the angle at which they're approaching the problem. And, like you said, that shadow I t. Has been probably around for longer than anybody want, cares to admit, because people want to move faster. Organizations want to get their product out to market sooner. And so what? What really is we're having conversations now about, you know, how do I get the visibility? How do I get you know, the policies in the governance so that I can actually understand either how much I'm spending in the cloud or whether I'm getting the actual performance that I'm looking for, that I need that connectivity. So I get the bandwidth, and so these are the kinds of conversations that we have with customers is going. I realized that this is going on now I actually have to Now put some governance and controls around. That is their products is their solutions, is there? You know, they're looking to Cisco to help them through this journey because it is a journey. Because as much as we talk about cloud and you know, companies that were born in the cloud cloud native there is a tremendous number of I see organizations that are just starting that journey that are just entering into this phase where they have to solve these problems. >>Yeah, I agree. And they're starting the journey with a deliberate strategy as opposed to Okay, we got this thing. But if you think about the competitive landscape, it's kind of interesting. And I want to try to understand where Cisco fits because again, you initially had companies that didn't know in a public cloud sort of pushing multi cloud. You say? Well, I guess they have to do that. But now you see, and those come out with Google, you see Microsoft leaning in way. Think eventually aws is gonna lead in. And then you say I'm kind of interested in working with some of these cloud agnostic not trying to force Now, now Cisco. A few years ago, you didn't really think about Cisco as a player. Now this goes right in the middle. I have said often that Cisco's in a great position John Furrier as well to connect businesses and from a source of networking strength, making a strong argument that we have the most cost effective, most secure, highest performance networks to connect clouds. That seems to be a pretty fundamental strength of yours. And does that essentially summarize your strategy? And And how does that map into the actions that you're taking in terms of products and services that you're bringing to market? >>I would say that I can I can I can take that. Yeah, for sure. It's chewy question for hours. So I was thinking about satellite you mentioned before. Like Okay, that's, you know, the world has turned around completely way seem to talk about Target satellite Is something bad happening? And now, suddenly we completely forgot about it, like let let free, free up the developers and let them do whatever they want. And basically that is what I think is happening out there in the market. So all of the solutions you mentioned in the go to market approaches and the architectures that the public cloud providers at least our offering out there. Certainly the Big Three have differences have their strengths on. And I think those things are closer to the developer environment. Basically, you know, if you're looking into something like AI ml, there's one provider that you go with. If you're looking for a mobile development framework, you're gonna go somewhere else. If you're looking for a D, are you gonna go somewhere else? Maybe not a big cloud, but your service provider. But you've been dealing with all this all this time, so you know that they have their accreditation that you're looking for. So where does Cisco come in? You know, we're not a public cloud provider way offer products as a service from our data centers and our partners data centers. But at the the way that the industry sees a cloud provider a public cloud like AWS Azure, Google, Oracle, IBM, etcetera, we're not that we don't do that. Our mission is to enable organizations with software hardware products SAS products to be able to facilitate their connectivity, security, visibility, observe ability, and in doing business and in leveraging the best benefits from those clubs. So way kind of way kind of moved to a point where we flip around the question, and the first question is, Who is your club provider? What? How many? Tell us the clouds you work with, and we can give you the modular pieces you can put we can put together for you. So these, so that you can make the best out of >>your club. Being able to do that across clouds in an environment that is consistent with policies that are consistent, that represent the edicts of your organization, no matter where your data lives, that's sort of the vision and the way >>this is translated into products into Cisco's products. You naturally think about Cisco as the connectivity provider networking. That's that's really sort of our, you know, go to in what we're also when we have a significant computing portfolio as well. So connectivity is not only the connectivity of the actual wire between geography is point A to point B. In the natural routing and switching world, there's connectivity between applications between compute and so this week. You know, the announcements were significant in that space when you talk about the compute and the cloud coming together on a single platform, that gives you not only the ability to look at your applications from an experience journey map so you can actually know where problems might occur in the application domain. You can actually, then go that next level down into the infrastructure level and you can say, Okay, maybe I'm running out of some sort of resource, whether it's compute resource, whether it's memory, whether it's on your private cloud that you have enabled on Prem, or whether it's in the public cloud, that you have that application residing and then, quite candidly, you have the actual hardware itself. So inter site. It has an ability to control that entire stack so you can have that visibility all the way down to the hardware layer. >>I'm glad you brought up some of the applications. I wonder if we could stay there for a moment. Talk about some of the changing patterns for customers. A lot of talk in the industry about cloud native often gets conflated with micro services, container ization and lots of the individual pieces there. But when one of Our favorite things have been talking about this week is software that really sits at the application layer and how that connects down through some of the infrastructure pieces. So help us understand what you're hearing from customers and how you're helping them through this transition to cost. You're saying, Absolutely, there's going to be lots of new applications, more applications and they still have the old stuff that they need to continue to manage because we know in I t nothing ever goes away. Yeah, >>that's that's definitely I was I was thinking, you know, there's there's a vacuum at the moment on and there's things that Cisco is doing from from a technology perspective to fill that gap between application. What you see when it comes to monitoring, making sure your services are observable. And how does that fit within the infrastructure stack, You know, everything upwards of the network layer. Basically, that is changing dramatically. Some of the things that matter touched upon with regards to, you know, being able to connect the networking, the security and the infrastructure of the compute infrastructure that the developers basically are deploying on top. So there's a lot of the desert out of things on continue ization. There's a lot of, in fact, it's one part of the off the shelf inter site of the stack that you mentioned and one of the big announcements. Uh huh. You know that there's a lot of discussion in the industry around. Okay, how does that abstract further the conversation on networking, for example? Because that now what we're seeing is that you have a huge monoliths enterprise applications that are being carved down into micro services. Okay, they know there's a big misunderstanding around what is cloud native? Is it related to containers? Different kind of things, right? But containers are naturally the infrastructure defacto currency for developers to deploy because of many, many benefits. But then what happens between the kubernetes layer, which seems to be the standard and the application? Who's going to be managing services talking to each other that are multiplying? You know, things like service mesh, network service mess? How is the never evolving to be able to create this immutable infrastructure for developers to deploy applications? So there's so many things happening at the same time where Cisco has actually a lot of taking a lot of the front seat. Leading that conversation >>is where it gets really interesting. Sort of hard to squint through because you mentioned kubernetes is the de facto standard, but it's a defacto standard that's open everybody's playing with. But historically, this industry has been defined by a leader comes out with a de facto standard kubernetes, not a company. It's an open standard, so but there's so many other components than containers. And so history would suggest that there's going to be another defacto standard or multiple standards that emerge. And your point earlier. You got to have the full stack. You can't just do networking. You can't just do certain if you so you guys are attacking that whole pie. So how do you think this thing will evolve? I mean, you guys obviously intend to put out a stat cast a wide net as possible, captured not only your existing install basement attract, attract others on you're going aggressively at it as a czar. Others How do you see it shaking out? You see you know, four or five pockets, you see one leader emerging. I mean, customers would love all you guys to get together and come up with standards. That's not going to happen. So where it's jump ball right now? >>Well, yeah. You think about, you know, to your point regarding kubernetes is not a company, right? It is. It is a community driven. I mean, it was open source by a large company, but it's community driven now, and that's the pace at which open source is sort of evolving. There is so much coming at I t organizations from a new paradigm, a new software, something that's, you know, the new the shiny object that sort of everybody sort of has to jump onto and sort of say, that is the way we're gonna function. So I t organizations have to struggle with this influx of just every coming at them and every angle. And I think what starting toe happen is the management and the you know that Stack who controls that or who is helping i t organizations to manage it for them. So really, what we're trying to say is there's elements that have to put together that have to function, and kubernetes is just one example Docker, the operating system that associated with it that runs all that stuff then you have the application that goes right sides on top of it. So now what we have to have is things like what we just announced this week. Hx AP the application platform for a check so you have the Compute cluster, but then you have the stack on top of that that's managed by an organization that's looking at the security that's looking at the the actual making opinions about what should go in the stack and managing that for you. So you don't have to deal with that because you just focus on the application development. Yeah, >>I mean, Cisco's in a strong position to do. There's no question about it. To me, it comes down to execution. If you guys execute and deliver on the products and services that you say, you know, you announced, for instance, this weekend previously, and you continue on a road map, you're gonna get a fair share of this market place. I think there's no question >>so last topic before we let you go is love your viewpoint on customers. What's separating kind of leaders from you know, the followers in this space, you know, there's so much data out there. And I'm a big fan of the State of Dev Ops report Help separate, You know, some not be not. Here's the technology or the piece, but the organizational and, you know, dynamics that you should do. So it sounds like you like that report also, love. What do you hear from customers? How do you help guide them towards becoming leaders in the cloud space? >>Yeah, The State of Dev Ops report was fascinating. I mean, they've been doing that for a number of years now. Yeah, exactly. And really what? It's sort of highlighting is two main factors that I think that are in this revolution or the third paradigm shift. Our journey we're going through, there's the technology side for sure, and so that's getting more complex. You have micro services, you have application explosion. You have a lot of things that are occurring just in technology that you're trying to keep up. But then it's really about the human aspect of human elements, the people about it. And that's really I think, what separates you know, the elites that are really sort of, you know, just charging forward and ahead because they've been able to sort of break down the silos because really, what you're talking about in cloud Native Dev Ops is how you take the journey of the experience of the service from end end from the development all the way to production. And how do you actually sort of not have organizations that look at their domain their data, set their operations and then have to translate that or have to sort of you have another conversation with another organization that that doesn't look at that, That has no experience of that? So that is what we're talking about, that end and view. >>And in addition to all the things we've been talking about, I think security's a linchpin here. You guys are executing on security. You got a big portfolio and you've seen a lot of M and A and a lot of companies trying to get in, and it's gonna be interesting to see how that plays out. But that's going to be a key because organizations are going to start there from a strategy standpoint, and they build out >>Yeah, absolutely. If you follow Dev ops methodologies, security gets baked in along the way so that you're not having to 100% gone after anything, just give you the final word. >>I was just a follow up with You. Got some other model was saying, There's so many, there's what's happening out there Is this democracy around? Standards with is driven by communities and way love that in fact, Cisco is involved in many open sores community projects. But you asked about customers and just right before you were asking about you know who is gonna be the winner. There's so many use cases. >>Uh huh. >>There's so much depth in Tim's off. You know what customers want to do with on top of kubernetes, you know, take Ai Ml, for example, something that we have way have some, some some offering services on there's cast. A mother wants to ai ml their their container stuck. Their infrastructure will be so much different to someone else, is doing something just hosting. And there's always going to be a SAS provider that is niche servicing some oil and gas company, you know, which means that the company of that industry will go and follow that instead of just going to a public cloud provider that is more agnostic. Does that make sense? Yeah. >>Yeah. There's relationships that exist that are just gonna get blown away. That add value today. And they're not going to just throw him out. Exactly. >>Well, thank you so much for helping us understand the updates where your customers are driving super exciting space. Look forward to keeping an eye on it. Thanks so much. Alright, there's still lots more coming here from Cisco Live 2020 in Barcelona. People are standing watching all the developer events, lots going on the floor and we still have more. So thank you for watching the Cube. Yeah, yeah.

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you [Music] [Applause] [Music] live from Barcelona Spain it's the cube covering Cisco live 2020 rot to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners come back this is the cubes coverage of Cisco live 2020 here in Barcelona doing about three and a half days of wall-to-wall coverage here I'm Stu minim and my co-host for this segment is Dave Volante John furs also here scouring the floor and really happy to welcome to the program to first-time guests I believe so Ron Daris is the product manager of product marketing for cloud computing with Cisco and sitting to his left is Matt Ferguson who's director of product development also with the Cisco cloud group Dave and I are from Boston Matt is also from the Boston area yes and Costas is coming over from London so thanks so much for joining us thanks IBPS all right so obviously cloud computing something we've been talking about many years we've really found fascinating the relationship Cisco's had with its customers as well as through the partner ecosystem had many good discussions about some of the announcements this week maybe start a little bit you know Cisco's software journey and you know positioning in this cloud space right now yes oh so it's a it's a really interesting dynamic when we start transitioning to multi cloud and we actually deal with cloud and compute coming together and we've had whether you're looking at the infrastructure ops organization or whether you're looking at the apps operations or whether you're looking at you know your dev environment your security operations each organization has to deal with their angle at which they view you know multi cloud or they view how they actually operate within those the cloud computing context and so whether you're on the infrastructure side you're looking at compute you're looking at storage you're looking at resources if you're an app operator you're looking at performance you're looking at visibility assurance if you are in the security operations you're looking at maybe governance you're looking at policy and then when you're a developer you really sort of thinking about CI CD you're talking about agility and there's very few organizations like Cisco that actually is looking at from a product perspective all those various angles of multi-cloud yeah definitely a lot of piece of cost us maybe up level it for us a little bit there's there's so many pieces you know we talked for so long you know you don't talk to any company that doesn't have a cloud strategy doesn't mean that it's not going to change over time and it means every company's got at home positioning but talk about the relationship cisco has with its customer and really the advisory position that you want to have with them it's actually a very relevant question to what to what Matt is talking about because we talk a lot about multi cloud as a trend and hybrid clouds and this kind of relationship between the traditional view of looking at computing data centers and then expanding to different clouds you know public cloud providers have now amazing platform capabilities and if you think about it the the it goes back to what Matt said about IT ops and the development kind of efforts why is this happening really you know there's there's the study that we did with with an analyst and there was an amazing a shocking stat around how within the next three years organizations will have to support 50% more applications than they do now and we have been trying to test this stat our events that made customer meetings etc that is a lot of a lot of change for organizations so if you think about why are they use why do they need to basically what go and expand to those clouds is because they want to service IT Ops teams want ER servers with capabilities their developers faster right and this is where you have within the IT ops kind of theme organization you have the security kind of frame the compute frame the networking where you know Cisco has a traditional footprint how do you blend all this how do you bring all this together in a linear way to support individual unique application modernization efforts I think that's what are we hearing from customers in terms of the feedback and this is what influences our strategy to converts the different business units and engineering engineering efforts right couple years ago I have to admit I was kind of a multi cloud skeptic I always said I thought it was more of a symptom than actually a strategy a symptom of you know shadow IT and different workloads and so forth but now I'm kind of buying in because I think IT in particular has been brought in to clean up the crime scene I often say so I think it is becoming a strategy so if you could help us understand what you're hearing from customers in terms of their strategy toward the multi cloud and how Cisco that was mapping into that yeah so so when we talk to customers it comes back to the angle at which they're approaching the problem in like you said the shadow IT has been probably around for longer than anybody won't cares to admit because the people want to move faster organizations want to get their product out to market sooner and and so what what really is we're having conversations now about you know how do I get the visibility how do I get you know the policies and the governance so that I can actually understand either how much I'm spending in the cloud or whether I'm getting the actual performance that I'm looking for that I need the connectivity so I get the bandwidth and so these are the kinds of conversations that we have with customers is is is going I realize that this is going on now I actually have to now put some you know governance and controls around that is their products is their solutions is their you know they're looking to Cisco to help them through this journey because it is a journey because as much as we talk about cloud and you know companies that were born in the cloud cloud native there is a tremendous number of IT organizations that are just starting that journey that are just entering into this phase where they have to solve these problems yeah I agree and it's just starting the journey with a deliberate strategy as opposed to okay we got this this thing but if you think about the competitive landscape its kind of interesting and I want to try to understand where Cisco fits because again you you initially had companies that didn't know in a public cloud sort of pushing multi cloud and you'd say oh well okay so they have to do that but now you see anthos come out with Google you see Microsoft leaning in we think eventually AWS is going to lean in and then you say I'm kind of interested in working with someone whose cloud agnostic not trying to force now now Cisco a few years ago you didn't really think about Cisco as a player now so this goes right in the middle I have said often that Cisco's in a great position John Fourier as well to connect businesses and from a source of networking strength making a strong argument that we have the most cost-effective most secure highest performance network to connect clouds that seems to be a pretty fundamental strength of yours and does that essentially summarize your strategy and and how does that map into the actions that you're taking in terms of products and services that you're bringing to market I would say that I can I can I can take that ya know it's a chewy question for hours yeah so I I was thinking about a satellite in you mentioned this before and you're like okay that's you know the world is turning around completely because we we seem to talk about satellite e is something bad happening and now suddenly we completely forgot about it like let let free free up the developers gonna let them do whatever they want and basically that is what I think is happening out there in the market so all the solutions you mentioned in the go to market approaches and the architectures that the public cloud providers at least are offering out there certainly the big three have differences have their strengths and I think those strengths are closer to the developer environment basically you know if you're looking into something like a IML there's one provider that you go with if you're looking for a mobile development framework you're gonna go somewhere else if you're looking for a dr you're gonna go somewhere else maybe not a big cloud but your service provider that you've been dealing with all these all these times and you know that they have their accreditation that you're looking for so where does Cisco come in you know we're not a public cloud provider we offer products as a service from our data centers and our partners data centers but at the - at the way that the industry sees a cloud provider a public cloud like AWS a sure Google Oracle IBM etc we're not that we don't do that our mission is to enable organizations with software hardware products SAS products to be able to facilitate their connectivity security visibility observability and in doing business and in leveraging the best benefits from those clouds so we we kind of we kind of moved to a point where we flip around the question and the first question is who is your cloud provider what how many tell us the clouds you work with and we can give you the modular pieces you can put we can put together for you so there's so that you can make the best out of your plan it's been being able to do that across clouds we're in an environment that is consistent with policies that are consistent that represent the edicts of your organization no matter where your data lives that's sort of the the vision in the way this is translated into products into Cisco's product you naturally think about Cisco as the connectivity provider networking that's that's really sort of our you know go to in what we're also when we have a significant computing portfolio as well so connectivity is not only the connectivity of the actual wire between geographies point A to point B in the natural routing and switching world there's connectivity between applications between cute and so this week you know the announcements were significant in that space when you talk about the compute and the cloud coming together on a single platform that gives you not only the ability to look at your applications from a experience journey map so you can actually know where the problems might occur in the application domain you can actually then go that next level down into the infrastructure level and you can say okay maybe I'm running out of some sort of resource whether it's compute resource whether it's memory whether it's on your private cloud that you have enabled on Prem or whether it's in the public cloud that you have that application residing and then why candidly you have the actual hardware itself so inter-site it has an ability to control that entire stack so you can have that visibility all the way down to the hardware layer I'm glad you brought up some of the applications wonderful we can you know stay there for a moment and talk about some of the changing patterns for customers a lot of talk in the industry about cloud native often it gets conflated with you know microservices containerization and lots of the individual pieces there but you know one of our favorite things that been talked about this week is the software that really sits at the application layer and how that connects down through some of the infrastructure pieces so help us understand what you're hearing from customers and and where how you're helping them through this transition to constants as you were saying absolutely there's going to be lots of new applications more applications and they still have the the old stuff that they need to continue to manage because we know an IT nothing ever goes away that's that's definitely true I was I was thinking you know there's there's a vacuum at the moment and and there's things that Cisco is doing from from technology leadership perspective to fill that gap between the application what do you see when it comes to monitoring making sure your services are observable and how does that fit within the infrastructure stack you know everything upwards network the network layer base again that is changing dramatically some of the things that Matt touched upon with regards to you know being able to connect the the networking the security in the infrastructure the computer infrastructure that the developers basically are deploying on top so there's a lot of there's a lot of things on containerization there's a lot of in fact it's you know one part of the of the self-injure side of the stack that you mentioned and one of the big announcements you know that there's a lot of discussion in the industry around ok how does that abstract further the conversation on networking for example because that now what we're seeing is that you have huge monoliths enterprise applications that are being carved down into micro services ok they you know there's a big misunderstanding around what is cloud native is it related to containers different kind of things right but containers are naturally the infrastructure de facto currency for developers to deploy because of many many benefits but then what happens you know between the kubernetes layer which seems to be the standard and the application who's gonna be managing services talking to each other that are multiplying you know things like service mesh network service mess how is the network evolving to be able to create this immutable infrastructure for developers to deploy applications so there's so many things happening at the same time where cisco has actually a lot of taking a lot of the front seat this is where it gets really interesting you know it's sort of hard to squint through because you mentioned kubernetes is the de facto standard but it's a de-facto standard that's open everybody's playing with but historically this industry has been defined by you know a leader who comes out with a de facto standard kubernetes not a company right it's an open standard and so but there's so many other components than containers and so history would suggest that there's going to be another de facto standard or multiple standards that emerge and your point earlier is you you got to have the full stack you can't just do networking you can't just do certain few so you guys are attacking that whole pie so how do you think this thing will evolve I mean you guys are obviously intend to put out as Casta as wide a net as possible capture not only your existing install base but attractive attract others and you're going aggressively at it as are as are others how do you see it shaking out deep do you see you know four or five pockets do you see you know one leader emerging I mean customers would love all you guys to get together come up with standards that's not going to happen so we're it's jump ball right now well yeah and you think about you know to your point regarding kubernetes is not a company right it is it is a community driven I mean it was open source by a large company but it's but it's community driven now and that's the pace at which open source is sort of evolving there is so much coming at IT organizations from a new paradigm a new software something that's you know the new the shiny object that sort of everybody sort of has to jump on to and sort of say that is the way we're going to function so IT organizations have to struggle with this influx of just every coming at them and every angle and I think what's starting to happen is the management and the you know that stack who controls that or who is helping IT organizations to manage it for them so really what we're trying to say is there's elements that you have to put together that have to function and kubernetes is just one example docker the operating system that associated with it that runs all that stuff then you have the application that goes rides IDEs on top of it so now what we have to have is things like what we just announced this week HX ap the application platform for HX so you have the compute cluster but then you have the on top of that that's managed by an organization that's looking at the security that's looking at the the actual making opinions about what should go in the stock and managing that for you so you don't have to deal with that because you can just focus on the application development yeah I mean Cisco's in a strong position to do there's no question about it and to me it comes down to execution if you guys execute and deliver on the the products and services that you say you know your nouns for instance this week and previously and you continue on a roadmap you're gonna get a fair share of this marketplace I think there's no question so last topic before we let you go is love your viewpoint on customers what's separating kind of leaders from you know the followers in this space you know there's so much data out there you know I'm a big fan of the state of DevOps report yeah focus you know separate you know some but not the not here's the technology or the piece but the organizational and you know dynamics that you should do so it sounds like Matt you you like that that report also love them what are you hearing from customers how do you help guide them towards becoming leaders in the cloud space yeah the state of DevOps report was fascinating and I mean they've been doing that for what a number of years yeah exactly and really what it's sort of highlighting is two main factors that I think that are in this revolution or this this this paradigm shift or journey we're going through there's the technology side for sure and so that's getting more complex you have micro services you have application explosion you have a lot of things that are occurring just in technology that you're trying to keep up but then it's really about the human aspect that human elements the people about it and that's really I think what separates you know the the elites that are really sort of you know just charging forward in the head because they've been able to sort of break down the silos because really what you're talking about in cloud native DevOps is how you take the journey of that experience of the service from end to end from the development all the way to production and how do you actually sort of not have organizations that look at their domain their data set their operations and then have to translate that or have to sort of you know have another conversation with another organization that it doesn't look at that that has no experience of that so that is what we're talking about that end-to-end view is that in addition to all the things we've been talking about I think Security's a linchpin here now you guys are executing on security you got a big portfolio and you've seen a lot of M&A and a lot of companies now trying to get in and it's gonna be interesting to see how that plays out but that's going to be a key because organizations are going to start there from a strategy standpoint and then build out yeah absolutely if you follow the DevOps methodology its security gets baked in along the way so that you're not having to sit on after do anything Custis give you the final word I was just as follow-up with regard what what Mark was saying there's so many there's what's happening out there is this just democracy around standards which is driven by communities and we will love that in fact cisco is involved in many open-source community projects but you asked about customers and and just right before you were asking about you know who's gonna be the winner there's so many use cases there's so much depth in terms of you know what customers want to do with on top of kubernetes you know take AI ml for example something that we have we have some some offering the services around there's the customer that wants to do AML there their containers that their infrastructure will be so much different to someone else's doing something just hosting yeah and there's always gonna be a SAS provider that is niche servicing some oil and gas company you know which means that the company of that industry will go and follow that instead of just going to a public law provider that is more organized if there's a does that make sense yeah yeah this there's relationships that exist the archer is gonna get blown away that add value today and they're not gonna just throw them out so exactly right well thank you so much for helping us understand the updates where your customers are driving super exciting space look forward to keeping an eye on it thank you thank you so much all right there's still lots more coming here from Cisco live 20/20 in Barcelona people are standing watching all the developer events lots of going on the floor and we still have more so thank you for watching the cute [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you [Music] live from Barcelona Spain it's the cube covering Cisco live 2020 rot to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners welcome back over 17,000 in attendance here for Cisco live 2020 in Barcelona ops to Minh and my co-host is Dave Volante and to help us to dig into of course one of the most important topic of the day of course that security we're thrilled to have back a distinguished engineer Francisco one of our cube alumni TK Kia Nene TK thanks so much for joining us ideal man good good all right so TK it's 2020 it's a new decade we know the bad actors are still out there they're there the the question always is you know it used to be you know how do you keep ahead of them then I've here Dave say many times well you know it's not you know when it's it's not if it's when you know you probably already have been okay you know compromised before so it gives latest so you know what you're seeing out there what you're talking to customers about in this important space yeah it's uh it's kind of an innovation spiral you know we we innovate we make it harder for them and then they innovate they make it harder for us right and round and round we go that's been going on for for many years I think I think the most significant changes that have happened recently have to deal with not essentially their objectives but how they go about their objectives and Defenders topologies have changed greatly instead of just your standard enterprise you now have you know hybrid multi cloud and all these new technologies so while while all that innovation happens you know they get a little clever and they find weaknesses and round and round we go so we talked a lot about the sort of changing profile of the the threat actors going from hacktivists took criminals now is a huge business and nation-states even what's that profile look like today and how has that changed over the last decade or so you know that's pretty much stayed the same bad guys are bad guys at some point in time you know just how how they go about their business their techniques they're having to like I said innovate around you know we make it harder for them they you know on Monday we're safe on Tuesday we're not you know and then on Wednesday it switches again so so it talked about kind of this multi-cloud environment when we talk to customers it's like well I want the developer to be able to build their application and not really have to think too much underneath it that that has to have some unique challenges we know security we knew long ago well I just go to the cloud it doesn't mean they take care of it some things are there some things they're gonna remind you now you need to make sure you set certain things otherwise you could be there but how do we make sure that Security's baked in everywhere and is up as a practice that everybody's doing well I mean again some of the practices hold true no matter what the environment I think the big thing was cognitive is in back in the day when when you looked at an old legacy data center you were part sort of administrator in your part detective and most people don't even know what's running on there that's not true in cloud native environments some some llamó file some some declaration it's it's just exactly what productions should look like right and then the machines instantiate production so you're doing things that machine scale forces the human scale people to be explicit and and for me I mean that's that's a breath of fresh air because once you're explicit then you take the mystery out of what you're protecting how about in terms of how you detect threats right phishing for credentials has become a huge deal but not just you know kicking down the door or smashing a window using your your own credentials to get inside of your network so how is that affected the way in which you detect yeah it's it's a big deal you know a lot of a lot of great technology has a dual use and what I mean by that is network cryptology you know that that whole crypto on the network has made us safer for us to compute over insecure networks and unfortunately it works just as well for the bad guys so you know all of their malicious activity is now private to so it you know for us we just have to invent new ways of detecting direct inspection for instance I think it's a thing of the past I mean we just can't depend on it anymore we have to have tools of inference and not only that but it's it's gave rise in a lot of innovation on behavioral science and as you say you know it's it's not that the attacker is breaking into your network anymore they're logging in ok what do you do then right Alice Alice's account it's not gonna set off the triggers so you have to say you know when did Alice start to behave differently you know she's working in accounting why is she playing around with the source code repository that's that's a different thing right yes automation is such a big trend you know how do we make sure that automation doesn't leave us more vulnerable that's rarity because we need to be able automate we've gone beyond human scale for most of these configurations that's exactly right and and how do how do we I always say just with security automation in particular just because you can automate something doesn't mean you should and you really have to go back and have practices you know you could argue that that this thing is just a you know machine scale automation you could do math on a legal pad or you can use a computer to do it right what so apply that to production if you mechanized something like order entry or whatever you're you're you're automating part of your business use threat modeling you use the standard threaten modeling like you would your code the network is code now right and the storage is code and everything is code so you know just automate your testing do your threat modeling do all that stuff please do not automate for your attacker matrix is here I want to go back to the Alice problem because you're talking about before you have to use inference so Alice's is in the network and you're observing her moves every day and then okay something anomalous occurs maybe she's doing something that normally she wouldn't do so you've got to have her profile in her actions sort of observed documented stored the data has got to be there and at the same time you want to make sure it's always that balance of putting handcuffs on people you know versus allowing them to do their job and be productive at the same time as well you don't want to let the bad guys know that you know that alice is doing something that she didn't be doing is actually not Alice so all that complexity how are you dealing with it and what's the data model look like doing it machines help let's say that machines can help us you know you and I we have only so many sense organs and the cognitive brain can only store so many so much state machines really help us extend that and so you know looking at not three dimensions of change but 7000 dimensions have changed right something in the machine is going to say there's an outlier here that's interesting and you can get another machine to say that's that's interesting maybe I should focus on that and you build these analytical pipelines so that at the end of it you know they may argue with each other all the way to the end but at the end you have a very high fidelity indicator that might be at the protocol level it might be at the behavioral level it might be seven days back or thirty days back all these temporal and spatial dimensions it's really cheap to do it with a machine yeah and if we could stay on that for a second so it try to understand I know that's a high-level example but is it best practice to have the Machine take action or is it is it an augmentation and I know it depends on the use case but but how is that sort of playing out again you have to do all of this safely okay a lot of things that machines do don't return back to human scale stuff that returns back to human scale that humans understand that is as useful so for instance if machines you know find out all these types of in assertions even in medical you know right now if if you've got so much telemetry going into the medical field see the machine tells you you have three weeks to live I mean you better explain what the heck you know how you came about that assertion it's the same with security you know if I'm gonna say look we're gonna quarantine your machine or we're gonna readjust machine it's not I'm not like picking movies for you or the next song you might listen to this is high stakes and so when you do things like that your analytics needs to have what is called entailment you have to explain what it is how you got to that assertion that's become incredibly important in how we measure our effectiveness in in doing analytics that's interesting because because you're using a lot of machine intelligence to do this and in a lot of AI is blackbox you're saying you cannot endure that blackbox problem in security yeah that black boxes is is very dangerous you know I you know personally I feel that you know things that should be open sourced this type of technology it's so advanced that the developer needs to understand that the tester needs to understand that certainly the customer needs to understand it you need to publish papers and be very very transparent with this domain because if it is in fact you know black box and it's given the authority to automate something like you know shut down the power or do things like that that's when things really start to get dangerous so good TK what wondered you know give us the latest on stealthWatch there you know Cisco's positioning when it when it comes to everything we've been talking about here you know stealthWatch again is it's been in market for quite some time it's actually been in market since 2001 and when I when I look back and see how much has changed you know how we've had to keep up with the market and again it's not just the algorithms rewrite for detection it's the environments have changed right but when did when did multi-cloud happen so so operating again cusp it's not that stealthWatch wants to go their customers are going there and they want the stealthWatch function across their digital business and so you know we've had to make advancements on the changing topology we've had to make advancements because of things like dark data you know the the network's opaque now right we have to have a lot of inference so we've just you know kept up and stayed ahead of it you know we've been spending a lot of time talking to developer communities and there's a lot of open-source tooling out there that that's helping enable developers specifically in security space you were talking about open-source earlier how does what you've been doing the self watch intersect with that yeah that's always interesting too because there's been sort of a shift in let's call them the cool kids right the cool kids they want everything is code right so it's not about what's on glass or you know a single pane of glass anymore it's it's what stealth watches code right what's your router as code look at dev net right yeah yeah I mean definite is basically Cisco as code and it's beautiful because that is infrastructure as code I mean that is the future and so all the products not just stealthWatch have beautiful api's and that's that's really exciting I've been saying for a while now it's do you I think you agree is that that is a big differentiator for Cisco I think you you're one of the few if not the only large established player and the enterprise that has figured out that sort of infrastructure is code play others have tried and are sort of getting there but you know start/stop you use a term that really cool is like living off the land you know bear bear grylls like the guy who lives down so bad so and and and threat actors are doing that now they're using your own installed software and tooling to hack you and and steal from you how were you dealing with that problem yeah it's a tough one and like I said you know much respect the the adversary is talented and they're patient they're well funded okay that's that's where it starts and so you know why why bring why bring an interpreter to a host when there's already one there right why right all this complicated software distribution when I can just use yours and so that's that's where the the play the game starts and and the most advanced threats aren't leaving footprints because the footprints are already there you know they'll get on a machine and behaviorally they'll check the cache to see what's hot and what's hot in the cache means that behaviorally it's a path they can go they're not cutting a new trail most of the time right so living off the land is not only the tools that they're using the automation your automation they're using against you but it's also behavioral and so that that makes it you know it makes it harder it's it impossible no can we make it harder for them yes so yeah no I'm having fun and I've been doing this for over twenty five years every week it's something new well it's a hard problem you're attacking and you know Robert Herjavec who came on the cube sort of opened my eyes and you think about what are we securing we're securing everything I mean a critical infrastructure were essentially exerted securing the entire global economy and he said something that really struck me it's an 86 trillion dollar economy we spend point zero one four percent on securing that economy and it's nothing now of course he's an entrepreneur and he's pimping for his is his business but it's true we are barely scratching the surface of this problem yeah I'm and it's changing I mean it's changing it could it be better yes it is changing his board awareness you know twenty years ago then right me to a dinner party they you know what does your husband do I'd say you know cyber security or something they'd roll their eyes and change the subject now they asked me the same question so oh you know my computer's running really slow right these are not this is everyone I'm worried about a life hack yeah how do I protect myself or what about these coming off the bank I mean that's those guys a dinner table cover every party so now now you know I just make something up I don't do cybersecurity I just you know a tort or a jipner's you've been to this business forever I can't remember have I ever asked you the superhero question what is that your favorite superhero that's a tough one there's all the security guys I know they like it's always dreamed about saving the world [Laughter] you're my superhero man I love what you do I think you've a great asset for Cisco and Cisco's customers really thanks TK give us a final word if people want to you know find out more about about what Cisco's doing read more of what you're working on but what's some of the best resource I have to go do you know just drop by the web pages I mean everything's published out that like I said even even for the super nerdy you know we published all our our laurs security analytics papers I think we're over 50 papers published in the last 12 years TK thank you so much always a pleasure to catch alright yeah and a travels thank you so much for de Villante I'm Stu Mittleman John furrier is also in the house we will be back with lots more coverage here from Cisco live 20/20 in Barcelona thanks for watching the keys [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] live from Barcelona Spain it's the cube covering Cisco live 2020s brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners hello and welcome back to the cubes live coverage it's our fourth day of four days of coverage here in Barcelona Spain for Cisco live 2020 I'm John Faria my co-host to many men to great guests here in the dev net studio where the cube is sitting all week long been packed with action mindy Whaley senior director developer experiences but dev net and partner a senior director welcome back to this cube good to see you guys glad to be here so we've had a lot of history with you guys what from day one yes watching def net from an idea of hey we should develop earthing you also have definite create yes separate more developer focused definite is Cisco's developer environment we've been here from the beginning what a progression congratulations on the success thank you thank you so much it's great to be here in Barcelona with everybody here you know learning in the workshops and we just love these times to connect with our community at Cisco live and it definitely ate what you mentioned which is coming up in March so it's right around the corner def net zone which we're in it's been really robust spins it's been the top of the show every year and it gets bigger and the sessions are packed because people are learning developers new developers as well as Cisco engineers who were certified coming in getting new skills as the modern cloud hybrid environments are new skills is a technology shift yeah exactly and what we have in the definite zone are different ways that the engineers and developers can engage with that technology shift so we have demos around IOT and security and showing how you know to prevent threats from attacking the Industrial routers and things like that we have coding workshops from you know beginning intro to Python intro to get all the way up through advanced like kubernetes topics and things like that so people can really dive in with what they're looking for and this year we're really excited because we have the new definite certifications with those exams coming out right around the corner in February so a lot of people are here saying I'm ready to skill up for those exams I'm starting to dive into this topic well Susie we was on she's the chief of deaf net among other things and she said there's gonna be a definite 500 the first 500 certifications of deaf net are gonna be kind of like the Hall of Fame or you know the inaugural or founder certifications so can you explain what this it means it's not a definite certification badge it's a series of write different sir can you deeper in then yeah just like we have our you know existing network certifications which are so respected and loved around the world people get CCIE tattoos and things just like there's an associate and professional and expert level on the networking truck there's now a definite associate a definite professional and coming soon definite expert and then there's also specialist badges which help you add specific skills like data center automation IOT WebEx so it's a whole new set of certifications that are more focused on the software so there are about 80 80 % software skills 20 percent knowledge of networking and then how you really connect up and down the stock so these are new certifications not replacing anything all the same stuff they're new they're part of the same program they have the same rigor the same kind of tests they actually have ways to enter weave with the existing networking certifications because we want people to do both skill paths right to build this new IT team of the future and so it's a completely new set of exams the exams are gonna be available to take February 24th and you can start signing up now so with the definite 500 you know that's gonna be a special recognition for the first 500 people who get dead note certifications it'll be a lifetime achievement they'll always be in the definite 500 right and I've had people coming up and telling me you know I'm signed up for the first day I'm taking my exams on the first day I'm trying to get into them you and I only always want to be on the lift so I think we might be on them and what's really great is with the certifications we've heard from people in the zone that they've been coming and taking classes and learning these skills but they didn't have a specific way to map that to their career path to get rewarded at work you know to have that sort of progression and so with the certifications they really will have that and it's also really important for our partners and par is doing a lot of work with certifications and partners yeah definitely that would love to hear a little bit we've interviewed on the cube over the years some of the definite partners from a technology standpoint of course the the channels ecosystem hugely important to Cisco's business gives the update as to you know definite partnering as well as what will these certifications mean to both the technology and go to market partners yeah the wonderful thing about this is it really demonstrates Cisco's embracement of software and making sure that we're providing that common language for software developers and networkers to bring the two together and what we've found is that our partners are at different levels of maturity along that progression of program ability and this new definite specialization which is anchored in the individuals that are now certified at that partner allow them to demonstrate from a go-to-market standpoint from a recognition standpoint that as a practice they have these skills and look at the end of the day it's all about delivering what our customers need and our customers are asking us for significant help in automation digital transformation they're trying to drive new business outcomes and this this will provide that recognition on on who to partner with in the market it's so important I remember when Cisco helped a lot of the partner ecosystem build data center practices went from the silos and now embracing you've got the hardware the software we're talking multi cloud it's the practice that is needed today going forward to help customers with where they're going it really is and and another benefit that we're finding and talking to our partners is we're packaging this up and rolling it out is not only will it help them from a recognition standpoint from a practice standpoint and from a competitive differentiation standpoint but it'll also help them attract challenge I mean it's no secret there is a talent shortage right now if you talk to any CEO that's top of mind and how these partners are able to attract these new skills and attract smart people smart people like working on smart things right and so this has really been a big traction point for them as well it's also giving ways to really specifically train for new job roles so some of the ways that you can combine the new definite certifications with the network engineering certifications we've looked at it and said you know there's there's a role of Network automation developer that's a new role everyone we ask in one of our sessions who needs that person on their team so many customers partners raise their hands like we want the network Automation developer on our team and you can combine you know your CCNP Enterprise with a definite certification and build up the skills to be that Network automation developer certainly has been great buzz I got to get your guys thoughts because certainly it's for careers and you guys are betting on the the people and the people are betting on Cisco mm-hmm yes this is what's going on submit surety of Devin it almost it's like a pinch me moment for you guys because you continue to grow I got to ask you what are some of the cool things that you're showing here as you mature you still have the start here session which is intro to Python and other things pretty elementary and then there's more advanced things what are some of the new things that's going on yeah that you could share so some of the new things we've got going on and one of my favorites is the IOT insecurity demonstration there's a an industrial robot arm that's picking and placing things and you can see how it's connected to the network and then something goes wrong with that robot alarm and then you can actually show how you can use the software and security tools to see was there code trying to access you know something that that robot was it was using it's getting in the way of it working so you could detect threats and move forward on that we also have a whole automation journey that starts from modeling your network to testing to how you would deploy automation to a deep dive on telemetry and then ends with multi domain automation so really helping engineers like look at that whole progression that's been that's been really popular Park talked about the specialization which ones are more popular or entry-level which ones are people coming into getting certified first network engineering automation first or what's the yeah so we're so the program is going to roll out with three different levels one is a specialized level the second is an advanced level and then we'll look to that third level again they're anchored in the in the individual certs and so as we look for that entry level it's really all about automation right I mean some things you take for granted but you still need these new skills to be able to automate and scale and have repeatable scalable benefits from that this the second tier will be more cross-domain and that's where we're really thinking that an additional skill set is needed to deliver dashboard experience compliance experiences and then that next level again we'll anchor towards the expert level that's coming out but one thing I want to point out is in addition to just having the certified people on staff they also have to demonstrate that they have a practice around it so it's not just enough to say I've passed an exam as we work with them to roll out the practice and they earn the badge they're demonstrating that they have the full methodology in place so that it really there's a lot behind it that means we can't be in the 500 list then even if a 500 list I don't know that the cube would end up being specialized its advertising no seriously all fun it's all fun it's Cisco live in Europe is there a difference between European and USD seeing any differences in geographic talent you know in the first couple years we did it I think there was a bigger difference it felt like there were different topics that were very popular in the US slightly different in Europe last year and this year I feel like they have converged it's it's the same focus on DevOps automation security as a huge focus in both places and it also feels like the the interest and level of the people attending has also converged it's really similar congratulations been fun to watch the rise and success of Devon it continues to be strong how see in the hub here and the definite zone behind us pact sessions yes what's the biggest surprise for you guys in terms of things that you didn't expect or some of the success what's what's jumped out yeah I think you know one of the points that I want to make sure we also cover and it has been an added benefit we're hoping it would happen we just didn't realize it would happen this soon we're attracting new companies new partners so the specialization won't just be available for our traditional bars this is also available for our non resale and we are finding different companies accessing definite resources and learning these skills so that's been a really great benefit of Deb net overall definitely my favorite surprises are when I show up at the community events and I hear from someone I met last year what the what they went back and did and the change that they drove and they come in their company and I think we're seeing those across the board of people who start a grassroots movement take back some new ideas really create change and then they come back and we get to hear about that from them those are my favorite surprises and I tell you we've known for years how important the developer is but I think the timing on this has been perfect because it is no longer just oh the developer has some tools that they like in the corner the developer connected to the business and driving things forward exactly so perfect timing congratulations on this certification their thing that's been great is that our at Cisco itself we now have API is across the whole portfolio and up and down the stock so that's been a wonderful thing to see come together because it opens up possibilities for all these developers so Cisco's API first company we are building it guys everywhere we can and and that the community is is taking them and finding creative things to build it's been fun to watch you guys change Cisco but also impact customers has been great to watch far many thanks for coming up yeah games live coverage here in Barcelona for Cisco live 20/20 I'm John Ford Dave Dave Alon face to many men we right back with more after this short break [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you live from Barcelona Spain it's the cube covering Cisco live 2020 brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners hello and welcome back to the cubes live coverage here at Cisco live 20/20 and partial into Spain I'm John first evening men cube coverage we've got a lot of stuff going on with Cisco multi-cloud and cloud technologies of clarification of Cisco's happening in real time is happening right now cloud is here here to stay we got two great guests to unpack what's going on in cloud native and networking and applications as the modern infrastructure and software evolves we got eugene kim global product marketing and compute storage at cisco global part of marketing manager and fabio corey senior director cloud solutions marketing guys great comeback great thanks for coming back appreciate it thanks very much great to see a lot of guys so probably we've had multiple conversations and usually even out from the sales force given kind of the that the discussion and the motivation cloud is big it's here it's here to stay it's changing Cisco API first we hear and all the products it's changing everything what's the story now what's going on I would say you know the reason why we're so excited about the launch here in Barcelona it's because this time it's all about the application experience I mean the last two years we've been announcing some really exciting stuff in the cloud space right think about all the announcements with the AWS the Google's the Azure so the world but this time it really boils down to making sure that is incredibly hyper distributed world well there is an application explosion ultimately we will help for the right operations tools and infrastructure management tools to ensure that the right application experience will be guaranteed for the end customer and that's incredibly important because at the end what really really matters is that you will ensure the best possible digital experience to your customer otherwise ultimately nothing is gonna work and of course you're going to lose your brand and your customers one of the main stories that we're covering is the transformation of the industry also Cisco and one of the highlights to me was the opening keynote you had app dynamics first not networking normally it's like what's under the hood the routers and the gear no it was about the applications this is the story we're seeing it's kind of a quiet unveiling it's not yet a launch but it's evolving very quickly can you share what's going on behind this all this absolutely it's exactly along the lines of what I was saying a second ago in the end that the reason why we're driving the announcement if you want from the application experience side of the house is because without dynamics we already have a very very powerful application performance measurement tool which it's evolving extremely rapidly first of all after Amex can correlate not just the application performance to some technology kpi's but to true actual business KPIs so AB dynamics can give you for instance the real-time visibility of say a marketing funnel conversion rates transactions that you're having in your in your business operation now we're introducing an incredibly powerful new capability that takes the bar to a whole new level and that's the dynamics experience journey Maps what are those it's actually the ability of focusing not so much on front-ends and backends and databases performances but really focusing on what the user is seeing in front of his or her screen and so what really matters is capturing the journey that a given user of your application is is being and understanding whether the experience is the one that you want to deliver oh you have like a sudden drop of somewhere and you know why that is important because in the end we've been talking about is it a problem of the application performance user performance well it could be a badly designed page how do you know and so this is a very precious information is that were giving to application developers not just to the IT ops guys that is incredibly precious to get this in so you just brought up that journey so that's part of the news so just break down real quick one minute yeah what the news is yeah so we have three components the first one as you as you correctly pointed out is really introduction the application journey Maps right the experience journey Maps that's very very important the second is we are actually integrating after am it's with the inter-site action inter-site optimization manager the workload team is a workload promisor and so because there is a change of data between the two now you are in a position to immediately understand whether you have an application problem we have a workload problem or infrastructure problem which is ultimate what you really need to do as quickly as you can and thirdly we have introduced a new version of our hyper flex platform which is hyper-converged flat G flat for Cisco with a fully containerized version we tax free if you want as well there is a great platform for containerized application of parameter so you teen when I've been talking to customers last few years when they go through their transformational journey there's the modernization they need to do the patterns I've seen most successful is first you modernize the platform often HCI is you know and often for that it really simplifies the environment you know reduces the silos and has more of that operational model that looks closer to what the cloud experience is and then if I've got a good platform then I can modernize the applications on top of it but often those two have been a little bit disconnected it feels like the announcements now that they are coming together what are you seeing what are you hearing how is your solution set solving this issue yeah exactly I mean as we've been talking to our customers love them are going through different application modernisations and kubernetes and containers is extremely important to them and to build a container cloud on Prem is extremely one of their needs and so there's three distinctive requirements that they've kind of talked to us about a lot of it has to be able to it's got to be very simple very turnkey and a fully integrated ready to turn on the other one is something that's very agile right very DevOps friendly and the third being a very economic container cloud on Prem as far we mentioned high flex application platform takes our hyper-converged system and builds on top of it a integrated kubernetes platform to deliver a container as a service type capability and it provides a full stack fully supported element platform for our customers and the one of the best great aspects of is that's all managed from inside from the physical infrastructure to the hyper-converged layer to all the way to the container management so it's very exciting to have that full stack management and insight as well yeah it's great to you know John and I have been following this kubernetes wave you know since the early early days Fabio mentioned integrations with the Amazons and Google's the world because you know a few years ago you talked to customers and they're like oh well I'm just gonna build my own urbanity right back nobody ever said that is easy now just delivering at his service seems to be the way most people wanted so if I'm doing it on Amazon or Google they've got their manage service that I could do that or that they're through partners they're working with so explain what you're doing to make it simpler in the data center environment because I'm tram absolutely is a piece of that hybrid equation the customers need yes so essentially from the customer experience perspective as I mentioned it's very fairly turnkey right from the hyper flicks application platform we're taking our hyper grew software we're integrating a application virtualization layer on top of it Linux KVM based and then on top of that we're integrating the kubernetes stack on top as well and so in essence right it's a fully curated kubernetes stack right it has all the different elements from the networking from the storage elements and and providing that in a very turnkey way and as I mentioned the inner site management is really providing that simplicity that customers need for that management ok Fabio this the previous announcement you've made with the public clouds yeah this just ties into those hybrid environments that's exactly you know a few years ago people like oh is there gonna be a distribution that wins in kubernetes we don't think that's the answer but still I can't just move between kubernetes you know seamlessly yet but this is moving towards that direction so a lot of customers want to have a very simple implementation at the same time they want of course a multi cloud approach and I really care about you know marking the difference between you know multi-cloud hybrid cloud there's been a lot of confusion but if you think about it multi cloud is really rooted into the business need of harnessing innovation from whatever it comes from you know the different clouds PV different things and you know what they do today tomorrow it could even change so people want option maladie so they want a very simple implementation that's integrated with public cloud providers that simplifies their life in terms of networking security and application of workload management and we've been executing towards that goal to fundamentally simplify the operations of these pretty complex kind of hybrid environments I want you to nail that operations on ibrid that's where multi cloud comes in absolutely just a connection point absolutely you're not a shitty mice no isn't a shit so in order to fulfill your business like your I know business needs you then you have a hybrid problem and you want to really kind of have a consistent production rate environment between fins on Prem that you own and control versus things that you use and you want to control better now of course there are different school of thoughts but most of the customers who are speaking with really want to expand their governance and technology model right to the cloud as opposed to absorb in different ways of doing things from each and every clock I want to unpack a little bit of what you said earlier about the knowing where the problem is because a lot of times it's a point the finger at the other first and where's it's the application problem isn't a problem so I want to get into that but first I want to understand the hyper flex application platform Eugene if you could just share the main problem that you guys saw what did some of the pain points that customers had what problems does the AP solve yeah as I mentioned it's really the platform for our customers to modernize their applications on right and it addresses those things that they're looking for as far as the economics right really the ability to provide a full stack container experience without having to you know but you know bringing any third party hypervisor licenses as well as support cost so that's fully integrated there you have your integrated hyper-converged storage capability you have the cloud-based management and that's really developing you providing that developer DevOps simplicity from the data Julie that they're looking for internally as well as for their product production environments and then the other aspect is its simplicity to be able to manage all this right in the entire lifecycle management as well so it's the operational side of the whole yeah uncovers Papio on the application side where the problem is because this is where I'm a little bit skeptical you know normally rightfully so but I can see in a problem where it's like whose fault is it gasification is problem or the network I mean it runs into more serious workloads the banking app that's having trouble how do you know where it what the problem is and how do you solve that problem what what's going on for that specific issue absolutely and you know the name of the game here is breaking down this operational side right and I love what our app dynamics VP GM Danny winoker said you know it has this terminology beast DevOps which you know may sound like an interesting acrobatics but it's absolutely true the business has to be part of this operational kind of innovation because as you said you know developer edges you know drops their containers and their code to the IET ops team but you don't really know whether the problem a certain point is gonna be in the code or in how the application is actually deployed or maybe a server that doesn't have enough CPU so in the end it boils down to one very important thing you have to have visibility inside and take action and every layer of the stack I mean instrumentation absolutely there are players that only do it in their software overlay domain the problem is very often these kind of players assume that underneath links are fine and very often they're not so in the end this visibility inside inaction is the loop that everybody is going after these days to really get to the next if you want generational operation where you gotta have a constant feedback loop and making it more faster and faster because in the end you can only win in the marketplace right regardless of your IT ops if you're faster than your competitor well still still was questioning the GM of AppDynamics running observability and he's like no it's not to feature it's everywhere so he his comment was yeah but serve abilities don't really talk about it because it's big din do you agree with that absolutely it has to be at every layer of the stack and only if you have visibility inside an action through the entire stack from the software all the way to the infrastructure level that you can solve the problem otherwise the finger-pointing quote-unquote will continue and you will not be able to gain the speed that you need okay so the question on my mind I want to get both of you guys can weigh in on this is that you look at Cisco as a company you got a lot going on I mean a guy's huge customer base core routers - no applications there's a lot going on a lot of a lot of complexity you got IOT security Ramirez talked about that you got the WebEx rooms got totally popular it's kind of got a lot of glam to it having the WebEx kind of you know I guess what virtual presence was yeah telepresence kind of model and then you get cloud is there a mind share within the company around how cloud is baked into everything because you can't do IOT edge without having some sort of cloud operational things so there's stuff you're talking about is not just a division it's kind of gonna it's kind of threads everywhere across Cisco what's the what's the mind share right now within the Cisco teams and also customers around clarification well I would say it's it's a couple of dimension the first one is the cloud is one of the critical domains of this multi domain architecture that of course is the cornerstone of Cisco's technology strategy right if you think about it it's all about connecting users to applications wherever they are and not just the user the applications themselves like if you look at the latest stats from IDC 58% of workloads is heading to the public cloud and to the edge it's like the data center is literally exploding in many different directions so you have this highly distributed kind of fabric guess what sits in between all these applications and microservices is a secure network and that's exactly what we're executing upon now that's the first kind of consideration the second is if you look at the other silver line most of the Cisco technology innovation is also going a direction of absorbing cloud as a simplified way of managing all the components or the infrastructure you look at the IP flex ap is actually managed by inter site which is a SAS kind of component this journey started a long time ago with Cisco Meraki and then of course we have SAS properties like WebEx everything else is kind of absolutely migrants reporter we've been reporting eugen that from years ago we saw the movement where api's are starting to come in when you go back five years ago not a lot of the gear and stuff at Cisco had api's now you got api's building into all the new products that's right you see the software shift with you know you know intent-based networking to AppDynamics it's interesting it's you're seeing kind of this agile mindset this is some of you and I talk about all the time but agile now is the new model is it ready for customers I mean the normal Enterprise is still got the infrastructure and application it's separated okay how do I bring it together what are you guys seeing the customer base what's going on with with not that not the early adopters heavy-duty hardcore pioneers out there but you know the the general mainstream enterprise are they there yet have they had that moment of awakening yeah I mean I think they they are there because fundamentally it's all about that ensuring that application experience and you can only ensure that application experience right by having your application teams and your structure teams work together and that's what's exciting you mentioned the API is and what we've done there with AppDynamics integrating with inter-site workload optimizer as Fabio mentioned it's all about visibility inside action and what app dynamics is provides providing that business and end-user application performance experience visibility inner sites giving you know visibility on the underlining workload and the resources whether it's on Prem in your you know drive data center environment or in different type of cloud providers so you get that full stack visibility right from the application all the way down to the bottom and then inner side local optimizer is then also optimizing the resources to proactively ensure that application experience so before you know if we talk about someone at a checkout and they're about to have abandonment because the functions not working we're able to proactively prevent that and take a look at all that so you know in the end I think it's all about ensuring that application experience and what we're providing with app dynamics is for the application team is kind of that horizontal visibility of how that application is performing and at the same time if there's an issue the infrastructure team could see exactly within the workload topology where the issue is and insert' aeneas lee whether it be manual intervention or even automatically there's or a ops capability go ahead and provide that action so the action could be you know scaling out the VMS it's on-prem or looking at a new different type of ec2 template in the cloud that's what's very exciting about this it's really the application experience is now driving and optimizing infrastructure in real time and let me flip your question like do you even have a choice John when you think about in the next two years 50% more applications if you're a large enterprise you have 5 to 7,000 apps you have another to 3,000 applications just coming into into the the frame and then 50% of the existing ones that are gonna be refactor lifted and shifted or replace or retired by SAS application it's just like it's tsunami that's that's coming on you and oh by the way because of again the micro service is kind of affect the number of dependencies between all these applications is growing incredibly rapidly like last year we were eight average interdependencies for applications now we are 20 so imaging imaging what happens as as you are literally flooded with the way the scanner really you have to ensure that your application infrastructure fundamentally will get tied up as quickly as you can still and I have been toilet for at least five years now if not longer the networking has been the key kind of last changeover - clarification and I would agree with you guys I think I've asked the question because I wanted to get your perspective but think about it it's 13 years since the iPhone so mobile has shown people that a mobile app can change business but now if you look at the pressure the network's bringing the pressure on the network or the pressure for the network to be better than programmable is the rise of video and data I mean so you got mobile check now you've got video I mean more people doing video now than ever before videos of consumer oil as streaming you got data these two things absolutely forced yeah the customers to deal with it but what really tipped the the balance John is is actually the SAS effect is the cloud effect because as you know it's in IT sort of inflection points nothing is linear right so once you reach a certain critical mass of cloud apps and we're absolutely there already all of a sudden you're traffic pattern on your network changes dramatically so why in the world are you continuing kind of you know concentrating all of your traffic in your data center and then going to the internet you have to absolutely open the floodgates at the branch level as close to the users as possible and that implies a radical change I would even add to that and I think you guys are right on where you guys are going it may be hard to kind of tease out with all the complexity with Cisco but in the keynote the business model shifts come from SAS so you got all this technical stuff going on now you have this Asif ocation or cloud that's changes the business models so new entrants can come in and existing players can get better so I think that whole business model conversation yeah never was discussed at Cisco live before yeah in depth as well hey run your business connect your hubs campus move packets around that was applications in business model yeah but also the fact that there is increasing number of software capabilities and so fundamental you want to simplify the life of your customers through subscription models that help the customer by now using what they really need right at any given point in time all the way to having enterprise agreements I also think that's about delivering these application experiences for your business small different type experience that's really what's differentiating you from your different competitors right and so I think that's a different type of shift as well well you guys are good got some good angle on this cloud I love it I got to ask you the question what can we expect next from Cisco more progression along clarification what's next well I would say we've been incredibly consistent I believe in the last few years in executing on our cloud strategy which again is centered around helping customers really gluon this mix set of data centers and clouds to make it work as one write as much as possible and so what we really deliver is networking security and application of performance management and we're integrating there's more and more on the two sides of the equation right the the designer side and the powerful outside and more more integrating in between all of these layers again to fundamentally give you this operational capability to get faster and faster we'll continue doing so and you set up before we came on camera that you were talking to the sales teams what are they what's their vibe with the sales team they get excited by this what's that oh yeah feedback oh yeah absolutely from the inner side were claw optimizer and they have dynamics that's very exciting for them especially the conversations they're having with their customers really from that application experience and proactively insuring it and on the hyper flex application platform side this is extremely exciting with providing a container cloud to our customers and you know what's coming down is more and more capabilities for our customers to modernize their applications on hyper flex you guys are riding some pretty big waves here at Cisco I get a cloud way to get the IOT Security wave it's pretty exciting pretty big stuff thanks for coming in thanks for sharing the insights Fabio I appreciate it thank you for having us your coverage here in Barcelona I'm John Force dude Minutemen be back with more coverage fourth day of four days of cube coverage we right back after this short break [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] why Trump Barcelona Spain it's the cube covering Cisco live 2020 rot to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners welcome back to Barcelona everybody we're here at Cisco live and you're watching the cube the leader in live tech coverage we got to the events and extract the signal from the noise this is day one really we started a zero yesterday Eric Hertzog is here he's the CMO and vice president of storage channels probably been on the cube more than [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] live from Barcelona Spain it's the cube covering Cisco live 2020 rot to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners welcome back everyone's two cubes live coverage day four of four days of wall-to-wall action here in Barcelona Spain Francisco live 2020 I'm John Ferrier with mykos Dave Volante with a very special guest here to wrap up Cisco live the president of Europe Middle East Africa and Russia Francisco Wendy Mars cube alumni great to see you thanks for coming on to kind of put a bookend to the show here thanks for joining us right there it's absolutely great to be here thank you so what a transformation as Cisco's business model of continues to evolve we've been saying brick by brick we still think is a big move coming I think there's more action I can sense the walls talking to us like let's just go live in the US and more technical announcements in the next 24 months you can see you can see where it's going it's cloud its apps yeah its policy based program ability it's really a whole nother business model shift for you and your customers the technology shift and the business model shift so I want to get your perspective of this year opening key no you let it off talking about the philosophy of the business model but also the first presenter was not a networking guy it was an application person yeah app dynamics yep this is a shift what's going on with Cisco what's happening what's the story well you know if you look for all of the work that we're doing is but is really driven by what we see from requirements from our customers the change that's happening in the market and it is all around you know if you think digital transformation is the driver organizations now are incredibly interested in how do they capture that opportunity how do they use technology to help them but you know if you look at it really there's the three items that are so important it's the business model evolution it's actually the business operations for for organisations plus their people there are people in the communities within that those three things working together and if you look at it with you know it's so exciting with application dynamics there because if you look for us within Cisco that linkage of the application layer through into the infrastructure into the network and bringing that linkage together is the most powerful thing because that's the insight and the value our customers are looking for you know we've been talking about the in the innovation sandwich you know you got you know date in the middle and you got technology and applications underneath that's kind of what's going on here but you I'm glad you brought up the year the part about business model business operations and people in communities because during your keno you had a slide that laid out three kind of pillars yes people in communities business model and business operations there was no 800 series in there there was no product discussions this is fundamentally the big shift that business models are changing I tweeted provocatively the killer app and digital the business model because you think about it the applications are the business and what's running under the covers is the technology but it's all shifting and changing so every single vertical every single business is impacted by this it's not like a certain secular thing in the industry this is a real change can you describe how those three things are operating with that constitute think if you look from you know so thinking through those three areas if you look at the actual business model itself our business models as organizations are fundamentally changing and they're changing towards as consumers we are all much more specific about what we want we have incredible choice in the market we are more informed than ever before but also we are interested in the values of the organizations that were getting the capability from as well as the products and the services that naturally we're looking to gain so if you look in that business model itself this is about you know organizations making sure they stay ahead from a competitive standpoint about the innovation of portfolio that they're able to bring but also that they have a strong strong focus around the experience that their customer gains from an application a touch standpoint that all comes through those different channels which is at the end of the day the application then if you look as to how do you deliver that capability through the systems the tools and the processes as we all evolve our businesses you have to change the dynamic within your organization to cope with that and then of course in driving any transformation the critical success factor is your people and your culture you need your teams with you the way teams operate now is incredibly different it's no longer command and control its agile capability coming together you need that to deliver on any transformation never never mind let it be smooth you know in the execution there so it's all three together what I like about that model and I have to say we this is you know ten years to do in the cube you you see that marketing in the vendor community often leads what actually happens not surprising as we entered the last decade it was a lot of talk about cloud well it kind of was a good predictor we heard a lot about digital transformations a lot of people roll their eyes and think it's a buzzword but we really are I feel like an exiting this cloud era into the digital era it feels real and there are companies that you know get it and are leaning in there are others that maybe you're complacent I'm wondering what you're seeing in in Europe just in terms of everybody talks digital yeah be CEO wants to get it right but there is complacency there when it's a services say well I'm doing pretty well not on my watch others say hey we want to be the disruptors and not get disrupted what are you seeing in the region in terms of that sentiment I would say across the region you know there will always be verticals and industries that are slightly more advanced than others but I would say that then the bulk of conversations that I'm engaged in independence of the industry or the country in which we're having that conversation in there is a acceptance of transfer digital transformation is here it is affecting my business i if I don't disrupt I myself will be disrupted and be challenged help me so I you know I'm not disputing the end state I need guidance and support to drive the transition and a risk mythic mitigated manner and they're looking for help in that and there's actually pressure in the boardroom now around a what are we doing within within organizations within that enterprise the service right of the public said to any type of style of company there's that pressure point in the boardroom of come on we need to move it speed now the other thing about your model is technology plays a role in contribute it's not the be-all end-all but plays a role in each of those the business model of business operations and developing and nurturing communities can you add more specifics what role do you see technology in terms of advancing those three spheres so I think you know if you look at it technology is fundamental to all of those spheres in regard to the innovation the differentiation technology can bring then the key challenges one of being able to reply us in a manner where you can really see differentiation of value within the business so in then the customers organization otherwise it's just technology for the sake of technology so we see very much a movement now to this conversation of talk about the use case the use cases the way by which that innovation can be used to deliver the value to the organization and also different ways by which a company will work look at the collaboration capability that we announced earlier this week of helping to bring to life that agility look at the app D discussion of helping to link the layer of the application into the infrastructure the network's to get to root cause identification quickly and to understand where you may have a problem before you thought it actually arises and causes downtime many many ways I think the agility message has always been a technical conversation a gel methodology technology software development no problem check that's ten years ago but business agility mmm it's moving from a buzzword to reality exactly that's what you're kind of getting in here and teams how teams operate how they work you know and being able to be quick efficient stand up stand down and operate in that way you know we were kind of thinking out loud on the cube and just riffing with Fabio gory on your team on Cisco's team about clarification with Eugene Kim around just just kind of real-time what was interesting is we're like okay it's been 13 years since the iPhone and so 13 years of mobile in your territory in Europe Middle East Africa mobilities been around before the iPhone so with in more advanced data privacy much more advanced in your region so you got you out you have a region that's pretty much I think the tell signs for what's going on in North America and around the world and so you think about that you say okay how is value created how the economics changing this is really the conversation about the business model is okay if the value activities are shifting and be more agile and the economics are changing with sass if someone's not on this bandwagon it's not an in-state discussion where it's done deal yeah it's but I think also there were some other conversation which which are very prevalent here is in in the region so around trust around privacy law understanding compliance you look at data where data resides portability of that data GDP are came from Europe you know and as ban is pushed out and those conversations will continue as we go over time and if I also look at you know the dialogue that you saw so you know within World Economic Forum around sustainability that is becoming a key discussion now within government here in Spain you know from a climate standpoint and many other areas as well Dave and I've been riffing around this whole where the innovation is coming from it's coming from Europe region not so much the u.s. I mean us discuss some crazy innovations but look at blockchain us is like don't touch it pretty progressive outside United States little bit dangerous to but that's where innovation is coming from and this is really the key that we're focused on I want to get your thoughts on how do you see it going next level the next level next-gen business model what's your what's your vision so I think there'll be lots of things if we look at things like with the introduction of artificial intelligence robotics capability 5g of course you know on the horizon we have Mobile World Congress here in Barcelona in a few weeks time and if you talked about with the iPhone the smartphone of course when 4G was introduced no one knew what the use case would that would be it was the smartphone which wasn't around at that time so with 5g in the capability there that will bring again yet more change to the business model for different organizations and the capability and what we can bring to market when we think about AI privacy data ownership becomes more important some of the things you were talking about before it's interesting what you're saying John and when the the GDP are set the standard and and you see in the u.s. there are stovepipes for that standard California is going to do one every state is going to have a different center that's going to slow things down that's going to slow down progress do you see sort of an extension of a GDP are like framework of being adopted across the region and that potentially you know accelerating some of these you know sticky issues and public policy issues that can actually move the market forward I think I think the will because I think there'll be more and more you know if you look at there's this terminology of data is the new oil what do you do with data how do you actually get value from that data and make intelligent business decisions around that so you know that's critical but yet if you look for all of ours we are extremely passionate about you know where is our data used again back to trust and privacy you need compliance you need regulation you know I think this is just the beginning of how we will see that evolve you know when do I get your thoughts does Dave and I have been riffing for 10 years around the death of storage long live storage and but data needs to be stored somewhere networking is the same kind of conversation just doesn't go away in fact there's more pressure now forget the smartphone that was 13 years ago before that mobility data and video now super important driver that's putting more pressure on you guys and so hey we're networking so it's kind of like Moore's law it's like more networking more networking so video and data are now big your thoughts on video and data video but if you look at the Internet of the future you know what so if you look for all of us now we are also demanding as individuals around capability and access to that and inter vetted the future the next phase we want even more so there'll be more and more - you know requirement for speed availability that reliability of service the way by which we engage and we communicate there's some fundamentals there so continuing to to grow which is which is so so exciting for us so you talk about digital transformation that's obviously in the mind of c-level executives I got to believe security is up there as a topic what other what's the conversation like in the corner office when you go visit your customers so I think that there's a huge excitement around the opportunity realizing the value of the of the opportunity you know if you look at top of mind conversations are around security around making sure that you can make tank maintain that fantastic customer experience because if you don't the custom will go elsewhere how do you do that how do you enrich at all times and also looking at markets adjacencies you know as you go in and you talk at senior levels within within organizations independent of the industry in which they're in there are a huge amount of commonalities that we see across those of consistent problems by which organizations are trying to solve and actually one of the big questions is what's the pace of change that I should operate at and when is it too fast and when is what am I too slow and trying to balance that is exciting but also a challenge for companies so you feel like sentiment is still strong even though we're 10 years into this this bull market you know you got Briggs it you get you know China tensions with the US u.s. elections but but generally you see Tennessee sentiment still pretty strong and demand so I would say that the the excitement around technology the opportunity that is there around technology in its broadest sense is greater than ever before and I think it's on all of us to be able to help organizations to understand how they can consume I see value from us but it's you know it's fantastic science it tastes trying to get some economic indicators but really the real thing I'm trying to get you is Minh set of the CEO the corner office right now is it is it we're gonna we're gonna grow short-term by cutting or do we do are we gonna be aggressive and go after this incremental opportunity and it's probably both you're seeing a lot of automation yeah and I think if you look fundamentally for organizations it's it's that the three things helped me to make money how me to save money keep me out of trouble you know so those are the pivots they all operate with and you know depending on where an organization is in its journey whether a start-up there you know in in the in the mid or the more mature and some of the different dynamics and the markets in which they operate in as well there's all different variables you know so it's it's it's mix Wendy thanks so much for spending the time to come on the cube really appreciate great keynote folks watching if you haven't seen the keynote opening sections that's a good section the business model I think it's really right on I think that's going to be a conversation it's going to continue thanks for sharing that before we look before we leave I want to just ask you a question around what you what's going on for you here at Barcelona as the show winds down you had all your activities take us in the day of the life of what you do customer meetings what were some of those conversations take us inside inside what what goes on for you here well I'd say it's been an amazing it's been an amazing few days so it's a combination of customer conversations around some of the themes we just talked about conversations with partners and there's investor companies that we invest in a Cisco that I've been spending some time with and also you know spending time with the teams as well the DEF net zone you know is amazing we have this afternoon the closing session where we've got a fantastic external guest who's coming in it's going to be really exciting as well and then of course the party tonight and we'll be announcing the next location which I'm not gonna reveal now later on today we kind of figured it out already because that's our job and there's the break news but we're not gonna break it for you you can have that hey thank you so much for coming on really appreciate Wendy Martin expecting the Europe Middle East Africa and Russia for Cisco she's got our hand on the pulse and the future is the business model that's what's going on fundamental radical change across the board in all areas this the cue bringing you all the action here in Barcelona thanks for watching [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music]

>>Live from San Diego, California It's the Q Covering Koopa and Cloud Native Cot Brought to you by Red Cloud. Native Computing Pounding and its ecosystem >>Welcome back, toe Gorgeous. SAN Diego, California This is Q Khan Cloud Native Khan. 29 years. I'm still minimum. My co host is John Troyer, and this is the end of three days water wall coverage over 12,000 and 10 d Having a welcome to the program. Cassie, Who's the executive director at the national headquarters for v. American Red Cross. Matt. Thank you, American Red Cross. And thank you so much for joining us. >>Yeah. Thanks for having me. Uh, it's been a great conference so far. Uh, you know, we're here to share our story where as an end user on our journey with Cloud native with kubernetes Andi how that helps Red Cross do what we do, which is help people in need a cz best we can every day. >>Eso no matter what industry I talked to, everybody's dealing with change. There's always more things happening. American Red Cross. I mean, you know, it feels like I hear American Red Cross mentioned Maur a cz Time goes on because you know everything from, you know, things related to climate through, you know, global events and the like. So maybe before we get into some of the tech, just give us, you know, you know your role there and how kind of the changing world impact your organization. >>Sure. So my role is to support a few different business units. One is biomedical marketing. We try to recruit blood donors, too. Give blood at Red Cross Blood Dot or GE and other channels. That's obviously a significant part of what we d'oh were major player in the blood supply market in the US we provide service is to the armed forces, you know, in that regard as well. So that's part of it. Part of it is I work with humanitarian service is group as well to recruit financial donors on recruit volunteers. That's primarily through Red Cross. That or GE a T least as faras my group goes on, then corporate brand marketing and chapter related marketing and communications. So all that happens through Red Cross that Oregon Red Cross blood dot organ some related platforms on those our flagship brand products. >>Okay, And what led to the American Red Cross being part of this cloud. Native computing, Yeah, system. >>Our journey is a lot like, you know, a lot of other folks. We had a very, you know, monolithic type of architecture. We had all of these different business units with the different priorities, different timelines, different needs wrapped up into one big monster of a platform that, you know, kind of bundled up risk for everybody in this one platform. And, uh, you know, we'd always have collisions of priorities, mostly not to mention the resource issues of who's gonna work, you know, on what? At what time. And so a few years ago, we started talking about breaking that down. And, um, we've been lucky to have some technical leaders that are very aware of and welcoming to new cloud native technologies. We decided at that time to pursue, you know, a cloud native architecture. And what we have today in a few years later, is two years worth of being in production with a platform that runs on Amazon. We take advantage of a lot of the native orchestration tools there for running our clusters. And we've been able to service, you know, those different needs in a much more nimble way. We can release something for a Red Cross blood dot or without risking much on the financial donation side or on the volunteer recruitment side. And likewise, you know, for those other groups, we can kind of separate out the risks for each of those groups. And that's that's been a great, great benefit. >>You've been on the the vendor side. The for profit side is I t very different at the non profit. If you're looking, people are looking down, you get >>higher. Yeah, You know, I have been doing it a long time, a lot of different perspectives. But I think you know what I tried to do. And I would. I think I've seen work best is when I t is not the ticket taker, you know, integrated with the business. I'm very fortunate to have some business partners at Red Cross that collaborate. You know, every day we're having conversations every day. We have some people on our team that feel as though they're accountable for business outcomes, not just, you know, doing cool technology things, you know, For example, you know, multiyear evolution of process related to being more agile. We've got so much more integration and communication with business teams have gone from, you know, something like one release every five months now due to a weak, you know, and I think we could do more. It's just we don't have the need to do more. Um, and that's a huge, huge, big lift. You know, there's a lot of conversations that need to happen. Should make that work. >>Yeah, it's all a journey, right? We're all we're all improved. Continuous improvement, but so follow up there. So as a 90 leader for a very large organization, you know, they're one of the things people are saying this year. Wow. The conference is big. So many new technologies. So many new company somebody open source projects. You know, you're in the middle of this journey. You can't screw it up, right? That would be disastrous. So how do you How do you How did you and your organization look at new technologies and pick out which do technologies to try and incorporate them into your stack and your portfolio? >>Right. So we wanted to be a cloud native. We wanted a do, um, you know, focus on projects that where we knew there were skills in the marketplace, uh, that we could acquire at our price point. You know, we try to be good stewards of donor dollars at the end of the day, you know, all the money we have comes from folks like you and you guys who support Red Cross, you know, and thank you very much for all that generous support. And so we try to spend that money, uh, you know, very carefully. Way have some people who are, uh, you know, employees on our team made about 25 or so. But one of the great things we've been able to do with some of these technologies now is we have a program called Code for Good. It's a volunteer work force where we're here recruiting volunteers with the skill set that you know, they have a day job, but they have an interest in supporting Red Cross. Uh, maybe not financially. Maybe not with their blood, but they can give us some time on their skills, and we run it like an open source project. We set out a road map of features for six months or so. We have planning sessions, we say. Listen, you know if you can sign up for a feature that because you have two hours this week to work. Great. You have six hours. Great. You just had a baby, and you're not available for three months. Fine. You know, we we wanna have a, you know, a bench of people that can self select based on their time commitment, what to work on. And somehow it's been been working Great. You know, we started this in June. We have about 30 volunteers now on. We've already delivered an app for slack. That is kind of a workplace app where you can, you know, if your organization works with us, you can donate right from slack. You can give a schedule of blood donation, appointment, do things like that. >>I love that model. It's something that, you know we've looked at years ago. That kind of micro participation, if you will. You know, You think it's like, you know, Wikipedia wouldn't have been built if it wasn't for everybody. Just spending a little bit of time on it. Uh, I'm curious. Does something like participating with you know, this ecosystem I have generalized tools that people know and can plug in with, as opposed to, you know, having to know your direct stack Is that helpful To kind of be able to recruit people into that environment? What? What are the kind of most needed skills on dhe usages that you're recruiting? >>It is. You are learning. Curve at this point is much smaller than it was on our previous platform Because of the fact that we're using technologies people are familiar with, um, you know, things like Docker we use a lot. We just started evaluating Prometheus, another C N C F project for monitoring some non proud systems. Hopefully that'll graduate into production systems. So from a technology standpoint, yes, yes, we find that, you know, the people we talked with can walk in and be productive sooner. You know, there's still the Red Cross specific things they need to know about how we do business. But, um, you know, at least at this point, is that and not some proprietary system that they also have to learn >>any learnings that you've had participating in the c m. D. F. With the rollout of the technologies that you share with your peers, >>you know, I love the sea. NCF is very maintainer driven, You know, uh, and and user driven. I heard today at one of the analyst panels. I did. I think maybe 30% of people here are end users. >>That's a pretty >>large number. Um, you know, the fact that we can come here and learn about technologies meet people, meat vendors meet some of the people contributing code. Um, it's a lot different than you know, maybe some some summit sponsored by a for profit vendor that wants to, uh, you know, generate leads and sell you things. It feels much more community driven here and open to lots of different perspectives. >>So now what you looking forward to in the next few years? Both in terms of your stack and maybe coming back >>to Cuba? Yeah, way. It's funny. We've started to see other parts of Red Cross come to us toe, learn about kubernetes because the vendors they work with are mentioning these things. And and we have been early adopters, as far as you know, where across goes our group. Um and I think it's great if we can expand usage of, um, cloud native technologies to other parts of the organization on really get some economies of scale. So that's part of what we're trying to do is kind of internal, uh, consulting knowledge sharing collaboration on then, as far as what we're doing on our team way. Just really want to focus on. We're on a stable point in the platform, and then we want to do some things around monitoring and alerting that. Reduce those incident outages, too. Nothing. Hopefully, um, and work on that. >>You're working on a few projects that are that are being worked on here for That >>s So you have this Prometheus project. Like I said, we're piloting that, uh, you know, I would say in four or five months time, we'll know if that's going to be something we can, you know, put some more investment into >>All right, that want to give you the final word. Red cross dot org's code for good. I believe. The web. >>Yes, yes. >>What else? >>Your code for the number four. Good on. You know, if you're interested in volunteering, we need technical skills. We need team leadership skills, product owner skills, eh? So it's not just about you know, developing features and ops engineers as well. So thanks for your time. I want to say hi to my daughter, Peyton. It's late on the East Coast, so go to bed now, but thanks, folks. >>All right. What? Well, Matt, and actually, that is the final word for our day one of coverage for John Troyer. I'm stupid. And be sure to join us tomorrow. We've got two more days water wall coverage here. Lots of great speakers. Really appreciate. We've got the end users on. And, Matt, thank you so much. And, you know, great mission. The code for good. We definitely hope that the community here, you know, reaches out in connection Participates s Oh, that's it for today. Fixes all for watching.

(upbeat music) >> From Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the Cube, covering the Churchills, 2019. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Welcome back here Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're at the Chuchill's, it's the 9th annual award celebration put on by the Churchill club and the theme is all about leadership this year. We're really excited to have a very special guest John W. Thompson, chairman of Microsoft, a partner at Lightspeed Ventures, he's been around a long time. He's known and talks to a lot of leaders. So john, great to have you on. >> Nice to be here, thank you very much for having me. >> So leadership is such an interesting topic right? You go everything from, um, West point and trying to train young men to be leaders in a military situation to a start up that starts as some small company that had some interesting idea that grows to a huge corporate thing that's changing the world. Ya know, what are some of your thoughts as Silicon Valley is going through some hiccups right now and when you look, >> [John W. Thompson] We are? >> Just a couple little ones. >> I did recognize any of those. >> Well maybe not looking at the stock market. I don't know when that thing is coming back down. But you know when you think about leaders, what are somethings people maybe don't think about and really more interestingly how should people grow or what do you look for in a board member when you're talking to some CEO of a hot rising company? >> Well I think leadership is is as much about your personality and the business that use chose to go run is anything else. And the skills and experiences that someone might need to run a, pick a business, a business the size of Microsoft are fundamentally different than what you might need to run Rubrik, which is a company whose board I serve on. But that being said, leadership has some core principles that are critical independent of the size of the company or organization you're on. First of which is, integrity, second of which is focus, third of which is follow through and execution. There is lots of things that fundamental do and do well. And those who don't do well, don't become or stay leaders very long, that's for sure. >> It's interesting to look at Microsoft cause, ya know, three big personalities. Obviously Bill got it started as a young kid, I mean he was literally a kid in college. Um, then you had Steve Ballmer come in, completely different personalities and ya know, interesting for Bill to be willing to give up their reigns and then ya know, some tough times at Microsoft little bit stagnant and then Satya came in and just has supercharged and really driven a huge transformation in a giant big company. What are some of the attributes when you look at those three as leaders and you've worked with them, that make them so successful? >> Well, I think each of them brought something fundamentally different to the table when they were in the leadership role. In the case of Bill, he clearly was a visionary. He defined a point of view about the technology industry. That had he not done that, we wouldn't be where we are in the world today. And so, Bills role was unique. In the case of Steve, the company had hit a significant bump in the road all around the anti-trust activity. And candidly, it's my impression that Bill really didn't want to be involved in that, so he turned to Steve and says tag you're it. And Steve had a very fundamental view about execution. He was very much focus on execute, execute, execute. And if you look at the way the company preformed, its revenue grew from roughly ten, fifteen billion to almost eighty billion dollars during his term as CEO. However, the stock did not perform very well. So people weren't very happy with that. Ironically enough Satya come in, Satya had run the search business, had run the cloud business, had even run the enterprise software business. So he had a very fundamental view about of what he thought the company needed to do. And there were two issues, issues number one was strategy around cloud. And on the day of his announcement, he announced mobile first, cloud first are the strategies of Microsoft. And then he quickly, quickly made it clear that the number two issue, for the company, was about its culture. And while I am unbelievably fascinated by how much progress we've made on the product front, I'm even more encouraged by what has happened on the, candidly, on the cultural front. >> Right. So on the cultural front that is, are you a harder thing to impact especially on a large global company with hundreds of thousands of employees distributed all over the world, so what are the secrets that change culture like that? >> Its fundamental, it's about openness and honesty and candor. Um, one of the things that happens here in the valley, often for some companies is when they do their quarterly or monthly employee all hands meetings, guess what? They screen and filter all of the questions. Well, we don't do that at Microsoft office. Satya does not do that. He wants to be open and honest and candid with his employees with what's going on. My gosh! That's what real leaders do. And so I think what he has done is nothing that is unique, it's just consistent. He has been very very consistent and predictable in his execution of what openness, listening rather than talking, all of the things that good leaders are able to do. >> Right, its funny the one word you haven't said since we have been sitting here, you keep saying execution of focus, which I love focus execute and delight the customer. You haven't said strategy one single time. you said vision, but not strategy. Its interesting because I think a lot of people don't put enough emphasis on, its just work, you just got to execute. >> Its one thing to have a strategy, but if you can't execute the strategy, of what value is it? So I have always had a view in my roles as leader that it's about focus and executing. Yes, you have to come up with a vision and yes you have to create ideas that employees, and partners, and customers can become excited about. But ultimately it's about execution day in and day out. 368 days of the years, not 365. >> Alright, final question I know you've got a busy night. As you look as some leaders that you look up to, maybe not of this generation that you've been working with, but maybe of a past generation, who are some of the folks that you look to for your inspiration on the leadership side? >> Well, I would have to say the first one was the former vice chairman of IBM, who I was the chief of staff to many many many years ago. His name was Paul Rizzo. Paul was probably one of the most influential people in the company during that period of time, but you'd never know it. He had a level of humility about himself. He had a level of openness and candor in his interaction with employees at all levels up and down the line. And a company of IBM's size back in those days, it was two, three hundred thousand people big. And so he would be the first leader that comes to my mind as someone who was impactful on me. Another one would have been, a guy who created Akamai. He's on the board of Oracle and he's an awesome awesome friend of mine. He was the guy that ran the America's and gave me my first really really big job. And the fact that he was willing to give a guy like me a job like that, was a pretty important move. George Conrades is his name by the way. And so those two people were very very influential as leaders. As I would look at them and try to determine whether or not can I, can I pattern myself after that? Or are there things that they do and say and execute that I should consider as I think about my evolving leadership. >> Right so important to have people that you can look up to, learn from, and to take care of ya and help you along the way. >> [John W. Thompson] I agree >> John, thanks for spending some time it's always great to sit down with you >> Nice to see you as well. >> And continue success. We'll hopefully see you next time not to long from now. >> Lets hope not. >> Alright, he's John W. Thompson and I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching the Cube, were at the Churchill's in Santa Clara California. Thanks for watching we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> live from San Francisco celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum World 2019 brought to you by IBM wear and its ecosystem partners. >> Well, good afternoon. And welcome back to San Francisco. Where Mosconi north along with David Dante, John Wall's You're watching our coverage here. Live on the Cuba Veum world. 2019 days. I've been over on the other set. I know you've been busy on this side as well. Show going. All right for you >> so far. Yeah, A lot of action going on over here. We had a pact Hellsing on this morning, Michael Dell, with this VM wear hat, we get Sanjay Putin downtown later. >> Yeah, yeah. Good light up. And that lineup continues. Great. Use the CEO Veritas. >> Great to be here. Very John, >> actually, just outside the Veritas Meadow here. Sponsored the this area. This is the meadow set. That >> nice to be here? Yeah, I didn't know >> that. All right, just first off, just give me your your idea of the vibe here. What you are. You're feeling >> what? I think there's a tremendous amount of energy. It's been a lot of fun to be here Obviously VM was talking about this hybrid multi cloud world, and Veritas is 100% supportive of that vision. We work with all the major cloud service providers, you know, eight of us. Google. Microsoft is or we share thousands of customers with the M, where some of the biggest customers, the most complicated customers in the world, where we provide availability and protection and insights for those customers has always >> been the ethos of veritas. When you go back to the early days of Veritas, essentially, it was the storage management, you know, the no hardware agenda, the sort of independent storage company, but pure software. >> That sounds. You >> know, years ago there was no cloud, but there were different platforms, and so that that that that culture has really migrated now into this multi cloud work world. Your thoughts on that >> absolutely look, you know, I'll give an example of a customer that we worked with closely with VM wear on, and that is Renault. America's Renault is Ah, big joint venture. They've got a huge ASAP installation 8000 users 40 terabytes, Big Net backup customer. They also use their products in for a scale and V. R P for availability and D r. And they work with us because we are hardware agnostic. They looked at us against the other competitors, and we're hardware agnostic. And because of that where we came in its 60% lower TCO than those other providers. So we that hardware agnostic approach works really well. You were >> Just touch it on this great little bit when you said, You know whether Tiger, whether it's multi, whether it's private, whatever it is, you know we're here to provide solutions. The fact that this stuff is hard to figure out and really kind of boggle the mind a bit, it's very complex. Um, how much of an inhibitor is that? In terms of what you're hearing from clients and in terms of their progress and and their decision making >> well, let me explain where we sit. And we are the leader in enterprise data protection, availability and insights. We work with the largest, most complex, most high route, highly regulated and most demanding customers on the planet. 99 of the Fortune 100 are customers of Veritas. 10 of the top 10 tell coast 10 of the top 10 healthcare companies and 10 of the top 10 financial institutions. I spend about 50% of my time talking to these customers, so we learn a lot. And here the four big challenges they're facing first is the explosion of data. Data is just growing so fast, Gardner estimates will be 175 Zita bytes of data in 2025. If you cram that in, iPhones will take 2.6 trillion iPhones and go to the sun and back, right? It's an enormous amount of data. Second, they're worried about Ransomware. It's not a question off if you'll be attacked. It's when you'll be attacked. Look at what's happening in Texas right now with the 22 municipalities dealing with that. What you want in that case is a resilient infrastructure. You wanna be terrible to restore from a really good backup copy of data. Third, they want the hybrid multi cloud world, just like Pak Gil Singer has been talking about. That's what customers want, but they want to be able to protect their data wherever it is, make it highly available and get insights in the data wherever it's located. And then finally, they're dealing with this massive growth in government regulations around the world because of this concern about privacy. I was in Australia a few weeks ago and one of our customers she was telling me that she deals with 27 different regulatory environments. Another customer was saying the California Privacy Act will be the death of him. And he's based in St Louis, right? So our strategy is focused on taking away the complexity and helping the largest companies in the world deal with these challenges. And that's why we introduce the enterprise. Data Service is platform, and that's why we're here. VM world Talking >> about Greg. Let's unpack some of those, Asai said. Veritas kind of created a market way back when and now you see come full circle, you got multi cloud. You have a lot of new entrance talking about data management. That's it's always been your play, but you came to the king of the Hell's. Everybody wants a piece of your hide, so that's kind of interesting, But but data growth. So let's let's start there. So it used to be data was, ah, liability. Now it's becoming an asset. So what? What your customers saying about sort of data is something that needs to be managed, needs to be done cost effectively and efficiently versus getting more value on data. And what's Veritas is sort of perspective. >> They're really trying to get insights in their data. Okay. And, uh, that's why we acquired a company called Apt Are. So when I This is my second time of Veritas. I was here from 2003 to 2010 rejoined the company of 2018. I talked to a lot of customers. I've found that their infrastructure was so complex that storage infrastructure so complex the companies were having a hard time figuring out anything about their data. So they're having the hardest time just answering some fundamental questions that boards were asking. Boards are saying because of the ransomware threat. Is all our data protected? Is it backed up? Are all our applications backed up and protected and customers could not answer that question. On the other hand, they also were backing up some data 678 times wasting storage. What apt are does, and it's really amazing. I recommend seeing a demo of that. If you get a chance, it pulls information from Santa raise network file systems, virtual machines, uh, san networking and all data protection applications to get a complete picture of what's happening with your data. And that is one example off what customers really want. >> Okay, so then that kind of leads to the second point, which is ransomware now. Part of part of that is analytics and understanding what's going on in the system as well. So but it's a relatively new concept, right? And ransom. Where is the last couple of years? We've really started to see it escalate. How does Veritas help address that problem? And does apt our play a role there? >> Well, Veritas, it just helps it. Cos address that problem because veritas helps create a resilient infrastructure. Okay, the bad guys are going to get in spear. Phishing works. You know, you you are going to find some employees were gonna click on a link, and the malware is going to get in so all you can do to protect you ultimately have tohave a good backup copies so you can restore at scale and quickly. And so there's been a lot of focus from these large enterprises on restoring at scale very quickly after ransom or attack, it's you're not beholden. You can't be extorted by the ransom or >> the third piece was hybrid. And of course, that leads to a kind of hybrid multi cloud. Let's let's put that category out there now. I've been kind of skeptical on hybrid multi cloud from an application perspective in other words, the vision that you can run any app anywhere in the world without having a retest Rica pile. I've been skeptical that, but the one area that I'm not skeptical and the courage with is data protection because I think actually, you can have a consistent data protection model across your on Prem different on prams, different clouds, because you know you're partnering with all the different cloud cos you obviously have expertise in on premise. So so talk about your approach, their philosophy and maybe any offering. >> Well, this is really what sets us apart. We have been around for 25 years, 2000 patents. We protect everything. 500 different sources of data 150 different targets, 60 different cloud service providers, you know, we compete with two categories of players. We compete with the newcomers, and they only they will only protect your most current technology. They don't go back. We've been around for 25 years. We protect everything, right? We also can't compete with the conglomerates, Okay? In their case, they're not focused. They're trying to do everything. All we do is availability, protection and insights. And that's why we've been in Gardner M Q 13 times and where the market share leader also absolutely >> touch me. Someone Dave was saying about the application side of this. I mean, just your thoughts about, you know, the kinds of concerns the day raises. I mean, it is not alone in that respect. I mean, there are general concerns here, right about whether that that'll fly. What do you think? In terms, >> I think the vision is spot on and like, oh, visions, it takes a while to get to. But I think what VM wears done recently in the acquisition, there've been basically trying to make the control plane for compute okay, and their acquisition of carbon, black and pivotal add to that control plane we're gonna be We are the control plane for data protection. I mean, that's that's the way our customers rely on, >> but that makes sense to me. So I think I feel like the multi cloud vision is very aspirational today, and I think it's gonna be really hard to get there without homogeneous infrastructure. And that's why you see things like Outpost to see the Oracle has clouded customer. You've got Azure Stack. So and I think it's gonna be a multi vendor world. However I do think is it relates the data protection you can set a standard and safe. We were going to standardize on Veritas. So one of us So I think that it's it's achievable. So that was my point there. The last one was was regulations. Do you think GDP are will be a sort of a framework globally body of customers seeing there? >> Well, they're dealing with more than GDP are like I talked about that one customer, 27 different regulatory environments and the challenge there is. How do you deal with that when you don't know what you have in terms of data, the 50% of data is what we call dark data. You don't know anything about right, so you need help classifying it, understanding and getting insight into that data, and that's what we can help >> our customers. But howdy, howdy, dildo. In that environment, I mean, I mean, a day raises the point. This is obvious. A swell that mean you cite California right, which is somewhat infamous for its own regulatory mindset. I mean, how do you exist? What? The United States has privacy concerns and Congress can address it, and various federal agencies could do the same Europe. Obviously we talked about now Australia. Now here. Now there you get this Balkan I system that has no consistency, no framework. And so how do you operate on a global scale? >> A. Mentally. It relies on classifying that data right. Understanding what's where and what do you have is a P I. I personally identifiable information. Is it information that's intellectual property? What kind of data you have once you have that insight, which is what we provide, you can layer on top of the regulatory Is that compliance? >> Star I P. Is that Veritas i p. A blender? >> It's a blend of avatar and veritas I p. We have a product called Info Studio that helps toe provide that now Remember one of the things that are net backup product has is a catalogue of data. So we know where the data is primary to secondary storage, and we have all the versions of that data. And then we can run analytics against the secondary storage and not hit the primary systems. Right? So we're out of band to the primary systems, and that turns out to be very valuable in the state's a >> question. The catalog. I can't do this without a catalogue in the enough to geek out here a little bit, but but you've got a little bit when you bring in multi clouds. Other clouds. How do you incorporate you know that knowledge into your catalog? >> Yeah. Art, art, technology work Idol of works across multiple clouds. So we work with 60 different Cloud service providers. There's three big ones represented here today. Microsoft, AWS and Google. We work very closely with all three, and >> that's because you do the engineering at the A P. I level. Our engineering teams work very, very closely together. Okay, um, so let's talk about competition a little bit. The markets heated up. It's great. It's good to see all this VC money floating in. Everybody I said wants a piece of your hide. Why Veritas? >> Well, I explained that, you know, we are the leader in enterprise, data protection, availability and insights. There are some newcomers. They just will support you on your current technology. They don't support the infrastructure you've had for many years. If your large complicated enterprise you have layers of technology, we support all that with VIN amount for 25 years against, the big conglomerates were completely focused. And that's why we're the leader, according to Gartner, in the Leader's Quadrant 13 years >> now. And just as we close up you talked about, you brought up the case in Texas, about 22 municipalities. You do a lot of public sector work states, federal government ever. It's just what is the difference of different animal between public and private and and what you need to do in terms of providing that >> we're struggling with the same challenge. In fact, we work with some of the largest government agencies in the world, and they're struggling with exactly the same challenge. They also want leverage the public cloud. They're worried about ransom where you know they're dealing with data growth. All of these are challenges to them. And that's the, uh So these are common challenges we're addressing. Our strategy is to help our customers with these challenges so they can focus on the value of data >> 18 months in. You seem pumped up. Does having a great time team fired up >> way. Get that right. Great. But you're okay with big geeking out to write a very good thanks for the time You've run out of time. 40 Niners next time. All right. Greg Hughes joining us from Veritas. Back with more Veum, World 2019 right here on the Cube. >> Thank you.

>> from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the queue covering active eo 2019. Data driven you by activity. >> Welcome back to Boston, Everybody. Money >> belong here with my co host, a student of John >> Kerry's. Also here today You watching the Cuban leader and on the ground tech coverage. This is day one of active fio 19 data driven content Conference hashtag data driven 19 red cara minuses. Here is the senior vice president of fantasy Sports A draftkings Greg. Thanks for coming on. What a cool title. >> Yeah, it's It's, you know, I was joking with my wife. Anytime you could be working fantasy sports, it's a great place to be. Everybody's a little bit jealous. >> So the formula is easy, right? Offer big giant prizes and everybody comes And that's all there is suing. Anybody can come >> in. I just have the dream job right now. >> So hugely competitive market. You guys, you become the >> leader. We were in the radio. Check out your websites. I mean, take us through the draft kings and your ascendancy. How you got here? >> So, you know, company started in 2012 initially around sort of the major big American sports on DH. Then really a CZ. We started scale that we saw there was a huge consumer interest in the product players that would come on. We're very, very, very sticky. Um, and we've just been kind of, you know, pushing, pushing on growing that using these. So the initial founders are three former analyst. So come on. It's always been sort of a very analytically driven company. So they looked at what we were dealing with, and it was we had L TVs that were way higher than our cracks. So let's keep marketing and growing and growing and growing and finding out ways to offer a better product. So, over 2015 we did a major marketing blitz, blew up the company Absolutely huge. Um, and since then we've been just constantly innovating, adding new sports, adding new features on DH, adding ways toe on the product. And then even more recently, just about a year ago, we expanded also into online sports betting over New Jersey has that's become a legal product across the U. S. So it's been a great time to be at the company a lot of fun. >> What what was your first sport was like Amazon started in books and then, you know, scaled out what was your first sport. So it's actually the first sport was >> baseball because of the time that they actually launched. So is the middle of April. Sporting calendar is a little bit thin. Right then, so is it was baseball to start, and then once football season started, that's really when things take on >> 2015 is when you started the marketing blitz and I remember just here in the ads and it was just intense, like a while. This company's going for it. So you sort of took >> all the chips I went >> all in and it worked. Yeah, I mean, it's part of the, you know, the lifeblood of the company. It's We're a company that ends up being taking risks, but we take calculated risks. So at any given point, you sort of say, like, Hey, what is the what is the range of outcomes over here? We're not playing for second place. We want to be a market leader, so you have to take risks in order, be a market leader. So let's take calculated risks. Let's make sure we're not being insane, but you know we did the math. We figured out what? This is A This is a worthwhile shot. We pushed him for it. Andi really took off from their love to bet on >> sure things. Yeah, well, Greg, we know the people that play the fantasy for it feel that data is what differentiates whether they're going to live in, you know, winner lose. Talk to us a little bit about the data journey inside your business And how that helped differentiate draftkings in the market. Yes. So we think Death draftkings >> is one of the most analytically based companies in the, you know, definitely in the market, but also into sort of like General Cos right now we use our analytics platform to inform pretty much everything we dio on. Go to your point. You're joking. You know, it seems like fantasy sports is easy throughout some giant prizes there, and everything will take care of itself. You know, running a fantasy sports car company. If you throw out a contest that's too big, you lose a ton of money. There's a lot of asymmetric risk in the business where if we're right, we make a little bit more. But if we're wrong. We lose a ton very, very, very fast. So our ability to be very, very sound analytically is what allows us to sort of pushed the envelope and grow, grow, grow but not, you know, lose our heads along the way. You know, some of the fun of that is really, you know, when we first ran, I think one of the most game changing contest we ran was actually back in October of 2014. It was the very first millionaire maker contest I could still remember. It was Week five of the 2020 14 NFL season where we said, Hey, this it's crazy. We need crazy things that happen in order for it to work. But if we're on a $20 contest to enter with $1,000,000 top prize and 2,000,000 of total prizes, it could go viral, go absolutely crazy. And if it loses, here's how it'll losing. Here's how much will hurt us. It's a worthwhile risk. Let's go for it. So that sort of energy of, you know, doing discipline analysis and constantly sort of them. Taking the risk on the back of it is what allowed us to build >> up the brand value that you would have got out of that was sort of worth that risk in part anyway. And you wouldn't have to hurt presumably. >> Exactly. We knew our downside. As long as you know your downside, you're normally in a pretty good spot to take those risks. >> So where do you >> see this All going mean? So the company has grown. You're at this kind of critical mass now, Like we said, highly competitive, you know, knock down. You know, if you take your eye off the ball. So how do you guys keep this going? >> So we have a huge challenge ahead of us over the next couple of years, as sports betting becomes legal across the US, we need to make sure that we are one of the top competitors in that market. Sports betting in the US, we expect to be an absolutely enormous market. It will probably be significantly larger than the fantasy sports market in terms of absolute revenue and even, you know, on order of magnitude more competitive. So we need to be executing each step along the way a CZ markets open up. We need to be able to get into getting two market very, very fast. And that means our tech team needs to be working feverishly to make sure that we can hit the requirements that each legislator and each regulator puts on market entry in their state. We didn't mean making sure we're constantly figuring out what are the product elements that are absolutely critical for our for our users. Is it Maura around the live betting experiences that around the different markets that you offer? It's around pricing. And how do we find these things, these different lovers and told them to make sure that we're putting out a great product for users. And if we do that and throw a great product after users were pretty sure we can make you want >> to be one stop shopping presumably, right? I mean, all sports, right? But But then you've got these niche sports betting. I mean eggs, invest. Example. I could think of this horse racing. You know where it is alive. It's gonna video. It's got commentators on the ground that you know the business really well. Is >> that Is that the strategy to go sort of horizontal and so be a one stop shop or you >> gonna sort of pick your spots? What is the day to tell you? >> You know, I think we're constantly talking about it. One of the things that allowed our fantasy sports business to grow so fast was going a little bit more horizontal. So we offered Gulf in Mass at a time period when the primary competitors and the space vandal did not. On DH, we built that product into one of our largest sports. It's, you know, right up there with MLB in terms of the actual size that that comes in a Z have gone also horizontal, we pulled in other places, like NASCAR. Mm, a great sports that people are interested in. It gets more users into our platform. And honestly, if uses are interested in a product, we don't want them to have to go elsewhere. We want to be able to have the offerings that any sort of, you know, critical mass type environment is going toe is gonna have >> Well, it's that experience, right? Well, I like to shop in Amazon. You do, too, because I >> trusted. And it's the same user experience. So, Greg, one of things >> I'm hearing from you is something that everybody tries for, but it's really challenging that speed. How do you react that fast and move the company into new markets and new offerings and keep innovating? You know, culturally technology wise, you know, How does Draftkings do that? You know, I think a za company, you know, from really every single person that we recruit in higher We've been actually execution Aly disciplined throughout the company's history. It's It's something that our founders did a great job of instilling in the culture right at the gates. I mean, we've tried to foster all the way along the way, which is all the best strategies of the world. They're going to fail if you can't execute well and every single person down the company knows that. And we try to, you know, enable each person to be as autonomous as possible in their ability to execute their their portion of the business that allows us to move really, really, really fast. You know, we disseminate that responsibility quickly, and each leader and sort of each person knows what they have to do to execute. There's a high degree of accountability behind that, you know, I'd like to say there's some. There's some magic recipe that's, um, secret sauce, but it's a lot of just great people doing great work everyday. Well, Greg, you know it's any your competitors that they look at, You know, Boston's been been doing pretty well in Draftkings era, you know, for the last few years. ES o Boston's been a great market for us. We've expanded Conover here on DH. The sports teams have been fantastic, although the Bruins it was a little bit sad about Game seven over there, but it happens. >> So his m o be the flagship news that no, I wouldn't say >> that MLB was first, primarily just of the time of the year when we launched. NFL is always going to go, are not always going to be, but for the for the foreseeable future is the dominant US sport on will remain the dominant US for >> no reason. I mean, kids there watch MLB anymore. Maybe the maybe the playoffs and the games. It was a game. I think I'm some Father's day was like almost five hours long, you know, gets called. You can come in and out. But you know what some of the trends. You see soccer. Is that growing NFL? Obviously huge. Do you see so niche sports like lax coming on. >> So, uh, you know, starting point NFL has been huge. We actually launched a new product Ah, little over a year ago called Showdown, which allowed you start to do fantasy for a single game as opposed to the combination of games that's taken off fantastically because that's tapping into more of the I'm going to sit down and watch this game, and I would love to have a fantasy team on that on this game. That's really expanded the audience like that. That >> was genius because, look, if you're >> out of the running, it doesn't matter because I'm weak. On top of that N b A and NHL on fire. The embassy put out a great product is an actual sport league. You know, the Finals were great. You hate to see the injuries, but it was a great final. Siri's very competitive. The NHL Finals has been very, very competitive. Golf is growing phenomenally as a sport, way farm or interesting golf than I ever anticipated when I first started with the company and it's one of the most exciting things. When the Masters comes each year, every screen has turned to it and we see a huge player. Player number is kind of coming into that one. Beyond that, you know NASCAR. What's been interesting? NASCAR's been having a tough couple years, but the Truck series for us? We launched it this year and the trucks have been great. I don't know if you've watched NASCAR Trucks. They're wildly entertaining. Uh, you know, Emma, you got the big fighter. So every sport sort of has its moments. It's a matter of like picking those moments and figuring out how to make >> the most of them. Do you see boxing at all making a comeback? >> So we have thought about how to get boxing into a into a fantasy. We don't have it at the moment. We're putting a lot of thought into it, so we are actually seeing through. We've seen, you know, we've been in the M M A space and we've seen the growth out from there where that sports doing great and you look at places like Bela Tor. The Professional Fighters league is other leagues, and then boxing is the next step. There's a lot of interest there. I don't think they have the right products yet to be able to kind of engage with that extra way. So that's one of things we're working on. Also, you need a marquee fighter. You always need a marquee fighter. Kind of helped bring in the interest over on that side. So, um, be interesting to see with Taki on sort of the downside of his career. At this point on DH, Mayweather hasn't been fighting much. Will be interesting to see. Who's that next meeting with Adam. But >> I grew up in an era >> of Marquis fighters. What? They would fight, you know, they literally fight 6 70 times a year, you know, and you had used huge names on DSO, and then mm comes along and he's really hurt, >> but it feels like it's tryingto so to resuscitate. Yeah. I mean, I think these things could >> be a little bit cyclical. Like you get one Marquis fighter out there like so my wife, this Filipino. So I'm a huge backing out fan now way watch every fight. Even when we were living in remote locations that forces watching at weird hours. He's a type of athlete that could bring popularity of the sport. So if there was a major U. S. Fighter that gains that degree of sort of, you know that that degree of fame people will be into it, I think >> Do do do your analytics sort of have a probe into the activity at the at the fan level at the sports level, not just the fantasy level or the betting level? Is that a sort of ah ah predictor for you? Yet we >> see a lot of correlations between how many people play our sport are fantasy game, and how many people actually follow the underlying sport. Way can also see trends in terms of If I'm from Boston, I probably pick more patriots in my fantasy lineups than, uh, normal on DH. You can actually see that as people play different sports that you know, the number one Q. Be drafted in in Boston is almost always gonna be Tom Brady. And once you leave that you start seeing Aaron Rodgers pop up. Let's really, really fast. So you see these little micro trends where it's like you are still a sports fan of your local team in your local environment, but it manifest itself in the fantasy. >> So what you think that is? Do you think it's fan affinity >> or do you think it's just the sort of lack of knowledge out inside? You're sort of a circle of trust. >> I think it's probably a combination. I mean, I could say is, you know, following the Celtics in the mid to thousands, I knew the depth of the Celtics pension, how they would use their rotation better than anybody else, Probably better than anybody else in the coaches would probably disagree. But it's like I knew that James Posey was a huge value play on Saturday nights. I knew. I kind of with I feel the Eddie House nights. Uh, so, you know, on your local team, you probably know those players at the not the top top echelon All Stars, but the guy's right beneath. You know them a little bit better and probably more comfortable using >> what's your favorite sport. >> So my favorite sport, from a fantasy perspective, is I play all the basket. I play all football, played basketball just during play offs, and I played baseball. But baseball I'm strictly a fantasy player. I don't really follow the sport to play. I'm just playing fantasy. Okay, >> That's great. So, what do you think? The conference. Here. >> You have you Have you had any timeto interact? I know you were swamped after coming off the stage. >> You know, it looks like a great turnout over here. There's a lot of enthusiasm amongst them from people. I was a little bit late to the late to show up this morning, so I got a bit Swanson eager to go and be able to catch up a bit more. >> Okay, Well, Greg, thanks so much for coming on. The Cuba's great to have your every pleasure meeting you. >> All right, people. Right there. Still, when I >> was back with our next guest, John for it is also in the house. You wanted The Cube from active field data driven 19. Right back

>> live from Miami Beach, Florida It's the que covering demon 2019. Brought to you, by the way, >> Welcome back to Vima on 2019 in Miami. Everybody, we're here at the Fountain Blue Hotel. This is Day two of our coverage of the Cube, the leader in live Tech. And I'm David Dante with Peter Bors. Pippen. Jay Raj is here. He's the vice president and CEO of Make A Wish America. Just that awesome foundation nonprofit people. Thanks for coming on the Cube. >> Thank you for having me appreciate it. >> So make a wish. Children with wishes and have terminal illnesses. You guys make them come true. It's just a great organizations. Been around for a long time, I think, since the early eighties, right, >> 39 years and going >> years and hundreds of thousands of wishes made. So just how did you get Teo make a wish that all come about >> it? It wasn't interesting journey. I was consulting in I t for multiple big companies. And, you know, two years back, it was through a recruiting channel that I got an opportunity to start some conversations as the CIA and make a wish. Uh, the thing that got me in the opportunity was predominately about enterprises and just to give you a little bit off, make official operations. Make a Wish was Founded and Phoenix, Arizona. And but we also operate a 60 chapters across the United States that it is 60 chapters each of the chapter there 501 C three companies themselves with the CEO and abort. Essentially, it is 60 plus one. The national team kind of managing. All of the chapters are helping the chapters. National does not do any wish. Granting all the wish planning happens to the chapters. But National helps the chapters with the distribution of funding models brand. And thanks for That's a couple of years back in the national board talked about in our dream and mission, which is granting every eligible child the notion ofthe enterprise. You know, working as an enterprise came into four and it being a great piece off providing shared services and thanks for that. So I was brought on board and we took on I would call as the leader today said and dashes dream off. Bringing together all the 60 chapters and the city chapter's essentially are split across 120 locations. So Wade took on a project off. You know, combining our integrating all of their infrastructure needs into one place. And Phoenix without ada, sent a provider. You know, we worked with a partner. Phoenix. Now fantastic partners >> there. We had them on the other day. >> Yep, yep. Yeah, MacLaren. I mean, and the team, they did a great job. And, you know, when we had to move all of the data, everything from the 60 chapters applications everything into a centralized data center, locations that we managed right now from Make a Wish National office and provide a service back to the chapters That gives you a little bit off. You know, from behind the scenes. What happened? >> You provide the technical overview framework for all the 60 chapters. >> It almost sounds like a franchise model. >> It's what we call a Federated model back in the nonprofit. >> But but but but because make a wish is so driven by information. Yep. Both in the application as well as the programs to deliver thie brand promise. And the brand execution has got to be very, very closely tied to the quality of a shared services you provide >> exactly. Exactly. And like I said, the reason I talked about them being a separate companies themselves is you know, as I always say to my 60 CEOs, Ah, I should be able to provide the services because they wanted, because they have a choice to go outside and have their own partner. Another thing for that which they can. But they would want to work with the national team and get my, you know, work through our services rather than having have to because of the very it's A. It's a big difference when it comes to, but I've been lucky on privileged to you have these conversations with the CEO's. When I start talking to them about the need for centralization, the enterprise society assed much, there are questions when he start leading with the mission and the business notion of why we need to do that, it's It's fantastic. Everybody is in line with that. I mean, there's no question, then, as toe Hey, guys, uh, let me do all the Operation Manisha fight and leave it to me and I'll in a handler for you, and I let you guys go to what you do best. which is granting wishes. So then it becomes it doesn't become a question off, you know, should be a shouldn't way. And of course, to back that up. But I was talking to the dean, folks, It just solutions. Like VMware, Veeam. It makes it much simpler even from a cost prospect. You not for me to manage a bigger team s so that I can take those dollars and give it back to the business to grant another wish. So it's it's pretty exciting that >> way. So you set the standards. Okay, here's what you know, we recommend and then you're you're saying that adoption has been quite strong. Yeah, I remember Peter. Don't say easy. I used to run Kitty Sports in my local town in which is small town. And there was, you know, a lot of five or six or seven sports, and I was the sort of central organization I couldn't get six sports to agree that high man is 60 different CEO's. But that's okay. So not easy. But so how were you able to talk leadership or leading as we heard from Gino Speaker today? How were you able to get those guys, you know, aligned with your vision. >> Uh, it's it's been fantastic. I've had a lot ofthe good support from our executive came from a leadership team because leadership is always very important to these big initiatives are National board, which comprises off some of the that stuff best leaders in America and I have the fortune toe be mentored by Randy Sloan, who used to be the CEO of Southwest. And before that, you see a global CEO for, uh, you know, Popsicle. You know, he always told me, but but I mean CIA job. One thing is to no the technology, but completely another thing. Toe building relationships and lead with the business conversation. And so a typical conversation with the CEO about Hey, I need to take the data that you have all the I t things that you have and then me doing it. And then there are questions about what about my staff and the's conversations. Because you know, it's a nonprofit is a very noble, nice feeling, and you wouldn't want the conversations about, you know, being rift and things like that are being reduced producing the staff and thinks of that. But you know as he walked through that and show the benefits of why we doing it. They get it. And they've been able to repurpose many off the I. D functions back in tow, revenue generation model or ofhis granting in our team. And in many cases, I've been ableto absolve some off their folks from different places, which has worked out fine for me, too, because now I have kind of a power user model across the United States through which I can manage all these 120 locations. It's very interesting, >> you know, site Reliable and Engineering Dev Ops talks about thie error budget or which is this notion of doo. You're going tohave errors. You're going to have challenges. Do you want it in the infrastructure you wanted the functions actually generating value for the business? I don't know much about Make a wish. I presume, however, that the mission of helping really sick kids achieve make achieve a wish is both very rewarding, very stressful. He's gotta be in a very emotional undertaking, and I imagine it part of your message them has got to be let's have the stress or that emotional budget be dedicated to the kids and not to the technology >> completely agree. That's that. That's been one of my subjects, as you asked about How is it going about? It's about having the conversation within the context of what we talked about business and true business. Availability of data. You know, before this enterprise project data was probably not secure enough, which is a big undertaking that we're going down the path with cyber security. And you know, that is a big notion, misplaced notion out there that in a non profits are less vulnerable. Nobody. But that's completely untrue, because people have found out that nonprofits do not probably have the securing of walls and were much more weight being targeted nonprofits as a whole, targeted for cyber security crimes and so on and so forth. So some of these that I used to, you know, quote unquote help or help the business leaders understand it, And once they understand they get it, they ableto, you know, appreciate why we doing it and it becomes the conversation gets much more easier. Other What's >> the scope of the size of the chapters is that is a highly variable or there is. >> It is highly variable, and I should probably said, That's Thesixty chapters. We look at it as four categories, so the cat ones are what we call the Big Ice, the Metro New Yorkers and Francisco Bay Area. They're called Category one chapters anywhere between 4 1 60 to 70 staff. Grant's close to around 700 wishes you so as Make a Wish America, we ran close toe 15,600 wishes a year, and cat ones do kind of close to 700 15,600 400 to 700. And then you get into care to scare threes and cat for scat force are anywhere between, you know, given example Puerto Rico or Guam territory there. Cat Force New Mexico is a cat for three staff members Gammas operated by two staff members and 20 volunteers. They grant about 3 2 20 12 to 15 which is a year, so it's kind of highly variable. And then, you know, we talk about Hawaii chapter. It's a great example. They cat once predominate because of the fact that you know, they they do. There's not a lot ofthe wishes getting originated from how I but you know, Florida, California and how your three big chapters with a grand are a vicious ist with a lot of grant, you know, wish granting. So there's a lot off, you know, traffic through those chapters >> so so very distributed on diverse. What's the relationship between data and the granting of wishes? Talk about the role of data. >> Should I? I was say this that in a and I probably race a lot of fibrosis and my first introductory session a couple of years back when I John make a wish with the CEO's uh, when we had the CEO meeting and talk to them about I leaders the days off making decisions based on guts are gone. It has to be a data driven decision because that's where the world is leading to be. Take anything for that matter. So when we talk about that, it was very imperative going back to my project that the hall we had all of the data in one place or a semblance off one single place, as opposed to 60 different places to make decisions based on wish forecast, for example, how many wishes are we going to do? How many wishes are coming in? How's the demand? Was the supply matching up one of the things that we need to do. Budget purposes, going after revenue. And thanks for that. So data becomes very important for us. The other thing, we use data for the wish journeys. Essentially, that's a storytelling. You know, when I you know, it was my first foray into for profit Sorry, nonprofit. And me coming from a full profit is definitely a big culture shock. And one of the things they ask us, what are we selling? Its emotions and story. And that's our data. That is what you know. That's huge for us if we use it for branding and marketing purposes. So having a good semblance off data being ableto access it quickly and being available all the time is huge for us. >> Yeah, and you've got videos on the site, and that's another form of data. Obviously, as we as we know here, okay. And then, from a data protection standpoint, how do you approach that? Presume you're trying to standardize on V maybe is way >> are actually invested in veeam with them for a couple of years right now, as we did the consolidation of infrastructure pieces Veeam supporters with all of the backup and stories replication models. Uh, we're thinking, like Ratmir talked about act one wi be a part of the journey right now, and we're looking at active. What that brings to us. One of the things that you know, dream does for us is we have close to 60 terabytes of data in production and close to another 400 terabytes in the back of things. And, uh, it's interesting when they look about look at me equation, you think about disaster recovery back up. Why do you need it? What? The business use cases case in point. This classic case where we recently celebrated the 10th anniversary ofthe back wish bad kid in San Francisco, we have to go back and get all the archives you know, in a quick fashion, because they're always often requests from the media folks to access some of those. They don't necessarily come in a planned manner. We do a lot of things, a lot of planning around it, but still there are, you know, how How did that come about? What's the story behind? So you know, there are times we have to quickly go back. That's one second thing is having having to replicate our data immediately. Another classic case was in Puerto Rico. There was a natural disaster happened completely. Shut off. All the officers work down. We had to replicate everything what they had into a completely different place so that they could in a vpn, into an access that other chapters and our pulled in to help. They were close to 10 wish families close to 10 which families were stranded because of that. So, you know, gaining that data knowledge of where the family is because the minute of his journey starts. Everything is on us till the witch's journey ends. So we need to make sure everything is proper. Everything goes so data becomes very crucial from those pants >> you're tracking us. I mean, if you haven't been on the make a Wish site is some amazing stories. There I went on the other day. There's a story of ah, of 13 year old girl who's got a heart condition. Who wanted to be a ballerina. A kid with leukemia five years old wants to be a You want to be a chef. My two favorites, I'll share What? It was this kid Brandon a 15 year old with cystic fibrosis. I wanted to be a Navy seal. You guys made that happen. And then there was this child. Colby was 12 years old and a spinal muscular issue. You want to be a secret agent so very creative, you know, wishes that you ran >> way had another wish a couple of years last year in Georgia, where they wish kid wanted to go to Saturn. Yes, yes, it was huge. I mean, and you know the best part about us once we start creating those ideas, it's amazing how much public support we get. The community comes together to make them wish granting process. Great. Now. So I got involved in that. They gave the wish Kato training sessions to make sure that he is equipped when he goes into. And we had a bushel reality company create the entire scene. It was fabulous. So, you know, the way you talk about data and the technology is now some of the things I'm very excited about us usage off thes next Gen technology is like our winter reality to grant a wish. I mean, how cool would that be for granting a wish kid who is not able to get out of the bed. But having able to experience a the Hawaii is swimming. Are being in Disney World enough a couple of days? That's That's another use case that we talked about. That other one is to put the donors who pay the money in that moment off granting, you know, they are big major gift, uh, donors for make a wish. Sometimes we were not able to be part of a fish, but that would be pretty cool if you can bring the technology back to them and you know not going for them. You know pretty much everybody and make the ass through that rather than a PowerPoint or a storytelling, when the storytelling has to evolve to incorporate all of that so pretty excited >> and potentially make a participatory like, say, the virtual reality and then even getting in more into the senses and the that the smells. And I mean this is the world that we're entering the machine intelligence, >> which you still have to have, But you still have to be a functioning, competent, operationally sound organization. There've been a number of charities, make a wish is often at the top of the list of good charities. But there were a number of charities where the amount of money that's dedicated to the mission is a lot less an amount of money, dedicated administration of fundraising, and they always blame it. Systems were not being able to track things. So no, it's become part of the mission to stay on top of how information's flowing because it's not your normal business model. But the services you provide is really useful. Important. >> Sure, let me percent you the business conundrum that I have personally as a 90 leader. It takes close to $10,400 on an average to grant a wish. Uh, and, uh, partly because of me. But being part of the mission, plus me as a 90 leader wanting to understand the business more, I signed up. I'm a volunteer at the local Arizona chapter. I've done couple of expanding myself, and, uh, the condom is, if asked, if you want to go, uh, you know, do the latest and greatest network upgrade for $10,400 are what do you want to, uh, you know and make the network more resilient cyber security and all that stuff. What do you want to go grant? Another wish as a 90 leader probably picked the former. But as a volunteer, I would be like, No, it needs to go to the kid. It's Ah, it's It's an interesting kind of number, you know? You have to find the right balance. I mean, you cannot be left behind in that journey because at many points of time s I talked about it being a cost center. It being a back office. I think those days have clearly gone. I mean, we we evolved to the point where it is making you steps to be a participant b A b a enabler for the top line to bring in more revenues, tow no augment solutions for revenue and things. For that sofa >> rattles the experience or exact role citizens. And in your case, it's the experience is what's being delivered to the degree that you can improve the experience administratively field by making operations cheaper. Great. But as you said, new digital technologies, they're going to make it possible to do things with the experience that we could even conceive of. Five >> wears a classic example. Williams and Beam. I couldn't have taken the data from 60 chapters 120 locations into one single location manageable, and it reduced the cost literally reduce the cost of the 60 instances in one place without technology is like, you know what Sharia virtual machines. And and then to have a backup robust backup solution in a replication off it. It's fantastic. It's amazing >> there. And that's against here. You could give back to the dash chapters and backing, But thanks so much for sharing your story. You Thank you. Thank you. You're welcome. Alright, keep it right there. Buddy. Peter and I were back with our next guest. You watching the Cube live from V mon from Miami? 2019. We're right back. Thank you.

>> Live from Mountain View, California It's theCUBE covering DevNet Create 2019, brought to you by Cisco. >> Hi, welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage, day one at CISCO DEVNET CREATE 2019, I'm Lisa Martin with John Furrier, we are at The Computer History Museum at Mountain View. We're pleased to welcome to theCUBE Ash Seddeek, strategic business consultant and story telling coach. >> Yes. >> This is an interesting combination, story telling coach with a bunch of developers. So first of all, talk to us about what it is that you, who do you help learn how to tell stories and then what your work is with Cisco. >> Fantastic. So, primarily at Cisco, I work with a lot of leaders in a coaching environment where we are looking at what they are trying to achieve with the organization and how they can articulate that message in an energetic and inspiring way. And we find stories are the best way to engage the audience. I'm working with one leader, he keeps telling me, the last talk he gave, the one thing people remember is the story. So, everyone is sort of realizing that if I want to tell them something about how we're transitioning from one technology platform to another, if I can find a metaphor, an analogy, a story, I have much better luck connecting with them and giving them something that they can remember. >> Is this like a personal story that they need to share and kind of open up some some vulnerability? Or just some other metaphor that everybody would understand? >> Yes, we actually sometimes use one or the other. Like in one case, we're using the car racing metaphor to talk about how teams come together to create amazing results. So then in that case, it's not about just the driver of that car or the team at the pit changing the tires and how fast they do that, but how they collectively then, have that success at the end of the race. Or, maybe to your point, maybe it's a personal story that then shows them, hey, I went through a lot of challenges and I know as engineers, you're going through a lot of challenges, and I can see us getting past it. So we also try to tap into what they've been able to achieve in the past. So then he can actually call on their memory, we've been able to produce these products for Cisco. Now, the customer expectations are changing and we need to get them to the market sooner, therefore, we need to figure ways where we can build some high preforming teams and get these products to the market much sooner. >> You know Ash, since hearing about your story telling here on theCUBE, as we do a lot of story telling, is that in the tech world, designed thinking has been a big part of the discipline around building products. >> Yes. >> How has some of the things that you're bringing to this kind of design story telling, >> Yes. >> Kind of ethos and thinking, >> Yes. >> Into the story telling creation process, not just, like hey I created this thing, now let's go bolt a story onto it. Is there an integration point inside the construction of the creative process, >> Yes. >> That might feed that. Can you take us through your state of the art thinking around this? >> Absolutely. It's actually, it was very comforting to find that the very first step in designed thinking is empathize, which essentially means, you have a particular target audience that you're trying to serve with a particular solution. We actually use the word hero to think about that audience and then we basically say, if she's a mom walking into the hospital lobby with her baby, what is the experience for that mother? Can we really empathize? Can we find out what the story is? What's been happening at home? The way she's going into the hospital, now she's driving into the lobby, how is she being received in that lobby, in the service level. And then we basically describe the story again of where things are today, which we can call experience number one. And then we basically talk to them about how can we envision a beautiful, delightful, experience for that mom? That becomes experience number two, and we use these stories between one and two to really energize us, to really help people understand we need to come up with a much better solution. >> I want to get your thoughts on Steve Jobs always said story telling was critical. It was his mantra before he passed away. I had a chance to interview John Chambers at his house recently. >> Yes. >> He's got a new book coming out and he's always been about trends and being on the right wave, so between the two, you had one product leader with Steve Jobs, you have a trend seer with John Chambers. How much of the DNA of the person you are coaching, that their natural talent shapes how you engage with how they could be a better story teller? >> Yeah, what I'm finding a lot, especially also with technical leaders, a lot of the time they are very sort of reserved. They sort of walk in the building a all of a sudden have this sort of character where I am not as, you know, charging ahead as I should be and a lot of the time I basically say, hey, can we get this voice to have a little bit of character? Can we get some vocal variety in here? Can we actually tell a story? Can you actually get up, stand up, and open up and really you know, tell us something about who you are and why you want to do this project to lead this team forward. So to your point, I really help them find out that they're actually like any other average citizen, they have so much energy and power within them, they just come into the corporate office and think, oh, I need to have a corporate character, then I come back and say, you know what, I actually need you, I need John to be here, in person, with all the stories that you can tell. And I tell them, go back into your old child and let's figure out some of those stories so that when you're talking about those stories, you remember the excitement, you remember the people that were there. And then all of a sudden, there's a bit of life in them, you know, so that's sort of, what I help them discover is that actually they have these stories. And they are engaging, they are inspiring, if they actually let them come out. >> I imagine that's got to be easier with some guys and girls than others. Some of those who really, maybe don't like public speaking or having to explain something that can be quite (inaudible) to certain audiences. >> Yes. >> What are some of the things that you've learned about working with some of these technologists that have helped kind of refine your methodology for cracking that surface and unleashing this energy and this sort of, natural passion. >> Yes. >> That's hidden inside. >> Absolutely and you know what's happening here at Cisco, especially at Cisco, where you see technology being used to do a lot of communication, a lot of them are realizing, if I don't articulate my message, I'm not going to get the funding. I'm not going to get the best resources. So they realize that communication became part of how do I influence up and make sure that my stakeholders understand that we have a critical project, so there is part of it where they know that there is a lot on the line if they don't speak up. And then they come to someone like me and say, Ash, how can we do this? So we then talk through what are you trying to accomplish with this team? What's that vision and how can we build it, a case for change and that becomes the thing that energizes them first and then we energize their teams and we think about, how do you take this message to executives that can give you the funding that you're looking for. >> So you talked about, before we went live, this program at Cisco, this sort of shark tank-like program, >> Yes. >> Where you're working with very technical men and women. >> Exactly, yeah. >> Who might have a brilliant idea, but in terms of articulating that to be able to get, like you said for, get funding or sponsorship for programs, Can you give us, maybe, one of your favorite examples of a, when you started with experience one or phase one, where it took you about a half an hour to figure out, that's the goal. To getting to the ah, there's the story. >> Yes, that's a good question. >> Tell us something that really sticks with you. >> YGreat question, so the program is called Hack It IT and it's an incubator program, as I mentioned. And one example, a team in China actually, was working on the idea of how do we reduce the number of customers that could be thinking about walking away from Cisco? So the technical term for that is customer churn. So I got on the phone with them, and of course, there are some challenges when it comes to speaking English by a lot of our Chinese colleagues. But then I listened in and I paid attention and then I started asking them, what got you interested in this idea? But we started to really kind of break down the fact that they have figured out that there is a way to listen into the data within Cisco and figure out that once they actually identify certain signals, they can help the sales teams realize they need to go talk to John, because John, if he doesn't have someone talking to him very soon, he or she might actually shift and go to another company, and then I said, well, what percentage do you think that churn is right now? And we found out that maybe like about 7% and with the technology they are building, we could bring it down to three 3%. I was like ding, ding, ding, ding! Earnings per share, number of customers, dollars per quarter, it was just an amazing opportunity and once they came out and communicated clearly, it was the winning idea at the end of the day. >> So you're helping take these technical folks, start to understand the business impact, >> Absolutely, yeah. >> And communicate-- >> And how big it is. >> Right. >> And how big it is. >> That can be pretty transformative for I think anybody in any field, right? >> And I remember on the call, I said, guys did we take a look at the industry averages on the churn? You know, what's the situation at Juniper? What's the situation at HPE? How does Cisco compare? How can we make sure that Cisco is much better off? Phenomenal opportunity for Cisco to listen in and catch things before they happen. >> What would be your advice to folks watching around? How to be a better story teller? Because you can really reel people in, get their attention and then deliver the pay load, whether it's venture funding, >> Yes. >> Or getting a project funded inside a corporation. There's always people interested in how they could be better story tellers, what's your playbook? >> Absolutely. So, the reason I talk about what I do is, I help people become chief excitement officers, which means we need to find the excitement, once we find the excitement, it's like finding gold in a very, very tough mountain and once we find the gold, then we can extract it out and then we can showcase it, right? So I think a lot of the time we're having difficulty finding out where the gold is. And that's one of the things that I help them with, but if they sit with their teams and really brainstorm what opportunities do we have? What are the sizes? How can we get some of these ideas out? Then all of a sudden that idea, that gold starts to show up and they are much more equipped to talk about it. And I have on the executivegreatness.com/storytelling, there is a nice cheat sheet that people can download and use to start really crafting these stories by first using a template in the beginning and then once they do it once, twice, three times it gets easier and better and if they can build a culture around story telling, it makes life so much easier. >> So you've got the, I think you mentioned it, but I want to make sure our viewers heard it. The executive greatness institute is something that you've created. >> Yes. >> And that people could go to that and find that template that you were just mentioning. >> Exactly, so executivegreatness.com/storytelling and they can download that template, it should be a very easy fill-in process in the beginning and it's a fantastic experience to really get that visual story. >> Find that gold, make some fine jewelry make some bars. >> Yes. Its amazing, there's so much potential because-- >> So this must be for anybody, and sorry to interrupt, in any industry. >> Absolutely yes. >> Anybody who can learn to find a way to connect with whomever, whatever, but it sounds like a lot of, kind of, horizontal benefits for anybody. >> Absolutely. >> And any level of their career. >> Totally because what we're finding is the clarity of the message once people get it, then you can actually ask them to do things for you or with you, but until then, there's a huge divide. People sit in these, in all hands meetings, the executive speaks, he or she speaks, they're not really catching on, you know, it's not so clear. >> It's about connecting. >> It's about connecting and clarity is the passage and story becomes the fantastic bridge. >> Yeah. >> To really do that connection. >> And really making it about being part of the same story, >> Yes, exactly. >> That connection creates more retention, success, one proposal versus the other. >> Exactly. >> Could be a swing, the swing could be the story. >> Yes, exactly, 'cause what, when we're working with these teams, we found out that if they can't communicate it, we could be losing out on a multi billion dollar idea. >> You know one thing I want to hear your thoughts on while your here because, >> Sure. >> It's as if I feel like I'm in a counseling session 'cause all we have to try to do is figure out how to tell our story better and our customers who come on theCUBE, they have social media channels, they have more channels. >> Yes. >> The story is broken down into little highlights and small video clips, so companies are challenged, not just individuals, to have a brand. >> Exactly. >> In social media. >> Absolutely. >> How do you take the gold, that excitement, and break it up, >> Yes, into a branding story-- >> Share the story in all channels possible. >> Absolutely. >> Do you have any opinion on that, or? >> It's a lot of tough work, but to your point, we need to find what that brand story is and make sure that everybody's actually clear on it 'cause a lot of times to your point, when you bring them together, each one has a different story. >> Absolutely. >> You know, so I think part of it is to really come together and say, let's get the story, let's honor it, by then, spreading it across the organization, >> And in a consistent way. >> And then we use it on the website, we use it in our marketing and our sales conversations. And if you started with that story with customers, you have something that's a whole lot more engaging, >> Get that story out there in a digital footprint. >> Exactly, yeah, exactly. >> Awesome. >> And I wonder if even what you're talking about in terms of you're right, it's about connection, is even more important as the world gets more and more and more connective with devices, and we get so focused on talking to a device, we've got to kind of come back to your sort of, bringing people back to the basic communication. >> With the human connection, so yeah. >> Exactly, which is, thankfully still needed and to your point, I think, what you were able to show your customers is a tremendous business impact, >> Yes. >> That this connection, this basic human connection in story telling can make. >> Absolutely. And the fact that you are really talking about human beings at the end, those experiences at the very end are touching somebody and we need to get excited, we basically, one of the executives from GE basically said, we need people who can go to the future and then get so excited and then come back, kind of keep that excitement on their face and walk around the organization, keep telling them, you know, when we get to Yosemite, you're going to see these waterfalls, the fresh air is amazing, I've been there, I saw it. I can't wait to get you guys there. And that's what they do on a daily basis, they're just walking around with that bug inside of them, they can see what it's like, and they can't wait to get everybody there. >> This is also somebody that can really breed and foster cultural transformation within a GE, an organization that has been around and has so many moving parts. >> Yes. >> Cultural transformation is essential for any company to transform digitally and that's a hard thing to do. >> Yeah, exactly. >> But it sounds like if, you know, you can, I like-- >> It's a big part of it. >> I like chief excitement officer, I think my dog is my chief excitement officer. But being able to maintain that and sustain it from a cultural transformation perspective is huge. >> Absolutely, 'cause all the digital transformation efforts are about that vision of the future, whether it's healthcare, to your point, or automotive industry or any other industry. It's about what kind of experience, much better experience are we going to create? >> Ash, great talking with you, exciting topic. >> Yes. >> Thank you for giving some time to John and me today at DevNet. >> Absolutely, thank you so much. >> We appreciate it. >> Thank, John, thank you so much. For John Furrier, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live at Cisco DevNet Create 2019. Thanks for watching. (outro music)

>> From Boston, Massachusetts, it's the Cube, covering LiveWorx 18, brought to you by PTC. (light electronic music) >> Welcome back to Boston, everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We're covering day one of the LiveWorx conference that's hosted by PTC. I'm Dave Vellante with my cohost Stu Miniman. Professor Linda A. Hill is here. She's the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. Professor Hill, welcome to the Cube. Thanks so much for coming on. >> Thank you for having me. >> So, innovation, lot of misconceptions about innovation and where it stems from. People think of Steve Jobs, well, the innovation comes from a single leader and a visionary who gets us in a headlock and makes it all happen. That's not really how innovation occurs, is it? >> No, it is not, actually. Most innovation is the result of a collaboration amongst people of different expertise and different points of view, and in fact, unless you have that diversity and some conflict, you rarely see innovation. >> So this is a topic that you've researched, so this isn't just an idea that you had. You've got proof and documentation of this, so tell us a little more about the work that you do at Harvard. >> So really over 10 years ago, I began to look at the connection between leadership and innovation, because it turns out that like a lot of organizations, the academy is quite siloed, so the people studying innovation were very separate from the ones who studied leadership, and we look at the connection between the two. When you look at that, what you discover is that leading innovation is actually different from leading change. Leading change is about coming up with a vision, communicating that vision, and inspiring people to want to fulfill that vision. Leading innovation is not about that. It's really more about how do you create a space in which people will be willing and able to do the kind of collaborative work required for innovation to happen? >> Sometimes I get confused, maybe you can help me, between invention and innovation. How should we think about those two dimensions? >> Innovation and invention. The way I think about it is an innovation is something that's both an invention, i.e. new, plus useful. So it can be an innovation or it can be creative, but unless it's useful and addresses an opportunity or a challenge that an organization faces, for me, that's not an innovation. So you need both, and that is really the paradox. How do you unleash people's talents and passions so you get the innovation or the invention or the new, and then how do you actually combine that, or harness all of those different ideas so that you get something that is useful, that actually solves a problem that the collective needs solved? >> So there's an outcome that involves changing something, adoption, as part of that innovation. >> For instance, one of the things that we're doing a lot right now is we're working with organizations, incumbents, I guess you'd call them, that have put together these innovation labs to create digital assets. And the problem is that those digital assets get created, they're new, if you will, but unless the core business will adopt them and use them, they get implemented, they're not going to be useful. So we're trying to understand, how do you take what gets created in those innovation labs, those assets, if you will, and make sure that the organization takes them in and scales them so that you can actually solve a business problem? >> Professor Hill, a fascinating topic I love digging into here. Because you see so many times, startups are often people that get frustrated inside a large company. I've worked for some very large companies, so which have had labs, or research division, and even when you carve aside time for innovation, you do programs on that, there's the corporate antibodies that fight against that. Maybe talk a little bit about that dynamic. Can large companies truly innovate? >> Yes, large companies can truly innovate. We do see it happening, it is not easy by any means, and I think part of the dilemma for why we don't see more innovation is actually our mindset about what leadership is about and who can innovate. So if I could combine a couple of things you asked, invention, often when we talk to people about what is innovation, they think about technology, and they think about new, and if I'm not a technologist and I'm not creative, then I can't play the game. But what we see in organizations, big ones that can innovate, is they don't separate out the innovators from the executors. They tell everybody, guess what, your job no matter who you are, of course you need to deal with making sure we get done what we said we'd deliver, but if we're going to delight our customers or we're ever going to really get them to be sticky with us, you also need to think about not just what should you be doing, but what could you be doing. In the literature, in the research, that's called how do you close an opportunity gap and not just a performance gap? In the organizations we look at that are innovative, that can innovate time and again, they have a very democratic notion: everybody has a role to play. So our work, Collective Genius, is called Collective Genius because what we saw in Pixar was the touchstone for that work, is that they believe everybody has a slice of genius. They're not equally big or whatever, but everybody has a contribution to make, and you need to use yours to come up with what's new and useful. A lot of that will be incremental, but some of it will be breakthrough. So I think what we see with these innovation labs and the startups, if you will, is that often people do go to start them up, of course they eventually have to grow their business, so a part of what I find myself doing now is helping startups that have to scale, figure out how to maintain that culture, those capabilities, that allowed them to be successful in the first place, and that's tough one for startups, right? >> Yeah, I think Pixar's only about a 1,500 person company and they all have creativity in wat they do. I'm wondering if there's some basic training that's missing. I studied engineering and I didn't get design training in my undergraduate studies. It wasn't until I was out in the workforce that I learned about that. What kind of mindset and training do you have to do to make sure the people are open to this? >> One of the things that I did related to this is about five years ago, I told our dean of Harvard Business School that I needed to join the board of an organization called Arts Center. I don't know if you were aware of Arts Center in Pasadena. It's the number one school of industrial design in the U.S., and people don't know about it 'cause I always laugh at them. The man who designed the Apple store is a graduate there. The man who designed Tesla car and et cetera, so they're not so good at it, but one of the things that we've all come to understand is design thinking, lean startup, these are all tools that can help you be better at innovation, but unless you create an environment around that, people are going to be willing to use those tools and make the missteps, the failures that might come with it, know how to collaborate together, even when they're a large organization, I mean it's easier when you're smaller. But unless you know how to do all that, those tools, the lean startup or digital or design thinking or whatever, ' cause I'm working with a lot of the people who do that, and deep respect for them, nothing gets done. In the end, we are human, we all need to know first off that it's worthwhile to take the risk to get done whatever it is you want to get done, so what's the purpose of the work, how's it going to change the world? The second thing is we need to share a set of values about learning because we have to understand, as you well know, you cannot plan your way to an innovation, you have to act your way. And with the startup, you act as fast as you can, right, so somebody will give you enough money before you run out of money. Same similar process you have to do in a large company, an incumbent, but of course it's more complicated. The other thing that makes it more complicated is companies are global, and the other part of it that makes it more complicated that I'm seeing like in personalized medicine: you need to build an ecosystem of different kinds, of nanotechnologists, biotechnologists, different expertise to come together. All of this, frankly, you don't learn any of it in school. I remember learning that you can't teach anyone how to lead. You actually have to help people learn how to lead themselves and technologists will frequently say to me, i don't know why, you're a leadership professor? Well, this is a technical problem. We just haven't figured out the platform right, and once we get it right, all will be. No, once you get it right, humans are still going to resist change and not know how to necessarily learn together to get this done. >> I wonder if, are there any speacial leadership skills we need for digital transformation? Really kind of the overarching theme of the show here, help connect the dots for us. >> So the leading change piece is about having a vision, communicating it, and inspiring people. What it really does turn out when we look at exceptional leaders of innovation, and all of us would agree that they've done wonderful things time and again, not just once, they understand that is collective. They spend time building a culture and capabilities that really will support people collaborating together. The first one they build is, how do we know how to create a marketplace of ideas through debate and discourse? Yeah, you can brainstorm, but eventually, we have to abrade and have conflict. They know how to have healthy debates in which people are taught terms of skills, basic stuff, not just listening and inquiring, but how to actively advocate in a constructive way for your point of view, these leaders have to learn how to amplify difference, whereas many leaders learn how to minimize it. And as the founder of Pixar once said, you can never have too many cooks in the kitchen. Many people believe you can. It's like today, you need as much talent as you can get. Your job as a leader, what are the skills you need to get those top cooks to be able to cook a meal together, not to reduce the amount of diversity. You got to be prepared for the healthy fight. >> You've pointed this out in some of your talks is that you've got to have that debate. >> Yes, you have to. >> That friction, to create innovation, but at the same time it has to be productive. I know it can be toxic to an organization, maybe talk about that a little. >> I think one of the challenges is what skills do people need to learn? One is, how do you deal with conflict when people are very talented and passionate? I think many people avoid conflict or don't know how to engage that constructively, just truly don't, and they avoid it. I find that many times organizations aren't doing what they need to do because the leadrr is uncomfortable. The other thing, and I'm going to stereotype horribly here, but I'm an introvert, that book quiet is wonderful, but one of the challenges you have if you're more introverted or if you're more technical and you tend to look at things from a technical point of view, in some ways is that you often find the people with that kind of, that's what drives them, there's a right answer, there's a rational answer we need to get through or get to, as opposed to understanding that really innovative ideas are often the combination of ideas that look like they're in conflict initially, and by definition, you need to have the naive eye and the expert working together to come up with that innovative solution, so for someone who's a technologist to think they should listen to someone who's naive about a technical problem, just the very basic mindset you have about who's going to have the idea. So that's a tricky one, it's a mindset, it's not even just a skill level, it's more, who do you think actually is valuable? Where is that slice that you need at this moment going to come from? It may not be from that expert, it may be from the one who had no point of view. I heard a story that I was collecting my data, and apparently, Steve Jobs went to see Ed Land. We're here in Boston over Polaroid, which is one of our most innovative companies, right, in the history. And he said, what do I need to learn from you? And what Land said to him is, whenever my scientist and technologist get stuck, I have some of the art students or the humanities students come in and spend time in the lab. They will ask the stupid question because they don't know it's stupid. The expert's not going to ask the stupid question, particularly the tech expert, not going to ask it. They will ask the question that gets the first principles. I think, but I wouldn't want to be held to this, the person who was telling me the story, that's partly how they came up with the instant camera. Some naive person said, why do I have to wait? Why can't I have it now? And of course, silly so-and-so, you don't know it takes this, that, and the others. Then someone else thought, why does she have to wait? I think it was really a she who asked the question, the person telling me this, and they came up with a different way. Who said it has to be done in a darkroom in that way? I think that there's certain things about our mindset independently of our skill, that get in the way of our actually hearing all the different voices we need to hear to get that abrasion going in the right way. >> Listening to those Columbo questions, you say, can sometime lead to an outcome that is radically different. There's a lot of conversation in our industry, the technology industry, about, we call it the cordially shock clock, the companies are on a cordially reporting mechanism or requirement from the SEC. A lot of complaints about that, but at the same time, it feels like at least in the tech business, that U.S. companies tend to be more innovative. But again, you hear a lot of complaints about, well, they can't think for the long term. Can you help us square that circle? >> It's funny, so one thing is you rarely ever get innovation without constraint. If you actually talk to people who are trying to innovate, there needs to be the boundaries around it in which they're doing the constraint. To be completely free rarely leads to, it is the constraint. Now we did do a study of boards to try to understand when is a board facilitating innovation and when is a board interfering with it? We interviewed CEOs and lead directors of a number of companies and wrote an article about that last year, and what we did find is many boards actually are seen as being inhibitors. They don't help management make the right decision. Then of course the board would say now management's the one that's too conservative, but this question about how the board, with guidance, and all of these issues have come up when you're looking at research analysts and who you play to, and I've been on corporate boards. One thing is that the CEO needs to know that the board is actually going to be supportive of his or her choices relative to how you communicate why you're making the choices you're making. So there is pressure, and I think it's real. We can't tell CEOs, no, you don't need to care about it, 'cause guess what, they do get in trouble if they don't. On the other hand, if they don't know how to make the argument for investing in terms of helping the company grow, so in the long run, innovation is not innovation for innovation's sake, it's to meet customer needs so you can grow, so you need to have a narrative that makes sense and be able to talk with people, the different stakeholders, about why you're making certain choices. I must say that I think that many times companies may be making the right choice for the long haul, and get punished in the short run, for sure that happens, but I also think that there are those companies that get a way with a lot of investment in the long haul, partly because they do, over time, deliver, and there is evidence that they're making the right choices or have built a culture where people think what they're saying might actually happen or be delivered. What's happening right now because of the convergence of industries, is I think a lot of CEOS, it's a frightening time, it is difficult to sustain success these days, because what you have to do is innovate at low cost. Going back to some other piece about boards, one of the things we've found is so many board members define innovation as being technology. Technology has a very important enabling role to play in otherwise, but they have such a narrow definition of it in a way that again, they create a culture to let the people in the innovation lab innovate, but not one where everybody understands that all of us, together, need to innovate in ways that will also prepare us to execute better. They don't see the whole culture transformation, digital transformation often requires cultural transformation for you to be able to get this stuff done, and that's what takes a long time. Takes a long time to get rid of your legacy systems and put in these new, or get that balance right, but what takes even longer is getting the culture to be receptive to using that new data capability they have and working in different ways and collaborating when they've been very siloed and they're paid to be very siloed. I think that unless you show, as a CEO, that you are actually putting all of those building blocks in place, and that's what you're about, you understand it's a transformation at that level, you're just talking to the analysts about, we're going to do x, and there's no evidence about your culture or anything else going on, how you're going to lead to attract and retain the kind of talent you need, no one's buying that, I think that that's the problem. There's not a whole story that they're telling about how this goes together and they're going to move forward on it. >> To your other point, is there data to suggest, can you quantify the relationship between diversity and innovation? >> There are some data about that, I don't have it. I find it's very funny, as you can see, I'm an African-American woman. My work is on leadership globalization and innovation. I do a lot of work on how you deliver global strategies. I often find when I'm working with senior teams, they'll ask me, would you help us with our inclusion effort? And I think it's partly because of who I am and diversity comes up in our work, and if you actually build the environments for talking about, they tend to be more inclusive about diversity of thought. Not demographic diversity, those can be separate as we well know because we know Silicon Valley is not a place where you see a lot of demographic diversity, but you might see diversity of thought. I haven't asked, it's interesting, I have had some invitations by governments, too. Japan, which has womenomics, which is a part of their policy If they need to get more women in the economy, frankly, otherwise they can't grow as an economy. It turns out that the innovation story is the business case that many businesses or business people find one that they can buy into, doesn't feel like you're doing it 'cause it's the right thing, or not that you shouldn't do the right thing, but helping them understand how you really, really make sure that the minority voice is heard, and I mean minority of thought, independent of demographic, but if you create an environment as a leader where you actually run your team so that people do feel they can speak up, as you all know. It's so often, I'll talk to people afterwards and they'll say, I didn't say what I really thought about those ideas because I didn't want to be punished or I didn't want to step in that person's territory. People are making decisions based on varying complete information everyone knows. What often happens is it gets escalated up. We had this one senior team complaining, everything is so slow here, a very big bank, not the one I'm on the board of, another very big bank we're working with. Everything's so slow, people won't do anything. So when we actually ask people, what's happening? Why aren't you making decisions? First off, decisions making rights are very fuzzy in this organization, except for at the very top, so what they say is all decisions, actually, they're made on the 34th floor. We escalate 'cause if you make a decision, they're going to turn it over anyway, so we've backed off, or we don't say what we think 'cause I don't want them to say what they think about my ideas 'cause we actually have very separate business units here. >> We might get shot. >> You might get shot. That's the reality that many people live in, so we're not surprised to see that not very many organizations can innovate time and again when we think about the reality of what our contexts are. The good news for us is that in part, millennials won't tolerate some of these environments in the same way, which is going to be a good thing. I think they're marvelous to work with, I'm not one of them obviously, but I think a lot of what they're requesting, the transparency, the understanding the connections between what they do and are they having impact, the desire to be developed and be learning, and wanting to be an organization they're not ashamed of but in fact they're very proud to be a part of what's happening there, I think that that requires businesses and leaders to behave differently. One of the businesses we studied, if the millennial wants to know who's on the front line, he or she is making a difference. They had to do finance differently to be able to show, to draw the cause and effect between what that person was doing every day and how it impacted the client's work. That ended up being a really interesting task. Or a supply chain leader, who really needed them to think very differently about supply chain so they could innovate. What he ended up doing is, instead of thinking about our customers being the pharmaceutical company, the CBS or the big hospital chain or whatever it is, think about the end customer. What would we have to do with supply chain to ensure that that end patient took his or her pill on time and got better? And when they shifted the whole meaning of the work to that individual patient in his or her home, he was able, over time, to get the whole supply chain group organization to understand, we're not doing what we need to do if we're really going to reduce diabetes in the world because the biggest problem we have is not when they go and get their medication, it's whether they actually use it properly when they're there. So when you switched it to that being the purpose of the work, the mindset that everyone had to have, that's what we're delivering on. Everyone said, oh, this is completely appropriate, we needed digital, we need different kind of data to know what's going on there. >> Don't get me started on human health. Professor Hill, for an introvert, you're quite a storyteller, and we appreciate you sharing your examples and your knowledge. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube. It was great to meet you. >> Been my pleasure, glad to know you, thank you. >> Keep it right there, everybody, Stu and I will be back right after this short break. You're watching the Cube from LiveWorx in Boston. We'll be right back. (light electronic music)

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018, brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin, we are with Keith Townsend, we are in Orlando, in the NetApp booth, at SAP Sapphire 2018, joined by the CIO of NetApp, Bill Miller, Bill welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, great to be here, I really appreciate it. >> So, NetApp, 26-year-old company, you guys have been on a big transformation journey, give us some nuggets of NetApp's transformation story. >> Yeah, it's really a fascinating story, and it all centered around the customer. In going back a couple of years when we realized this story was evolving from a storage story and a storage history, to a data-centric story going forward. We spent a lot of time listening to our customers. We listened to them in briefing center meetings, we listened to them through strategic customer account sessions, and we really were drawn to this notion of providing outcomes for our customers rather than providing storage long-term. Storage, like all other appliances, ironically in the name of the company, a very well-established respected company, Network Appliance. It was not going to be about appliances in the future, it was going to be about data management and leveraging the value of the data for our customers. So our transformation was about bringing that journey to life and giving our customers choice. Choice around where their data resides and how they utilize that data and how they leverage that data for their customers. So as we listened and we, we kind of absorbed the impact of this, it became clear that for the foreseeable future we were going to live in a hybrid-cloud world. And really what I mean by that is our large established customers were going to have very consequential private cloud data centers for a long time to come. We did very large complex applications that served their customer communities. They weren't going to be able to pick up those large applications and move them quickly to the cloud so they were going to run in high-intensity private cloud very efficient data centers. But at the same time, they were looking to transform digitally, to go on this digital transformation journey, and the vast majority of them wanted to lean in to the hyperscale or clouds, the cloud suppliers, and build their future strategic applications in the cloud. And it became clear to us that their data was now going to be bifurcated, it was going to reside in their own prim facilities but critical, mission critical, and advantageous data was also going to sit out there in the hyperscaler cloud and a company like NetApp could build this data fabric to connect them seamlessly so that the customers had choice. I mean, that's really what was behind the initiative to transform NetApp. >> So as we talk about that transformation, NetApp identified the opportunity. >> Yes. >> Looked at the product portfolio, looked at the gaps. Identified where they needed to go. >> Right. >> NetApp the company needed to go through a digital transformation itself. >> Yeah. >> So as an SAP customer, as a NetApp customer, as the person responsible for enabling developers, application teams, product teams, to execute on that digital transformation, what were some of the challenges, lessons learned as the CIO of NetApp that you experienced. >> It's an awesome question. You kind of went from we're going to transform for our customers to what I did to, or my teams and myself did, to enable that. There's a middle step which is all of our business partners in the company. You know, whether that's finance or sales or marketing, having to realign their business processes to this new need. So let me give you an example on the sales, the go-to-market function, you know. We call this a go-to-market motion, you know, how you sell. Well if you're selling an appliance, you know a piece of hardware with some software with it, that's one very well-defined and familiar motion. If you're going to sell software solutions, if you're going to sell advanced professional services that advise our customers on how to leverage data, those are very different motions that you have to enable to be successful. So what that means is taking that set of business processes that are unfamiliar to us. You know, when a customer wants to buy our products on a pay-as-you-go, a consumption model, rather than a capitalization acquisition, that's a whole different set of processes we have to put in place behind the scenes. Financial processes, legal processes, and of course IT systems. So it started with the business functions, figuring out how they were going to transform their work flows, and then IT had to come in underneath and say do we have the systems, the tools, the platforms, like SAP and other partner-provided platforms to enable that and make those work flows come to life. So it was really a partnership across the whole enterprise and if you really listen to our CEO, George Kurian, George will tell you, this transformation affected every single employee and every single leader in the corporation. It was a major change for us to figure out how you're going to take a business steaming in this direction and turn them 45 degrees on a dime and quickly embrace those new processes and mobilize them through new systems, tools, and platforms. So this was a wholesale change to the corporation, I mean it was a burn-the-ship's model, we're never going back, (Keith laughs) this is the new way of doing business for NetApp. Very exciting, and at the beginning a daunting journey. >> We had Dave Hitz on theCUBE doing a NetApp insight last year and one of the things that he said, he had to come in and tell the on-tap engineers, on-tapping the cloud is okay, we're NetApp and we can burn down what we've done before and do it again, and we'll make that journey. So, it's enlightening to hear that NetApp was willing to burn down the old stuff to build the new. So as we talk about that new, what are the major drivers, as you're talking to other CIOs, you know, I'm sure the sales team wants more of your time than you can give. >> Very perceptive, very perceptive Keith. (laughs) >> As you're talking to CIOs, what is that conversation, what jewels are they trying to get out of you? >> So, we spent a lot of time with our customers. One of the enjoyable parts of my job is my customers are my peers, our customers are my peers, so I did spend a lot of time looking at what's on their agenda. They're driven by two passions almost globally and consistently across the industry. They're driven by a desire to move to the cloud, to move to the cloud aggressively for flexibility, to take advantage of these new marketplaces that the hyperscalers are offering. Hyperscalers and their partners. But if you come out to our home base in Silicon Valley, what you see, all the start-up companies are being designed in the cloud functionality, so that's where a lot of the new R&D and the new IP is being created. So, my peers want to invest more heavily in the cloud. And the second thing they want to do is enable digital transformation, real digital transformation, how do they monetize the wealth of the data that they've acquired through their relationships with their customers, and then how do they leverage that for their customer benefit. That's what digital transformation really means to CIOs, and how do I engage in the cloud to do that. So when we looked at that we said, okay the story's about data, it's digital transformation around data, and it's enabling that cloud journey for our customers at a rate of consumption that is acceptable and digestable to them, right? Because every customer has a different rate of motion to the cloud and depending on their industry type and their degree of risk and enthusiasm to embrace change, they're in different places. So, we had to be very flexible in guiding different customers in different industries to that cloud database journey and so that's why we have to spend an awful lot of time listening to our customers to help them do that. >> Did you find during this time where, not only are you having to burn some ships down and transform yourself, while still transacting business in a competitive way. >> That's exactly right. >> Did you find yourselves going, alright so NetApp's talking about data is key, data fabric, are you going away from storage, did you find that was a question that was commonly asked and if so, how are they responding now to NetApp's transformation? >> That's a great question. Let me get back to that as you know, NetApp going away from storage, and hit something both of you said. This journey of transformation, you can do transformation a number of ways, but the two common ways are I do it and I'm gone. In other words, I get through the fiery pit and I'm on the other side, I'm like, wow I'm glad that's over, okay? That's not the nature of our company. It is, what George would call it, a culture of transformation, right? It's about being willing to change directions if you need to change direction and go, in this dynamic world. >> Based on the customers, what they think, not what as a company, NetApp would like. >> And we're in one of the most dynamic areas of high-tech, when you look at data and you look at the cloud and the solutions. So we realize, it's not over, we haven't transformed and we're done. We're in transformation 2.0, which is the whole next generation, and most of our leadership team is very comfortable with the discomfort associated with continually transforming. >> Comfortably uncomfortable. >> Yeah and I think it takes a certain kind of person to lead in our company and you have to be bold. You have to be bold and want to do that, okay? >> So George gave some emotional examples last year of data-driven capability. In order to make these transformations, NetApp itself has to be driven by data. >> That's right. >> What are some of the key capabilities as a CIO that you've given the business to be data-driven? George can't make these decisions unless he has data. What new capability has NetApp provided George? >> Well, I'll give you an example sitting here at this wonderful SAP conference, you know? We rolled out SAP C4C Hybris this past year. A big journey for us, we were on a separate platform, we knew we needed to build these new work flows into our day-to-day processes and as we thought about what potential solutions would be to kind of break the mold from where we were and move forward, we really liked the SAP HANA platform. We think the HANA platform, very dynamic you know in memory, a high-performance computing platform that's built on the NetApp framework, right? It's a NetApp high-performance infrastructure with an in-memory processing capability that's second to none in my opinion. So we looked at data availability, reporting, insights that we could get, and the commitment from our partners to continue to evolve in insights. So you know, you hear about Leonardo here, and some of the AI and machine learning platforms that are being developed, we felt like that HANA platform would give us a lot of flexibility in the future to be data-driven, to pull data and to do it fast and dynamically to help our business make the right decisions going forward. >> I'm curious, as we finish up here, how influential is NetApp's transformation? And you're right, it's a journey, right? You're going to get a destination, oh and now we're an intelligent enterprise, if only. How impactful and influential has NetApp's transformation been on really continuing to establish NetApp's relevance and your customer base, have you seen that like make deals happen because look what they've done. >> Yeah, a couple things I'll say to that. First of all, customers admire companies that are bold and that really want to lean into technology and make change, so our journey of transformation is absolutely a fascinating one for our customers. They feel like, if you're willing to do that, if you're willing to change dynamically on the behalf of your customers, we got a lot more confidence that you're serious about what you're doing and you're committed to the future. So number one, they love it. Number two, they just want to know how to transform themselves, so any nuggets they can take away from our journey, and reuse and position in their business for future success is much appreciated. And then the third thing I would say, and it gets back to an earlier question you asked. You know, as we give them more choice, as we give them a choice to either advance their current data center with high-performing flash or build a really cost-effective high-performing private cloud with converged infrastructure or really venture out into that digital transformative space of the hyperscalers, we're giving them choice every day. So, we're not afraid to offer them data management solutions in all three of those environments and not only choice by going out to a hyperscaler, an AWS or an Azure or a Google Cloud platform, but to be able to choose multiple cloud supplier platforms so they can put some workloads in Azure, some workloads in GPC, and get a confident feeling that NetApp's going to be there for them in any of those platforms in any of those configurations. They really feel more confident when they hear that story, and I would argue, to some degree, they're more likely to buy our traditional storage if they feel confident of our future vision in the enablement to allow them to succeed with that future vision, so it's been well received at that level. >> NetApp, bold. I love it Bill. >> I think we are. >> Thanks so much for stopping by, and now you're Cube Alumni, so congratulations. >> Well thank you and I hope to come back some time. >> Absolutely, we'd love to have you back. Thank you for watching theCube, I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend and the NetApp booth at SAP Sapphire 2018. Thanks for watching.