>>Okay, welcome back everyone to the Cube's live coverage here in Monaco for the MoCo crypto summit. I'm John fur. You're host of the cube. We got a great guest Dustin plant Boltz who is a crypto advisor, but also the crypto editor for Forbes Monaco here. Seeing the official event, the AAL event of the Monaco crypto summit in Monaco, your coverage area for Forbes, your MCing. Welcome to the >>Cube. Thank you for having me. And it's, it's always fun when I get to have an event in our backyard, cuz I get to hear what others know. And to me I'm very curious. Yeah. Always >>Learning. So you're on the MC on the stage here, you know, queue in the program online great program. So it's innovative event, inaugural event, great name by the way. Crypto summit and mono crypto >>Summit. Yeah, the MoCo crypto summit. >>That sounds like I want to attend every year. >>You're you're more than welcome to attend next year. >>Well, I hope so. Either way. I'm at the Al event with you. So gimme the take on what's on stage. What's been the program, like what's your observations going on here at the event today? >>So what we're starting to see globally is this digitization of things and the people that are part of the innovation side. And so that's what we've been able to see this morning. We're we're now at the break is what sort of companies are out there, the good ones and what are they building? Is this innovation? Is it even innovative and figuring out how they're gonna do it and the roadmaps to getting there from the metaverses to NFTs and even to decentralized finance. >>Yeah, it's the number one question I get is what's legit. What's not legit. And then you're starting to see the, the, the wheat and the shaft separating here and you know, something called crypto winter. But I don't see it. I mean, I see correction for some of the bad things going on in terms of not having the right underpinning infrastructure, the creative ideas are amazing. We're also seeing like digital bits and other platforms kind of coming together to enable the creators and, and the NFT side for instance has been huge. What has been your observation on that enablement? Because you have two schools of thoughts. You have the total nerds we're up and down building everything. Then you have artists and creators, whether it's music, tech apps building, they don't necessarily want to get 'em to the covers. They don't want to deal with all that. Yeah. Have you seen, what's your, what's your take on that? >>So I I'm seeing that a lot of these major brands, you know, they they're striving for excellence. You know, they're being more careful of who they partner with and the types of companies and you know, they, they look at it from reality and a little tough love to figure out should they align their brand. So what we're seeing here is is that there is so much inertia moving forward. That we're just at the beginning of this thing. Yeah. McKinsey recently said that the ecosystem will be over $30 trillion. So when you recognize that we are so early and it's those right now, or some might say are the risk takers. But to me there, aren't taking risk. They're being a part of making history. >>Yeah. You get the pioneers and you get the financial. So as they come together, how do you see the market? Cause what I've noticed with crypto and here in, in this, this market is international. One lot of international finance us is kind of lag behind. You got all kinds of rules, but you got the, the combination of the, the future billionaires. Sure. Okay. The pioneers and then the financeers yeah. Coming the money, the money and the power coming together. What's your reporting show you that's going on right now? What should people know about on how this is evolving? What they shouldn't >>Expect? Well, so you have a group that wants to become cryers they're seeing these individuals globally. They're making lots and lots of money, but what they don't realize is that not everybody is gonna have that outcome, but looking at the technology aspect of it and how it's going to improve a system that many can agree is collectively broken legacy just can't move beyond. It was never designed to you'll see people take shots at certain card companies and I go, but you recognize they developed the assembly line. And so I'm seeing that the smart money they got in long ago, believe it or not. And those now they're looking out for their errors are the ones that saying, I will not have an excuse when my, my grandkids or my, my nieces or my nephews, when they come and ask, where were you when the greatest transformational shift in human history, from both education to jobs, to careers and even wealth was being shifted to a digital world, why were you on the sideline waiting? And so I think what we're gonna see is this tsunami coming, and it's gonna start with one big player and then two and five, you go, go alone. You go far, go together. You go further. And that's what we're seeing is that this collective is moving forward >>And the community, we just had Beth Kaiser on, I've known Beth for many, many years. And she's what she's her journey has done. She's had a great mission and then gets she's a data scientist and came to Analytica. Now she's doing work with Ukraine and the rallying support around it has been impressive. And it's a community vibe, but the community's not just like sympathetic they're hands on together to your point. >>Yeah. It, but it also takes courage. I mean, you look at Britney Kaiser and what she had, and to me, courage is not, not having fear. Courage is not allowing the fear to stop. You, you know, recently asked my executive coach, who's 85 and I'm turning 39. This question of, do you let fear stop you? How do you decide? And he said, you know, you can either let, you can either ride the dragon. And I said, or let the dragon chase you. And Brittany has been one of these that made a decision to do what was right. And it came down to integrity. Yeah. >>So what are you have to these days what's going on in your world? >>What is going on in my world? So I moderate events all over and I connect and I like to ask people questions. So I'm gonna ask you, I'm gonna turn at the interviewer on the >>Interview. It's good. Natural. >>What are you learning? >>I mean, I'm learning, I mean today or this week or this month or this year. Well, I was just talking with Brittany about this. The security world is converging cloud technology, cloud computing. That revolution has just been amazing. Amazon posted their earnings yesterday. They blew it away as far as I'm concerned. So they kind of show there's no tech recession. I've learned that this recession, that we're so called in is the first downturn in tech where there's been cloud players as hyperscalers as an economic engine. Okay. So from a, from a business perspective, Amazon web services, Microsoft Azure now Google cloud, Alibaba's now in, in international version. This is the first time at downturns ever happened with cloud computing as an economic engine. And so therefore what I'm seeing is the digital transformation that's happening across the world for enterprises and entrepreneurs is not stopping. >>It's actually accelerating. So although the GDPs down in inflation is down, you're seeing a massive shift continuing to accelerate, spending and transformation with cloud technologies and decentralized. So you can almost see it kind of in the, this event and other events, even some of the bigger events, the best smartest people are working on it. The applications in all the categories are transforming. If cloud is step one, decentralized gonna be step two. So I see that kind of bridge going from cloud computing, cloud native to decentralized native. And I think a D DAPP market's gonna just explode. I think NFTs are just scratched on the surface. I think that's kind of, I won't say gimmicky, but I think no, but you're right, much more of a much more of a, an illustration that there's more coming. >>There is a lot more coming because people are seeing that there's more to an NFT than an ugly luck and J you know, ugly and JP image that there's, that there's data in there. And that your avatar will be stored as just that as an NFT. And I learned today from go of sing, that decentralization is, is the key to innovation. And I agree with that statement. Holy. >>Yeah. I mean, I think access to stuff is gonna be multidimensional. Like you think about the NFT as, as an ID, whether it's him or UN unstoppable domains is that company just got financing another round where the billion dollars, their concept is like, Hey, one NFT is your access for all of your potential identities in context. >>And isn't that exciting that we're now gonna be at this stage where you travel with you. Yeah. Instead of someone else traveling with you, you get to decide who you will be. And to me, everything you're doing in this world, this reality is now becoming part of your digital asset as a whole. >>I remember when I started my podcasting company in 20 2004, early pioneers, Evan Williams was there with Odo and you had, you know, the blogging revolution going on that whole democratization wave actually didn't happen right then. But all the people that were involved in that web two oh, kind of CRAs was all about democratization. It's kind of happening now. I mean, 15, 20 years later at web services is transformed cloud the democratization for own your own data, putting users in control. And I think in the middle of that, the Facebook's the world, the world garden data, you know, manipulation kind of took it off track a little bit. So I think now I'm, I psych to see that it's back on track to where it was. I mean, Facebook made billions of dollars. Now you got LinkedIn. I mean, LinkedIn's great for your resume, but it's also become a wall's garden with no data export. >>Yeah. And then >>No APIs keep >>Changing. Think about this. That if you wanna apply for a job, just change something quickly. Yeah. Ah, now you're the senior VP. Yeah. Before you were, you're an office manager >>Like to see the immutable block change, >>You don't get to see when did the record change. Yeah. >>Reputation data. You're a digital exhaust people gonna wanna reign that in. And I think the user in charge message that Brit Kaiser was talks about is hugely a mess under, under, under amplified concept. Digital assets are key, but the data ownership is something that I think is, is >>Powerful. So I'm gonna be launching a brand new company in and around September called cryptos. And it's a crypto career center. Think of it like the, the crypto for LinkedIn, that it's an aggregator becoming the industry standard for education, becoming the industry standard for crypto ships, with partners like ledger and moon pay and Casper labs. >>Look at this, we got an exclusive scoop on the cube. This >>Is the first time I will tell you this the first time in, in an environment like this. Yeah. That I'm excited to, I'm excited to talk about, right. Because it's time to be part of the change. Yeah, exactly. You know, as a father, I look at, I know where it's headed in the world of business. I know in the world of this, that we're gonna call the internet of connected things. Yeah. That it's gonna require you to have a certain talent skill or a certain certification. And to me, it's important to have an industry that supports one >>Staff and also, and also history on misinformation, smear campaigns can happen and ruin a career >>Overnight. Can you imagine that one little thing and because the internet never forgets. Yeah. It stays around indefinitely. >>The truth has to come out. Dustin. Great to have you on the queue. Thank you so much. Final question. What have you learned in there is MC what's your takeaway real quick? >>What I've learned is I never tire of learning. Thank you again, to learn more. Dustin plan.com. >>All right. Thanks for coming. Thank you. Cube coverage here at Monaco. I'm Shawn furry. We'll back with more coverage after this short break.

(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone. It's the CUBE's live coverage from Monaco for the Monaco Crypto Summit. I'm John Furrier, host of the CUBE. We're getting all the action here as the world goes decentralization as assets from the physical world connect with virtual to hybrid steady state. But Mattia Baldassarre's here, founder and CEO of Epico Play. Welcome to the CUBE! >> Thank you, John >> So I love to have you on. I love the Italian accent. Get a little European going here. We're from Silicon valley, where you're in Italy. Great to have you on. So Epico Play, what is it? >> So Epico Play is an innovative startup with the aim to digitalize the sport industry, to support clubs, federation leagues, to move into the digital era. Right? So we build up a technology. It is, actually two heads. One is a kind of white label technology for, you know, small, bigger club and then a B2C platform api-play.com where you actually can open up your own engaging channel straight away and allow clubs to have a digital infrastructure, to engage directly with their community, to monetize it and to make together some let's say two way engagement experience. Because we are used today, to just, you know a communication usually by this brand that has one way. So I tell you something, here is something, you know we create something together between the brand that is a club and the community itself. So it's kind of our ability to lump these experiences. >> Yeah. So I saw something on YouTube a day and a half ago. Roma soccer team introduced a new player and the fans were going crazy. They had a little light show. He comes out with the Big Digital Bits logo on this jersey. I forgot who the player was. You know, it was a young player. >> Dybala. Paulo Dybala. >> Yes. And the fans packed the place. And I know he's got the sponsorship with Digital Bits. So Digital Bits is sponsoring that club, but then the underlying technology. Are you over the top? Are you building apps on top of digital bits? >> Yes. I mean, that's also one of the, you know touching point of our partnership. Digital Bits today we announce our partnership with them, with Digital Bits Foundation. They're going to become, you know, our blockchain partner. They will support us on offering the token service to clubs. And for sure, we are going to, we are aiming to create our own token for Epico Play Platform which will always be the substances of the Digital Bits blockchain. And a second step will be for sure optimizing the relationship of Digital Bits, you know, also around the world. >> Yeah. >> But on ourself already has, you know a big pipeline of clubs onboarding. And I was telling before in the in the Summit is not just, we don't want just the top clubs. Right? That's easy. They have money. We want to help, you know, smaller club to go into this new era. Otherwise they're going to lose a lot of audience. They're going to lose a lot of revenue. >> It's interesting Mattia. I was telling earlier guests we had on about the meta version, sports. Sports clubs have been savvy around data for a decade, over a decade, all the big clubs that have TV contracts, certainly. They know how to manage, use technology to manage the team. They have technology to manage the stadiums and they have technology to manage the fan experience which was normally ticketing and, you know, I got a beer, I go to my seat, get stuff delivered, get a shirt, you know spot pricing, being smart. >> Sure. >> So with data. So, okay. That's good. That's a nice foundation. Now with the digital side of things and NFTs you've got assets and you've got a whole other level of interaction on the assets, the player, the brand the fan who can be a player and a fan. And so like now the multiple dimensions of new use cases. >> Completely. It is I believe it is, is like the game A New Hero, you know? So the touching point are much more our, let's say the Gen-Z, you know, the teenager, like they need more, much more input during the week. You know, for our, for my generation going to the stadium was the most exciting thing. So we were waiting for Sunday to go to the stadium, right? Now, the kids, they have so much information that if you don't engage them through this kind of fun engagement during the week, they will play PlayStation, you know or play whatever gaming on Sunday instead of watching the live match. >> But so to get that example let's stay with that for a second. You use your personal experience. Because I felt the same way for sports. If they could reach you during the week you'd be engaging with them. >> Exactly. You collect more data. >> You were ready. >> Exactly, you collect more data and mostly you have a higher quality of the data itself because you see how they behave. You see what they like, not just on the offline pitch. Right? But you can track everything here. So it's a, I think the big step that we bringing also into, into sports >> You know, I did a talk over 15 years ago at MIT and I said, web one was about information. Web two is about connections. And web three is about relationships. Okay, not just who you, you know connected to with devices, relationships. And guess what? Community, NFTs, self-expression, engagement, and the engagement patterns are changing as well. You're talking about things that aren't around right now. >> Yeah, exactly. >> This is new, new benefits. >> It's a new benefit, completely >> New benefits of everybody >> Completely for everybody. And especially, you know, actions that clubs need to do if they want to evolve, you know, that's I think really crucial for them. >> Great. You're building on Digital Bits. Where are you with the company? Talk about the origination story. How did it get started? Did you wake up one day and the apple fell on your head and you said, well, what happened? What's going on? >> So the story is this one, I worked in media, into sport media industry with a big group in London for a long time. And then I was also the CEO of a sport, OTT broadcaster. It is international, but I was taking care of Italy. While I was getting along with clubs, federation leagues, I said, there is a missing here. Right? They still not consider this as a main aspect. They always scared of investment or investing money in this. Right? So that's why we say, okay, you know what when I quit my job, we say, okay, I want, I'm going to... >> You just quit your job. Say I'm going to quit. >> Okay, no, I finished the season. Then I say, okay, done. Now I'm, I'm already thinking about what's going on. And then I open Epico Play. We also, with these mission say, okay there is an opportunity. There is a need in the market. And again, John, I'm not talking about just the top three teams of each league. I'm talking about all the teams. >> All the teams. >> All the teams, professional clubs, being basketball and volleyball. You know, all the sports need these changes. >> Yeah, some are bigger than others, but it's the power law. They all have communities. >> But if you aggregate all the small and medium teams, you know, right, You reach 1.5 billion fans. Right. So huge amount of data. And again, with our technology, we are able to give this environment without an investment from the club. So they are more open. They feel more like comfortable. And we are going to make money together with that. >> And they contribute the assets. So they're partner. >> Yeah. We are completely partner. So we build ecosystem, we then, for them and we make money together. >> It's a joint venture kind of, not formally but it's a win-win. >> It's a win. >> Not a lot of money out of pocket. They put a little bit probably to integrate in, but not big numbers. >> Not a lot of impact on the cash flow because in their mind is still for sure. The pitch, not the field is the most important thing. >> Yes. >> So that's why, okay, then we will help them. Okay. Don't worry. >> It's all upside for them. Do they have a rev share on things too? >> Yes. Exactly. >> So they do a business deal on their side? >> Yes >> So they're happy. They have the option for the future and... >> We build up everything for the future. Then we keep starting and keep monetizing together. So into different ways. >> So can you get some good tickets when the CUBE is in town? >> Whenever you want John. (laughs) >> Of course. What's next for you? Take us through your fundraising. You're building your team. Take a minute to put a plug in for your company. >> We actually, at the end, like seen around 1.2 million. Between, you know, an investment group that we're working with. This other venue, you know, one big TECHO company and some angel, strategic angel investor. Now we are also closing another bridge round to go then in 2023 to make a big round, you know, and scale internationally. So already, now we are approaching five to seven countries new countries, especially, you know, also going to South America where there is a massive adoption of this kind of opportunity, especially in terms of data. Then straight after we're going to, you know, make this fundraising and expand our business. Be really aggressive. As I told you before on the fact that, okay you know what we do the investment. Just let's build us your ecosystem together. >> Yes. >> And then we see, you know can be a different element between eventually other competitors will come out after. >> Okay. Great venture. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for coming on the CUBE. We'll see you at the yacht club later today. >> Thank you so much. >> The big gala event. Stay right there. We're wrapping it up here. I'm John for you here live in Monaco with the CUBE, Monaco Crypto Summit. All the next generation, new wave of businesses being refactored with new technologies, bring in value. That's what decentralization is, web three all coming together. Of course the Cube's covering it like a blanket. I'm John Furrier. We'll be back in more coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

>>Hello, everyone. Welcome to the cubes presentation of the 80 startup showcase marketing technology, emerging cloud scale customer experiences. This is season two, episode three of the ongoing series covering the exciting startups from the, a AWS ecosystem to talk about all the top trends and also featuring the key customers. I'm your host, John ER, today we're joined by Louis Fernando, Denise vice president of peak pay social and John Kim, the CEO of Sandberg to learn about the future of what's going on in fostering deeper customer relationships. Gentlemen, thanks for joining us in the cube showcase, >>Excited to be here. >>So John talk about Sendbird real quick set the table for us. What you guys do, you got a customer here to highlight some of the key things you're doing with customers, the value proposition what's Sendbird and what's the showcase about, >>Yeah, I'm really excited to be here. Uh, I'm John founder, C of Sandberg. So Sandberg is the worst leading conversations platform for mobile applications. We can power user to user conversations in mobile applications, as well as the brand to user conversations such as marketing sales and support. So, uh, today we power over quarter billion users on a monthly basis. Uh, we have, you know, through over 300 employees across seven different countries around the world, we work with some of the world's leading, uh, uh, customers such as big pay that we are going to showcase today, along with other, uh, wonderful customers like DoorDash, Reddit, <inaudible> sports and so forth. We have collectively raised over 200 million in funding. Um, so that's kind of where we are today. >>Well, it's always great to have, uh, one great success. Uh, good funding, more important is the customers. And I love showcases where the customers do the talking, because that means you've got some success stories. Louise, talk about, um, are you happy customer? What's it like working with Sandberg? Give us the, give us the scoop. >>So sandbar is being a great partner with us. So pick pay is a Brazilian payment app. We're at a FinTech here with more than 30 million active users using everyday pick pay to pay everything. So the, the, the majority of the payments are between peers, between people. So sandbar is, is helping us to improve a lot this journey to make it more pleasant between every everyone who are using big, big. So we are here, let's talk and it's a >>Pleasure. Yeah, it's awesome. Well, I great to have you guys on great, great relationship. And one of the things we've been talking about on the cube, if the folks watching that know our audience, no we've been banging the, the drum hard on this new world and this new patterns of user expectations and building relationships in this new digital world is not about the old way, the old MarTech way. There are new new use cases, new expectations by the consumers, John, that are, that are bringing up new opportunities, but also expectations. It's not about, I mean, I mean, if someone's using discord, for example, cuz they're gamers, they're done discord. If they want to communicate with, with slack, they, I do slack, SMS, kind of old hat. You got WhatsApp, you've got all these now peer to peer organic connections, multiple channels. This is all the new world. What's your vision on this new relationship building digital communication world. >>Yeah. So I, I think you brought a really good point there. One of the most frequently used applications in the world today are messaging applications across any countries, any region, any culture, if you look at the most frequently used and most longest used applications are usually some form of a, a messaging application. Now the end users or the customers in the world are so used to using, uh, uh, such a, you know, frictionless ver very responsive, modern experience on those messaging applications. What we want to help with the business around the world, the 99.9% of the business around the world don't have those really te knowledge or user experience expertise in messaging. So we want to help our businesses, help our customers be able to harness the power of modern messaging capabilities and then be able to embed it in their own business so that they can retain their users on their platform, engage with them in the con context that their, uh, what their business is about so that they can not only, uh, control or provide a better user experience, but also be able to, uh, understand their users better, uh, understand what they're doing on their businesses, be able to own and, uh, control the data in a more secure and safe way. >>So really it's uh, we're like the Robin hood of the world trying to keep superpower yeah. Back to the businesses. >>Yeah. Deal from the rich idea, the messaging scale. Bring that to everybody else. I love that. Uh, and you got kind of this double int Robin hood kind of new for the new generation finance. This is about taking the advantage of scalable platforms, monopolies, right. And giving the entrepreneur an opportunity to have that same capability feature, rich Louise PPE. You guys used Sendbird together. You have to level up, you gotta compete with those big monopolies to pride, scalable conversations. Okay. How did you engage this? What was your success path look? What was it look like? >>Yeah. When we look to this majority, the bigger chat apps that we have nowadays in the market, we are looking to them and then Brazilians are using for their daily course, but Brazilians are paying every day millions and millions of payments. And these chat apps are not, uh, able to, to, to deal with these payments. So what we are doing here is that, uh, providing a solution where every conversation that are going to happen before, during, or after a payment between the, the people, they would, uh, uh, have a nice platform that could afford all, all of their emotions and discussions that they have to do before or after the payment. So we are putting together the chat platform and we with the payment platform. So that's, that's what we are doing now. >>Okay. So just so I get this right. You're using Sandberg essentially integrated your mobile payment experience. Okay. Which is your app you're Sandberg to bring that scalability into the, into the social app application into the app itself. Is that right? >>Yes. Perfect. Integrated with the payment journey. So everybody who is going to pay, they need to find the one, the, the one they want to pay and then they can chat and conclude the payment through the platform. Yeah. I >>Mean, why not have it right there at point of, uh, transaction. Right. Um, why did you, um, decide to, um, to use conversations in your mobile wallet? Just curious. >>So it's important to say that we were born social. We born in 2012. So when our main main product was peer to peer payments, so everybody were sending money to a friend requesting or charging their family. So a service provider. And once we, we started as a social platform in that period. In that moment, we are just focusing in likes comments and like public interactions and the word become more private. And as soon we under understood this situation, we decided to move from a public feed to a private, to a private interaction. So that's, uh, that then the, the conversational space was the solution for that moving from a public interaction to a private interaction. So between the peers, which are involved in the, the transaction. So that's why we are providing the chat solution integrated with payments. >>That's a great call. John, just give some context here, again, for the folks watching this is now expected, this integrated experience. What's your, how would you talk to folks out there? I mean, first of all, I, I, I see it clearly, you've got an app, you gotta have all this integration and you need it scaling to reach features. Talk about your view on that. Is that the, is that what's happening here? What's, what's the real dynamic here. What's the, the big trend. >>Yeah. One thing that's, uh, super interesting about, uh, uh, like messaging experience in general, if you think about any kind of conversations that's happening, uh, digitally between human beings, more and more conversations, just like what Louis mentioned earlier are happening between in a private setting, even on applications, whether it be slack or other forms of communication, uh, more hap uh, more conversations happen through either one-on-one conversations or in a private small group settings. And because people feel more secure, uh, safe to have, uh, more intimate conversations. So even when you're making transactions is more, you know, there's a higher trust and, uh, people tend to engage, uh, far better on platforms through these kind of private conversations. That's where we kind of come in, whether it be, you want to set a one-on-one conversations or with a group conversation. And then ultimately if you want to take it public in a large group setting, you can also support, you know, thousands, if not, you know, hundreds of thousands of people, uh, engaging a public forum as well. So all of those capabilities can be implemented using something Ember, but again, the world is, uh, right now the businesses and how the user are, are interacting with this with each other is all happening through digital conversations. And we're seeing more and more of that happening, uh, throughout the life cycle of our company. >>Yeah, just as a sidebar, I was just talking to a venture in San Francisco the other day, and we're talking about the future of security and SAS and cloud scale. And, you know, the conversation went to more of, is it SAS? Is it platform as a service Louis? I wanna get your thoughts because, you know, you're seeing more and more needs for customization, low code, no code. You're seeing these trends. You gotta built in security. So, you know, the different, the old SAS model was softwares a service, but now that's everything in the cloud is softwares a service. So, but you need to have that platform kind of vibe for scale customization, maybe some developer integration, cuz apps are becoming the, the touchpoint. So can you walk us through what your vision was when you decided to integrate, chat into your app and how did you see that chat, changing the customer experience for payments and across your user journey? Cause, I mean, it's obvious now looking at it, but it might not have been for some. What was your, what was your vision? And when you had to do that, >>When you looked to Brazilian reality, we can see those in, uh, payment apps. All of them are focused on the transactional moment. And as soon as we started to think, how could be, how could our journey be better, more pleased than the others and make people want to be here and to use and to open our app every day is just about making the interaction with the peers easier, even with a merchant or even with my friend. So the main point that our first step was just to connect all, all the users between themselves to payments. The second step we are providing now is using the chat platform, the send bird platform as a platform for peak pay. So we are going to provide more best information. We're going to provide a better customer experience through the support and everything. So, um, this, this, this interaction or this connection, this partnership with Sandberg are going to unlock a new level of service for our users. And at the same time, a much more pleasant or a more pleasant journey for them while they are using the, the app for a, a simple payment, or if they are going to look for a group objective or maybe a crowdfund in the future or a group to decide, or just to pay something. So we are then locking a new level of interaction between the peers between the people and the users that are, that are involved into this, this payment or this simple transaction, we are making it more conversational. >>Yeah. You're making the application more valuable. We're gonna get to that in the next segment about, you know, the future of apps one and done, you see a lot of sports apps, oh, this big tournament, you know, and then you use it and then you never use it again until next year. You know, you have very time specific apps, but now you guys are smart to kind of build this in, but I gotta ask you a question because a lot of developers and companies out there always have this buy versus build decision. Why did you decide to use Sendbird versus building it in house? It's always kind of like the big trade off. >>Yeah. First of all, it will take a long, long time for us to achieve a major platform as Sandberg. And we are not a chat platform. So we are going to use this social interaction to improve the payment platform that we have. So when we look to the market and we found Sandberg, then we thought, okay, this guys, they are a real platform. And through the conversations, we are seeing that they are roadmap working in synergy with our roadmap. And then we can, we could start to deliver value to our, to our users in a fastest way. Could you imagine it spending 2, 3, 4 years to develop something like sand? And even when we achieve this point, probably our solution will be, would be weaker than, than Sandberg. So it was like no brainer to do that. Yeah. Because we want to improve the payment journey, not to do a chat, only a chat platform. So that's why we are working together to prove it's >>Really, you start to see these plugins, these, you know, look at Stripe for payments, for instance, right. And here in the success they've had, you know, people want to plug in for services. So John, I gotta ask you about, um, about the, the complexity that goes into it. The trust required that they have for you, you have to do this heavy lifting, you gotta provide the confidence that your service is gonna have to scale the compliance. Talk about that. What do you guys do under the covers that make this easy again, great business model, heavy lifting done by you. Seamless integration provide that value. That's why business is good, but there's a lot going on share what's happening under the, under the covers. >>Yeah. Um, before going to like the technical, like intricacy of what we do just to provide a little bit of background context on why we even started this business is we, uh, this is my second startup. My first company was a gaming company. We had built like chat three, four times just for our own game. So we were basically, we felt like we were reinventing the wheel. And then we actually went on a buyer's journey when we were building a social application, uh, uh, for, for, uh, uh, building our own community. We tried to actually be a buyer to see if we can actually find a solution. We want to use turns out that there weren't a lot of like sophisticated, you know, top notch, modern, uh, uh, chat experience that we can build using some other third party solutions. So we had to build all of that ourselves, which became the foundation for se today. >>And what we realized is that for most companies like using a building, the most sophisticated chat is probably not going to be their highest priority in case a pick pay will be, you know, financial transactions and all the other business that can be built on and hosted by platform like pick pay. But, you know, building the most topnotch chat experience would be a priority for a company like let's say WhatsApp or, or telegram, but it will probably not be the priority for, you know, major gaming companies, food delivery companies, finance companies, chat is not the highest priority. That's kind of where we come in, cuz chat is the highest priority for us. And we also have a privilege of working with some of the other, uh, world industry, uh, industry leaders. So by, uh, having this collective experience, working with the industry leaders, we get, uh, uh, technological superiority, being able to, uh, scale to, you know, hundreds of millions of users on a monthly basis. Also the security and the compliances by working with some of the largest commercial banks on some of the largest FinTech applications across the globe. So we have, you know, security, compliances, all the industry, best practices that are built in and all the new topnotch user experience that we are, uh, building with other customers can be also be, uh, utilized by a customer like pick pay. So you get this collective almost like evolutionary benefit. Yeah. By, uh, working with a company like us, >>You get a lot of economies of scale. Could you mind just sharing the URL for the company? So folks watching can go get, do a deep dive. Cause I'm you guys got a lot of, lot of, um, certifications under the covers, a lot of things you guys do. So you mind just sharing URL real quick. >>Yeah. So our company, uh, you can find everything about our company on sandberg.com like carrot pigeon. So, uh, you're sending a bird to send a message. So, uh, yeah. send.com >>All so let's get it to the application, cuz this is really interesting cuz Chad is table stakes now, but things are evolving beyond Chad. You gotta integrate that user experience. It's data. Now you gotta have scale. I mean, you know, people who wanna roll their own chat will find out there's a lot of client side and backend scale issues. Right. You can have a tsunami river like on Twitch, you know, you chat. I mean that, could you got client side issues, data scale. <laugh> right. You got backend. Um, Louis, talk about that dynamic because you know, as you start to scale, you want to rely on that. Talk about this dynamic, how apps now are integrating all these new features. So is it, are apps gonna go like more multifunctional? Do you see apps one and done? What's the, how do you guys see this app world playing out and where does, does the Sendbird fit in? And >>Just, just let me know better John, about the performance or about the, just, just let me >>Oh, slow with performance. Uh, performance is huge, right? You gotta have no one wants to have lag on, on chat. >>Okay. So, um, big pay when we look to the payments have millions, thousands of, of, of payments happen happening every second. So what we are doing now is moving all the payments through a conversation. So it always happened inside the conversation. So since from the first moment, um, every second counts to convert this client. And since from the first moment we never saw in, on Sandberg, any issue about that. And even when we have a question or something that we need to improve the team we're working together. So that that's, those are the points that are making us to work together and to make things going pretty fast. When we look to the users who are going to use chat, they are, their intention is three times better than the users who are not using payments through the chat. They are average. Average spent is three times higher too. >>So they, they are making more connections. They are chatting with their friends. They are friends are here. So the network effect is stronger. So if they're going to pay and they need to wait one more second, two seconds to conclude the payment, probably they will not go into choose paying through the, again, they will use only the wallet, only the code, only the Alliance of the user. So that's is so important for us to perform really, really fast. And then this is what we are finding. And this is what is happening with the integration with Sandberg. >>And what's interesting is, is that the by build chat with conversation, we just had a minute ago kind of plays in here. You get the benefits of Sandberg, but now your transactional fidelity is in the chat <laugh> that you don't build that you rely on them on. So again, that's an interesting dynamic. This is the future of apps, John, this is where it matters. The engagement. This is what you talk about is the new, the new digital experience who would've thought that five, 10 years ago. I mean, chat was just like, Hey, what's going around direct message. Now it's integral part of the app. What's your reading. >>Yeah. I mean, we're seeing that across, uh, uh, to Lewis's point, not just transactions, but like marketing messages are now being sent through chat. So the marketing is no longer just about like giving discount calls, but you can actually reengage with the brand. Uh, also support is becoming more real time through chat. So you're actually building a relationship. The support agents have a better context about the previous conversations and the transactions, the sales conversations, even like building, uh, building alerts, notification, all those things are now, uh, happening through conversations. And that's a better way for customers to engage with the brand cuz you actually, you're actually building a better relationship and also, uh, being able to trust the brand more because there is a channel for you to communicate and, and, and be seen and be heard, uh, by the brand. So we do believe that that's the future of the business and how more and more, uh, brands will be building relationships with their customers. >>Yeah. I love, I love your business model. I think it's really critical. And I think that stickiness is a real, uh, call out point there and the brand, the co-branding and the branding capability, but also really quickly in the last minute we have John and Luis, if you don't mind talking about security, I mean, I can't go a day now without getting an SMS scam, uh, text, uh, you seeing it now on WhatsApp. I mean, I don't even use telegram anymore. I mean, come on. So like, like this is now a problem. The old way has been infiltrated with spam and security issues. Security has to be there. The trust and security real quick, John, we'll start with you and we all Louis go, go ahead. >>No, no. Just, just to, to say how important is that we are not only a chatting platform. We are a payment platform, so we have money now, the transaction. So here in Brazil, we have all this safe, the, the, the layers, the security layers that we have in, on our app. And then we have the security layers provided from Sandburg. So, and when we look to the features, Sandberg are providing to us a lot of features that help users to feel safer like per refined profiles, like announcements, where it's a profile from peak pay, where the users can recognize. So this is peak pay talking with me. It's not a user trying to pass, trying to use big Bay's name to talk with me. So these issues is something that we are really, really, we really care about here because we are not only a chat platform. As I said before, we are a payment platform. We are a FinTech, we're at a digital bank. So we need to take care a lot and we don't have any complaint about it because Sandberg understood it. And then they, they, they are providing since the first moment with the perfect solutions and the user interface to make it simpler for the users to recognize that we speak, pay who is chatting with them, not a user with, with bad, bad intentions. >>Great, great insight, Louis. Thanks for sharing that, John really appreciate you guys coming on. Great showcase. Real final word. John will give you the final word folks watching out there. How do they engage with Sendbird? I want to integrate, I want to use your chat service. What do I do? Do I have to connect in as it managed service is the line of code. What do I do to get Sendbird? >>Yeah. So if you're a developer building a mobile application, simply come visit our website, we have a open documentation and SDK you can download and simply plug into your application. You can have a chat experience up and running matter of minutes, if not ours using our UI kit. So we want to make it as easy as possible for all the builders in the world to be able to harness the superpower of digital conversations. >>All right, great. Congratulations, John, on your success and all the growth and Louis, thanks for coming in, sharing the customer perspective and great insight. Thanks for coming on the showcase. Really appreciate it. Thanks for your time. >>Yeah. Thank you for having me. >>Okay. The a of us startup showcase season two, episode three here I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching.

>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Welcome back to the Cube's day one coverage of HPE discover 2022 live from Las Vegas. Lisa Martin, here with Dave ante. We've got a couple of guests here with us next, gonna be talking about industry transformation, please. Welcome, brought off director of global industry and sustainability marketing and Andy Hulk, halter senior director at worldwide industry sales programs, guys from HPE. Thanks for joining us. You bet. >>Thank you for having to >>Be here, >>Industry transformation. That's a big term. It's not a new concept, but we see so much going on. Andy, talk to you about industry transformation, from your perspective, where are customers, how are they capitalizing to really make data a true currency? >>Right? Well, underlying all this is, is the data that is becoming so complex, but at the same time, there's specialization required in each industry with the different applications that the industries are running and our ability to bring that forward and connect all those things is a big trend going on. And as we see that developing over time, um, we're getting more, um, connecting those different applications that are running is becoming more, uh, every day we're doing more of that. >>One more. >>So where do you wanna start? What's your favorite industry to, to transform? Uh, I mean, financial services is, you know, got the right, the whole blockchain thing going on, uh, industry 4.0 and manufacturing, you know, retail, everybody has, uh, you know, an Amazon war room, you know, energy now with EVs and, and solar and everything else and the price of oil. And, and now you throw in inflation and supply chain and you, I mean, it's just, every industry is getting disrupted. I, I wanna make an observation. You guys tell me what you think. Yeah. You know, think about the, the incumbent industries. They, they generally have data at the outskirts. It's all siloed and they're trying to put it at the core and that's a big challenge for them. What are you guys seeing in terms of who is having success with that? Do you have examples? What role do you play? Yeah, we have so much to talk about, right? Yeah. >>Yeah. Let me I'll jump in here. Um, I mean, I think one of the unique ideas is all this interest industries you mentioned, there are all trying to learn from each other, right? If you're a financial institution, you wanna understand what retail is doing because you wanna serve your customers better. Right. You wanna look at, you know, some of these technologies, how they're being applied. Um, you look about like sustainability industries are trying to learn how to do that better from each other. So there's this notion of industry and transformation is it's kind of twofold. It's one. How are these industries almost like entering new markets? I mean, you look at, at all the tech, tech companies out there, they're all getting in into payments, for example. Right. You know, Google pay app. Yeah. Mm-hmm <affirmative> so that's just like one example of where you're seeing the kind of, that, that blurring of lines between industries happening >>Content, uh, Amazon getting into grocery. And so in, in the premises, that data is the enabler. I mean, right. For decades, we've seen a, a, a stack, a vertical stack within an industry where, yeah. Where, whether it's, you know, research and development, manufacturing, sales, and distribute marketing, you were in that industry stuck for life. Right. And now all of a sudden data allows you to traverse industries. Yeah. This dual disruption agenda that you mentioned, right? >>Yeah. It's, it's, it's really, as it's core is because these companies have the ability to take advantage of that data even more. And they're trying to serve their customers even better that that's kind of opening up these new doors for them to, to do that because that's, you know, and again, there's so many good examples out there. Uh, automobile manufacturing are looking towards the gaming industry, you know, to how do they design controls, you know, that kind of stuff is, you know, as example. So you see, you know, all kinds of that. You mentioned also that, you know, everybody's trying to bring the data to the core. I don't, I don't think that's necessarily true. I think you heard earlier today in the keynote, you know, that that companies want to be able to, to take advantage of the data, data, wherever it is. Um, if it's the edge and a factory floor, if it's in a, you know, it's patient data sitting somewhere, you want to, you know, handle it where it is, and there's a cost to doing that, to bring it all >>Together. Yeah. So by the way, I wanna clarify you're absolutely right. The data by its very nature is distributed. Sure. When I say core, I mean, put it at the core of their business. Sure. That's >>What, I mean, >>Fair enough by data first, but your point is really, we're gonna talk about that. Yeah. Because it brings, brings so many other challenges with how you deal with that. But please jump in Lisa. Yeah. >>I was just gonna ask you, Brad, you talk about the blurred lines between industries. Yeah. And talk to us about how is HPE a facilitator of those industries learning from each other. You have such breadth in so many different industries as Dave mentioned, but how are you that enabler, if you will, of allowing them to, to be able to have data be that key. >>Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think it just comes through the experience of working with these customers, um, you know, in these various industries. And then, um, there's so many times where customers come to us and they want us brief and again, they wanna learn for these other industries. So we're an aggregator of that technology. We obviously UN understand the technology with the cloud or, you know, edge or, you know, anything we're doing in with data. So we're using those, you know, those lessons and just applying those out there, um, you know, to those industries. So it's, I think it's just us as an aggregator. >>You, you, how how's the customer experience changing any we heard from home Depot this morning, they were focused on the customer experience and, and their associate experience. Right? Yeah. Bringing those together maybe. >>Well, you know, what we also heard this morning is the different personas, right. That are out there and being that are looking to transform their business. Yeah. And each of those personas is still linked together by the data, but they want to use it in different ways with different applications and the ability to connect all those things. Again, they're learning from each industry. So what home Depot learns about their mobile apps, maybe something that we can deploy in, uh, manufacturing, um, as far as locating things on the floor and connecting the edge data in, bring it in to, and then use that to analyze, use AI models, to do predictive behavior, uh, preventative maintenance, all these things are similar uses of connecting the data, but then applying to the specific industry use case. Yeah. And that pivot of that horizontal use of the data into those specific demands by, uh, at the personas within the, the, the different industries is what we're, we're >>Focused on. Yeah. And the technology is like an accelerate, you know, here. So you're think about like something like 5g, right. 5g is gonna accelerate, you know, a lot of transformation in various industries. Um, throughout that, I mean, tech, you know, the technology alone is not really what the, the, the customer cares about it. They, they care about what do I do with that? What kind of outcome can I get? Right. >>I wanna ask you, Andy, about the customer conversations, you talked about the personas, we've been talking about data democratization for a very long time. Mm-hmm, <affirmative> obviously is a challenging thing to do, but how were you seeing customer conversations, change and evolve, especially over the last couple of years where every L B has to have access to data and be a driver of its value. >>Right. Well, the customer, you know, historically H HP's, uh, background is in infrastructure and we've served industries in the data center for a legacy, right. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, but now they're saying it's more, you know, I've gotta talk to, uh, more people in my business as a data center owner, I've gotta serve these folks, understand their business. And as a supplier, to me, you need to understand them as well. And sometimes help me with that conversation and help me see the things to make those connections that I may not know as a data, you know, as a, as an it professional. Um, and how do we challenge the business to think about different ways of doing things in the industry? So how do we, we think about, um, you know, bringing those connections from other industries in, and, and, uh, uncovering, uh, opportunities or problems anticipating problems in those deployments that they may not have seen by their staying in their swim lane. >>Yeah. You know, I'm, I'm touring on this topic because on the one hand, I think about the, the big data era and, and, and I know a, of, a lot of failures to, to return, you know, the expectations and it wasn't a fail fast. It took a decade, you know, to get there. And part of the failure domain was to your earlier point, Brett, everything was sort of shoved into this centralized location. Yeah. You have this hyper specialized data team, and everybody has to go through them, but organizations I think are now realizing it, like, like your thoughts on this, that data has to go out to the lines of business. It has to be contextualized. People are now talking about building data products and monetizing data. And yeah, that's really, to me what digital transformation is about. So, but generally speaking, most companies are not great at data. They have a lot of data. Yeah. A lot of, lot of data line around insights. I think we heard in the morning keynote are scarce. Right. So what's your vision for how this evolves? >>Yeah. I think, I think, you know, from the data perspective that again, the, at the core is how do I serve my customer better? Right. So, you know, whether that is actual, you know, customer data that you want to sort of up personalized offers for, or, you know, make decisions of, you know, medical decisions for their, you know, for their, you know, better patient outcomes. So if they keep that in mind, then, you know, as far as how it's used by the different lines of business there, you know, that's where we can help facilitate, you know, in many ways. And that's where, you know, cloud becomes a, you know, a really key technology, um, you know, having that flexibility to, to move it around as needed, create the, you know, um, deliver the workload where the customer needs it, that, you know, that sort of idea is, is where we're, we're going with this. >>I think, yeah. I'd, I'd like to give you an example, um, please, in the FSI industry, uh, out here on the floor, we've got a demo on payment systems, right. And we've been doing that, uh, with our nonstop, uh, product and supporting that, uh, in the, in the banking industry for 10 years or more. And it's evolved over time to be one of the, you know, it's a ubiquitous across the, in the support. Yeah. Um, but now we're talking about new regulations with all the global events that are going on, you know, crazy stuff that more pressure on the banks to, to comply with that, um, worries about money laundering and fraud prevention. Well, connecting those, the data from those payment systems into the AI modeling that is now being deployed to do more sophisticated fraud detection and Mon money laundering detection and all of those kinds of things, how you connect those together as an example, what we're seeing, how we get more insights by, uh, by the combination that we can bring together. >>And the insights is critical. Yes. Right. I mean, without it, the data isn't very useful. >>Right, right. Right. And I think even, you know, these, these concepts like swarm learning right. Where you're actually trying to aggregate a lot of those, you know, a lot of that data and, and provide, you know, even a broader data set to, to learn from is even, you know, more beneficial. >>I think the, when you think about the, the principles of this, this decentralized world, that's that it starts with an organization saying, look, we recognize that we can't shove it all into a data warehouse or a data hub or a single data lake. Yeah. We're gonna have all of those. And those are just kind of nodes in the mesh, like it's steel as Youma the GHI term <laugh> and, and, and, and increasingly data as product that can be monetized. We're hearing a lot more about this, and those are organizational yeah. Considerations. I mean, HPE can maybe facilitate that through whiteboard sessions, but, but the, that leads to, in order to, to democratize data, I need self-service infrastructure and I need data that can be shared and governed. I, I don't know about the last one, but you definitely are. Number three self-service infrastructure simplification. Yeah. Your version of cloud. How do you see that, uh, your, your role in that little vision that I just laid out? Do you buy that? >>You wanna take that or, >>Well, I, I think that we have, um, we definitely, because we, we see the data in all these different places and we're, we're trying to be agnostic to, um, you know, where it comes from, who owns it. It's how do you get it together and make it useful? And you don't have to capture it. You don't have to own it, but you may own some of it. You may borrow some of it. You may rent some of it. You may buy it and you may bring it together and they'll use it for the purpose. And then move on to expand into new things that you learn from that you may then monetize, um, in all those different ways. So we have a role of making that platform in a way that you can see it in different ways and use it consistently and repetitively and GRA gain more value of it, and then apply your applications and, you know, all those other things that you do. But that, that bringing together agnostically is a big part of our offering. >>And, and am I, am I not correct? I'm in my thinking on H HP's value is providing that infrastructure, uh, to be able to do just, just that that's your swim lane, if you will. And >>It is, but we're being asked to move up the stack and provide not only the infrastructure now, the platform, the ability to offer that platform, uh, in our HPE GreenLake offering where we're, we now can, you know, have cloud-like services on prem. It doesn't really matter where the data sits, um, and then plug in the applications and even manage those applications for the >>Customers. Okay. So, I mean, I see you as I, as, and Paz, which that up to stack yeah. The ability to, okay. I want whatever Python or open shift, I wanna build applications now on that. Interesting. The management piece is something I, I excluded, um, be because an organization may say, Hey, we need help managing this stuff. Right. But I see that, that I, as in pass, as infrastructure, you're not getting into applications where you're getting, you're not >>No other than letting, letting customers, you actually build on top of that. Right. Right. There's a >>Lot of customer, you're an enabler. >>Absolutely. Yeah. You look at some of the things we're doing with, you know, with our escrow platform and things like that. Right. You know, we're providing that development platform in a, in a really streamlined way of, of, you know, pushing, you know, applications out. I mean, little known fact, right. Is that most banks right now are hiring more developers right now than, than finance people. So all these, all these industries are becoming tech companies and that's, you know, that's the whole launch of the FinTech industry many years ago, and it's, you know, continued to evolve >>And they want to bring AI, they wanna bring data into their applications. And you, HPE I see is an enabler of >>That. Absolutely. Absolutely. >>Give us last question. As we wrap up here, give us the vision, like the next five years, what are some of the industry transformation elements you are forecasting if you have a crystal >>Ball. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think number one, just an increased focus on personalization and customization. Uh, you know, you look at, you know, personalized offers when you add location based services, things like that, combined 5g, you know, like all this technologies, you're seeing a lot of that custom manufacturing, so those kind of trends are gonna continue. And we know that's, you know, those are the workloads that we gotta, you know, know know is coming, you know, down the pike and, and, and address those. Um, secondly I think AI, right, AI is gonna, is gonna be, you know, it's gonna impact every industry in a big, big way. You know, when like Andy talked right about, you know, fraud detection, uh, you know, manufacturing, robotics, those kind of things. Uh, and then I think, um, you know, lastly, just, just this more convergence, you know, of these industries, right. You know, tech is just, you know, impacting everything in such a big way. And so you're gonna see more of that, that blurring of lines between, between industries. So they jump into jump outta their normal swim lanes. Right, right. >>Be between machine learning and AI, we're gonna see efficiencies by doing things better, with less, uh, deviations and driving, uh, lower cost. And we're gonna see new capabilities come to the forefront and that's gonna be consistent across all industries. And it's gonna be based on the data. Both of those require the models, you know, the data go in and drive their models. Do >>You think any industry is more ripe for disruption? I mean, timeframe wise, you got healthcare, you know, like I always wonder, you know, how is AI gonna help doctors make better diagnoses already is yeah. Will, will AI make the diagnoses? Yeah. You know, retail, I mentioned before, you know, energy, you know, government is changing entertainment, media entertainment is, do you see any industry patterns where one is being disrupted more than the other? >>When we talk to customers, every industry thinks their industry is not going fast enough. And so it's like, you know, I think everybody is just so hyper focused on, you know, what they are involved in and then their domain that, uh, you, you, depending on who you talk to. Yeah. I, you don't, everybody needs to do it faster, you know, more economically, um, and more efficiently. Right. And so >>I think, and they're all being disrupted now, too. Absolutely. It's not only have to do faster, but they've got to, um, transform to keep up with the demands of their >>Customer. Nobody's safe. >>Yeah. And the technology's just gonna continue to accelerate that. And that's the thing. And, and, and the market's becoming, you know, less forgiving as, as we go. So people have to react really, really fast in these markets, you know, and especially with all the other changes going on around us, uh, to, to actually, you know, make that impact. >>Interesting. I'm liking what's in this crystal ball. I'm gonna have to ask you guys for some cons after we wrap here. Absolutely. Thank you so much for joining David, me talking about industry transformation, tremendous amount of, of transformation so far and so much to go. It's exciting to watch. >>Yeah. Appreciate it. >>Have an, we appreciate it for our guests and Dave ante. I, Lisa Martin, you're watching the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. You AP back after a short break.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to this CUBE Conversation featuring Rockset CEO and co-founder Venkat Venkataramani who selected season two of the AWS Startup Showcase featured company. Before co-founding Rockset Venkat was the engineering director at Facebook, infrastructure team responsible for all the data infrastructure, storing all there at Facebook and he's here to talk real-time analytics. Venkat welcome back to theCUBE for this CUBE Conversation. >> Thanks John. Thanks for having me again. It's a pleasure to be here. >> I'd love to read back and I know you don't like to take a look back but Facebook was huge hyperscale data at scale, really a leading indicator of where everyone is kind of in now so this is about real-time analytics moving from batch to theme here. You guys are at the center, we've talked about it before here on theCUBE, and so let's get in. We've a couple different good talk tracks to dig into but first I want to get your reaction to this soundbite I read on your blog post. Fast analytics on fresh data is better than slow analytics on stale data, fresh beats stale every time, fast beats slow in every space. Where does that come from obviously it makes a lot of sense nobody wants slow data, no one wants to bail data.(giggles) >> Look, we live in the information era. Businesses do want to track, ask much information as possible about their business and want to use data driven decisions. This is now like motherhood and apple pie, no business would say that is not useful because there's more information than what can fit in one person's head that the businesses want to know. You can either do Monday morning quarterback or in the middle of the third quarter before the game is over, you're maybe six points down, you look at what plays are working today, you look at who's injured in your team and who's injured in your opponent and you try to come up with plays that can change the outcome of the game. You still need Monday morning quarterbacking that's not going anywhere, that's batch analytics, that's BI, classic BI, and what the world is demanding more and more is operational intelligence like help me run my business better, don't just gimme a great report at the end of the quarter. >> Yeah, this is the whole trend. Looking back is key to post more like all that good stuff but being present to make future decisions is a lot more mainstream now than ever was you guys are the center of it, and I want to get your take on this data driven culture because the showcase this year for this next episode of the showcase for Startup says, cloud stuff says, data as code something I'm psyched for because I've been saying in theCUBE for many years, data as code is almost as important as infrastructure as code. Because when you think about the application of data in real-time, it's not easy, it's a hard problem and two, you want to make it easy so this is the whole point of this data driven culture that you're on right now. Can you talk about how you see that because this is really one of the most important stories we've seen since the last inflection point. >> Exactly right. What is data driven culture which basically means you stop guessing. You look at the data, you look at what the data says and you try to come up with hypothesis it's still guardrail, it's a guiding light it's not going to tell you what to do, but you need to be able to interrogate your data. If every time you ask a question and it takes 20 minutes for you to get an answer from your favorite Alexa CD or what have you you are probably not going to ever use that device you will not try to be data driven and you can't really build that culture, so it's not just about visibility it's not just about looking back and getting analytics on how the business is doing, you need to be able to interrogate your data in real-time in an interactive fashion, and that I think is what real-time analytics gives you. This is what we say when we say fast analytics on real-time data that's what we mean, which is, as you make changes to your business on the course of your day-to-day work, week-to-week work, what changes are working? How much impact is it having? If something isn't working you have more questions to figure out why and being able to answer all of that is how you really build the data driven culture and it isn't really going to come from just looking at static reports at the end of the week and at the end of the quarter. >> To talk about the latency aspect of the term and how it relates to where it could be a false flag in the sense of you could say, well, we have low latency but you're not getting all the data. You got to get the data, you got to ingest it, make it addressable, query it, represent it, these are huge things when you factor in every single data where you're not guessing latency is a factor. Can you unpack what this new definition is all about and how do people understand whether they got it right or not. >> A great question. A lot of people say, is five minutes real-time? Because I used to run my thing every six hours. Now for us, if it's more than two seconds behind in terms of your data latency, data freshness, it's too old. When does the present become the past and the future hasn't arrived yet and we think it's about one to two seconds. And so everything we do at Rockset we only call it real-time if it can be within one to two seconds 'cause that's the present, that's what's happening now, if it's five minutes ago, it's already five minutes ago it's already past tense. So if you kind of break it down, you're absolutely right that you have to be able to bring data into a system in real-time without sacrificing freshness, and you store it in a way where you can get fast analytics out of that so Rockset is the only real-time data platform real-time analytics platform with built-in connectors so this is why we have built-in connectors where without writing a single line of code, you can bring in data in real-time from wherever you happen to be managing it today. And when data comes into Rockset now the latency is about query processing. What is the point of bringing in data in real-time if every question you're going to ask is going to still take 20 minutes to come back. Well, then you might as well batch data in order to load it, so there I think we have a conversion indexing, we have a real-time indexing technology that allows data as it comes in real-time to be organized in a way and how a distributor SQL engine on top of that so as long as you can frame your question using a SQL query you can ask any question on your real-time data and expect subsequent response time. So that I think is the the combination of the latency having two parts to it, one is how fresh is your data and how fast is your analytics, and you need both, with the simplicity of the cloud for you to really unlock and make real-time analytics to default, as opposed to let me try to do it and batch and see if I can get away with it, but if you really need real-time you have to be able to do both cut down and control your data latency on how fresh your data is, and also make it fast. >> You talk about culture, can you talk about the people you're working with and how that translates into your next topic which is business observability, the next play on words obviously observability if you can measure everything, there shouldn't be any questions that you can't ask. But it's important this culture is shifting from hardcore data engineering to business value kind of coming together at scale. This is kind of where you see the hardcore data folks really bringing that into the business can you talk about this? The people you're working with, and how that's translating to this business observability. >> Absolutely. We work with the world's probably largest Buy Now Pay Later company maybe they're in the top three, they have hundreds of millions of users 300,000+ merchants, working in so many different countries so many different payment methods and there's a very simple problem they have. Some part of their product, some part of their payment system is always down at any given point in time or it has a very high chance of not working. It's not the whole thing is down but, for this one merchant in Switzerland, Apple Pay could be not working and so all of those kinds of transactions might not be processing, and so they had a very classic cloud data warehouse based solution, accumulate all these payments, every six hours they would kind of process and look for anomalies and say, hey, these things needs to be investigated and a response team needs to be tackling these. The business was growing so fast. Those analytical jobs that would run every six hours in batch mode was taking longer than six hours to run and so that was a dead end. They came to Rockset, simply using SQL they're able to define all the metrics they care about across all of their dimensions and they're all accurate up to the second, and now they're able to run their models every minute. And in sort of six hours, every minute they're able find anomalies and run their statistical models, so that now they can protect their business better and more than that, the real side effect of that is they can offer much better quality of a product, much better quality of service to their customer so that the customers are very sticky because now they're getting into the state where they know something is wrong with one of their more merchants, even before the merchants realize that, and that allows them to build a much better product to their end users. So business observability is all about that. It's about do you know really what's happening in your business and can you keep tabs on it, in real-time, as you go about your business and this is what we call operational intelligence, businesses are really demanding operational intelligence a lot more than just traditional BI. >> And we're seeing it in every aspect of a company the digital transformation affects every single department. Sales use data to get big sales better, make the product better people use data to make product usage whether it's A/B testing whatnot, risk management, OPS, you name it data is there to drill down so this is a huge part of real-time. Are you finding that the business observability is maturing faster now or where do you put the progress of companies with respect to getting on board with the idea that this wave is here. >> I think it's a very good question. I would say it has gone mainstream primarily because if you look at technologies like Apache Kafka, and you see Confluent doing really really well, those technologies have really enabled now customers and business units, business functions across the spectrum, to be able to now acquire really really important business data in real-time. If you didn't have those mechanisms to acquire the data in real-time, well, you can't really do analytics and get operational intelligence on that. And so the majority is getting there and things are growing very fast as those kinds of technologies get better and better. SaaSification also is a very big component to it which is like more and more business apps are basically becoming SaaS apps. Now that allows everything to be in the cloud and being interconnected and now when all of those data systems are all interconnected, you can now have APIs that make data flow from one system to another all in happening in real-time, and that also unlocks a lot more potential for again, getting better operational intelligence for your enterprise, and there's a subcategory to this which is like B2B SaaS companies also having to build real-time interactive analytics embedded as part of their offering otherwise people wouldn't even want to buy it and so that it's all interconnected. I think the market is emerging, market is growing but it is gone mainstream I would say predominantly because, Kafka, Confluent, and these kinds of real-time data collection and aggregation kind of systems have gone mainstream and now you actually get to dream about operational intelligence which you couldn't even think about maybe five or 10 years ago. >> They're getting all their data together. So to close it out, take us through the bottom line real-time business observability, great for companies collecting their data, but now you got B2B, you got B2C, people are integrating partnerships where APIs are connecting, it could be third party business relationships, so the data collection is not just inside the company it's also outside. This is more value. This is the more of what's going on. >> Exactly. So more and more, instead of going to your data team and demanding real-time analytics what a lot of business units are doing is, they're going to the product analytics platform, the SaaS app they're using for covering various parts of their business, they go to them and demand, either this is my recruiting software, sales software, customer support, gimme more real-time insights otherwise it's not really that useful. And so there is really a huge uptake on all these SaaS companies now building real-time infrastructure powered by Rockset in many cases that actually ends up giving a lot of value to their end customers and that I think is kind of the proof of value for a SaaS product, all the workflows are all very, very important absolutely but almost every amazing SaaS product has an analytics tab and it needs to be fast, interactive and it needs to be real-time. It needs you talking about fresh insights that are happening and that is often in a B2B SaaS, application developers always comes and tell us that's the proof of value that we can show how much value that that particular SaaS application is creating for their customer. So I think it's all two sides of the same coin, large enterprises want to build it themselves because now they get more control about how exactly the problem needs to be solved and then there are also other solutions where you rely on a SaaS application, where you demand that particular application gives you. But at the end of the day, I think the world is going real-time and we are very, very happy to be part of this moment, operational intelligence. For every classic BI use case I think there are 10 times more operational intelligence use cases. As Rockset we are on a mission to eliminate all cost and complexity barriers and really really provide fast analytics on real-time data with the simplicity of the cloud and really be part of this moment. >> You guys having some fun right now these days through in the middle of all the action. >> Absolutely. I think we're growing very fast, we're hiring, we are onboarding as many customers as possible and really looking forward to being part of this moment and really accelerate this moment from business intelligence to operational intelligence. >> Well, Venkat great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE as part of this CUBE Conversation, you're in the class of AWS Startup Showcase season two, episode two. Thanks for coming on. Keep it right there everyone watch more action from theCUBE. Your leader in tech coverage, I'm John Furrier your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Welcome everybody to the cubes live coverage of AWS reinvent 2021. We're here in the main hall. Yes, this is a physical event. It's a hybrid event, probably the industry's most important hybrid event in the year. We're super excited to be here. Of course, last year during the lockdown, reinvent was purely virtual. This year. They go in hybrid 20 plus thousand people. I hear the whisper numbers like 25, 20 7,000 hundreds of thousands of people online. The cubes here, two sets, we've got two remote studios, super excited. I'd like to introduce my co-host David Nicholson. He'll be here all week with us. Uh, John furrier is also here, Lisa Martin for the cubes wall-to-wall coverage. And we're so psyched to start off this session with Kenneth Chestnut. Who's the head of technology partnerships at Stripe. Stripe's an amazing company, Ken. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks for having me, Dave and David. I greatly appreciate it. How about this? >>Right. Finally live event. We've done a few. We probably done four or five this year, but >>It's good to be back in person. It is. Yeah, absolutely. It's >>A Stripe. I mean, wow. Can a powering the new economy. Tell us a little bit more for those people who may not be familiar with Stripe. They probably use it without even knowing it when they sign it away. Yeah. So tell us about the >>Well, uh, Stripe was founded in 2010 by two brothers, Patrick and John Colson. And really it was from their first business and realizing how hard it was to actually charge for things on online. Um, you had to acquire a relationship with, uh, with a gateway provider to accept payments. You had to acquire a relationship with a, with a acquiring bank. Um, and you had to do that for each and every country that you wanted to service. Uh, so the same way that AWS reduced the barrier in terms of not having to procure, spend millions of dollars on storage, computers, networking, uh, effectively, what we we've done at Stripe is reduce the barriers around economic infrastructure, accepting payments online, >>Use that undifferentiated heavy lifting for payments. So describe Ken, what it was like kind of pre Stripe. You would literally have to install servers, get storage and put, put software on there, get a database. And then what if you had any money left over, you can actually do some business, but, but describe the sort of what the experience is like with Stripe. >>Sure. So, uh, the R R with, with Stripe, we literally talk about seven lines of code. So we, we allow any developer to, um, uh, provide a set of APIs for any developer to accept payments on online. And we do the undifferentiated heavy lifting in terms of accepting payments, accepting those payments, processing them revenue, reporting, and reconciliation, um, all ensuring compliance and security. Um, so it's like you said, uh, taking care of the undifferentiated heavy lifting are around accepting payments online in the enabling >>The enabler. There is the cloud. I mean, it was 2009, 2010. You guys were founded, the cloud was only like three years old. Right. And so you had to really sort of take a chance on leveraging the cloud or maybe early on you just installed it yourself and said, this isn't going to scale. So maybe tell us how you sort of leverage the cloud. >>Sure. Um, so we're a long time, uh, AWS, uh, customer and user, um, uh, back in the early days of, of Stripe in the early days of, of AWS. And we've just grown, uh, with, with AWS and the ecosystem. And it's interesting because a lot of, uh, a lot of the companies that have been built on, on AWS and grown to be successful, they're also Stripe customers as well. So they use Stripe for their economic infrastructure. >>We use Stripe, we run our company on AWS and we use Stripe. It it's true. The integration took like minutes. It was so simple. Hey it, test it, make sure it scales. But so what, what's the stack look like? What is there, is there such thing as a payment stack? What's the technology stuff? >>Sure. So we initially started with payments and being able to accept payments, uh, on online. Uh we've we brought in out our, our, our Stripe product portfolio now to effectively provide economic, uh, infrastructure for the internet. So that could be accepting payments. Uh, it could be setting up marketplaces. So companies like Lyft and Deliveroo, uh, use Stripe to power their marketplaces with their, with their drivers and, and, um, uh, delivers, um, uh, we provide, uh, a product called radar that, uh, that, um, prevents fraud, uh, around, around the globe. Um, based upon the data that we're seeing from our, from our customers, um, we have, uh, issuing and treasury so that companies can provide their users or their merchants with banking services. So loans, uh, issuing credit cards. So we we've really broadened out the product portfolio of Stripe to provide sort of economic infrastructure for the internet. So >>We talked about strike being in the cloud from an infrastructure perspective and how that enables certain things, but that in and of itself, doesn't change the dynamics around sovereignty and governance from country to country. Sure. Uh, I imagine that the global nature of AWS sort of dovetails with your strategy, but how, how do you address that? It's one thing to tell me in Northern California, you can process payments for me, but now globally go across 150 countries. How do you make that work? Yeah, >>Uh, absolutely. So we, we establish relationships, uh, within, within each company country that we operate in we're in about 47, uh, countries, uh, today, um, and that's rapidly expanding so that companies can, can process or accept payments and do, uh, financial transactions within, within, within those countries. So we're in 47 countries today. We, we accept a multitude of different payment, uh, different currencies, different payment types. So the U S is very, uh, credit card focused. But if you go to other, other parts of the globe, it could be a debit cards. It could be, um, uh, wallets, uh, uh, Google pay, Ali pay, uh, others. So really it's, uh, providing sort of the payment methods that users prefer in, in the different countries, uh, and meeting and meeting those users where, where they are. >>Are you out of the box compliant? What integration is required to do that? Uh, what about things like data sovereignty, is that taken care of by the cloud provider or you guys, and where, w w where does, where does AWS end and you guys pick up? Yes, >>We're, we're PCI compliant. Um, we, we leverage AWS as our, as our infrastructure, um, to grow, grow and scale. So, um, one of the things that we're, we're proud of is, uh, through, throughout 2020 and 2021, we've, we've had 11 nines of, uh, of, of, uh, or five nines of uptime, um, even through, um, uh, black Friday and cyber Monday. So providing AWS provides that, that infrastructure, which we built on top of to provide, uh, you know, five nines of uptime for our, for our users. >>You describe in more detail, Kenya, your ecosystem. I mean, you're responsible for tech partnerships. What does that ecosystem, how I paint a picture of it? >>Sure. So, um, uh, a number of users want to be able to use Stripe with, with their other, uh, it infrastructure and, and their business processes. So a customer may start, uh, with a salesperson may start with a quote or order, uh, in, in Salesforce, want to automate the invoicing and billing and payment of that with, with Stripe and then, uh, reconcile re revenue and an ERP solution like SAP or Oracle or NetSuite or into it, um, in the case of, of small, medium businesses. So really, um, what we're focused on is building out that, that ecosystem to allow, uh, um, our, our customers to streamline their business processes, um, and, and integrate Stripe into their existing it infrastructure and, and business processes. >>You mentioned a lot of different services, but broadly speaking, if I think about payments, correct me if I'm wrong, but you were one of the early, uh, sort of software companies, if I can call you that, um, platforms, whatever, but to really focus on a usage based pricing, but how do I, how do I engage with you? What's, what's the pricing model. Maybe you could describe that a little. >>Sure. So the pricing model is very, very transparent. Uh, it's on, it's on the website. So, uh, we, we take a, um, a percentage of each transaction. So literally you can, you can set up a, a Stripe account it's self-service, um, uh, we, we take a 2.9% plus 30 cents on every, uh, Tran transaction. Um, we don't, you don't start getting, um, uh, charged until, uh, you start accepting payments from your, from your customers or from your users. >>Um, can you give us a sense of the business scope, maybe any metrics you can share, customers, whatever. >>Sure. So there's a couple of things we can share publicly, just in terms of the size of the business. I think since, uh, since 2020, uh, more than 2 million businesses have launched on, on Stripe. Uh, so, uh, 2 million in, in, in, in 2020, um, we've, uh, uh, in the past 12 months, we've, uh, uh, uh, processed over 173 billion, uh, API calls. Uh, we do we process about, um, uh, hundreds of billions of, of, of, uh, payment volume, uh, every, every year. Um, if you look at sort of the macros of the business, the business is growing faster than the broader e-commerce space. So the amount of payment volume that we did in this past year is more than the entire industry did when Patrick and John founded the company. And in 2010, just to give you a, uh, an idea of the, the, the size of the business and sort of the pace of the business >>You're growing as e-commerce grows, but you're also stealing share from other sort of traditional payment systems. Okay. So that's a nice flywheel effect. And of course, Stripe's a private company they've raised well over a billion dollars of Peter teal, and it wasn't original founders, so are funders. So, you know, that's, he's talking scale. I want to go back to something you said about radar. Sure. So there's tech in your stack fraud detection, right. So some of >>That in machine learning, right. >>So, and so you guys, I mean, are you a technology company, are you a F a FinTech company? What are you? >>We're a software company. We provide software and we provide technology for developers, uh, to make online businesses and make, uh, uh, commerce, uh, more seamless and more frictionless >>Cloud-first API first. I mean, maybe describe how that is different maybe than, you know, the technical debt that's been built up over, you know, decades with traditional payment systems. >>Yes, it's very similar to the early, earlier days of AWS where a lot of tech forward companies leveraged Stripe, um, to, um, whether it be large enterprises to transform their businesses and move online, or, or, uh, uh, startups and developers that want to, uh, start a new business online and, and do that, uh, as quickly and seamlessly as possible. So it's, it's quite the gamut from large enterprises that are digitally transforming themselves companies like Marske and, and NASDAQ and others, as well as, uh, um, startups and developers that have started their businesses and born on born on Stripe. So >>When you talk about a startup, how small of an entity makes sense, uh, when you think of, if you look at, from an economic perspective, lowering the friction associated with transactions can lift up a large part of the world with sort of, you know, w with very, very small businesses. Is that something that this is all about? >>Yeah, absolutely. So, like I said, you know, two, 2 million business have sub launched on, on, on Stripe, uh, in, in the past year. And, and those businesses vary, but it could be literally a, a developer or a, uh, uh, a small, uh, SMB that wants to be able to accept payments on online. And it can just set up a Stripe account and start accepting payments. >>Yeah. So this is not a one hit wonder, um, lay out the vision for Stripe, right? I mean, you're, you're a platform, uh, you're, you're becoming a fundamental ingredient of the digital economy sounds pre pandemic. That was all a bunch of buzzwords, but today we all know how important that is, but what lay out the vision for us can, >>Yeah, it really are. The mission of Stripe is to grow the GDP of the internet. Um, and, and so what that means is, uh, more and more our, our, our basic belief is more and more and more businesses, uh, will, will, uh, go, go online, uh, with, uh, with the pandemic that that was, uh, accelerated. But I think that the general trend of businesses moving online, uh, will continue to accelerate, and we want to provide, uh, economic infrastructure to support those businesses. Um, you know, um, uh, uh, Andreessen talked about sort of software, software eating the world well fit. Our belief has FinTech is eating software. So in, in the fullness of time, I think the opportunity is for, uh, any, any company to be a financial services company. And we want to empower any company that wants to, or any user that wants to be a financial services company to, to provide the economic infrastructure for them to do so. >>And, and, you know, I mean your data company in that sense, you're moving bits around, you know, and those datas, I like to say data's eating software, you know, cause really you gotta have your data act together. Absolutely. And that's an evolving, I mean, you guys started to, to 2010, I would imagine your data strategy has evolved quite dramatically. Yeah. >>It's a great, it's a great call out Dave. Uh, one of our other products is a product called Sigma. So Sigma allows, uh, merchants or our customers to query payment and transaction data. So they want to be able to understand who, who, who are their customers, what are the payment methods that those customers prefer in different countries, in different regions? Um, so we're, we're starting to have some interesting use cases, um, working with, with AWS and other partners when you can start combining payment and transaction data in Stripe with other data to understand customer segmentation, customer 360 lifetime value of a customer customer acquisition costs, being able to close the books faster in your ERP, because you can apply that payment and transaction data to your general ledger to, to close the books faster at the end of the month or at the end of the, at the end of the year. So, uh, yeah, we we're, um, uh, as, as more and more companies are using Stripe, um, they want to be able to take advantage of that data and combine it with other, other sources of data to drive business. >>Yeah. You mentioned some of those key metrics that are, that are so important to companies today. I'll give you the last word re-invent this hall is packed, um, a little bit surprising, frankly, you know, but, uh, but exciting. Uh, what are you looking forward to this? >>Yeah, I'm just looking forward to meeting people in person again, it's, uh, it's great to be here and, and, you know, uh, uh, we have a strong relationship with AWS. We have lots of partners in, in, in common here, uh, as well, both consulting partners and technology partners. So really looking forward to meeting with partners and customers, and especially as we, as we plan for next year and, uh, launching our, our, our partner program beginning of next year. Uh, there's a lot of, uh, uh, groundwork and things to learn from, from here. As we, as we, we, we, we launch our, our, our partner business formula next >>I'll bet. Looking forward to that, Ken, thanks so much for coming to the cure. You so much. It was great to have a chat at the time. All right. And we want to thank our sponsors, uh, AWS, of course, and also AMD who's making the editorial segments that we bring you this week possible for Dave Nicholson. I'm Dave Volante. You're watching the cube at AWS reinvent 2021. Keep it right there, right back.

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

>>Yeah. Hello and welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS public sector summit here in Washington D. C. We're live on the ground for two days. Face to face conference and expo hall and everything here but keith brooks who is the director and head of technical business development for a dress government Govcloud selling brains 10th birthday. Congratulations. Welcome to the cube. Thank you john happy to be E. C. 2 15 S three is 9.5 or no, that maybe they're 10 because that's the same day as sqs So Govcloud. 10 years, 20 years. What time >>flies? 10 years? >>Big milestone. Congratulations. A lot of history involved in Govcloud. Yes. Take us through what's the current situation? >>Yeah. So um let's start with what it is just for the viewers that may not be familiar. So AWS Govcloud is isolated. AWS cloud infrastructure and services that were purposely built for our U. S. Government customers that had highly sensitive data or highly regulated data or applications and workloads that they wanted to move to the cloud. So we gave customers the ability to do that with AWS Govcloud. It is subject to the fed ramp I and D O D S R G I L four L five baselines. It gives customers the ability to address ITAR requirements as well as Seaga's N'est ce MMC and Phipps requirements and gives customers a multi region architecture that allows them to also designed for disaster recovery and high availability in terms of why we built it. It starts with our customers. It was pretty clear from the government that they needed a highly secure and highly compliant cloud infrastructure to innovate ahead of demand and that's what we delivered. So back in august of 2011 we launched AWS GovCloud which gave customers the best of breed in terms of high technology, high security, high compliance in the cloud to allow them to innovate for their mission critical workloads. Who >>was some of the early customers when you guys launched after the C. I. A deal intelligence community is a big one but some of the early customers. >>So the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense were all early users of AWS GovCloud. But one of our earliest lighthouse customers was the Nasa jet propulsion laboratory and Nasa Jpl used AWS GovCloud to procure Procure resources ahead of demand which allowed them to save money and also take advantage of being efficient and only paying for what they needed. But they went beyond just I. T. Operations. They also looked at how do they use the cloud and specifically GovCloud for their mission programs. So if you think back to all the way to 2012 with the mars curiosity rover, Nasa Jpl actually streamed and processed and stored that data from the curiosity rover on AWS Govcloud They actually streamed over 150 terabytes of data responded to over 80,000 requests per second and took it beyond just imagery. They actually did high performance compute and data analytics on the data as well. That led to additional efficiencies for future. Over there >>were entire kicking they were actually >>hard core missing into it. Mission critical workloads that also adhere to itar compliance which is why they used AWS GovCloud. >>All these compliance. So there's also these levels. I remember when I was working on the jetty uh stories that were out there was always like level for those different classifications. What does all that mean like? And then this highly available data and highly high availability all these words mean something in these top secret clouds. Can you take us through kind of meetings >>of those? Yeah absolutely. So it starts with the federal compliance program and the two most popular programs are Fed ramp and Dodi srg fed ramp is more general for federal government agencies. There are three levels low moderate and high in the short and skinny of those levels is how they align to the fisma requirements of the government. So there's fisma low fisma moderate fisma high depending on the sensitivity of the government data you will have to align to those levels of Fed ramp to use workloads and store data in the cloud. Similar story for D. O. D. With srg impact levels to 45 and six uh impacts levels to four and five are all for unclassified data. Level two is for less sensitive public defense data levels. Four and five cover more sensitive defense data to include mission critical national security systems and impact level six is for classified information. So those form the basis of security and compliance, luckily with AWS GovCloud celebrating our 10th anniversary, we address Fed ramp high for our customers that require that and D. O. D impact levels to four and five for a sensitive defense guy. >>And that was a real nuanced point and a lot of the competition can't do that. That's real people don't understand, you know, this company, which is that company and all the lobbying and all the mudslinging that goes on. We've seen that in the industry. It's unfortunate, but it happens. Um, I do want to ask you about the Fed ramp because what I'm seeing on the commercial side in the cloud ecosystem, a lot of companies that aren't quote targeting public sector are coming in on the Fed ramp. So there's some good traction there. You guys have done a lot of work to accelerate that. Any new, any new information to share their. >>Yes. So we've been committed to supporting the federal government compliance requirements effectively since the launch of GovCloud. And we've demonstrated our commitment to Fed ramp over the last number of years and GovCloud specifically, we've taken dozens of services through Fed ramp high and we're 100% committed to it because we have great relationships with the Fed ramp, Jabor the joint authorization board. We work with individual government agencies to secure agency A. T. O. S. And in fact we actually have more agency A. T. O. S. With AWS GovCloud than any other cloud provider. And the short and skinny is that represents the baseline for cloud security to address sensitive government workloads and sensitive government data. And what we're seeing from industry and specifically highly regulated industries is the standard that the U. S. Government set means that they have the assurance to run control and classified information or other levels of highly sensitive data on the cloud as well. So Fed ramp set that standard. It's interesting >>that the cloud, this is the ecosystem within an ecosystem again within crossover section. So for instance um the impact of not getting Fed ramp certified is basically money. Right. If you're a supplier vendor uh software developer or whatever used to being a miracle, no one no one would know right bed ramp. I'm gonna have to hire a whole department right now. You guys have a really easy, this is a key value proposition, isn't it? >>Correct. And you see it with a number of I. S. V. S. And software as the service providers. If you visit the federal marketplace website, you'll see dozens of providers that have Fed ramp authorized third party SAAS products running on GovCloud industry leading SAAS companies like Salesforce dot com driven technology Splunk essay PNS to effectively they're bringing their best of breed capabilities, building on top of AWS GovCloud and offering those highly compliant fed ramp, moderate fed ramp high capabilities to customers both in government and private industry that need that level of compliance. >>Just as an aside, I saw they've got a nice tweet from Teresa Carlson now it's plunk Govcloud yesterday. That was a nice little positive gesture uh, for you guys at GovCloud, what other areas are you guys moving the needle on because architecturally this is a big deal. What are some areas that you're moving the needle on for the GovCloud? >>Well, when I look back across the last 10 years, there were some pretty important developments that stand out. The first is us launching the second Govcloud infrastructure region in 2018 And that gave customers that use GovCloud specifically customers that have highly sensitive data and high levels of compliance. The ability to build fault tolerant, highly available and mission critical workloads in the cloud in a region that also gives them an additional three availability zones. So the launch of GovCloud East, which is named AWS GovCloud Us East gave customers to regions a total of six availability zones that allowed them accelerate and build more scalable solutions in the cloud. More recently, there is an emergence of another D O D program called the cybersecurity maturity model, C M M C and C M M C is something where we looked around the corner and said we need to Innovate to help our customers, particularly defense customers and the defense industrial based customers address see MMC requirements in the cloud. So with Govcloud back in December of 2020, we actually launched the AWS compliant framework for federal defense workloads, which gives customers a turnkey capability and tooling and resources to spin up environments that are configured to meet see MMC controls and D. O. D. Srg control. So those things represent some of the >>evolution keith. I'm interested also in your thoughts on how you see the progression of Govcloud outside the United States. Tactical Edge get wavelength coming on board. How does how do you guys look at that? Obviously us is global, it's not just the jet, I think it's more of in general. Edge deployments, sovereignty is also going to be world's flat, Right? I mean, so how does that >>work? So it starts back with customer requirements and I tie it back to the first question effectively we built Govcloud to respond to our U. S. Government customers and are highly regulated industry customers that had highly sensitive data and a high bar to meet in terms of regulatory compliance and that's the foundation of it. So as we look to other customers to include those outside of the US. It starts with those requirements. You mentioned things like edge and hybrid and a good example of how we marry the two is when we launched a W. S. Outpost in Govcloud last year. So outpost brings the power of the AWS cloud to on premises environments of our customers, whether it's their data centers or Coehlo environments by bringing AWS services, a. P. I. S and service and points to the customer's on premises facilities >>even outside the United States. >>Well, for Govcloud is focused on us right now. Outside of the U. S. Customers also have availability to use outpost. It's just for us customers, it's focused on outpost availability, geography >>right now us. Right. But other governments gonna want their Govcloud too. Right, Right, that's what you're getting at, >>Right? And it starts with the data. Right? So we we we spent a lot of time working with government agencies across the globe to understand their regulations and their requirements and we use that to drive our decisions. And again, just like we started with govcloud 10 years ago, it starts with our customer requirements and we innovate from there. Well, >>I've been, I love the D. O. D. S vision on this. I know jet I didn't come through and kind of went scuttled, got thrown under the bus or whatever however you want to call it. But that whole idea of a tactical edge, it was pretty brilliant idea. Um so I'm looking forward to seeing more of that. That's where I was supposed to come in, get snowball, snowmobile, little snow snow products as well, how are they doing? And because they're all part of the family to, >>they are and they're available in Govcloud and they're also authorized that fed ramp and Gov srg levels and it's really, it's really fascinating to see D. O. D innovate with the cloud. Right. So you mentioned tactical edge. So whether it's snowball devices or using outposts in the future, I think the D. O. D. And our defense customers are going to continue to innovate. And quite frankly for us, it represents our commitment to the space we want to make sure our defense customers and the defense industrial base defense contractors have access to the best debris capabilities like those edge devices and edge capable. I >>think about the impact of certification, which is good because I just thought of a clean crows. We've got aerospace coming in now you've got D O. D, a little bit of a cross colonization if you will. So nice to have that flexibility. I got to ask you about just how you view just in general, the intelligence community a lot of uptake since the CIA deal with amazon Just overall good health for eight of his gum cloud. >>Absolutely. And again, it starts with our commitment to our customers. We want to make sure that our national security customers are defense customers and all of the customers and the federal government that have a responsibility for securing the country have access to the best of breed capability. So whether it's the intelligence community, the Department of Defense are the federal agencies and quite frankly we see them innovating and driving things forward to include with their sensitive workloads that run in Govcloud, >>what's your strategy for partnerships as you work on the ecosystem? You do a lot with strategy. Go to market partnerships. Um, it's got its public sector pretty much people all know each other. Our new firms popping up new brands. What's the, what's the ecosystem looks like? >>Yeah, it's pretty diverse. So for Govcloud specifically, if you look at partners in the defense community, we work with aerospace companies like Lockheed martin and Raytheon Technologies to help them build I tar compliant E. R. P. Application, software development environments etcetera. We work with software companies I mentioned salesforce dot com. Splunk and S. A. P. And S. To uh and then even at the state and local government level, there's a company called Pay It that actually worked with the state of Kansas to develop the Icann app, which is pretty fascinating. It's a app that is the official app of the state of Kansas that allow citizens to interact with citizens services. That's all through a partner. So we continue to work with our partner uh broad the AWS partner network to bring those type of people >>You got a lot of MST is that are doing good work here. I saw someone out here uh 10 years. Congratulations. What's the coolest thing uh you've done or seen. >>Oh wow, it's hard to name anything in particular. I just think for us it's just seeing the customers and the federal government innovate right? And, and tie that innovation to mission critical workloads that are highly important. Again, it reflects our commitment to give these government customers and the government contractors the best of breed capabilities and some of the innovation we just see coming from the federal government leveraging the count now. It's just super cool. So hard to pinpoint one specific thing. But I love the innovation and it's hard to pick a favorite >>Child that we always say. It's kind of a trick question I do have to ask you about just in general, the just in 10 years. Just look at the agility. Yeah, I mean if you told me 10 years ago the government would be moving at any, any agile anything. They were a glacier in terms of change, right? Procure Man, you name it. It's just like, it's a racket. It's a racket. So, so, but they weren't, they were slow and money now. Pandemic hits this year. Last year, everything's up for grabs. The script has been flipped >>exactly. And you know what, what's interesting is there were actually a few federal government agencies that really paved the way for what you're seeing today. I'll give you some examples. So the Department of Veterans Affairs, they were an early Govcloud user and way back in 2015 they launched vets dot gov on gov cloud, which is an online platform that gave veterans the ability to apply for manage and track their benefits. Those type of initiatives paved the way for what you're seeing today, even as soon as last year with the U. S. Census, right? They brought the decennial count online for the first time in history last year, during 2020 during the pandemic and the Census Bureau was able to use Govcloud to launch and run 2020 census dot gov in the cloud at scale to secure that data. So those are examples of federal agencies that really kind of paved the way and leading to what you're saying is it's kind >>of an awakening. It is and I think one of the things that no one's reporting is kind of a cultural revolution is the talent underneath that way, the younger people like finally like and so it's cooler. It is when you go fast and you can make things change, skeptics turned into naysayers turned into like out of a job or they don't transform so like that whole blocker mentality gets exposed just like shelf where software you don't know what it does until the cloud is not performing, its not good. Right, right. >>Right. Into that point. That's why we spend a lot of time focused on education programs and up skilling the workforce to, because we want to ensure that as our customers mature and as they innovate, we're providing the right training and resources to help them along their journey, >>keith brooks great conversation, great insight and historian to taking us to the early days of Govcloud. Thanks for coming on the cube. Thanks thanks for having me cubes coverage here and address public sector summit. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. Mhm. Mhm mm.

momentum is gathering [Music] business is evolving more and more quickly moving through one transformation to the next because change never stops it only accelerates this is a world that demands a new kind of compute deployed from edge to core to cloud compute that can outpace the rapidly changing needs of businesses large and small unlocking new insights turning data into outcomes empowering new experiences compute that can scale up or scale down with minimum investment and effort guided by years of expertise protected by 360-degree security served up as a service to let it control own and manage massive workloads that weren't there yesterday and might not be there tomorrow this is the compute power that will drive progress giving your business what you need to be ready for what's next this is the compute power of hpe delivering your foundation for digital transformation welcome to accelerating next thank you so much for joining us today we have a great program we're going to talk tech with experts we'll be diving into the changing economics of our industry and how to think about the next phase of your digital transformation now very importantly we're also going to talk about how to optimize workloads from edge to exascale with full security and automation all coming to you as a service and with me to kick things off is neil mcdonald who's the gm of compute at hpe neil always a pleasure great to have you on it's great to see you dave now of course when we spoke a year ago you know we had hoped by this time we'd be face to face but you know here we are again you know this pandemic it's obviously affected businesses and people in in so many ways that we could never have imagined but in the reality is in reality tech companies have literally saved the day let's start off how is hpe contributing to helping your customers navigate through things that are so rapidly shifting in the marketplace well dave it's nice to be speaking to you again and i look forward to being able to do this in person some point the pandemic has really accelerated the need for transformation in businesses of all sizes more than three-quarters of cios report that the crisis has forced them to accelerate their strategic agendas organizations that were already transforming or having to transform faster and organizations that weren't on that journey yet are having to rapidly develop and execute a plan to adapt to this new reality our customers are on this journey and they need a partner for not just the compute technology but also the expertise and economics that they need for that digital transformation and for us this is all about unmatched optimization for workloads from the edge to the enterprise to exascale with 360 degree security and the intelligent automation all available in that as a service experience well you know as you well know it's a challenge to manage through any transformation let alone having to set up remote workers overnight securing them resetting budget priorities what are some of the barriers that you see customers are working hard to overcome simply per the organizations that we talk with are challenged in three areas they need the financial capacity to actually execute a transformation they need the access to the resource and the expertise needed to successfully deliver on a transformation and they have to find the way to match their investments with the revenues for the new services that they're putting in place to service their customers in this environment you know we have a data partner called etr enterprise technology research and the spending data that we see from them is it's quite dramatic i mean last year we saw a contraction of roughly five percent of in terms of i.t spending budgets etc and this year we're seeing a pretty significant rebound maybe a six to seven percent growth range is the prediction the challenge we see is organizations have to they've got to iterate on that i call it the forced march to digital transformation and yet they also have to balance their investments for example at the corporate headquarters which have kind of been neglected is there any help in sight for the customers that are trying to reduce their spend and also take advantage of their investment capacity i think you're right many businesses are understandably reluctant to loosen the purse strings right now given all of the uncertainty and often a digital transformation is viewed as a massive upfront investment that will pay off in the long term and that can be a real challenge in an environment like this but it doesn't need to be we work through hpe financial services to help our customers create the investment capacity to accelerate the transformation often by leveraging assets they already have and helping them monetize them in order to free up the capacity to accelerate what's next for their infrastructure and for their business so can we drill into that i wonder if we could add some specifics i mean how do you ensure a successful outcome what are you really paying attention to as those sort of markers for success well when you think about the journey that an organization is going through it's tough to be able to run the business and transform at the same time and one of the constraints is having the people with enough bandwidth and enough expertise to be able to do both so we're addressing that in two ways for our customers one is by helping them confidently deploy new solutions which we have engineered leveraging decades of expertise and experience in engineering to deliver those workload optimized portfolios that take the risk and the complexity out of assembling some of these solutions and give them a pre-packaged validated supported solution intact that simplifies that work for them but in other cases we can enhance our customers bandwidth by bringing them hpe point next experts with all of the capabilities we have to help them plan deliver and support these i.t projects and transformations organizations can get on a faster track of modernization getting greater insight and control as they do it we're a trusted partner to get the most for a business that's on this journey in making these critical compute investments to underpin the transformations and whether that's planning to optimizing to safe retirement at the end of life we can bring that expertise to bayer to help amplify what our customers already have in-house and help them accelerate and succeed in executing these transformations thank you for that neil so let's talk about some of the other changes that customers are seeing and the cloud has obviously forced customers and their suppliers to really rethink how technology is packaged how it's consumed how it's priced i mean there's no doubt in that to take green lake it's obviously a leading example of a pay as pay-as-you-scale infrastructure model and it could be applied on-prem or hybrid can you maybe give us a sense as to where you are today with green lake well it's really exciting you know from our first pay-as-you-go offering back in 2006 15 years ago to the introduction of green lake hpe has really been paving the way on consumption-based services through innovation and partnership to help meet the exact needs of our customers hpe green lake provides an experience that's the best of both worlds a simple pay-per-use technology model with the risk management of data that's under our customers direct control and it lets customers shift to everything as a service in order to free up capital and avoid that upfront expense that we talked about they can do this anywhere at any scale or any size and really hpe green lake is the cloud that comes to you like that so we've touched a little bit on how customers can maybe overcome some of the barriers to transformation what about the nature of transformations themselves i mean historically there was a lot of lip service paid to digital and and there's a lot of complacency frankly but you know that covered wrecking ball meme that so well describes that if you're not a digital business essentially you're going to be out of business so neil as things have evolved how is hpe addressed the new requirements well the new requirements are really about what customers are trying to achieve and four very common themes that we see are enabling the productivity of a remote workforce that was never really part of the plan for many organizations being able to develop and deliver new apps and services in order to service customers in a different way or drive new revenue streams being able to get insights from data so that in these tough times they can optimize their business more thoroughly and then finally think about the efficiency of an agile hybrid private cloud infrastructure especially one that now has to integrate the edge and we're really thrilled to be helping our customers accelerate all of these and more with hpe compute i want to double click on that remote workforce productivity i mean again the surveys that we see 46 percent of the cios say that productivity improved with the whole work from home remote work trend and on average those improvements were in the four percent range which is absolutely enormous i mean when you think about that how does hpe specifically you know help here what do you guys do well every organization in the world has had to adapt to a different style of working and with more remote workers than they had before and for many organizations that's going to become the new normal even post pandemic many it shops are not well equipped for the infrastructure to provide that experience because if all your workers are remote the resiliency of that infrastructure the latencies of that infrastructure the reliability of are all incredibly important so we provide comprehensive solutions expertise and as a service options that support that remote work through virtual desktop infrastructure or vdi so that our customers can support that new normal of virtual engagements online everything across industries wherever they are and that's just one example of many of the workload optimized solutions that we're providing for our customers is about taking out the guesswork and the uncertainty in delivering on these changes that they have to deploy as part of their transformation and we can deliver that range of workload optimized solutions across all of these different use cases because of our broad range of innovation in compute platforms that span from the ruggedized edge to the data center all the way up to exascale and hpc i mean that's key if you're trying to affect the digital transformation and you don't have to fine-tune you know be basically build your own optimized solutions if i can buy that rather than having to build it and rely on your r d you know that's key what else is hpe doing you know to deliver things new apps new services you know your microservices containers the whole developer trend what's going on there well that's really key because organizations are all seeking to evolve their mix of business and bring new services and new capabilities new ways to reach their customers new way to reach their employees new ways to interact in their ecosystem all digitally and that means app development and many organizations of course are embracing container technology to do that today so with the hpe container platform our customers can realize that agility and efficiency that comes with containerization and use it to provide insights to their data more and more that data of course is being machine generated or generated at the edge or the near edge and it can be a real challenge to manage that data holistically and not have silos and islands an hpe esmerald data fabric speeds the agility and access to data with a unified platform that can span across the data centers multiple clouds and even the edge and that enables data analytics that can create insights powering a data-driven production-oriented cloud-enabled analytics and ai available anytime anywhere in any scale and it's really exciting to see the kind of impact that that can have in helping businesses optimize their operations in these challenging times you got to go where the data is and the data is distributed it's decentralized so i i i like the esmerel of vision and execution there so that all sounds good but with digital transformation you get you're going to see more compute in in hybrid's deployments you mentioned edge so the surface area it's like the universe it's it's ever-expanding you mentioned you know remote work and work from home before so i'm curious where are you investing your resources from a cyber security perspective what can we count on from hpe there well you can count on continued leadership from hpe as the world's most secure industry standard server portfolio we provide an enhanced and holistic 360 degree view to security that begins in the manufacturing supply chain and concludes with a safeguarded end-of-life decommissioning and of course we've long set the bar for security with our work on silicon root of trust and we're extending that to the application tier but in addition to the security customers that are building this modern hybrid are private cloud including the integration of the edge need other elements too they need an intelligent software-defined control plane so that they can automate their compute fleets from all the way at the edge to the core and while scale and automation enable efficiency all private cloud infrastructures are competing with web scale economics and that's why we're democratizing web scale technologies like pinsando to bring web scale economics and web scale architecture to the private cloud our partners are so important in helping us serve our customers needs yeah i mean hp has really upped its ecosystem game since the the middle of last decade when when you guys reorganized it you became like even more partner friendly so maybe give us a preview of what's coming next in that regard from today's event well dave we're really excited to have hp's ceo antonio neri speaking with pat gelsinger from intel and later lisa sue from amd and later i'll have the chance to catch up with john chambers the founder and ceo of jc2 ventures to discuss the state of the market today yeah i'm jealous you guys had some good interviews coming up neil thanks so much for joining us today on the virtual cube you've really shared a lot of great insight how hpe is partnering with customers it's it's always great to catch up with you hopefully we can do so face to face you know sooner rather than later well i look forward to that and uh you know no doubt our world has changed and we're here to help our customers and partners with the technology the expertise and the economics they need for these digital transformations and we're going to bring them unmatched workload optimization from the edge to exascale with that 360 degree security with the intelligent automation and we're going to deliver it all as an as a service experience we're really excited to be helping our customers accelerate what's next for their businesses and it's been really great talking with you today about that dave thanks for having me you're very welcome it's been super neal and i actually you know i had the opportunity to speak with some of your customers about their digital transformation and the role of that hpe plays there so let's dive right in we're here on the cube covering hpe accelerating next and with me is rule siestermans who is the head of it at the netherlands cancer institute also known as nki welcome rule thank you very much great to be here hey what can you tell us about the netherlands cancer institute maybe you could talk about your core principles and and also if you could weave in your specific areas of expertise yeah maybe first introduction to the netherlands institute um we are one of the top 10 comprehensive cancers in the world and what we do is we combine a hospital for treating patients with cancer and a recent institute under one roof so discoveries we do we find within the research we can easily bring them back to the clinic and vis-a-versa so we have about 750 researchers and about 3 000 other employees doctors nurses and and my role is to uh to facilitate them at their best with it got it so i mean everybody talks about digital digital transformation to us it all comes down to data so i'm curious how you collect and take advantage of medical data specifically to support nki's goals maybe some of the challenges that your organization faces with the amount of data the speed of data coming in just you know the the complexities of data how do you handle that yeah it's uh it's it's it's challenge and uh yeah what we we have we have a really a large amount of data so we produce uh terabytes a day and we we have stored now more than one petabyte on data at this moment and yeah it's uh the challenge is to to reuse the data optimal for research and to share it with other institutions so that needs to have a flexible infrastructure for that so a fast really fast network uh big data storage environment but the real challenge is not not so much the i.t bus is more the quality of the data so we have a lot of medical systems all producing those data and how do we combine them and and yeah get the data fair so findable accessible interoperable and reusable uh for research uh purposes so i think that's the main challenge the quality of the data yeah very common themes that we hear from from other customers i wonder if you could paint a picture of your environment and maybe you can share where hpe solutions fit in what what value they bring to your organization's mission yeah i think it brings a lot of flexibility so what we did with hpe is that we we developed a software-defined data center and then a virtual workplace for our researchers and doctors and that's based on the hpe infrastructure and what we wanted to build is something that expect the needs of doctors and nurses but also the researchers and the two kind of different blood groups blood groups and with different needs so uh but we wanted to create one infrastructure because we wanted to make the connection between the hospital and the research that's that's more important so um hpe helped helped us not only with the the infrastructure itself but also designing the whole architecture of it and for example what we did is we we bought a lot of hardware and and and the hardware is really uh doing his his job between nine till five uh dennis everything is working within everyone is working within the institution but all the other time in evening and and nights hours and also the redundant environment we have for the for our healthcare uh that doesn't do nothing of much more or less uh in in those uh dark hours so what we created together with nvidia and hpe and vmware is that we we call it video by day compute by night so we reuse those those servers and those gpu capacity for computational research jobs within the research that's you mentioned flexibility for this genius and and so we're talking you said you know a lot of hard ways they're probably proliant i think synergy aruba networking is in there how are you using this environment actually the question really is when you think about nki's digital transformation i mean is this sort of the fundamental platform that you're using is it a maybe you could describe that yeah it's it's the fundamental platform to to to work on and and and what we see is that we have we have now everything in place for it but the real challenge is is the next steps we are in so we have a a software defined data center we are cloud ready so the next steps is to to make the connection to the cloud to to give more automation to our researchers so they don't have to wait a couple of weeks for it to do it but they can do it themselves with a couple of clicks so i think the basic is we are really flexible and we have a lot of opportunities for automation for example but the next step is uh to create that business value uh really for for our uh employees that's a great story and a very important mission really fascinating stuff thanks for sharing this with our audience today really appreciate your time thank you very much okay this is dave vellante with thecube stay right there for more great content you're watching accelerating next from hpe i'm really glad to have you with us today john i know you stepped out of vacation so thanks very much for joining us neil it's great to be joining you from hawaii and i love the partnership with hpe and the way you're reinventing an industry well you've always excelled john at catching market transitions and there are so many transitions and paradigm shifts happening in the market and tech specifically right now as you see companies rush to accelerate their transformation what do you see as the keys to success well i i think you're seeing actually an acceleration following the covet challenges that all of us faced and i wasn't sure that would happen it's probably at three times the paces before there was a discussion point about how quickly the companies need to go digital uh that's no longer a discussion point almost all companies are moving with tremendous feed on digital and it's the ability as the cloud moves to the edge with compute and security uh at the edge and how you deliver these services to where the majority of applications uh reside are going to determine i think the future of the next generation company leadership and it's the area that neil we're working together on in many many ways so i think it's about innovation it's about the cloud moving to the edge and an architectural play with silicon to speed up that innovation yes we certainly see our customers of all sizes trying to accelerate what's next and get that digital transformation moving even faster as a result of the environment that we're all living in and we're finding that workload focus is really key uh customers in all kinds of different scales are having to adapt and support the remote workforces with vdi and as you say john they're having to deal with the deployment of workloads at the edge with so much data getting generated at the edge and being acted upon at the edge the analytics and the infrastructure to manage that as these processes get digitized and automated is is so important for so many workflows we really believe that the choice of infrastructure partner that underpins those transformations really matters a partner that can help create the financial capacity that can help optimize your environments and enable our customers to focus on supporting their business are all super key to success and you mentioned that in the last year there's been a lot of rapid course correction for all of us a demand for velocity and the ability to deploy resources at scale is more and more needed maybe more than ever what are you hearing customers looking for as they're rolling out their digital transformation efforts well i think they're being realistic that they're going to have to move a lot faster than before and they're also realistic on core versus context they're they're their core capability is not the technology of themselves it's how to deploy it and they're we're looking for partners that can help bring them there together but that can also innovate and very often the leaders who might have been a leader in a prior generation may not be on this next move hence the opportunity for hpe and startups like vinsano to work together as the cloud moves the edge and perhaps really balance or even challenge some of the big big incumbents in this category as well as partners uniquely with our joint customers on how do we achieve their business goals tell me a little bit more about how you move from this being a technology positioning for hpe to literally helping your customers achieve their outcomes they want and and how are you changing hpe in that way well i think when you consider these transformations the infrastructure that you choose to underpin it is incredibly critical our customers need a software-defined management plan that enables them to automate so much of their infrastructure they need to be able to take faster action where the data is and to do all of this in a cloud-like experience where they can deliver their infrastructure as code anywhere from exascale through the enterprise data center to the edge and really critically they have to be able to do this securely which becomes an ever increasing challenge and doing it at the right economics relative to their alternatives and part of the right economics of course includes adopting the best practices from web scale architectures and bringing them to the heart of the enterprise and in our partnership with pensando we're working to enable these new ideas of web scale architecture and fleet management for the enterprise at scale you know what is fun is hpe has an unusual talent from the very beginning in silicon valley of working together with others and creating a win-win innovation approach if you watch what your team has been able to do and i want to say this for everybody listening you work with startups better than any other company i've seen in terms of how you do win win together and pinsando is just the example of that uh this startup which by the way is the ninth time i have done with this team a new generation of products and we're designing that together with hpe in terms of as the cloud moves to the edge how do we get the leverage out of that and produce the results for your customers on this to give the audience appeal for it you're talking with pensano alone in terms of the efficiency versus an amazon amazon web services of an order of magnitude i'm not talking 100 greater i'm talking 10x greater and things from throughput number of connections you do the jitter capability etc and it talks how two companies uniquely who believe in innovation and trust each other and have very similar cultures can work uniquely together on it how do you bring that to life with an hpe how do you get your company to really say let's harvest the advantages of your ecosystem in your advantages of startups well as you say more and more companies are faced with these challenges of hitting the right economics for the infrastructure and we see many enterprises of various sizes trying to come to terms with infrastructures that look a lot more like a service provider that require that software-defined management plane and the automation to deploy at scale and with the work we're doing with pinsando the benefits that we bring in terms of the observability and the telemetry and the encryption and the distributed network functions but also a security architecture that enables that efficiency on the individual nodes is just so key to building a competitive architecture moving forwards for an on-prem private cloud or internal service provider operation and we're really excited about the work we've done to bring that technology across our portfolio and bring that to our customers so that they can achieve those kind of economics and capabilities and go focus on their own transformations rather than building and running the infrastructure themselves artisanally and having to deal with integrating all of that great technology themselves makes tremendous sense you know neil you and i work on a board together et cetera i've watched your summarization skills and i always like to ask the question after you do a quick summary like this what are the three or four takeaways we would like for the audience to get out of our conversation well that's a great question thanks john we believe that customers need a trusted partner to work through these digital transformations that are facing them and confront the challenge of the time that the covet crisis has taken away as you said up front every organization is having to transform and transform more quickly and more digitally and working with a trusted partner with the expertise that only comes from decades of experience is a key enabler for that a partner with the ability to create the financial capacity to transform the workload expertise to get more from the infrastructure and optimize the environment so that you can focus on your own business a partner that can deliver the systems and the security and the automation that makes it easily deployable and manageable anywhere you need them at any scale whether the edge the enterprise data center or all the way up to exascale in high performance computing and can do that all as a service as we can at hpe through hpe green lake enabling our customers most critical workloads it's critical that all of that is underpinned by an ai powered digitally enabled service experience so that our customers can get on with their transformation and running their business instead of dealing with their infrastructure and really only hpe can provide this combination of capabilities and we're excited and committed to helping our customers accelerate what's next for their businesses neil it's fun i i love being your partner and your wingman our values and cultures are so similar thanks for letting me be a part of this discussion today thanks for being with us john it was great having you here oh it's friends for life okay now we're going to dig into the world of video which accounts for most of the data that we store and requires a lot of intense processing capabilities to stream here with me is jim brickmeyer who's the chief marketing and product officer at vlasics jim good to see you good to see you as well so tell us a little bit more about velocity what's your role in this tv streaming world and maybe maybe talk about your ideal customer sure sure so um we're leading provider of carrier great video solutions video streaming solutions and advertising uh technology to service providers around the globe so we primarily sell software-based solutions to uh cable telco wireless providers and broadcasters that are interested in launching their own um video streaming services to consumers yeah so this is this big time you know we're not talking about mom and pop you know a little video outfit but but maybe you can help us understand that and just the sheer scale of of the tv streaming that you're doing maybe relate it to you know the overall internet usage how much traffic are we talking about here yeah sure so uh yeah so our our customers tend to be some of the largest um network service providers around the globe uh and if you look at the uh the video traffic um with respect to the total amount of traffic that that goes through the internet video traffic accounts for about 90 of the total amount of data that uh that traverses the internet so video is uh is a pretty big component of um of how people when they look at internet technologies they look at video streaming technologies uh you know this is where we we focus our energy is in carrying that traffic as efficiently as possible and trying to make sure that from a consumer standpoint we're all consumers of video and uh make sure that the consumer experience is a high quality experience that you don't experience any glitches and that that ultimately if people are paying for that content that they're getting the value that they pay for their for their money uh in their entertainment experience i think people sometimes take it for granted it's like it's like we we all forget about dial up right those days are long gone but the early days of video was so jittery and restarting and and the thing too is that you know when you think about the pandemic and the boom in streaming that that hit you know we all sort of experienced that but the service levels were pretty good i mean how much how much did the pandemic affect traffic what kind of increases did you see and how did that that impact your business yeah sure so uh you know obviously while it was uh tragic to have a pandemic and have people locked down what we found was that when people returned to their homes what they did was they turned on their their television they watched on on their mobile devices and we saw a substantial increase in the amount of video streaming traffic um over service provider networks so what we saw was on the order of 30 to 50 percent increase in the amount of data that was traversing those networks so from a uh you know from an operator's standpoint a lot more traffic a lot more challenging to to go ahead and carry that traffic a lot of work also on our behalf and trying to help operators prepare because we could actually see geographically as the lockdowns happened [Music] certain areas locked down first and we saw that increase so we were able to help operators as as all the lockdowns happened around the world we could help them prepare for that increase in traffic i mean i was joking about dial-up performance again in the early days of the internet if your website got fifty percent more traffic you know suddenly you were you your site was coming down so so that says to me jim that architecturally you guys were prepared for that type of scale so maybe you could paint a picture tell us a little bit about the solutions you're using and how you differentiate yourself in your market to handle that type of scale sure yeah so we so we uh we really are focused on what we call carrier grade solutions which are designed for that massive amount of scale um so we really look at it you know at a very granular level when you look um at the software and and performance capabilities of the software what we're trying to do is get as many streams as possible out of each individual piece of hardware infrastructure so that we can um we can optimize first of all maximize the uh the efficiency of that device make sure that the costs are very low but one of the other challenges is as you get to millions and millions of streams and that's what we're delivering on a daily basis is millions and millions of video streams that you have to be able to scale those platforms out um in an effective in a cost effective way and to make sure that it's highly resilient as well so we don't we don't ever want a consumer to have a circumstance where a network glitch or a server issue or something along those lines causes some sort of uh glitch in their video and so there's a lot of work that we do in the software to make sure that it's a very very seamless uh stream and that we're always delivering at the very highest uh possible bit rate for consumers so that if you've got that giant 4k tv that we're able to present a very high resolution picture uh to those devices and what's the infrastructure look like underneath you you're using hpe solutions where do they fit in yeah that's right yeah so we uh we've had a long-standing partnership with hpe um and we work very closely with them to try to identify the specific types of hardware that are ideal for the the type of applications that we run so we run video streaming applications and video advertising applications targeted kinds of video advertising technologies and when you look at some of these applications they have different types of requirements in some cases it's uh throughput where we're taking a lot of data in and streaming a lot of data out in other cases it's storage where we have to have very high density high performance storage systems in other cases it's i gotta have really high capacity storage but the performance does not need to be quite as uh as high from an io perspective and so we work very closely with hpe on trying to find exactly the right box for the right application and then beyond that also talking with our customers to understand there are different maintenance considerations associated with different types of hardware so we tend to focus on as much as possible if we're going to place servers deep at the edge of the network we will make everything um maintenance free or as maintenance free as we can make it by putting very high performance solid state storage into those servers so that uh we we don't have to physically send people to those sites to uh to do any kind of maintenance so it's a it's a very cooperative relationship that we have with hpe to try to define those boxes great thank you for that so last question um maybe what the future looks like i love watching on my mobile device headphones in no distractions i'm getting better recommendations how do you see the future of tv streaming yeah so i i think the future of tv streaming is going to be a lot more personal right so uh this is what you're starting to see through all of the services that are out there is that most of the video service providers whether they're online providers or they're your traditional kinds of paid tv operators is that they're really focused on the consumer and trying to figure out what is of value to you personally in the past it used to be that services were one size fits all and um and so everybody watched the same program right at the same time and now that's uh that's we have this technology that allows us to deliver different types of content to people on different screens at different times and to advertise to those individuals and to cater to their individual preferences and so using that information that we have about how people watch and and what people's interests are we can create a much more engaging and compelling uh entertainment experience on all of those screens and um and ultimately provide more value to consumers awesome story jim thanks so much for keeping us helping us just keep entertained during the pandemic i really appreciate your time sure thanks all right keep it right there everybody you're watching hpes accelerating next first of all pat congratulations on your new role as intel ceo how are you approaching your new role and what are your top priorities over your first few months thanks antonio for having me it's great to be here with you all today to celebrate the launch of your gen 10 plus portfolio and the long history that our two companies share in deep collaboration to deliver amazing technology to our customers together you know what an exciting time it is to be in this industry technology has never been more important for humanity than it is today everything is becoming digital and driven by what i call the four key superpowers the cloud connectivity artificial intelligence and the intelligent edge they are super powers because each expands the impact of the others and together they are reshaping every aspect of our lives and work in this landscape of rapid digital disruption intel's technology and leadership products are more critical than ever and we are laser focused on bringing to bear the depth and breadth of software silicon and platforms packaging and process with at scale manufacturing to help you and our customers capitalize on these opportunities and fuel their next generation innovations i am incredibly excited about continuing the next chapter of a long partnership between our two companies the acceleration of the edge has been significant over the past year with this next wave of digital transformation we expect growth in the distributed edge and age build out what are you seeing on this front like you said antonio the growth of edge computing and build out is the next key transition in the market telecommunications service providers want to harness the potential of 5g to deliver new services across multiple locations in real time as we start building solutions that will be prevalent in a 5g digital environment we will need a scalable flexible and programmable network some use cases are the massive scale iot solutions more robust consumer devices and solutions ar vr remote health care autonomous robotics and manufacturing environments and ubiquitous smart city solutions intel and hp are partnering to meet this new wave head on for 5g build out and the rise of the distributed enterprise this build out will enable even more growth as businesses can explore how to deliver new experiences and unlock new insights from the new data creation beyond the four walls of traditional data centers and public cloud providers network operators need to significantly increase capacity and throughput without dramatically growing their capital footprint their ability to achieve this is built upon a virtualization foundation an area of intel expertise for example we've collaborated with verizon for many years and they are leading the industry and virtualizing their entire network from the core the edge a massive redesign effort this requires advancements in silicon and power management they expect intel to deliver the new capabilities in our roadmap so ecosystem partners can continue to provide innovative and efficient products with this optimization for hybrid we can jointly provide a strong foundation to take on the growth of data-centric workloads for data analytics and ai to build and deploy models faster to accelerate insights that will deliver additional transformation for organizations of all types the network transformation journey isn't easy we are continuing to unleash the capabilities of 5g and the power of the intelligent edge yeah the combination of the 5g built out and the massive new growth of data at the edge are the key drivers for the age of insight these new market drivers offer incredible new opportunities for our customers i am excited about recent launch of our new gen 10 plus portfolio with intel together we are laser focused on delivering joint innovation for customers that stretches from the edge to x scale how do you see new solutions that this helping our customers solve the toughest challenges today i talked earlier about the superpowers that are driving the rapid acceleration of digital transformation first the proliferation of the hybrid cloud is delivering new levels of efficiency and scale and the growth of the cloud is democratizing high-performance computing opening new frontiers of knowledge and discovery next we see ai and machine learning increasingly infused into every application from the edge to the network to the cloud to create dramatically better insights and the rapid adoption of 5g as i talked about already is fueling new use cases that demand lower latencies and higher bandwidth this in turn is pushing computing to the edge closer to where the data is created and consumed the confluence of these trends is leading to the biggest and fastest build out of computing in human history to keep pace with this rapid digital transformation we recognize that infrastructure has to be built with the flexibility to support a broad set of workloads and that's why over the last several years intel has built an unmatched portfolio to deliver every component of intelligent silicon our customers need to move store and process data from the cpus to fpgas from memory to ssds from ethernet to switch silicon to silicon photonics and software our 3rd gen intel xeon scalable processors and our data centric portfolio deliver new core performance and higher bandwidth providing our customers the capabilities they need to power these critical workloads and we love seeing all the unique ways customers like hpe leverage our technology and solution offerings to create opportunities and solve their most pressing challenges from cloud gaming to blood flow to brain scans to financial market security the opportunities are endless with flexible performance i am proud of the amazing innovation we are bringing to support our customers especially as they respond to new data-centric workloads like ai and analytics that are critical to digital transformation these new requirements create a need for compute that's warlord optimized for performance security ease of use and the economics of business now more than ever compute matters it is the foundation for this next wave of digital transformation by pairing our compute with our software and capabilities from hp green lake we can support our customers as they modernize their apps and data quickly they seamlessly and securely scale them anywhere at any size from edge to x scale but thank you for joining us for accelerating next today i know our audience appreciated hearing your perspective on the market and how we're partnering together to support their digital transformation journey i am incredibly excited about what lies ahead for hp and intel thank you thank you antonio great to be with you today we just compressed about a decade of online commerce progress into about 13 or 14 months so now we're going to look at how one retailer navigated through the pandemic and what the future of their business looks like and with me is alan jensen who's the chief information officer and senior vice president of the sawing group hello alan how are you fine thank you good to see you hey look you know when i look at the 100 year history plus of your company i mean it's marked by transformations and some of them are quite dramatic so you're denmark's largest retailer i wonder if you could share a little bit more about the company its history and and how it continues to improve the customer experience well at the same time keeping costs under control so vital in your business yeah yeah the company founded uh approximately 100 years ago with a department store in in oahu's in in denmark and i think in the 60s we founded the first supermarket in in denmark with the self-service and combined textile and food in in the same store and in beginning 70s we founded the first hyper market in in denmark and then the this calendar came from germany early in in 1980 and we started a discount chain and so we are actually building department store in hyber market info in in supermarket and in in the discount sector and today we are more than 1 500 stores in in three different countries in in denmark poland and germany and especially for the danish market we have a approximately 38 markets here and and is the the leader we have over the last 10 years developed further into online first in non-food and now uh in in food with home delivery with click and collect and we have done some magnetism acquisition in in the convenience with mailbox solutions to our customers and we have today also some restaurant burger chain and and we are running the starbuck in denmark so i can you can see a full plate of different opportunities for our customer in especially denmark it's an awesome story and of course the founder's name is still on the masthead what a great legacy now of course the pandemic is is it's forced many changes quite dramatic including the the behaviors of retail customers maybe you could talk a little bit about how your digital transformation at the sawing group prepared you for this shift in in consumption patterns and any other challenges that that you faced yeah i think uh luckily as for some of the you can say the core it solution in in 19 we just roll out using our computers via direct access so you can work from anywhere whether you are traveling from home and so on we introduced a new agile scrum delivery model and and we just finalized the rolling out teams in in in january february 20 and that was some very strong thing for suddenly moving all our employees from from office to to home and and more or less overnight we succeed uh continuing our work and and for it we have not missed any deadline or task for the business in in 2020 so i think that was pretty awesome to to see and for the business of course the pandemic changed a lot as the change in customer behavior more or less overnight with plus 50 80 on the online solution forced us to do some different priorities so we were looking at the food home delivery uh and and originally expected to start rolling out in in 2022 uh but took a fast decision in april last year to to launch immediately and and we have been developing that uh over the last eight months and has been live for the last three months now in the market so so you can say the pandemic really front loaded some of our strategic actions for for two to three years uh yeah that was very exciting what's that uh saying luck is the byproduct of great planning and preparation so let's talk about when you're in a company with some strong financial situation that you can move immediately with investment when you take such decision then then it's really thrilling yeah right awesome um two-part question talk about how you leverage data to support the solid groups mission and you know drive value for customers and maybe you could talk about some of the challenges you face with just the amount of data the speed of data et cetera yeah i said data is everything when you are in retail as a retailer's detail as you need to monitor your operation down to each store eats department and and if you can say we have challenge that that is that data is just growing rapidly as a year by year it's growing more and more because you are able to be more detailed you're able to capture more data and for a company like ours we need to be updated every morning as a our fully updated sales for all unit department single sku selling in in the stores is updated 3 o'clock in the night and send out to all top management and and our managers all over the company it's actually 8 000 reports going out before six o'clock every day in the morning we have introduced a loyalty program and and you are capturing a lot of data on on customer behavior what is their preferred offers what is their preferred time in the week for buying different things and all these data is now used to to personalize our offers to our cost of value customers so we can be exactly hitting the best time and and convert it to sales data is also now used for what we call intelligent price reductions as a so instead of just reducing prices with 50 if it's uh close to running out of date now the system automatically calculate whether a store has just enough to to finish with full price before end of day or actually have much too much and and need to maybe reduce by 80 before as being able to sell so so these automated [Music] solutions built on data is bringing efficiency into our operation wow you make it sound easy these are non-trivial items so congratulations on that i wonder if we could close hpe was kind enough to introduce us tell us a little bit about the infrastructure the solutions you're using how they differentiate you in the market and i'm interested in you know why hpe what distinguishes them why the choice there yeah as a when when you look out a lot is looking at moving data to the cloud but we we still believe that uh due to performance due to the availability uh more or less on demand we we still don't see the cloud uh strong enough for for for selling group uh capturing all our data we have been quite successfully having one data truth across the whole con company and and having one just one single bi solution and having that huge amount of data i think we have uh one of the 10 largest sub business warehouses in global and but on the other hand we also want to be agile and want to to scale when needed so getting close to a cloud solution we saw it be a green lake as a solution getting close to the cloud but still being on-prem and could deliver uh what we need to to have a fast performance on on data but still in a high quality and and still very secure for us to run great thank you for that and thank alan thanks so much for your for your time really appreciate your your insights and your congratulations on the progress and best of luck in the future thank you all right keep it right there we have tons more content coming you're watching accelerating next from hpe [Music] welcome lisa and thank you for being here with us today antonio it's wonderful to be here with you as always and congratulations on your launch very very exciting for you well thank you lisa and we love this partnership and especially our friendship which has been very special for me for the many many years that we have worked together but i wanted to have a conversation with you today and obviously digital transformation is a key topic so we know the next wave of digital transformation is here being driven by massive amounts of data an increasingly distributed world and a new set of data intensive workloads so how do you see world optimization playing a role in addressing these new requirements yeah no absolutely antonio and i think you know if you look at the depth of our partnership over the last you know four or five years it's really about bringing the best to our customers and you know the truth is we're in this compute mega cycle right now so it's amazing you know when i know when you talk to customers when we talk to customers they all need to do more and and frankly compute is becoming quite specialized so whether you're talking about large enterprises or you're talking about research institutions trying to get to the next phase of uh compute so that workload optimization that we're able to do with our processors your system design and then you know working closely with our software partners is really the next wave of this this compute cycle so thanks lisa you talk about mega cycle so i want to make sure we take a moment to celebrate the launch of our new generation 10 plus compute products with the latest announcement hp now has the broadest amd server portfolio in the industry spanning from the edge to exascale how important is this partnership and the portfolio for our customers well um antonio i'm so excited first of all congratulations on your 19 world records uh with uh milan and gen 10 plus it really is building on you know sort of our you know this is our third generation of partnership with epic and you know you are with me right at the very beginning actually uh if you recall you joined us in austin for our first launch of epic you know four years ago and i think what we've created now is just an incredible portfolio that really does go across um you know all of the uh you know the verticals that are required we've always talked about how do we customize and make things easier for our customers to use together and so i'm very excited about your portfolio very excited about our partnership and more importantly what we can do for our joint customers it's amazing to see 19 world records i think i'm really proud of the work our joint team do every generation raising the bar and that's where you know we we think we have a shared goal of ensuring that customers get the solution the services they need any way they want it and one way we are addressing that need is by offering what we call as a service delivered to hp green lake so let me ask a question what feedback are you hearing from your customers with respect to choice meaning consuming as a service these new solutions yeah now great point i think first of all you know hpe green lake is very very impressive so you know congratulations um to uh to really having that solution and i think we're hearing the same thing from customers and you know the truth is the compute infrastructure is getting more complex and everyone wants to be able to deploy sort of the right compute at the right price point um you know in in terms of also accelerating time to deployment with the right security with the right quality and i think these as a service offerings are going to become more and more important um as we go forward in the compute uh you know capabilities and you know green lake is a leadership product offering and we're very very you know pleased and and honored to be part of it yeah we feel uh lisa we are ahead of the competition and um you know you think about some of our competitors now coming with their own offerings but i think the ability to drive joint innovation is what really differentiate us and that's why we we value the partnership and what we have been doing together on giving the customers choice finally you know i know you and i are both incredibly excited about the joint work we're doing with the us department of energy the oak ridge national laboratory we think about large data sets and you know and the complexity of the analytics we're running but we both are going to deliver the world's first exascale system which is remarkable to me so what this milestone means to you and what type of impact do you think it will make yes antonio i think our work with oak ridge national labs and hpe is just really pushing the envelope on what can be done with computing and if you think about the science that we're going to be able to enable with the first exascale machine i would say there's a tremendous amount of innovation that has already gone in to the machine and we're so excited about delivering it together with hpe and you know we also think uh that the super computing technology that we're developing you know at this broad scale will end up being very very important for um you know enterprise compute as well and so it's really an opportunity to kind of take that bleeding edge and really deploy it over the next few years so super excited about it i think you know you and i have a lot to do over the uh the next few months here but it's an example of the great partnership and and how much we're able to do when we put our teams together um to really create that innovation i couldn't agree more i mean this is uh an incredible milestone for for us for our industry and honestly for the country in many ways and we have many many people working 24x7 to deliver against this mission and it's going to change the future of compute no question about it and then honestly put it to work where we need it the most to advance life science to find cures to improve the way people live and work but lisa thank you again for joining us today and thank you more most importantly for the incredible partnership and and the friendship i really enjoy working with you and your team and together i think we can change this industry once again so thanks for your time today thank you so much antonio and congratulations again to you and the entire hpe team for just a fantastic portfolio launch thank you okay well some pretty big hitters in those keynotes right actually i have to say those are some of my favorite cube alums and i'll add these are some of the execs that are stepping up to change not only our industry but also society and that's pretty cool and of course it's always good to hear from the practitioners the customer discussions have been great so far today now the accelerating next event continues as we move to a round table discussion with krista satrathwaite who's the vice president and gm of hpe core compute and krista is going to share more details on how hpe plans to help customers move ahead with adopting modern workloads as part of their digital transformations krista will be joined by hpe subject matter experts chris idler who's the vp and gm of the element and mark nickerson director of solutions product management as they share customer stories and advice on how to turn strategy into action and realize results within your business thank you for joining us for accelerate next event i hope you're enjoying it so far i know you've heard about the industry challenges the i.t trends hpe strategy from leaders in the industry and so today what we want to do is focus on going deep on workload solutions so in the most important workload solutions the ones we always get asked about and so today we want to share with you some best practices some examples of how we've helped other customers and how we can help you all right with that i'd like to start our panel now and introduce chris idler who's the vice president and general manager of the element chris has extensive uh solution expertise he's led hpe solution engineering programs in the past welcome chris and mark nickerson who is the director of product management and his team is responsible for solution offerings making sure we have the right solutions for our customers welcome guys thanks for joining me thanks for having us krista yeah so i'd like to start off with one of the big ones the ones that we get asked about all the time what we've been all been experienced in the last year remote work remote education and all the challenges that go along with that so let's talk a little bit about the challenges that customers have had in transitioning to this remote work and remote education environment uh so i i really think that there's a couple of things that have stood out for me when we're talking with customers about vdi first obviously there was a an unexpected and unprecedented level of interest in that area about a year ago and we all know the reasons why but what it really uncovered was how little planning had gone into this space around a couple of key dynamics one is scale it's one thing to say i'm going to enable vdi for a part of my workforce in a pre-pandemic environment where the office was still the the central hub of activity for work uh it's a completely different scale when you think about okay i'm going to have 50 60 80 maybe 100 of my workforce now distributed around the globe um whether that's in an educational environment where now you're trying to accommodate staff and students in virtual learning uh whether that's uh in the area of things like uh formula one racing where we had uh the desire to still have events going on but the need for a lot more social distancing not as many people able to be trackside but still needing to have that real-time experience this really manifested in a lot of ways and scale was something that i think a lot of customers hadn't put as much thought into initially the other area is around planning for experience a lot of times the vdi experience was planned out with very specific workloads or very specific applications in mind and when you take it to a more broad-based environment if we're going to support multiple functions multiple lines of business there hasn't been as much planning or investigation that's gone into the application side and so thinking about how graphically intense some applications are one customer that comes to mind would be tyler isd who did a fairly large roll out pre-pandemic and as part of their big modernization effort what they uncovered was even just changes in standard windows applications had become so much more graphically intense with windows 10 with the latest updates with programs like adobe that they were really needing to have an accelerated experience for a much larger percentage of their install base than than they had counted on so in addition to planning for scale you also need to have that visibility into what are the actual applications that are going to be used by these remote users how graphically intense those might be what's the login experience going to be as well as the operating experience and so really planning through that experience side as well as the scale and the number of users uh is is kind of really two of the biggest most important things that i've seen yeah mark i'll i'll just jump in real quick i think you you covered that pretty comprehensively there and and it was well done the couple of observations i've made one is just that um vdi suddenly become like mission critical for sales it's the front line you know for schools it's the classroom you know that this isn't a cost cutting measure or a optimization nit measure anymore this is about running the business in a way it's a digital transformation one aspect of about a thousand aspects of what does it mean to completely change how your business does and i think what that translates to is that there's no margin for error right you really need to deploy this in a way that that performs that understands what you're trying to use it for that gives that end user the experience that they expect on their screen or on their handheld device or wherever they might be whether it's a racetrack classroom or on the other end of a conference call or a boardroom right so what we do in in the engineering side of things when it comes to vdi or really understand what's a tech worker what's a knowledge worker what's a power worker what's a gp really going to look like what's time of day look like you know who's using it in the morning who's using it in the evening when do you power up when do you power down does the system behave does it just have the it works function and what our clients can can get from hpe is um you know a worldwide set of experiences that we can apply to making sure that the solution delivers on its promises so we're seeing the same thing you are krista you know we see it all the time on vdi and on the way businesses are changing the way they do business yeah and it's funny because when i talk to customers you know one of the things i heard that was a good tip is to roll it out to small groups first so you could really get a good sense of what the experience is before you roll it out to a lot of other people and then the expertise it's not like every other workload that people have done before so if you're new at it make sure you're getting the right advice expertise so that you're doing it the right way okay one of the other things we've been talking a lot about today is digital transformation and moving to the edge so now i'd like to shift gears and talk a little bit about how we've helped customers make that shift and this time i'll start with chris all right hey thanks okay so you know it's funny when it comes to edge because um the edge is different for for every customer in every client and every single client that i've ever spoken to of hp's has an edge somewhere you know whether just like we were talking about the classroom might be the edge but but i think the industry when we're talking about edge is talking about you know the internet of things if you remember that term from not to not too long ago you know and and the fact that everything's getting connected and how do we turn that into um into telemetry and and i think mark's going to be able to talk through a couple of examples of clients that we have in things like racing and automotive but what we're learning about edge is it's not just how do you make the edge work it's how do you integrate the edge into what you're already doing and nobody's just the edge right and and so if it's if it's um ai mldl there's that's one way you want to use the edge if it's a customer experience point of service it's another you know there's yet another way to use the edge so it turns out that having a broad set of expertise like hpe does to be able to understand the different workloads that you're trying to tie together including the ones that are running at the at the edge often it involves really making sure you understand the data pipeline you know what information is at the edge how does it flow to the data center how does it flow and then which data center uh which private cloud which public cloud are you using i think those are the areas where where we really sort of shine is that we we understand the interconnectedness of these things and so for example red bull and i know you're going to talk about that in a minute mark um uh the racing company you know for them the the edge is the racetrack and and you know milliseconds or partial seconds winning and losing races but then there's also an edge of um workers that are doing the design for for the cars and how do they get quick access so um we have a broad variety of infrastructure form factors and compute form factors to help with the edge and this is another real advantage we have is that we we know how to put the right piece of equipment with the right software we also have great containerized software with our esmeral container platform so we're really becoming um a perfect platform for hosting edge-centric workloads and applications and data processing yeah it's uh all the way down to things like our superdome flex in the background if you have some really really really big data that needs to be processed and of course our workhorse proliance that can be configured to support almost every um combination of workload you have so i know you started with edge krista but but and we're and we nail the edge with those different form factors but let's make sure you know if you're listening to this this show right now um make sure you you don't isolate the edge and make sure they integrate it with um with the rest of your operation mark you know what did i miss yeah to that point chris i mean and this kind of actually ties the two things together that we've been talking about here but the edge uh has become more critical as we have seen more work moving to the edge as where we do work changes and evolves and the edge has also become that much more closer because it has to be that much more connected um to your point uh talking about where that edge exists that edge can be a lot of different places but the one commonality really is that the edge is is an area where work still needs to get accomplished it can't just be a collection point and then everything gets shipped back to a data center or back to some some other area for the work it's where the work actually needs to get done whether that's edge work in a use case like vdi or whether that's edge work in the case of doing real-time analytics you mentioned red bull racing i'll i'll bring that up i mean you talk about uh an area where time is of the essence everything about that sport comes down to time you're talking about wins and losses that are measured as you said in milliseconds and that applies not just to how performance is happening on the track but how you're able to adapt and modify the needs of the car uh adapt to the evolving conditions on the track itself and so when you talk about putting together a solution for an edge like that you're right it can't just be here's a product that's going to allow us to collect data ship it back someplace else and and wait for it to be processed in a couple of days you have to have the ability to analyze that in real time when we pull together a solution involving our compute products our storage products our networking products when we're able to deliver that full package solution at the edge what you see are results like a 50 decrease in processing time to make real-time analytic decisions about configurations for the car and adapting to to real-time uh test and track conditions yeah really great point there um and i really love the example of edge and racing because i mean that is where it all every millisecond counts um and so important to process that at the edge now switching gears just a little bit let's talk a little bit about some examples of how we've helped customers when it comes to business agility and optimizing their workload for maximum outcome for business agility let's talk about some things that we've done to help customers with that mark yeah give it a shot so when we when we think about business agility what you're really talking about is the ability to to implement on the fly to be able to scale up to scale down the ability to adapt to real time changing situations and i think the last year has been has been an excellent example of exactly how so many businesses have been forced to do that i think one of the areas that that i think we've probably seen the most ability to help with customers in that agility area is around the space of private and hybrid clouds if you take a look at the need that customers have to to be able to migrate workloads and migrate data between public cloud environments app development environments that may be hosted on-site or maybe in the cloud the ability to move out of development and into production and having the agility to then scale those application rollouts up having the ability to have some of that some of that private cloud flexibility in addition to a public cloud environment is something that is becoming increasingly crucial for a lot of our customers all right well i we could keep going on and on but i'll stop it there uh thank you so much uh chris and mark this has been a great discussion thanks for sharing how we helped other customers and some tips and advice for approaching these workloads i thank you all for joining us and remind you to look at the on-demand sessions if you want to double click a little bit more into what we've been covering all day today you can learn a lot more in those sessions and i thank you for your time thanks for tuning in today many thanks to krista chris and mark we really appreciate you joining today to share how hpe is partnering to facilitate new workload adoption of course with your customers on their path to digital transformation now to round out our accelerating next event today we have a series of on-demand sessions available so you can explore more details around every step of that digital transformation from building a solid infrastructure strategy identifying the right compute and software to rounding out your solutions with management and financial support so please navigate to the agenda at the top of the page to take a look at what's available i just want to close by saying that despite the rush to digital during the pandemic most businesses they haven't completed their digital transformations far from it 2020 was more like a forced march than a planful strategy but now you have some time you've adjusted to this new abnormal and we hope the resources that you find at accelerating next will help you on your journey best of luck to you and be well [Music] [Applause] [Music] 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>>Okay, >>welcome to Accelerating next. Thank you so much for joining us today. We have a great program. We're gonna talk tech with experts, will be diving into the changing economics of our industry and how to think about the next phase of your digital transformation. Now. Very importantly, we're also going to talk about how to optimize workloads from edge to excess scale with full security and automation all coming to you as a service. And with me to kick things off as Neil Mcdonald, who's the GM of compute at HP NEAL. Always a pleasure. Great to have you on. >>It's great to see you dad >>now, of course, when we spoke a year ago, we had hoped by this time we'd be face to face. But here we are again, you know, this pandemic, It's obviously affected businesses and people in so many ways that we could never have imagined. But the reality is in reality, tech companies have literally saved the day. Let's start off, how is HPV contributing to helping your customers navigate through things that are so rapidly shifting in the marketplace, >>although it's nice to be speaking to you again and I look forward to being able to do this in person. At some >>point. The >>pandemic has really accelerated the need for transformation and businesses of all sizes. More than three quarters of C. I. O. S. Report that the crisis has forced them to accelerate their strategic agendas, organizations that were ready transforming or having to transform faster and organizations that weren't on that journey yet are having to rapidly develop and execute a plan to adapt to this new reality. Our customers are on this journey and they need a partner for not just the computer technology but also the expertise and economics that they need for that digital transformation. And for us this is all about unmatched optimization for workloads from the edge to the enterprise to extra scale With 360° security and the intelligent automation all available in that as a service experience. >>Well, you know, as you well know, it's a challenge to manage through any transformation, let alone having to set up remote workers overnight, securing them, re setting budget priorities. What are some of the barriers that you see customers are working hard to overcome? >>Simply put the organizations that we talk with our challenged in three areas. They need the financial capacity to actually execute a transformation. They need the access to the resource and the expertise needed to successfully deliver on a transformation. And they have to find the way to match their investments with the revenues for the new services that they're putting in place to service their customers in this environment. >>You know, we have a data partner E. T. R. Enterprise Technology Research and the spending data that we see from them is it's quite dramatic. I mean last year we saw a contraction of roughly 5% of in terms of I. T. Spending budgets etcetera. And this year we're seeing a pretty significant rebound. Maybe a 67% growth ranges is the prediction. The challenge we see his organizations have to they got to iterate on that. I call it the forced march to digital transformation and yet they also have to balance their investments. For example that the corporate headquarters which have kind of been neglected. Is there any help in sight for the customers that are trying to reduce their spending and also take advantage of their investment capacity? >>I think you're right. Many businesses are understandably reluctant to loosen the purse strings right now given all of the uncertainty. And often a digital transformation is viewed as a massive upfront investment that will pay off in the long term, and that can be a real challenge in an environment like this, but it doesn't need to be uh, we work through HP financial services to help our customers create the investment capacity to accelerate the transformation, often by leveraging assets they already have and helping them monetize them in order to free up the capacity to accelerate what's next for their infrastructure and for the business. >>So can we drill into that? I would wonder if you could add some specifics. I mean, how do you ensure a successful outcome? What are you really paying attention to as those sort of markers for success? >>Well, when you think about the journey that an organization is going through, it's tough to be able to run the business and transform at the same time and one of the constraints is having the people with enough bandwidth and enough expertise to be able to do both. So we're addressing that in two ways for our customers. One is by helping them confidently deploy new solutions which we have engineered, leveraging decades of expertise and experience in engineering to deliver those workload optimized portfolios that take the risk and the complexity out of assembling some of these solutions and give them a prepackaged validated supported solution intact that simplifies that work for them. But in other cases we can enhance our customers bandwidth by bringing them HP point Next experts with all of the capabilities we have to help them plan, deliver and support these I. T. Projects and transformations. Organizations can get on a faster track of modernization, getting greater insight and control as they do it. We're a trusted partner to get the most for a business that's on this journey in making these critical computer investments to underpin the transformations and whether that's planning to optimizing to save for retirement at the end of life. We can bring that expertise to bear to help amplify what our customers already have in house and help them accelerate and succeed in executing these transformations. >>Thank you for that. Let's let's talk about some of the other changes that customers see him in the cloud is obviously forced customers and their suppliers to really rethink how technology is packaged, how it's consumed, how it's priced. I mean there's no doubt in that. So take Green Lake, it's obviously leading example of a pay as you scale infrastructure model and it could be applied on prem or hybrid. Can you maybe give us a sense as to where you are today with Green Lake? >>Well, it's really exciting now from our first pay, as you go offering back in 2006, 15 years ago to the introduction of Green Lake. HBs really been paving the way on consumption-based services through innovation and partnership to help meet the exact needs of our customers. Hp Green Lake provides an experience, is the best of both worlds. A simple paper use technology model with the risk management of data that's under our customers direct control and it lets customers shift to everything as a service in order to free up capital and avoid that upfront expense that we talked about. They can do this anywhere at any scale or any size and really HP Greenlee because the cloud that comes to you >>like that. So we've touched a little bit on how customers can maybe overcome some of the barriers to transformation. What about the nature of transformations themselves? I mean historically there was a lot of lip service paid to digital and and there's a lot of complacency, frankly, but you know that covid wrecking ball meme that so well describes that if you're not a digital business, essentially you're gonna be out of business. So, you know, those things have evolved, how is HPV addressed the new requirements? >>Well, the new requirements are really about what customers are trying to achieve. And four very common themes that we see are enabling the productivity of remote workforce. That was never really part of the plan for many organizations being able to develop and deliver new apps and services in order to service customers in a different way or drive new revenue streams, being able to get insights from data so that in these tough times they can optimize their business more thoroughly. And then finally think about the efficiency of an agile hybrid private cloud infrastructure. Especially one that now has to integrate the edge. And we're really thrilled to be helping our customers accelerate all of these and more with HP computer. >>I want to double click on that remote workforce productivity. I mean again the surveys that we see, 46 of the ceo say that productivity improved with the whole work from home remote work trend. And on average those improvements were in the four range which is absolutely enormous. I mean when you think about that how does HP specifically help here? What do you guys do? >>Well every organization in the world has had to adapt to a different style of working and with more remote workers than they had before. And for many organizations that's going to become the new normal. Even post pandemic, many I. T. Shops are not well equipped for the infrastructure to provide that experience because if all your workers are remote the resiliency of that infrastructure, the latency is of that infrastructure, the reliability of are all incredibly important. So we provide comprehensive solutions expertise and as a service options that support that remote work through virtual desktop infrastructure or V. D. I. So that our customers can support that new normal of virtual engagements online everything across industries wherever they are. And that's just one example of many of the workload optimized solutions that we're providing for our customers is about taking out the guesswork and the uncertainty in delivering on these changes that they have to deploy as part of their transformation. And we can deliver that range of workload optimized solutions across all of these different use cases. Because of our broad range of innovation in compute platforms that span from the ruggedized edge to the data center all the way up to exa scale in HPC. >>I mean that's key if you're trying to affect the digital transformation and you don't have to fine tune, you know, basically build your own optimized solutions if I can buy that rather than having to build it and rely on your R and D. You know, that's key. What else is HP doing? You know, to deliver new apps, new services, you your microservices, containers, the whole developer trend, what's going on there? >>Well, that's really key because organizations are all seeking to evolve their mix of business and bring new services and new capabilities, new ways to reach their customers, new way to reach their employees, new ways to interact in their ecosystem all digitally. And that means that development and many organizations of course are embracing container technology to do that today. So with the HP container platform, our customers can realize that agility and efficiency that comes with container ization and use it to provide insight to their data more and more on that data of course is being machine generated or generated the edge or the near edge. And it can be a real challenge to manage that data holistically and not of silos and islands at H. P. S. Moral data fabric speeds the agility and access to data with a unified platform that can span across the data centers, multiple clouds and even the edge. And that enables data analytics that can create insights powering a data driven production oriented cloud enabled analytics and AI available anytime anywhere and at any scale. And it's really exciting to see the kind of impact that that can have in helping businesses optimize their operations in these challenging times. >>You gotta go where the data is and the data is distributed. It's decentralized. I I like the liberal vision and execution there so that all sounds good. But with digital transformation you're gonna see more compute in hybrid deployments. You mentioned edge. So the surface area, it's like the universe its its ever expanding. You mentioned, you know, remote work and work from home before. So I'm curious where are you investing your resources from a cyber security perspective? What can we count on from H P. E there >>Or you can count on continued leadership from hp as the world's most secure industry standard server portfolio. We provide an enhanced and holistic 360° view to security that begins in the manufacturing supply chain and concludes with a safeguarded end of life Decommissioning. And of course we've long set the bar for security with our work on silicon root of trust and we're extending that to the application tier. But in addition to the security customers that are building this modern Khyber or private cloud, including the integration of the Edge need other elements to they need an intelligent software defined control plane so that they can automate their compute fleets from all the way at the edge to the core. And while scale and automation enable efficiency, all private cloud infrastructures are competing with Web scale economics and that's why we're democratizing web scale technologies like Pensando to bring web scale economics and web scale architecture to the private cloud. Our partners are so important in helping us serve our customers needs. >>Yeah. I mean H. P. Is really up to its ecosystem game since the middle of last decade when when you guys reorganized and it became even more partner friendly. So maybe give us a preview of what's coming next in that regard from today's event. >>Well, they were really excited to have HP. Ceo, Antonio Neri speaking with Pat Gelsinger's from Intel and later lisa su from A. M. D. And later I'll have the chance to catch up with john Chambers, the founder and Ceo of J. C. Two ventures to discuss the state of the market today. >>Yeah, I'm jealous. You got, yeah, that's a good interviews coming up, NEal, thanks so much for joining us today on the virtual cube. You've really shared a lot of great insight how HP is is partner with customers. It's, it's always great to catch up with you. Hopefully we can do so face to face, you know, sooner rather than later. >>I look forward to that. And you know, no doubt our world has changed and we're here to help our customers and partners with the technology, the expertise and the economics they need For these digital transformations. And we're going to bring them unmatched workload optimization from the edge to exa scale with that 360° security with the intelligent automation. And we're gonna deliver it all as an as a service experience. We're really excited to be helping our customers accelerate what's next for their businesses. And it's been really great talking with you today about that day. Thanks for having me >>very welcome. It's been super Neil and I actually, you know, I had the opportunity to speak with some of your customers about their digital transformation and the role of that HPV plays there. So let's dive right in. >>Yeah. Mm.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the cubes. Continuing coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 Virtual the Cube Virtual. We're here covering the partner ecosystem and some of the new innovations coming from the reinvent community. Let's talk about something that anyone who drives a vehicle can relate to. Roadside assistance with me or Beth Davidson, chief marketing officer at a zero, and Raj borrows the vice president and c t o at zero folks, welcome to the Cube. >>Hello, nice to see you. >>So let's start with you. Maybe talk a little bit about your your mission, how you work with automakers. You've got, you know, a lot of good pipeline, their insurers and other others in the in the ecosystem. Tell us about the company. >>Absolutely. So for 50 years, we've been helping consumers with their cars. Um, that's what it comes down Thio. We know that one in three people has a roadside event every year on the way you think about that is, you know, if in three years you haven't had a roadside event, tick tock. You know, statistically, it's coming for you. We work with everybody. We work with the auto manufacturers. We work with the insurers. What we're trying to do is get closer to consumers. On the reason you may have never heard of a Gero is that's by design. Were white label. We work for our clients typically on. Do you know they trust us with their consumers? They trust us with their brands. Um, and we're just in the business of getting consumers back on the road. >>Thank you for that. So talk a little bit about how you approach this problem. I mean, you looked out roadside assistance, and you know, we can again all relate. Oh, am I up to date or at least the car? So there's gotta be some kind of 800 number in my glove compartment somewhere, right? So what was the state of roadside assistance before you guys got involved? And maybe we could get into sort of how you solve the problem. >>Yeah, I think that's a great question, Dave, as we look at roadside assistance, everyone things about picking up the phone number 800 number from the glove box compartment And over the years we have invested heavily on bringing a fully digital experience to our customers from insurance companies to AM. And when this Alexa opportunity came up earlier this summer, he said, Hi. How about taking that digital experience, adding, all the Alexa do goods goods about voice interaction, making it very interactive for the users to request that experience in a very normal consumer friendly, friendly were and brought that we integrated all those services got that whole uber like experience with for roadside assistance? >>Yeah. Now. So, Beth, you know, I reminded when, like the smart TV first came out, you had a type in right, and we're really getting spoiled now. It should be easy as a blink. Okay, so you're unveiling blink, you know, what's this service all about? >>So this service is about, you know, trying to get to consumers as easy as we can and getting removing the friction. Right? So what Rogers just talking about is again we asked consumers. We say, you know, imagine that tomorrow you went out and there was a flat tire on your car in your driveway. What do you dio? And universally, they pause and They're like, I don't know. I haven't thought about it, right. And then they start making up stuff. Like maybe I'm gonna go through the glove box. Maybe I'm going to go through my files. But wouldn't it be great if they could just kind of talked to the air and say, Alexa, what? Doe ideo and have it work for them, you know, And that's one friction. The second friction is consumers actually don't know their addresses or don't know it. Well, we joke around the office about the difference between saying you're on route one and Route one A is is the difference between 20 minutes of that tow truck getting to you in time. You know, these air points of friction that technology can help us with, you know, and then with payments even better, Right? So the fact that you can pay for this thing with Amazon pay and you don't have to worry about having cash for a driver or have a credit card. I mean, there's just so many points of friction that are reduced by using Alexa. >>Okay, so let's talk about the the integrations here in the technical aspects of how you put everything together and made it work, and we'll get into some of the cloud aspect >>Attack launched. We're asking users to tell what they want, and they can tell the whole address. They can get the address from the Alexa device. Or if it is Alexa Auto. The GPS will provide us the Latin belong. And we take that address and we get what kind of experience they want. Whether it is a flat tire, we're going to send somebody else to put despair. If it is a jump start, we're gonna put send somebody Thio jumps out the vehicle. So depending on that, we put pull all that information together, get this consent for the user to charge their an Amazon parrot card on profile, and then go So it's literally to come to sentences. And then we're on. We're on to sending you experience with some of the text messages that will allow you to truck tractor truck coming down to your driver. >>Now I'll show my age. So yeah, we've all I don't have all but I've been locked out of the car many times Now, in the old days, used to be able to get a coat hanger and pop it open. But so? So that people still get locked out of their cars. >>Yes, cars. More often than not, it's, you know, the key. Fob stopped working, right? Lost the battery of my key fob these days. But it's the equivalent. >>Alright, so All right, so right. What else do you guys do in the cloud? Do you use a W s for your own business? Maybe share with us some of >>the over the years. For the past 78 years, we have, uh, integrated and got all of our technologies into the AWS cloud. And we have now revamped and re innovated on top of those and create a new product lines. We have accident scene management. We do, um, handle automatic clash notifications for some of our partner customers. We dio dealer service appointments, so we do a lot of these things. And all of these are not possible without the amazing teams. 20 or so teams that we have across three continents working on 50 plus, uh, approved services on aws, uh, innovating around the clock, bringing these new innovations to our market. >>So, Beth, you were saying earlier that you, you know, want to reach out to the consumer. I mean, how do you market? Uh, you obviously go through through partners. And I'm curious system, What's your go to market and maybe how you're different from from others in the marketplace, >>right? Eso again because we're white label with most of the client side business that we do, we help our clients message better on DSO. We talked to them about how often you have to remind people that this isn't a one and done, um, on the skill store for Alexa. You know how we're different is you know, you don't aske much as I love the branding that we came up with blank roadside. You know, you don't actually have to use it. You don't have to say, Alexa, open my blank roadside. You could just say, Alexa, help me with my flat tire, which really helps cut out the fact that I actually need to market the brand like a traditional market or would have had Thio. But our biggest problem is how do you market something to someone in that moment of need, right? How do I How do I prime you to get you to think about it way, way before you ever actually have the problem. >>And how do you charge for the service? >>Eso It's it's a flat fee on did. It's better than what consumers would be able to get on their own. Or at least we believe so. But it is a flat fee for any kind of road service, so it's flat tire. It's dead batteries. It's winching you out. You know, it's it's all of those things. Um, that can happen to you that are just kind of those minor everyday mishaps. >>Okay? And so and so do I. How do I get it? Do I do I have tow hope that my you know, if I'm leasing a car that the auto has it, can I go direct? How doe I >>all direct? It's all direct. So you don't have to worry about an I d number membership number. You're just paying for it out of your Amazon account on. Do you know you don't have to worry about knowing your how many digit vin number. You know, none of that stuff. It's just one and done. >>Awesome. So, Raja, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your your scale. Um, maybe I don't know if you can share any metrics and what What factors? The cloud generally and a W s specifically has has played and enabling that scale. >>Yeah, we have amazing number of integrations with our Fortune 100 insurance companies. Um, over 35 insurance companies and we have 100 and 70 b two b clients today, Um, and we integrate with them were deeply, um, uh integrated into the building systems into their coverage systems. And all of that is to be able to provide that sub minute sub second experience to our customers when they're calling in, uh, when they need the service. Um, right now we do over a billion AP A calls. As a result of these transactions, all these integrations or for quarter and all of these, uh, our third parties, service providers who go around the on the roads and provide this location information today off the tow trucks to us, all of these 8 8000 or so trucks extreme that information to us almost on every hour. So we bring all that information together on the AWS platform, stream it back shaded back in a very secure private manner back to the customers, right at the moment of need. >>Yeah, So I mean, without the cloud, you'd be backing up. You know, the servers to the truck to the loading dock. And it would just take so much longer toe spin up new products. I would imagine that you guys have a lot of ideas about new data products or new services that you can you can provide. Um, you probably I'm sure you can tell us what they are, But but in terms of the time, it takes you to conceive toe to get to the market. That must be impressed with the cloud. >>Yeah, it's a fraction of what it used to take years ago when we were not in AWS, right? And it also allows us to not to spend all this time on worrying about the same thing that you used to worry about for every project. Now you can actually think about how, what how you let be able to leverage new innovations that are coming in and actually improve improve the experience with some kind of intelligence that is added on, which makes the experience much smoother for people. >>Well, Beth will give you last word. But first of all, thanks for helping us make our lives even even better and more convenient. But bring us home. What's the last word here? >>So the last word is, you know, we dio we do 12 million events a year right now, right? And if you if you like math, it's 35,000 day. It's 20 for every minute, you know. And the work that that Rajan team have done to make the scalable means we're ready to do the next 12 million on. Do you know we know. We know there are consumers out there having those events. We just want to be there for you, you know, take care of that frustrating event on get you back >>on the road. Well, it's just, you know, having you there and being able to push a button and talk to a device is just It's a game changer. So thank you guys for coming on the cube and sharing your story really interesting. Yeah. All right. Thanks for watching. Keep it right there. You're watching the cubes coverage of aws reinvent 2020. We'll be right back right after this short break

>> Announcer: From Chicago, it's theCUBE, covering Oracle Transformation Day 2020. Brought to you by Oracle Consulting. >> Welcome back, everybody, to this special digital event coverage that theCUBE is looking into the rebirth of Oracle Consulting. Janet George is here, she's a group VP, autonomous for advanced analytics with machine learning and artificial intelligence at Oracle, and she's joined by Grant Gibson, who's a group VP of growth and strategy at Oracle. Folks, welcome to theCUBE, thanks so much for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Grant, I want to start with you because you've got strategy in your title. I'd like to start big-picture. What is the strategy with Oracle, specifically as it relates to autonomous, and also consulting? >> Sure, so, I think Oracle has a deep legacy of strength in data, and over the company's successful history, it's evolved what that is from steps along the way. And if you look at the modern enterprise, an Oracle client, I think there's no denying that we've entered the age of AI, that everyone knows that artificial intelligence and machine learning are a key to their success in the business marketplace going forward. And while generally it's acknowledged that it's a transformative technology, and people know that they need to take advantage of it, it's the how that's really tricky, and that most enterprises, in order to really get an enterprise-level ROI on an AI investment, need to engage in projects of significant scope. And going from realizing there's an opportunity or realizing there's a threat to mobilizing yourself to capitalize on it is a daunting task for enterprise. Certainly one that's, anybody that's got any sort of legacy of success has built-in processes, has built-in systems, has built-in skill sets, and making that leap to be an autonomous enterprise is challenging for companies to wrap their heads around. So as part of the rebirth of Oracle Consulting, we've developed a practice around how to both manage the technology needs for that transformation as well as the human needs, as well as the data science needs to it. So there's-- >> So, wow, there's about five or six things that I want to (Grant chuckles) follow up with you there, so this is a good conversation. Janet, ever since I've been in the industry, when you're talking about AI, it's sort of start-stop, start-stop. We had the AI winter, and now it seems to be here. It almost feels like the technology never lived up to its promise, 'cause we didn't have the horsepower, the compute power, it didn't have enough data, maybe. So we're here today, it feels like we are entering a new era. Why is that, and how will the technology perform this time? >> So for AI to perform, it's very reliant on the data. We entered the age of AI without having the right data for AI. So you can imagine that we just launched into AI without our data being ready to be training sets for AI. So we started with BI data, or we started with data that was already historically transformed, formatted, had logical structures, physical structures. This data was sort of trapped in many different tools, and then, suddenly, AI comes along, and we say, take this data, our historical data, we haven't tested it to see if this has labels in it, this has learning capability in it. We just thrust the data to AI. And that's why we saw the initial wave of AI sort of failing, because it was not ready for AI, ready for the generation of AI, if you will. >> So, to me, this is, I always say this was the contribution that Hadoop left us, right? I mean, Hadoop, everybody was crazy, it turned into big data. Oracle was never that nuts about it, they just kind of watched, sat back and watched, obviously participated. But it gathered all this data, it created cheap data lakes, (laughs) which people always joke, turns into data swamps. But the data is oftentimes now within organizations, at least present, right. >> Yes, yes, yes. >> Like now, it's a matter of what? What's the next step for really good value? >> Well, basically, what Hadoop did to the world of data was Hadoop freed data from being stuck in tools. It basically brought forth this concept of platform. And platform is very essential, because as we enter the age of AI and we enter the petabyte range of data, we can't have tools handling all of this data. The data needs to scale. The data needs to move. The data needs to grow. And so, we need the concept of platform so we can be elastic for the growth of the data. It can be distributed. It can grow based on the growth of the data. And it can learn from that data. So that's the reason why Hadoop sort of brought us into the platform world. And-- >> Right, and a lot of that data ended up in the cloud. I always say for years, we marched to the cadence of Moore's law. That was the innovation engine in this industry. As fast as you could get a chip in, you'd get a little advantage, and then somebody would leapfrog. Today, it's, you've got all this data, you apply machine intelligence, and cloud gives you scale, it gives you agility. Your customers, are they taking advantage of that new innovation cocktail? First of all, do you buy that, and how do you see them taking advantage of this? >> Yeah, I think part of what Janet mentioned makes a lot of sense, is that at the beginning, when you're taking the existing data in an enterprise and trying to do AI to it, you often get things that look a lot like what you already knew, because you're dealing with your existing data set and your existing expertise. And part of, I think, the leap that clients are finding success with now is getting novel data types. You're moving from the zeroes and ones of structured data to image, language, written language, spoken language. You're capturing different data sets in ways that prior tools never could, and so, the classifications that come out of it, the insights that come out of it, the business process transformation that comes out of it is different than what we would have understood under the structured data format. So I think it's that combination of really being able to push massive amounts of data through a cloud product to be able to process it at scale. That is what I think is the combination that takes it to the next plateau for sure. >> So you talked about sort of we're entering the new era, age of AI. A lot of people kind of focus on the cloud as sort of the current era, but it really does feel like we're moving beyond that. The language that we use today, I feel like, is going to change, and you just started to touch on some of it, sensing, our senses, and the visualization, and the auditory, so it's sort of this new experience that customers are seeing, and a lot of this machine intelligence behind that. >> I call it the autonomous enterprise, right? >> Okay. >> The journey to be the autonomous enterprise. And when you're on this journey to be the autonomous enterprise, you need, really, the platform that can help you be. Cloud is that platform which can help you get to the autonomous journey. But the autonomous journey does not end with the cloud, or doesn't end with the data lake. These are just infrastructures that are basic, necessary, necessities for being on that autonomous journey. But at the end, it's about, how do you train and scale very large-scale training that needs to happen on this platform for AI to be successful? And if you are an autonomous enterprise, then you have really figured out how to tap into AI and machine learning in a way that nobody else has to derive business value, if you will. So you've got the platform, you've got the data, and now you're actually tapping into the autonomous components, AI and machine learning, to derive business intelligence and business value. >> So I want to get into a little bit of Oracle's role, but to do that, I want to talk a little bit more about the industry. So if you think about the way the industry seems to be restructuring around data, historically, industries had their own stack or value chain, and if you were in the finance industry, you were there for life, you know? >> Yes. >> You had your own sales channel, distribution, et cetera. But today, you see companies traversing industries, which has never happened before. You see Apple getting into content, and music, and there's so many examples, Amazon buying Whole Foods. Data is sort of the enabler there. You have a lot of organizations, your customers, that are incumbents, that they don't want to get disrupted. A big part of your role is to help them become that autonomous enterprise so they don't get disrupted. I wonder if you could maybe comment on how you're doing. >> Yeah, I'll comment, and then, Grant, you can chime in. >> Great. >> So when you think about banking, for example, highly regulated industry, think about agriculture, these are highly regulated industries. It is very difficult to disrupt these industries. But now you're looking at Amazon, and what does an Amazon or any other tech giant like Apple have? They have incredible amounts of data. They understand how people use, or how they want to do, banking. And so, they've come up with Apple Cash, or Amazon Pay, and these things are starting to eat into the market. So you would have never thought an Amazon could be a competition to a banking industry, just because of regulations, but they are not hindered by the regulations because they're starting at a different level, and so, they become an instant threat and an instant disruptor to these highly regulated industries. That's what data does. When you use data as your DNA for your business, and you are sort of born in data, or you've figured out how to be autonomous, if you will, capture value from that data in a very significant manner, then you can get into industries that are not traditionally your own industry. It can be the food industry, it can be the cloud industry, the book industry, you know, different industries. So that's what I see happening with the tech giants. >> So, Grant, this is a really interesting point that Janet is making, that, you mentioned you started off with a couple of industries that are highly regulated and harder to disrupt. You know, music got disrupted, publishing got disrupted, but you've got these regulated businesses, defense. Automotive hasn't been truly disrupted yet, so Tesla maybe is a harbinger. And so, you've got this spectrum of disruption. But is anybody safe from disruption? >> (laughs) I don't think anyone's ever safe from it. It's change and evolution, right? Whether it's swapping horseshoes for cars, or TV for movies, or Netflix, or any sort of evolution of a business, I wouldn't coast on any of it. And I think, to your earlier question around the value that we can help bring to Oracle customers is that we have a rich stack of applications, and I find that the space between the applications, the data that spans more than one of them, is a ripe playground for innovations where the data already exists inside a company but it's trapped from both a technology and a business perspective, and that's where, I think, really, any company can take advantage of knowing its data better and changing itself to take advantage of what's already there. >> The powerful people always throw the bromide out that data is the new oil, and we've said, no, data's far more valuable, 'cause you can use it in a lot of different places. Oil, you can use once and it's all you can do. >> Yeah. >> It has to follow the laws of scarcity. Data, if you can unlock it, and so, a lot of the incumbents, they have built a business around whatever, a factory or process and people. A lot of the trillion-dollar startups, that become trillionaires, you know who I'm talking about, data's at the core, they're data companies. So it seems like a big challenge for your incumbent customers, clients, is to put data at the core, be able to break down those silos. How do they do that? >> Mm, grating down silos is really super critical for any business. If it's okay to operate in a silo, for example, you would think that, "Oh, I could just be payroll and expense reports, "and it wouldn't matter if I get into vendor "performance management or purchasing. "That can operate as a silo." But anymore, we are finding that there are tremendous insights between vendor performance management and expense reports, these things are all connected. So you can't afford to have your data sit in silos. So grating down that silo actually gives the business very good performance, insights that they didn't have before. So that's one way to go. But another phenomena happens. When you start to grate down the silos, you start to recognize what data you don't have to take your business to the next level. That awareness will not happen when you're working with existing data. So that awareness comes into form when you grate the silos and you start to figure out you need to go after a different set of data to get you to new product creation, what would that look like, new test insights, or new capex avoidance, that data is just, you have to go through the iteration to be able to figure that out. >> And then it becomes a business problem, right? If you've got a process now where you can identify 75% of the failures, and you know the value of the other 25% of the failures, it becomes a simple investment. "How much money am I willing to invest "to knock down some portion of that 25%?" And it changes it from simply an IT problem or an expense management problem to the universal cash problem. >> To a business problem. >> But you still need a platform that has APIs, that allows you to bring in-- >> Yes, yes. >> Those data sets that you don't have access to, so it's an enabler. It's not the answer, it's not the outcome, in and of itself, but it enables the outcome. >> Yeah, and-- >> I always say you can't have the best toilet if your plumbing doesn't work, you know what I mean? So you have to have your plumbing. Your plumbing has to be more modern. So you have to bring in modern infrastructure, distributed computing, that, there's no compromise there. You have to have the right ecosystem for you to be able to be technologically advanced and a leader in that space. >> But that's kind of table stakes, is what you're saying. >> Stakes. >> So this notion of the autonomous enterprise, help me here. 'Cause I get kind of autonomous and automation coming into IT, IT ops. I'm interested in how you see customers taking that beyond the technology organization into the enterprise. >> Yeah, this is such a great question. This is what I've been talking about all morning. I think when AI is a technology problem, the company is at a loss. AI has to be a business problem. AI has to inform the business strategy. When companies, the successful companies that have done, so, 90% of our investments are going towards data, we know that, and most of it going towards AI. There's data out there about this. And so, we look at, what are these 90% of the companies' investments, where are these going, and who is doing this right, and who is not doing this right? One of the things we are seeing as results is that the companies that are doing it right have brought data into their business strategy. They've changed their business model. So it's not making a better taxi, but coming up with Uber. So it's not like saying, "Okay, I'm going to be "the drug manufacturing company, "I'm going to put drugs out there in the market," versus, "I'm going to do connected health." And so, how does data serve the business model of being connected health, rather than being a drug company selling drugs to my customers? It's a completely different way of looking at it. And so now, AI's informing drug discovery. AI is not helping you just put more drugs to the market. Rather, it's helping you come up with new drugs that will help the process of connected care. >> There's a lot of discussion in the press about the ethics of AI, and how far should we take AI, and how far can we take it from a technology standpoint, (laughs) long road map, there. But how far should we take it? Do you feel as though public policy will take care of that, a lot of that narrative is just kind of journalists looking for the negative story? Will that sort itself out? How much time do you spend with your customers talking about that, and what's Oracle's role there? Facebook says, "Hey, the government should figure this out." What's your sort of point of view on that? >> I think everybody has a role, it's a joint role, and none of us can give up our responsibilities. As data scientists, we have heavy responsibility in this area, and we have heavy responsibility to advise the clients on this area also. The data we come from, the past, has to change. That is inherently biased. And we tend to put data science on biased data with a one-dimensional view of the data. So we have to start looking at multiple dimensions of the data. We've got to start examining, I call it irresponsible AI, when you just simply take one variable, we'll start to do machine learning with that, 'cause that's not right. You have to examine the data. You've got to understand how much bias is in the data. Are you training a machine learning model with the bias? Is there diversity in the models? Is there diversity in the data? These are conversations we need to have. And we absolutely need policy around this, because unless our lawmakers start to understand that we need the source of the data to change, and if we look at the source of the data, and the source of the data is inherently biased or the source of the data has only a single representation, we're never going to change that downstream. AI's not going to help us there. So that has to change upstream. That's where the policy makers come into play, the lawmakers come into play. But at the same time, as we're building models, I think we have a responsibility to say, "Can we triangulate? "Can we build with multiple models? "Can we look at the results of these models? "How are these features ranked? "Are they ranked based on biases, sex, age, PII information? "Are we taking the PII information out? "Are we really looking at one variable?" Somebody failed to pay their bill, but they just failed to pay their bill because they were late, versus that they don't have a bank account and we classify them as poor on having no bank account, you know what I mean? So all this becomes part of responsible AI. >> But humans are inherently biased, and so, if humans are building algorithms-- >> That's right, that's right. >> There is the bias. >> So you're saying that through iteration, we can stamp out the bias? Is that realistic? >> We can stamp out the bias, or we can confirm the bias. >> Or at least make it transparent. >> Make it transparent. So I think that even if we can have the trust to be able to have the discussion on, "Is this data "the right data that we are doing the analysis on?" and start the conversation there, we start to see the change. >> Well, wait, so we could make it transparent, then I'm thinking, a lot of AI is black box. Is that a problem? Is the black box syndrome an issue, or are we, how would we deal with it? >> Actually, AI is not a black box. We, in Oracle, we are building our data science platform with an explicit feature called explainability of the model, on how the model came up with the features, what features it picked. We can rearrange the features that the model picked. So I think explainability is very important for ordinary people to trust AI. Because we can't trust AI. Even data scientists can't trust AI, to a large extent. So for us to get to that level where we can really trust what AI's picking, in terms of a model, we need to have explainability. And I think a lot of the companies right now are starting to make that as part of their platform. >> So that's your promise to clients, is that your AI will not be a black box. >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> 'Cause that's not everybody's promise. >> Yes. >> I mean, there's a lot of black box in AI, as you well know. >> Yes, yes, there is. If you go to open source and you start downloading, you'll get a lot of black box. The other advantage to open source is sometimes you can just modify the black box. They can give you access and you can modify the black box. But if you get companies that have released to open source, it's somewhat of a black box, so you have to figure out the balance between. You don't really have to worry too much about the black box if you can see that the model has done a pretty good job as compared to other models. If I triangulate the results of the algorithm, and the triangulation turns out to be reasonable, the accuracy and the r values and the matrixes show reasonable results, then I don't really have to worry if one model is too biased compared to another model. But I worry if there's only one dimension to it. >> Mm-hm, well, ultimately, to much of the data scientists' dismay, somebody on the business side is going to ask about causality. >> That's right. >> "Well, this is what "the model says, why is it saying that?" >> Yeah, right. >> Yeah. >> And, ethical reasons aside, you're going to want to understand why the predictions are what they are, and certainly, as you go in to examine those things, as you look at the factors that are causing the predictions and the outcomes, I think any sort of business should be asking those responsibility questions of everything they do, AI included, for sure. >> So, we're entering a new era, we kind of all agree on that. So I just want to throw a few questions out and have a little fun here, so feel free to answer in any order. So when do you think machines will be able to make better diagnoses than doctors? >> I think they already are making better diagnoses. I mean, there's so much, like, I found out recently that most of the very complicated cancer surgeries are done by machines, doctors just standing by and making sure that the machines are doing it well. And so, I think the machines are taking over in some aspects, I wouldn't say all aspects. And then there's the bedside manners, where you (laughs) really need the human doctor, and you need the comfort of talking to the doctor. >> Smiley face, please! (Janet laughs) >> That's advanced AI, to give it a better bedside manner. >> Okay, when do you think that driving and owning your own vehicle is going to be the exception rather than the rule? >> That, I think, is so far ahead, it's going to be very, very near future, because if you've ever driven in an autonomous car, you'll find that after your initial reservations, you're going to feel a lot more safer in an autonomous car. Because it's got a vision that humans don't. It's got a communication mechanism that humans don't. It's talking to all the fleets of cars. >> It's got a richer sense of data. >> It's got a richer sense of data, it's got a richer sense of vision, it's got a richer sense of ability to (snaps) react when a kid jumps in front of the car. Where a human will be terrified and not able to make quick decisions, the car can. But at the same time, we're going to have some startup problems. We're going to see AI misfire in certain areas, and insurance companies are gearing themselves up for that, 'cause that's just, but the data's showing us that we will have tremendously decreased death rates. That's a pretty good start to have AI driving our cars. >> You're a believer, well, and you're right, there's going to be some startup issues, because this car, the vehicle has to decide, "Do I kill that person who jumped in front of me, "or do I kill the driver?" Not kill, I mean, that's overstating-- >> Yeah. >> But those are some of the startup things, and there will be others. >> And humans, you don't question the judgment system for that. >> Yes. >> There's no-- >> Dave: Right, they're yelling at humans. >> Person that developed, right. It's treated as a one-off. But I think if you look back five years, where were we? You figure, the pace of innovation and the speed and the gaps that we're closing now, where are we going to be in five years? >> Yeah. >> You have to figure it's, I have an eight-year-old son, and I question if he's ever going to drive a car. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> How about retail? Do you think retail stores largely will disappear? >> Oh, I think retail, there will be a customer service element to retail, but it will evolve from where it's at in a very, very high-stakes rate, because now, with RFID, you know who's, we used to be invisible as we walked, we still are invisible as you walk into a retail store, even if you spend a lot of money in retail. And now, with buying patterns and knowing who the customer is, and your profile is out there on the Web, just getting a sense of who this person is, what their intent is walking into the store, and doing responsible AI, bringing value to that intent, not irresponsibly, that will gain the trust, and as people gain the trust. And then RFIDs, you're in the location, you're nearby, you'd normally buy the suit, the suit's on sale, bring it all together. So I think there's a lot of connective tissue work that needs to happen, but that's all coming together. >> Yeah, it's about the value-add and what the proposition to the customer is. If it's simply there as a place where you go and pick out something you already know what you're going to get, that store doesn't add value, but if there's something in the human expertise, or in the shared, felt sudden experience of being in the store, that's where you'll see retailers differentiate themselves. >> I like to shop still. (laughs) >> Yeah, yeah. >> You mentioned Apple Pay before. Well, you think traditional banks will lose control of the payment systems? >> They're already losing control of payment systems. If you look at, there was no reason for the banks to create Siri-like assistants. They're all over right now. And we started with Alexa first. So you can see the banks are trying to be a lot more customized, customer service, trying to be personalized, trying to really make you connect to them in a way that you have not connected to the bank before. The way that you connected to the bank is you knew the person at the bank for 20 years, or since when you had your first bank account. That's how you connected with the banks. And then you go to a different branch, and then, all of a sudden, you're invisible. Nobody knows you, nobody knows that you were 20 years with the bank. That's changing. They're keeping track of which location you're going to, and trying to be a more personalized. So I think AI is a forcing function, in some ways, to provide more value, if anything. >> Well, we're definitely entering a new era, the age of AI, the autonomous enterprise. Folks, thanks very much for a great segment, really appreciate it. >> Yeah, our pleasure, thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us. >> You're welcome, all right, and thank you. And keep it right there, we'll be right back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of the rebirth of Oracle Consulting. We'll be right back. (upbeat electronic music)

from London England it's the cube covering Koopa inspire 19 emia taught to you by Koopa hey welcome to the cube Lisa Martin coming to you from London I'm at Koopa inspire 19 pleased to be joined by one of Koopas spent setters hit me here is alla Williams the managing director and chief procurement officer at Barclays al welcome to the cube Thank You Lisa thanks for having me so Barclays is a three hundred plus year old Bank three hundred and thirty five years I think I also was was headquartered in London I didn't know this until he did some research Barclays is the pioneer of the ATM yes and a credit card in the UK credit card why first credit card in the UK and the pioneer in inventor of the ATM correct yes so when we think of an organization that is three hundred and thirty five years old we think how agile is that organization how transformative can it be talk to me about what it's like at Barclays from a digital perspective before we get into some of the procurement stuff which or not but tight and culture like that's a great question right could you think about a three hundred thirty-five year old Bank how innovative could it can it be right how agile can it be and the market in the the sector we work in requires us to be very agile because banking is a disrupted sector especially on the retail and consumer side expectations around technology and mobile capabilities and digital transformation are the most significant they've ever been in this sector and so for Barclays it's it's absolutely key that we deliver on those capabilities both in terms of our front office for our consumers and our corporate clients as well as for our own employees within the bank how influential is the consumer side because as consumers we are so used to being able to get anything that we want we can buy products and services we can pay bills with a click or swipe on the on the business side it's harder for businesses to transform and innovate it's a lot of other risks and security issues how influential is Barclays Barclays is your retail your consumer business in terms of your b2b work and that's a great question because I think the the experiences that shape people's expectations come from their interactions in retail and consumer when it comes to b2b and traditionally business-to-business commerce and financial transactions haven't been nearly as sophisticated streamlined or frictionless you know as you would in a consumer model so the expectations are built on the consumer side in consumer to business type models and then the business and business models been playing catch-up for the last several years as a result talk to me about now the role of finance leaders I was reading surgery that Kupa did recently have 253 uk-based financial decision makers and a big number of them I think it was 96 percent said we don't have complete visibility of all of our spent there's a big opportunity there to work with a company like Cooper but talk to me about how the role of the chief procurement officer is changing you've been doing it for quite a while you're a veteran right some of the trends that you have seen that you've really jumped on and said this is the direction we need to be going in right so I've been the chief procurement officer of Barclays for two and half years and the CEO of a large global technology company for nine years before that so I think the the the role of the chief procurement officer has changed significantly over the course of the last say 10 years five years two years we're at a point now where the chief procurement officer is seen as a source of and the organization of procurement is seen as a source of innovation it's seen as a source of capacity creation for the the the organization for the company and it's also seen as sort of a steward of the portfolio of spins for that particular organization to ensure we're maximizing the utility and value of that spend and of that supply chain so the expectations for procurement have tripled quadrupled or more fold in the last you know four or five years some of the interesting things that we're hearing from Koopa and from their customers and partners today is beyond simply initiative to simply but beyond you know dramatically improving procurement and invoicing and dispensing and leveraging the platform as one source for visibility of all that spent but it's being transformative to completely other areas like I was hearing a story of a customer who redefined procurement and is actually positively impacting corporate sustainability yes Wow so talk to me a little bit about I know one of the things that you really thrive on is competition how are you leveraging that and maybe your old American football days to build and maybe foster a sense of collaborative competition within your team to transform procurement at Barclays yes so I think that whether it's in sport or whether it's in business I think the concept of teams is key and effective teams are built on trust they're built on empowerment they they're built on collaboration open communication limited asymmetry and information as it's passed and that's all about kind of driving agility for whether you're on this on the football field American footballer or other football or on or in a business environment of business context so you know it's really and as a CEO and for all of the leaders on my team it's also about being a player coach and knowing when you need to be a player when you need to sort of roll up sleeves contribute in a particular area or particular solving a particular problem but more importantly when you need to be coached and and help those players sort of and those team members in on the team sort of step up to the challenge and coach them to be more success see Bennet Berkeley's a couple years now talk to me about your use case the purpose has with Koopa what are you guys doing together and what are some of the transformations that both internally and externally you've been able to achieve yeah so the relationship with coop has been great again I joined to make a couple of years ago one of the sort of first pillars associated with our overall transformation journey of centralizing procurement from five different procurement or six different procurement organizations really to moving to strategic locations to building out a new organization structure and operating model for for procurement I won't go into all that but one of the key pillars was around technology and we didn't have a common procure-to-pay or source to pay capability that extended or threaded throughout the bank for managing and supply chain so early on when I joined Barclays partnered partnering with Koopa working both of our teams working very effectively together to deploy sort of country by country and region by region we're now in 11 countries with the Koopa source to pay platform we're going to point to six more by the end of this calendar year and over 95% of our spend is flowing through Koopa as a multinational banks so it's been a significant component of our overall transformation journey for for Barclays and part of that transformation journey the technology piece is important that all a lot of its cultural we talked about a history of a three hundred and thirty-five year old organization but also going from five different procurement organizations down to one using a central platform that's challenging to get folks on board right being comfortable with change is your spirit of competitiveness was that a facilitator of getting adoption so that you could get them well I think so I mean I think to get the most out of teams and the most out of any organization large or small you need to galvanize around a common set of goals and objectives the the adage we ought to be pulling on the rope together to achieve achieve the end result and I think in the case of the sort of our Koopa journey both in terms of its strategy and overall deployment it was something more or less our entire procurement organization was able able to galvanize around and in feel like they were a part of and it it created an identity for us within Barclays as a procurement organization as well and kind of put his front and center with our business units and our stakeholders in a way we had we'd never been before so in terms of procurement having a seat at the board table is that something now that you have the ability to do with Barclays and be much more of a strategic driver of business yeah and look at Barclays compared to some of my other experiences it's not an it's not an issue of not having a seat at the table we might have a seat at too many tables sometimes there's a lot of attention on procurement within Barclays to help it deliver on its strategic objectives so with that seat comes a lot of responsibility so I often will coach my teams to ensure that they understand kind of that that that component of it's not just about having a seat at the table it's about what we're going to contribute what are we going to do differently when we're at that table when we're helping shape the decisions for the organization and what are the accountabilities and responsibilities that will pick up as a result and deliver on those promises that's absolutely critical one of the things that was talked about this morning is to trust Rob Bernstein talked about it they also had a guest speaker Rachel Botsman who's a trusted expert it was such an interesting conversation you know we talked about any chuck event that the cube goes to you always talk about trust got to have trust in the data you gotta have trust in your suppliers but what they were talking about here was really being an enabler of trust but cooper really working to earn the trust of its customers tell me about how has earned your trust and also allowed you to have those better discussions at the board table so that you have marked trusted relationships with your executive and your peer team yeah I mean it all starts for Barclays at the very top of the house in front office because we're in the business of trust I mean Bank a bank is in the business of trust that's what we deliver and promise to our consumers and our corporate clients and I think you know within procurement we need to make sure we're sort of delivering on that same promise around around trust and building trust with our teams and with our suppliers in the case of Kupa frankly it was about asking them to ensure they appropriately set expectations with me with my team in terms of what we could or couldn't do with the capability right don't over promise and under deliver but actually be very prudent and practical about what we're gonna be able to get done and then deliver on those promises to the best of your ability but if something and I always do if something goes so not according to plan right it's be open communicative and direct with the issue and how we're going to address it that to me is how we build trust in any team and that's how we built trust with Kupa through our transformation over the last two years that's critical mister your point no deployment probably ever goes perfectly according to plan there are always things that happen whatever it is software hardware is that we're talking about and I think for companies to address that confront it help the customer through those challenges to me that's more valuable I'm saying everything went beautifully was flawless that's not reality right I completely agree and I think that's that's what separates good from great companies to write is their ability to build that trust whether it be within their supply chain with their clients with their employees and look it's it's a journey it's not something you're one and done and you can say okay we've got the trust you can lose it as easy as you can obtain it and you have to keep a focus on on those trusting relationships should think about that we've earned this trust but we have to focus on it so we don't lose it so we grow X having the focus on that because you're right whether it's a deployment of software it's not one and it's the same thing with any sort of trusted relationship right it's maintaining that it's ensuring that there's value right being delivered on both sides that's right tell me a little bit about your ability Barclays ability as a spend setter in this program that Cooper has to influence technology directions like they talk a lot about the community all the insights that they're able to deliver to the community because of the community as Burton is able to be a strategic her gir with Cooper rather than just a customer yeah Phil we are I mean Rob and his team Raja Ravi the entire crew are very receptive and they're very collaborative in hearing from an organization like Barclays now look I'll be the first to admit Barclays and in banking and banking specifically in the UK it's a different animal than many other companies and sectors that kupo would work in so what might work for other companies doesn't always work for us and kind of flipping that around there's certain things that we need from Koopa that that we've been able to partner with them to deliver over the course of the last two years and the relationship of coop has been fantastic they hear us they listen to us they help us understand what the solution can do what it can't do or won't be able to do in the near term and then how do we augment that in the right way so we don't create cottage industries of activity with Impa cure med when we could be leveraging the capability of ghupat to deliver on those services right so you mentioned a little bit about what's next for you guys in terms of rolling out the deployment a little bit more broadly last question for you is some of the news that came out today with the expansion of Koopa pay with American Express for example and just some of the other innovations that Koopa is making what are some of your thoughts what are some of the things that excite you about the direction are going in well yes so on the Koopa pay front I'm actually going to be on stage with Ravi tomorrow talking about Koopa pay because Mark Lee card is also a key component of that capability for the first virtual card that they integrated probably I believe it was yeah and and so so I think about payments is sort of the one not the only but one of the next frontiers from a source to pay or a procurement perspective and it's about how do we innovate in the payment space to get away from having that through the old traditional methods of adding suppliers you know detailed information to our vendor masters so that we can then eventually get an invoice and then reconcile payment remittance to invoices and sort of work through there's a lot of cost in that a lot of time and very little speed we want to move the dial on speed the value we want to move the dial on efficiencies and eventually get to a point where we can offer things like early payment discounts so by having control over our our payment process and that's where Koopa pay and the Barclaycard partnership with Koopa pay is really played a key role in making that happen so in q1 we made our commitment to deploy Koopa pay in q1 after we're through some of our deployments through the rest of this year on the base of the platform and look forward to continuing that journey next year on the payment side one last thing that just popped up I was doing some research and the b2c side is transformed much faster a lot of demand from the consumers we talked about that a moment ago do you see what the direction could the pay is going in with Barclays card for example as bringing in some of the consumer implements to start facilitating the acceleration that's needed there and I think yes I think that's exactly right because again when you think about the consumer side of payments or use it we're all using our phones we're using other digital means we're using wearables we're using different ways of buying and paying especially in retail and the first question we have to ask ourselves why can't those innovations be applied in a b2b space now kupah pay is I think a start of sort of that journey and certainly not the end you know destination but certainly I think it sets us off in the right direction yeah we as consumers are quite demanding yes I'll thank you for doing you on the cube ensuring the Barclays spends that our success rate good luck tomorrow in your keynote thank you for having me thank you pleasure I'm Lisa Martin you're watching the cube from cuca inspire London 19 thanks for watching

from London England it's the cube covering Koopa inspire 19 Mei brought to you by Koopa hey welcome to the cube Lisa Martin on the ground in London at Koopa inspire 19 very pleased to welcome to the cube for the first time we have Dean Henry the EVP of business financing and supplier management from American Express Dean welcome to the cube thank you happy to be here so let's talk about payments we those of us in our date lives as consumers the b2c transactions are so easy these days right you can transact from your phone from your watch it's we're doing everything we're paying bills we're buying things yet in the b2b space business payments haven't had as rapid as innovation as we seen on the on the consumer side talk to me a little bit about the business-to-business payments industry from MX's perspective before we get in to what you guys are doing with Cooper yeah well first comment on on the innovation you're absolutely right the innovation that's happening and retail payments hasn't made its way to b2b payments I think that's mostly a function of you know a consumer having the ease to try something new download an app and and change the way that they transact a bit at a store but with with whomever they're paying whereas a big business has a lot of processes that drive their their business spend and the way that they manage it and systems and you know as we're here talking with Koopa today you know the the processes that they automate and that they bring are critical to you know making payments happen and because because of that there's just barriers to entry that make make b2b payments harder to mirror the speed that you see in the retail side that said there's a lot of exciting things happening you know b2b payments is a hundred and twenty seven trillion dollar market globally it's a big profit pool that a lot of players are innovating in and when you look into the landscape and you consider who's playing out there you know there's traditional big banks that have been sort of the stalwarts of Global Payments there's obviously a large and grow and growing FinTech community with new companies every day that are in the media offering new capabilities to to clients and then there's players like American Express and I think we're actually uniquely positioned in that landscape with not too many exactly like us and when you look at you know the big banks and some of the challenges that they have when I talk to our customers about fees and and you know processes that take a while or money that moves with with relative uncertainty in terms of how much is actually going to show up and the beneficiaries account based on lifting fees as money moves between banks and then you look at the FinTech community that's new innovative solutions but you're not sure that they're always going to be around you know after the next funding cycle I think we're we're trying to play an in the middle where were a great alternative to the FinTech community we're a global platform for payments we're a global platform for lending so we can really do all the things that a FinTech can do all the things that a bank can do in many instances and and do that with the brand and the certainty that is a max and so we're excited about the space and we're investing a lot of time and energy and and partnering where we need to in order to make sure our customers can transact where they want us to to help them facilitate commerce right that point of enabling a customer to transact where they want what influences are you is the American Express seeing and being able to infuse into your partnerships from the consumer side from that consumer who buy something with a click or a swipe on Amazon and wants to be able to do something similar in their business day job tell me about the influence that American Express is seeing and what that position that you just subscribe is allowing you guys to say all right this is a direction that we're gonna go and because we know yeah I need to meet you mr. customer where you are right what look I think part of it is is demographics to be perfectly honest if you look at Gen Y and Gen Z they're they're more of the decision makers in today's management they will be even more tomorrow's management and so they to your point have that expectation that their business life shouldn't be that much more complex in their personal life so so what we're trying to do is find the partners that have the best user experience and make sure our solutions work seamlessly there that's step one that's that's what we're doing here with Koopa step two is we're also trying to make sure that our capabilities on on Amex a digital real-estate works just it just as easily as our retail side of our business and we're we're doing that you know with a with the unifying principles and American Express which is you know the trust and the service and the brand that that we offer to our clients but then also the the merchant rewards so there's a rich history of of American Express providing a differentiated value proposition with the credit card rewards that that exists and we take take that capability into our our business relationships and make sure that it's a value add to those customers that want it so let's talk about what American Express is doing with Kupa what was it just announced with Koopa pay so yeah Koopa pay you know I was impressed by the stats that Rob put up there they're they're growing quickly and we want to be part of it we're a candidly following the requests of our clients who want American Express as a payment option inside the Koopa pay we offer a tremendous value prop inside of Koopa pay the data that flows with a payment the data that we're able to collect that differentiates us from our competition helps our our clients reconcile their payments eliminate the paper realize the efficiencies that that Koopas clients are excited about and so we're they're simply enabling American Express to be a payment option and my hope and I think Koopas hope is that that's step one of a partnership and and will be able to do more together to serve our collective clients so this is enabling American Express of virtual cards be available as a payment option within Kupa pay yes and what is a virtual card so virtual card is is a virtual credit card number it can be a one-time use or a multi-use okay and you know our our clients use it for several different reasons you know buyers of of goods use a virtual card in order to make the payment of a supplier easier to get more data along with the transaction so that they can reconcile a payment to a purchase order and to associated invoices the suppliers get benefit as well and in that they to get enhanced data to reconcile payment that they receive on their end there's also working capital benefit in that if if a buyer chooses to pay early an invoice we can extend financing and pay the the supplier earlier so that they have more working capital to operate their business and so so it's a real balanced value prop where both parties are realizing value is this going to enable a buyer to have benefits like increased security with the way the virtual card works yeah what increased security and so far as a virtual card isn't is encrypted the fact that you know American Express stands behind all of our card payments with our brand and our promise that differentiates from you know a traditional bank payment you know ACH and other other low value clearings that don't have those guarantees along with it and so so that is a big differentiator but but I think candidly the the biggest benefit our clients see is the enhanced data and the working capital I think that's where we're trying to enrich both sides of the transaction give more data to enable the automation that's happening in the industry and extend credit so that businesses can operate more efficiently and and and by the things that they need to buy and hire the people they need to hire is this also something that will give suppliers and buyers more visibility you talked about enhanced data well they now have more visibility over buyers like different supplier options or suppliers with different ways that they can get paid so certainly enhance visibility on on when a suppliers getting paid and relative to the invoice date and what we're trying to do is work with Koopa and work with our partners around well how do we enhance the data so that so that as you know Koopa talks about the community of suppliers that their buyers utilize how can we be part of that how do we support the buyers and making decisions the suppliers and utilizing American Express as a as a source to be a verified business that has gone through all the legal legal checks that are required in commerce and bringing both of those capabilities to to do a transaction on the Koopa Network one of the stats that Rob mentioned this morning and love stats I really geeked out over them I don't know why you say there's five million plus suppliers on the Koopa platform is that an advantage that American Express sees to help extend the footprint of your virtual cards absolutely I what I'm candidly more excited about is the millions and millions of suppliers that are on the American Express network and that's an asset that I see personally as something that we can work with with Koopa and other partners to bring you know the businesses that are already verified that are on our network that we personally talk to every you know every year and bring those verified profiles to the commerce networks like Koopa so that it's easier to transact on Koopa if you have an American Express card got it and then last question for you is if we look at this partnership what was announced today this is launching in the UK and Australia first and then you'll roll it up more globally can you tell me a little bit about why those two regions yeah one that's going to be available for customers to use so so the honest answer is we wanted to be fast to market and quick and quick out to our customer base the UK and Australia are two very important geographies for us so we're launching first in those places by the end of the year and then looking at rolling out in the US and early 2020 and then from their expanding alongside excellent well Dean thank you for joining me on the cube this afternoon sharing what's new with Amex and Cooper we appreciate your time thank you so much really happy to be here excellent for Dean Henry I'm Lisa Martin you're watching the cube from Cooper inspire London 19 thanks for watching [Laughter]

(fast intro music) >> Narrator: From London England, it's the Cube, covering Coupa Inspire 19 EMEA. Brought to you by Coupa. >> Hey, welcome to The Cube. Lisa Martin coming to you from Coupa Inspire 19 in London. Pleased to welcome one of Coupa's spend setters, joining me now is James Wagstaff, the chief procurement officer of Provident. James, welcome to the Cube. >> Hello, Lisa, nice to be here. >> So you had a very busy day. Thank you for taking some time to talk to me about Provident, what you doing with Coupa. But give our audience an overview of Provident and what you guys do and deliver to your customers. >> Very good, so Provident is a ftse 250 UK financial services business. It lends money to people without access to mainstream lending. Um, so it's real focus is to do that in a responsible, caring way. So if you can't borrow money from Barclays or HSBC, then Provident is a company that will help you get back to access to that mainstream market. >> Individuals as well as like small businesses? >> Consumers, around two million people in the UK currently use Provident, either the credit card or our home credit or our car leasing business. >> Okay, so how long have you been there? >> I have been at Provident now since April of 2018. >> Okay. >> So we're coming up now to, I think 19 months, and we put Coupa into the bank, which is the credit card business in April or April/May. >> Okay talk to me, though, about about your journey in business and finance. One of the things I read about you is that you were encouraged from an early age to really understand all aspects of a business from operations to finance to marketing to truly provide value through procurement. Talk to me about the history there that you have. >> So I'm a big fan of mentor programs. So I think everyone should have a mentor, and I lucked into mine, a chap called Terry, who, for reasons best known to him, took me under his wing. I was quite old when I came to procurement. I was around late 20s, maybe 30, and he had a vision about what great procurement looked like, and it was a holistic view. So procurement at its worst can be very tactical, very cost focused, and Terry was very focused on the bigger picture, about top-line growth not just bottom line, and right from day one, he seeded that in me, and it's been the strength of my career. So I owe Terry, Terry Western, if he's watching, I owe Terry, I owe Terry everything for that. And then I spent the last 10 years as an expat. So prior to Provident, I had three years as the group CPI for VimpelCom, which is the Russian equivalent of Vodafone or AT&T, who have businesses throughout Soviet Union, CIS, and Asia-Pac. And then seven years with Huawei, who are China's largest private company, telecoms company, and I was traveling around the world on the sales side facing procurement. So that was a very sobering enlightening experience to see procurement from the supplier side of the table, and I think it's made me a different procurement person as a result in terms of the way the I treat people and relate to people. So that holistic nature combined with, I think, a very business-centric view of what procurement should do. >> Interesting, though, that you that you said, I got a late start in procurement, but your start was founded upon someone giving you very solid advice of look beyond that because this is an element of the business that can, somebody that clearly was seeing how transformative, but also how it was important for procurement to partner and understand different requirements and needs within each division within an organization, so it sounds like you didn't really grow up in that traditional siloed approach of procurement. >> I did not, and I think that for me it makes my life interesting. So I think if you're in procurement and the danger is you become quite siloed, you're very narrow, and I did my MBA quite recently while I was traveling just to get that bigger perspective. It makes the job fun. I mean, I think you know you can negotiate contract after contract after contract, but it's the context of what that's doing for the business. And I think when I looked at Coupa as a system, it was with that in mind. So looking at Coupa, not from the perspective of what it did for procurement, but how it was for end-user customers. So as a service, was it really, really simple to use? Did it feel like an Amazon shopping experience? Because that drives adoption, and if you can get people wanting to use the system because it's easy, then the data's in the system, and then the data's in the system you can do something with it. So you're not, you're not fighting that adoption issue that you would be on a lot of systems. So if you go to some of the big ERP systems, they can be really hard for people to change and adopt, and Coupa's not been like that. It's been relatively easy. >> Interesting that you talk about it as it needs to be as simple as an Amazon marketplace. As consumers we're so used to that, right. I mean, people transact daily and get fulfillment of whatever product or service they're ordering from Amazon within... Sometimes it's within an hour or two. So we have this expectation and this demand. To your point, though, about wanting to have software that would be as easy for your teams to take up, that consumer effect. Talk to me about that as an influence. Because you know, kind of right away experience with other systems that might be bigger legacy systems that are challenging to get folks to use because they're not that intuitive. Did you know right away when you came into Provident that I need to have something that is more consumer-like. >> I knew that we needed a system and because as a regulated industry, we had to control our spend. So the fact that we needed a procurement system was a given, so then the choice is what do you buy? I think you don't really need a big ERP unless you really want to spend a lot of money on assistant inspirations and complexity. So your then into the mid-market space. And, um, there's a lot of vendors out there that have had an on-premise model, been around a long time, but you can feel that when you use it. So I didn't do a paper-based RFP. I think this is probably a terrible way of evaluating systems because you can get a function list on paper, but that doesn't really tell you what it's like to use. So the procurement process was around video online demos. So getting users into the room, three hours for an online demo walk through the system. So it's a very non-traditional procurement process to buy a procurement system. And I think at the end of that, I think it was a more valuable process for it. >> Was that something that was driven by you or was that something that was driven by Coupa? Is that how they deliver that type of experience? >> It was driven by me, but I think it was welcomed by Coupa. I think, I think from the sales guys I think they do an awful lot of paper-based RFP, and I think it's a challenge because it's very hard to differentiate on paper. Actually, a lot of the systems kind of do the same stuff, but it's not what they do. It's how they do it. And you can't, you can't get that out of the paper. You have to see it and feel it and touch it. >> Exactly. One of the things that Rob Bernshteyn talks about, and he spoke about it this morning, is that the best UI is no UI. And he really talked about what they've done to be user-centric and talked proudly about the adoption that they've had. And you know, it's... We all know whatever software you're putting in an organization, all these, you know, whether its marketing, finance, operation, sales, if people aren't going to use it, it's not going to be able to deliver the value that whoever purchased it and brought it on needs it to do. Talk to me about that user-centric. Did you see and feel that right away in those demos? >> I think if you're a procurement guy, you have suppliers every day send you certain messages, and those messages are fairly consistent around, you know, delivering value and solutions. I mean, Rob's great. He's a bit of a force of nature. Um, you got to say that. But what I like about it is that he's got a very clear sense of vision about what the system should be, and I think he's done a great job of getting that throughout the company, top to bottom. And to date we've felt that. So normally what happens is you buy the software license, you sign the agreement, there's lots of love and care, and then kind of the vendor disappears a little bit, and you're on your own. And to date, Coupa done a great job. We got Damian Pinnell, who's our success manager. I get the sense that he really cares about whether the system is going to do what it promised to do. And how do we get more value out of it? Some of it is about selling more licenses because Coupa have got other modules they want you to buy, but that's kind of okay if the modules are delivering more value, then you don't mind paying for them. But even the modules we own, there is a real sense of are you exploiting it to the max? And that's pretty cool. >> What are some of the key values that you have gleaned so far in just the, what, maybe six months or so that you guys have been using the platform? >> So I'm getting, I'm quite surprised at the extent to the insights, the value I'm getting out of the insights. So as an example, and I'll be honest. Coupa told me that said your, your spend-through catalog is 27% and your industry top quartile is 95. And I kind of went, "Nah, I don't believe you." And then they said, "Your electronic invoicing could be 77%, and you're currently single digits." And I went, "Nah, I don't believe you." And then through the community we spoke to Co-Oper, another Coupa customer, and Marley there was saying, "No, we're doing it. We're at this. "We're at 95% or 97% even." And I went "Well, how are you doing it?" And she just talked me through how they sell it to suppliers and how, in my head, the reluctance to adopt actually evaporated because she was able to sell the idea to suppliers, sell the value as. She didn't force them to do it. She just said this is what you're going to get out of it if you do it this way, and she's genuinely got to 97. So what it's done for me is it's remove my own blockers in my own mind, you know, in my own head "You can't do this." Well, insights and speaking to other communities. Yes, I can. So it's opened my, changed my targets, changed what I think is possible. And I think that's cool. >> You look back to the beginning of your journey in procurement, business, and finance, when you were given this great advice, like "Be open-minded, understand how different parts of the business work," from then to where you are now and what you're able to deliver, in just a short time, leveraging Coupa, would have believed you'd been able to go from there to there? >> Uh, yeah, so Terry would always say to me, you know, if you're going to negotiate a deal, before you even pick up a contract, you would spend an hour with the business owner or the techie or whoever it is, and you just white board, at a technical level, what the solution is. I think that, years and years and years of doing that, of going deeper into technology and software and integration and through deal after deal after deal, when you come to run the project, to implement Coupa, you have that as a foundation. So you're not just at the surface and relying on other technical people because you're lost when you get to this level of detail. You've already got a little bit more depth. So I think that was the big spin-off, in a way. That you're able to have more in-depth conversations at a technical level, which you need to unblock stuff. >> So some of the news that came out today. They talked about what they're doing to expand Coupa Pay with American Express. I was just talking with Barclays. Barclays card been on that for a little while. Looking at the payment space for instance, on the BDC side, we have this expectation as consumers. We can do any transaction, we can pay bills. It hasn't been as... On the B2B side, it hasn't been as innovative. Some technology gaps, large scale. Where do you see Coupa in that respect with what they're doing with Coupa Pay? Do you see that influence from the consumer side that might eventually become an important part of what you're able to do at Provident? >> We haven't enabled Coupa Pay, so I'm in a position to talk authoritatively about it. >> In terms of taking the consumer and demand? >> So I look at the one-time-use credit cards, and I'm really quite excited about what that could do, and I kind of get the business sense and the use case behind that. So that's certainly on our radar. I like the risk-aware products as well, using the big data and AI stuff. So, there's a few things in the road map I've got my eye on. We're deploying expenses module in December/January, so that'll keep us busy on that. And then we'll need to route six months of data through Coupa so that we've got enough of a data pool to do the analytics. So we've got a busy road map, that's for sure. >> For a last question for you, James, for peers of yours, whether they're in financial services industry or not that are facing similar challenges and opportunities to transform procurement, what's you're best advice? >> Mmm, go and spend a few years as a supplier. I think procurement suffers a little bit from people who have only ever been in procurement. And I think that different perspective would be enormously powerful. So I think if we could get more marketing people, more lawyers, more different people and different professions into procurement, I think it would give you a broader perspective rather than a "I've grown up in procurement the last 20 years" sort of perspective. So go and get that holistic, global view would be my suggestion. >> Well, James, that's great advice for anybody, anywhere, and I'm sure Terry would be proud to hear you say that. >> I'm sure he would. >> Thank you so much for joining me on The Cube and sharing with us what Provident is doing with Coupa. We appreciate your time. >> It's been a real pleasure. Thank you, Lisa. >> Excellent. To James Wagstaff, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching The Cube from Coupa Inspire 19. Thanks for watching. (computerized tune)