>>Good morning fellow nerds and welcome back to AWS Reinvent. We are live from the show floor here in Las Vegas, Nevada. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined with my fabulous co-host John Furrier. Day two keynotes are rolling. >>Yeah. What do you thinking this? This is the day where everything comes, so the core gets popped off the bottle, all the announcements start flowing out tomorrow. You hear machine learning from swee lot more in depth around AI probably. And then developers with Verner Vos, the CTO who wrote the seminal paper in in early two thousands around web service that becames. So again, just another great year of next level cloud. Big discussion of data in the keynote bulk of the time was talking about data and business intelligence, business transformation easier. Is that what people want? They want the easy button and we're gonna talk a lot about that in this segment. I'm really looking forward to this interview. >>Easy button. We all want the >>Easy, we want the easy button. >>I love that you brought up champagne. It really feels like a champagne moment for the AWS community as a whole. Being here on the floor feels a bit like the before times. I don't want to jinx it. Our next guest, Scott Castle, from Si Sense. Thank you so much for joining us. How are you feeling? How's the show for you going so far? Oh, >>This is exciting. It's really great to see the changes that are coming in aws. It's great to see the, the excitement and the activity around how we can do so much more with data, with compute, with visualization, with reporting. It's fun. >>It is very fun. I just got a note. I think you have the coolest last name of anyone we've had on the show so far, castle. Oh, thank you. I'm here for it. I'm sure no one's ever said that before, but I'm so just in case our audience isn't familiar, tell us about >>Soy Sense is an embedded analytics platform. So we're used to take the queries and the analysis that you can power off of Aurora and Redshift and everything else and bring it to the end user in the applications they already know how to use. So it's all about embedding insights into tools. >>Embedded has been a, a real theme. Nobody wants to, it's I, I keep using the analogy of multiple tabs. Nobody wants to have to leave where they are. They want it all to come in there. Yep. Now this space is older than I think everyone at this table bis been around since 1958. Yep. How do you see Siente playing a role in the evolution there of we're in a different generation of analytics? >>Yeah, I mean, BI started, as you said, 58 with Peter Lu's paper that he wrote for IBM kind of get became popular in the late eighties and early nineties. And that was Gen one bi, that was Cognos and Business Objects and Lotus 1 23 think like green and black screen days. And the way things worked back then is if you ran a business and you wanted to get insights about that business, you went to it with a big check in your hand and said, Hey, can I have a report? And they'd come back and here's a report. And it wasn't quite right. You'd go back and cycle, cycle, cycle and eventually you'd get something. And it wasn't great. It wasn't all that accurate, but it's what we had. And then that whole thing changed in about two, 2004 when self-service BI became a thing. And the whole idea was instead of going to it with a big check in your hand, how about you make your own charts? >>And that was totally transformative. Everybody started doing this and it was great. And it was all built on semantic modeling and having very fast databases and data warehouses. Here's the problem, the tools to get to those insights needed to serve both business users like you and me and also power users who could do a lot more complex analysis and transformation. And as the tools got more complicated, the barrier to entry for everyday users got higher and higher and higher to the point where now you look, look at Gartner and Forester and IDC this year. They're all reporting in the same statistic. Between 10 and 20% of knowledge workers have learned business intelligence and everybody else is just waiting in line for a data analyst or a BI analyst to get a report for them. And that's why the focus on embedded is suddenly showing up so strong because little startups have been putting analytics into their products. People are seeing, oh my, this doesn't have to be hard. It can be easy, it can be intuitive, it can be native. Well why don't I have that for my whole business? So suddenly there's a lot of focus on how do we embed analytics seamlessly? How do we embed the investments people make in machine learning in data science? How do we bring those back to the users who can actually operationalize that? Yeah. And that's what Tysons does. Yeah. >>Yeah. It's interesting. Savannah, you know, data processing used to be what the IT department used to be called back in the day data processing. Now data processing is what everyone wants to do. There's a ton of data we got, we saw the keynote this morning at Adam Lesky. There was almost a standing of vision, big applause for his announcement around ML powered forecasting with Quick Site Cube. My point is people want automation. They want to have this embedded semantic layer in where they are not having all the process of ETL or all the muck that goes on with aligning the data. All this like a lot of stuff that goes on. How do you make it easier? >>Well, to be honest, I, I would argue that they don't want that. I think they, they think they want that, cuz that feels easier. But what users actually want is they want the insight, right? When they are about to make a decision. If you have a, you have an ML powered forecast, Andy Sense has had that built in for years, now you have an ML powered forecast. You don't need it two weeks before or a week after in a report somewhere. You need it when you're about to decide do I hire more salespeople or do I put a hundred grand into a marketing program? It's putting that insight at the point of decision that's important. And you don't wanna be waiting to dig through a lot of infrastructure to find it. You just want it when you need it. What's >>The alternative from a time standpoint? So real time insight, which is what you're saying. Yep. What's the alternative? If they don't have that, what's >>The alternative? Is what we are currently seeing in the market. You hire a bunch of BI analysts and data analysts to do the work for you and you hire enough that your business users can ask questions and get answers in a timely fashion. And by the way, if you're paying attention, there's not enough data analysts in the whole world to do that. Good luck. I am >>Time to get it. I really empathize with when I, I used to work for a 3D printing startup and I can, I have just, I mean, I would call it PTSD flashbacks of standing behind our BI guy with my list of queries and things that I wanted to learn more about our e-commerce platform in our, in our marketplace and community. And it would take weeks and I mean this was only in 2012. We're not talking 1958 here. We're talking, we're talking, well, a decade in, in startup years is, is a hundred years in the rest of the world life. But I think it's really interesting. So talk to us a little bit about infused and composable analytics. Sure. And how does this relate to embedded? Yeah. >>So embedded analytics for a long time was I want to take a dashboard I built in a BI environment. I wanna lift it and shift it into some other application so it's close to the user and that is the right direction to go. But going back to that statistic about how, hey, 10 to 20% of users know how to do something with that dashboard. Well how do you reach the rest of users? Yeah. When you think about breaking that up and making it more personalized so that instead of getting a dashboard embedded in a tool, you get individual insights, you get data visualizations, you get controls, maybe it's not even actually a visualization at all. Maybe it's just a query result that influences the ordering of a list. So like if you're a csm, you have a list of accounts in your book of business, you wanna rank those by who's priorities the most likely to churn. >>Yeah. You get that. How do you get that most likely to churn? You get it from your BI system. So how, but then the question is, how do I insert that back into the application that CSM is using? So that's what we talk about when we talk about Infusion. And SI started the infusion term about two years ago and now it's being used everywhere. We see it in marketing from Click and Tableau and from Looker just recently did a whole launch on infusion. The idea is you break this up into very small digestible pieces. You put those pieces into user experiences where they're relevant and when you need them. And to do that, you need a set of APIs, SDKs, to program it. But you also need a lot of very solid building blocks so that you're not building this from scratch, you're, you're assembling it from big pieces. >>And so what we do aty sense is we've got machine learning built in. We have an LQ built in. We have a whole bunch of AI powered features, including a knowledge graph that helps users find what else they need to know. And we, we provide those to our customers as building blocks so that they can put those into their own products, make them look and feel native and get that experience. In fact, one of the things that was most interesting this last couple of couple of quarters is that we built a technology demo. We integrated SI sensee with Office 365 with Google apps for business with Slack and MS teams. We literally just threw an Nlq box into Excel and now users can go in and say, Hey, which of my sales people in the northwest region are on track to meet their quota? And they just get the table back in Excel. They can build charts of it and PowerPoint. And then when they go to their q do their QBR next week or week after that, they just hit refresh to get live data. It makes it so much more digestible. And that's the whole point of infusion. It's bigger than just, yeah. The iframe based embedding or the JavaScript embedding we used to talk about four or five years >>Ago. APIs are very key. You brought that up. That's gonna be more of the integration piece. How does embedable and composable work as more people start getting on board? It's kind of like a Yeah. A flywheel. Yes. What, how do you guys see that progression? Cause everyone's copying you. We see that, but this is a, this means it's standard. People want this. Yeah. What's next? What's the, what's that next flywheel benefit that you guys coming out with >>Composability, fundamentally, if you read the Gartner analysis, right, they, when they talk about composable, they're talking about building pre-built analytics pieces in different business units for, for different purposes. And being able to plug those together. Think of like containers and services that can, that can talk to each other. You have a composition platform that can pull it into a presentation layer. Well, the presentation layer is where I focus. And so the, so for us, composable means I'm gonna have formulas and queries and widgets and charts and everything else that my, that my end users are gonna wanna say almost minority report style. If I'm not dating myself with that, I can put this card here, I can put that chart here. I can set these filters here and I get my own personalized view. But based on all the investments my organization's made in data and governance and quality so that all that infrastructure is supporting me without me worrying much about it. >>Well that's productivity on the user side. Talk about the software angle development. Yeah. Is your low code, no code? Is there coding involved? APIs are certainly the connective tissue. What's the impact to Yeah, the >>Developer. Oh. So if you were working on a traditional legacy BI platform, it's virtually impossible because this is an architectural thing that you have to be able to do. Every single tool that can make a chart has an API to embed that chart somewhere. But that's not the point. You need the life cycle automation to create models, to modify models, to create new dashboards and charts and queries on the fly. And be able to manage the whole life cycle of that. So that in your composable application, when you say, well I want chart and I want it to go here and I want it to do this and I want it to be filtered this way you can interact with the underlying platform. And most importantly, when you want to use big pieces like, Hey, I wanna forecast revenue for the next six months. You don't want it popping down into Python and writing that yourself. >>You wanna be able to say, okay, here's my forecasting algorithm. Here are the inputs, here's the dimensions, and then go and just put it somewhere for me. And so that's what you get withy sense. And there aren't any other analytics platforms that were built to do that. We were built that way because of our architecture. We're an API first product. But more importantly, most of the legacy BI tools are legacy. They're coming from that desktop single user, self-service, BI environment. And it's a small use case for them to go embedding. And so composable is kind of out of reach without a complete rebuild. Right? But with SI senses, because our bread and butter has always been embedding, it's all architected to be API first. It's integrated for software developers with gi, but it also has all those low code and no code capabilities for business users to do the minority report style thing. And it's assemble endless components into a workable digital workspace application. >>Talk about the strategy with aws. You're here at the ecosystem, you're in the ecosystem, you're leading product and they have a strategy. We know their strategy, they have some stuff, but then the ecosystem goes faster and ends up making a better product in most of the cases. If you compare, I know they'll take me to school on that, but I, that's pretty much what we report on. Mongo's doing a great job. They have databases. So you kind of see this balance. How are you guys playing in the ecosystem? What's the, what's the feedback? What's it like? What's going on? >>AWS is actually really our best partner. And the reason why is because AWS has been clear for many, many years. They build componentry, they build services, they build infrastructure, they build Redshift, they build all these different things, but they need, they need vendors to pull it all together into something usable. And fundamentally, that's what Cient does. I mean, we didn't invent sequel, right? We didn't invent jackal or dle. These are not, these are underlying analytics technologies, but we're taking the bricks out of the briefcase. We're assembling it into something that users can actually deploy for their use cases. And so for us, AWS is perfect because they focus on the hard bits. The the underlying technologies we assemble those make them usable for customers. And we get the distribution. And of course AWS loves that. Cause it drives more compute and it drives more, more consumption. >>How much do they pay you to say that >>Keynote, >>That was a wonderful pitch. That's >>Absolutely, we always say, hey, they got a lot of, they got a lot of great goodness in the cloud, but they're not always the best at the solutions and that they're trying to bring out, and you guys are making these solutions for customers. Yeah. That resonates with what they got with Amazon. For >>Example, we, last year we did a, a technology demo with Comprehend where we put comprehend inside of a semantic model and we would compile it and then send it back to Redshift. And it takes comprehend, which is a very cool service, but you kind of gotta be a coder to use it. >>I've been hear a lot of hype about the semantic layer. What is, what is going on with that >>Semantec layer is what connects the actual data, the tables in your database with how they're connected and what they mean so that a user like you or me who's saying I wanna bar chart with revenue over time can just work with revenue and time. And the semantic layer translates between what we did and what the database knows >>About. So it speaks English and then they converts it to data language. It's >>Exactly >>Right. >>Yeah. It's facilitating the exchange of information. And, and I love this. So I like that you actually talked about it in the beginning, the knowledge map and helping people figure out what they might not know. Yeah. I, I am not a bi analyst by trade and I, I don't always know what's possible to know. Yeah. And I think it's really great that you're doing that education piece. I'm sure, especially working with AWS companies, depending on their scale, that's gotta be a big part of it. How much is the community play a role in your product development? >>It's huge because I'll tell you, one of the challenges in embedding is someone who sees an amazing experience in outreach or in seismic. And to say, I want that. And I want it to be exactly the way my product is built, but I don't wanna learn a lot. And so you, what you want do is you want to have a community of people who have already built things who can help lead the way. And our community, we launched a new version of the SES community in early 2022 and we've seen a 450% growth in the c in that community. And we've gone from an average of one response, >>450%. I just wanna put a little exclamation point on that. Yeah, yeah. That's awesome. We, >>We've tripled our organic activity. So now if you post this Tysons community, it used to be, you'd get one response maybe from us, maybe from from a customer. Now it's up to three. And it's continuing to trend up. So we're, it's >>Amazing how much people are willing to help each other. If you just get in the platform, >>Do it. It's great. I mean, business is so >>Competitive. I think it's time for the, it's time. I think it's time. Instagram challenge. The reels on John. So we have a new thing. We're gonna run by you. Okay. We just call it the bumper sticker for reinvent. Instead of calling it the Instagram reels. If we're gonna do an Instagram reel for 30 seconds, what would be your take on what's going on this year at Reinvent? What you guys are doing? What's the most important story that you would share with folks on Instagram? >>You know, I think it's really what, what's been interesting to me is the, the story with Redshift composable, sorry. No, composable, Redshift Serverless. Yeah. One of the things I've been >>Seeing, we know you're thinking about composable a lot. Yes. Right? It's, it's just, it's in there, it's in your mouth. Yeah. >>So the fact that Redshift Serverless is now kind becoming the defacto standard, it changes something for, for my customers. Cuz one of the challenges with Redshift that I've seen in, in production is if as people use it more, you gotta get more boxes. You have to manage that. The fact that serverless is now available, it's, it's the default means it now people are just seeing Redshift as a very fast, very responsive repository. And that plays right into the story I'm telling cuz I'm telling them it's not that hard to put some analysis on top of things. So for me it's, it's a, maybe it's a narrow Instagram reel, but it's an >>Important one. Yeah. And that makes it better for you because you get to embed that. Yeah. And you get access to better data. Faster data. Yeah. Higher quality, relevant, updated. >>Yep. Awesome. As it goes into that 80% of knowledge workers, they have a consumer great expectation of experience. They're expecting that five ms response time. They're not waiting 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 seconds. They're not trained on theola expectations. And so it's, it matters a lot. >>Final question for you. Five years out from now, if things progress the way they're going with more innovation around data, this front end being very usable, semantic layer kicks in, you got the Lambda and you got serverless kind of coming in, helping out along the way. What's the experience gonna look like for a user? What's it in your mind's eye? What's that user look like? What's their experience? >>I, I think it shifts almost every role in a business towards being a quantitative one. Talking about, Hey, this is what I saw. This is my hypothesis and this is what came out of it. So here's what we should do next. I, I'm really excited to see that sort of scientific method move into more functions in the business. Cuz for decades it's been the domain of a few people like me doing strategy, but now I'm seeing it in CSMs, in support people and sales engineers and line engineers. That's gonna be a big shift. Awesome. >>Thank >>You Scott. Thank you so much. This has been a fantastic session. We wish you the best at si sense. John, always pleasure to share the, the stage with you. Thank you to everybody who's attuning in, tell us your thoughts. We're always eager to hear what, what features have got you most excited. And as you know, we will be live here from Las Vegas at reinvent from the show floor 10 to six all week except for Friday. We'll give you Friday off with John Furrier. My name's Savannah Peterson. We're the cube, the the, the leader in high tech coverage.

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, This is "Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante". >> Black Hat 22 was held in Las Vegas last week, the same time as theCUBE Supercloud event. Unlike AWS re:Inforce where words are carefully chosen to put a positive spin on security, Black Hat exposes all the warts of cyber and openly discusses its hard truths. It's a conference that's attended by technical experts who proudly share some of the vulnerabilities they've discovered, and, of course, by numerous vendors marketing their products and services. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis", we summarize what we learned from discussions with several people who attended Black Hat and our analysis from reviewing dozens of keynotes, articles, sessions, and data from a recent Black Hat Attendees Survey conducted by Black Hat and Informa, and we'll end with the discussion of what it all means for the challenges around securing the supercloud. Now, I personally did not attend, but as I said at the top, we reviewed a lot of content from the event which is renowned for its hundreds of sessions, breakouts, and strong technical content that is, as they say, unvarnished. Chris Krebs, the former director of Us cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency, CISA, he gave the keynote, and he spoke about the increasing complexity of tech stacks and the ripple effects that that has on organizational risk. Risk was a big theme at the event. Where re:Inforce tends to emphasize, again, the positive state of cybersecurity, it could be said that Black Hat, as the name implies, focuses on the other end of the spectrum. Risk, as a major theme of the event at the show, got a lot of attention. Now, there was a lot of talk, as always, about the expanded threat service, you hear that at any event that's focused on cybersecurity, and tons of emphasis on supply chain risk as a relatively new threat that's come to the CISO's minds. Now, there was also plenty of discussion about hybrid work and how remote work has dramatically increased business risk. According to data from in Intel 471's Mark Arena, the previously mentioned Black Hat Attendee Survey showed that compromise credentials posed the number one source of risk followed by infrastructure vulnerabilities and supply chain risks, so a couple of surveys here that we're citing, and we'll come back to that in a moment. At an MIT cybersecurity conference earlier last decade, theCUBE had a hypothetical conversation with former Boston Globe war correspondent, Charles Sennott, about the future of war and the role of cyber. We had similar discussions with Dr. Robert Gates on theCUBE at a ServiceNow event in 2016. At Black Hat, these discussions went well beyond the theoretical with actual data from the war in Ukraine. It's clear that modern wars are and will be supported by cyber, but the takeaways are that they will be highly situational, targeted, and unpredictable because in combat scenarios, anything can happen. People aren't necessarily at their keyboards. Now, the role of AI was certainly discussed as it is at every conference, and particularly cyber conferences. You know, it was somewhat dissed as over hyped, not surprisingly, but while AI is not a panacea to cyber exposure, automation and machine intelligence can definitely augment, what appear to be and have been stressed out, security teams can do this by recommending actions and taking other helpful types of data and presenting it in a curated form that can streamline the job of the SecOps team. Now, most cyber defenses are still going to be based on tried and true monitoring and telemetry data and log analysis and curating known signatures and analyzing consolidated data, but increasingly, AI will help with the unknowns, i.e. zero-day threats and threat actor behaviors after infiltration. Now, finally, while much lip service was given to collaboration and public-private partnerships, especially after Stuxsnet was revealed early last decade, the real truth is that threat intelligence in the private sector is still evolving. In particular, the industry, mid decade, really tried to commercially exploit proprietary intelligence and, you know, do private things like private reporting and monetize that, but attitudes toward collaboration are trending in a positive direction was one of the sort of outcomes that we heard at Black Hat. Public-private partnerships are being both mandated by government, and there seems to be a willingness to work together to fight an increasingly capable adversary. These things are definitely on the rise. Now, without this type of collaboration, securing the supercloud is going to become much more challenging and confined to narrow solutions. and we're going to talk about that little later in the segment. Okay, let's look at some of the attendees survey data from Black Hat. Just under 200 really serious security pros took the survey, so not enough to slice and dice by hair color, eye color, height, weight, and favorite movie genre, but enough to extract high level takeaways. You know, these strongly agree or disagree survey responses can sometimes give vanilla outputs, but let's look for the ones where very few respondents strongly agree or disagree with a statement or those that overwhelmingly strongly agree or somewhat agree. So it's clear from this that the respondents believe the following, one, your credentials are out there and available to criminals. Very few people thought that that was, you know, unavoidable. Second, remote work is here to stay, and third, nobody was willing to really jinx their firms and say that they strongly disagree that they'll have to respond to a major cybersecurity incident within the next 12 months. Now, as we've reported extensively, COVID has permanently changed the cybersecurity landscape and the CISO's priorities and playbook. Check out this data that queries respondents on the pandemic's impact on cybersecurity, new requirements to secure remote workers, more cloud, more threats from remote systems and remote users, and a shift away from perimeter defenses that are no longer as effective, e.g. firewall appliances. Note, however, the fifth response that's down there highlighted in green. It shows a meaningful drop in the percentage of remote workers that are disregarding corporate security policy, still too many, but 10 percentage points down from 2021 survey. Now, as we've said many times, bad user behavior will trump good security technology virtually every time. Consistent with the commentary from Mark Arena's Intel 471 threat report, fishing for credentials is the number one concern cited in the Black Hat Attendees Survey. This is a people and process problem more than a technology issue. Yes, using multifactor authentication, changing passwords, you know, using unique passwords, using password managers, et cetera, they're all great things, but if it's too hard for users to implement these things, they won't do it, they'll remain exposed, and their organizations will remain exposed. Number two in the graphic, sophisticated attacks that could expose vulnerabilities in the security infrastructure, again, consistent with the Intel 471 data, and three, supply chain risks, again, consistent with Mark Arena's commentary. Ask most CISOs their number one problem, and they'll tell you, "It's a lack of talent." That'll be on the top of their list. So it's no surprise that 63% of survey respondents believe they don't have the security staff necessary to defend against cyber threats. This speaks to the rise of managed security service providers that we've talked about previously on "Breaking Analysis". We've seen estimates that less than 50% of organizations in the US have a SOC, and we see those firms as ripe for MSSP support as well as larger firms augmenting staff with managed service providers. Now, after re:Invent, we put forth this conceptual model that discussed how the cloud was becoming the first line of defense for CISOs, and DevOps was being asked to do more, things like securing the runtime, the containers, the platform, et cetera, and audit was kind of that last line of defense. So a couple things we picked up from Black Hat which are consistent with this shift and some that are somewhat new, first, is getting visibility across the expanded threat surface was a big theme at Black Hat. This makes it even harder to identify risk, of course, this being the expanded threat surface. It's one thing to know that there's a vulnerability somewhere. It's another thing to determine the severity of the risk, but understanding how easy or difficult it is to exploit that vulnerability and how to prioritize action around that. Vulnerability is increasingly complex for CISOs as the security landscape gets complexified. So what's happening is the SOC, if there even is one at the organization, is becoming federated. No longer can there be one ivory tower that's the magic god room of data and threat detection and analysis. Rather, the SOC is becoming distributed following the data, and as we just mentioned, the SOC is being augmented by the cloud provider and the managed service providers, the MSSPs. So there's a lot of critical security data that is decentralized and this will necessitate a new cyber data model where data can be synchronized and shared across a federation of SOCs, if you will, or mini SOCs or SOC capabilities that live in and/or embedded in an organization's ecosystem. Now, to this point about cloud being the first line of defense, let's turn to a story from ETR that came out of our colleague Eric Bradley's insight in a one-on-one he did with a senior IR person at a manufacturing firm. In a piece that ETR published called "Saved by Zscaler", check out this comment. Quote, "As the last layer, we are filtering all the outgoing internet traffic through Zscaler. And when an attacker is already on your network, and they're trying to communicate with the outside to exchange encryption keys, Zscaler is already blocking the traffic. It happened to us. It happened and we were saved by Zscaler." So that's pretty cool. So not only is the cloud the first line of defense, as we sort of depicted in that previous graphic, here's an example where it's also the last line of defense. Now, let's end on what this all means to securing the supercloud. At our Supercloud 22 event last week in our Palo Alto CUBE Studios, we had a session on this topic on supercloud, securing the supercloud. Security, in our view, is going to be one of the most important and difficult challenges for the idea of supercloud to become real. We reviewed in last week's "Breaking Analysis" a detailed discussion with Snowflake co-founder and president of products, Benoit Dageville, how his company approaches security in their data cloud, what we call a superdata cloud. Snowflake doesn't use the term supercloud. They use the term datacloud, but what if you don't have the focus, the engineering depth, and the bank roll that Snowflake has? Does that mean superclouds will only be developed by those companies with deep pockets and enormous resources? Well, that's certainly possible, but on the securing the supercloud panel, we had three technical experts, Gee Rittenhouse of Skyhigh Security, Piyush Sharrma who's the founder of Accurics who sold to Tenable, and Tony Kueh, who's the former Head of Product at VMware. Now, John Furrier asked each of them, "What is missing? What's it going to take to secure the supercloud? What has to happen?" Here's what they said. Play the clip. >> This is the final question. We have one minute left. I wish we had more time. This is a great panel. We'll bring you guys back for sure after the event. What one thing needs to happen to unify or get through the other side of this fragmentation and then the challenges for supercloud? Because remember, the enterprise equation is solve complexity with more complexity. Well, that's not what the market wants. They want simplicity. They want SaaS. They want ease of use. They want infrastructure risk code. What has to happen? What do you think, each of you? >> So I can start, and extending to the previous conversation, I think we need a consortium. We need a framework that defines that if you really want to operate on supercloud, these are the 10 things that you must follow. It doesn't matter whether you take AWS, Slash, or TCP or you have all, and you will have the on-prem also, which means that it has to follow a pattern, and that pattern is what is required for supercloud, in my opinion. Otherwise, security is going everywhere. They're like they have to fix everything, find everything, and so on and so forth. It's not going to be possible. So they need a framework. They need a consortium, and this consortium needs to be, I think, needs to led by the cloud providers because they're the ones who have these foundational infrastructure elements, and the security vendor should contribute on providing more severe detections or severe findings. So that's, in my opinion, should be the model. >> Great, well, thank you, Gee. >> Yeah, I would think it's more along the lines of a business model. We've seen in cloud that the scale matters, and once you're big, you get bigger. We haven't seen that coalesce around either a vendor, a business model, or whatnot to bring all of this and connect it all together yet. So that value proposition in the industry, I think, is missing, but there's elements of it already available. >> I think there needs to be a mindset. If you look, again, history repeating itself. The internet sort of came together around set of IETF, RSC standards. Everybody embraced and extended it, right? But still, there was, at least, a baseline, and I think at that time, the largest and most innovative vendors understood that they couldn't do it by themselves, right? And so I think what we need is a mindset where these big guys, like Google, let's take an example. They're not going to win at all, but they can have a substantial share. So how do they collaborate with the ecosystem around a set of standards so that they can bring their differentiation and then embrace everybody together. >> Okay, so Gee's point about a business model is, you know, business model being missing, it's broadly true, but perhaps Snowflake serves as a business model where they've just gone out and and done it, setting or trying to set a de facto standard by which data can be shared and monetized. They're certainly setting that standard and mandating that standard within the Snowflake ecosystem with its proprietary framework. You know, perhaps that is one answer, but Tony lays out a scenario where there's a collaboration mindset around a set of standards with an ecosystem. You know, intriguing is this idea of a consortium or a framework that Piyush was talking about, and that speaks to the collaboration or lack thereof that we spoke of earlier, and his and Tony's proposal that the cloud providers should lead with the security vendor ecosystem playing a supporting role is pretty compelling, but can you see AWS and Azure and Google in a kumbaya moment getting together to make that happen? It seems unlikely, but maybe a better partnership between the US government and big tech could be a starting point. Okay, that's it for today. I want to thank the many people who attended Black Hat, reported on it, wrote about it, gave talks, did videos, and some that spoke to me that had attended the event, Becky Bracken, who is the EIC at Dark Reading. They do a phenomenal job and the entire team at Dark Reading, the news desk there, Mark Arena, whom I mentioned, Garrett O'Hara, Nash Borges, Kelly Jackson, sorry, Kelly Jackson Higgins, Roya Gordon, Robert Lipovsky, Chris Krebs, and many others, thanks for the great, great commentary and the content that you put out there, and thanks to Alex Myerson, who's on production, and Alex manages the podcasts for us. Ken Schiffman is also in our Marlborough studio as well, outside of Boston. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight, they help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters, and Rob Hoff is our Editor-in-Chief at SiliconANGLE and does some great editing and helps with the titles of "Breaking Analysis" quite often. Remember these episodes, they're all available as podcasts, wherever you listen, just search for "Breaking Analysis Podcasts". I publish each on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com, and you could email me, get in touch with me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or you can DM me @dvellante or comment on my LinkedIn posts, and please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis". (upbeat music)

>>Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're back at the center of the coverage of the world 20 twenty-two, the first live event in three years. Pretty amazing. And I'm really excited to have Tony Coleman. Here is the c e o of those who changing the finance and banking industry. And this is the global head of industry solutions. That would be welcome. Back to the cube. Welcome. First time. Um, so thanks for coming on. Thank you. >>Thanks for having us, >>Tony. Tell us about what are you guys up to? Disrupting the finance world. >>So tomorrow is everyone's banking platform. So we are a software company. We have over 3000 financial institutions around the world. Marketing tell me that that works out is over 1.2 billion people rely on terminal software for their banking and financial needs. 41 of the top 50 banks in the world run software and we are very proud to be powering all of those entities on their innovation journeys and bringing you know, that digital transformation that we've seen so much all over the past few years and enabling a lot of the world's unbanked through digital banking become, you know, members of the >>community. So basically you're bringing the software platform to enable that to somebody you don't have to build it themselves because they never get there. Absolutely. And and so that's why I don't know if you consider that disruptive. I guess I do to the industry to a certain extent. But when you think of disruption in the business, you think of Blockchain and crypto, and 50 is that is completely separate world and you guys participate in that as well. Well, I >>would say it's related right? I mean, I was doing a podcast recently and they had this idea of, um, buzzword jail where you could choose words to go into jail and I said 50 not because I think they're intrinsically bad, but I think just at the moment they are a rife for scam area. I think it's one of those one of these technologies and investment area that people don't understand it, and there's a lot of a lot of mistakes that can be made in that, >>Yeah, >>I mean, it's a fascinating piece that it could be truly transformative if we get it right, but it's very emerging, so we'll see so don't play a huge part in the Blockchain industry directly. We work with partners in that space, but in terms of digital assets and that sort of thing. Yeah, absolutely. >>So, Boris, you have industry solutions in your title. What does that entail? So >>basically, I'm responsible for all the verticals, and that includes great partners like Tony. And we're doing a lot of verticals by now. When you listen. Today in all these various talks, we have so much stuff ranging from banking, go retail, healthcare, insurance, you name it, we have it by now. And that's obviously the clients moving from the edge solution. Like touching a little toe in the water, but longer to going all in building biggest solutions you saw on stage the lady from this morning. These are not second Great. Yeah, we do something small now. We're part of the transformation journey. And this is where Tony and I can regularly together how we transform things and how we built a new way of banking is done with Michael services and technology surrounding it. Yeah, >>but what about performance in this world? Can you tell me about that? >>Yeah. This is an interesting thing because people always challenging what is performance and document databases. And Tony challenged us actually, six weeks before his own show several weeks ago in London and says, Boris, let's do a benchmark And maybe you bring your story because if I get too excited, I follow. >>Yeah, sure, that performance and efficiency topics close close to my heart. I have been for for years. And so, yeah, we every two or three years, we run a high water. We've got a high water benchmark, and this year we sort of double down literally double down on everything we did previously. So this was 200 million accounts, 100 million customers, and we were thrashing through 102,800 seventy-five transactions a second, which is a phenomenal number. And, uh, >>can I do that on the Blockchain? >>Wow. Yeah, exactly. Right. So this is you know, I get asked why we do such high numbers and the reason is very straightforward. If somebody wants 10,000 transactions a second, we're seeing banks now that need that sort of thing. If I can give them a benchmark report, this is 100,000. I don't need to keep doing benchmarks. 10. >>Yeah. Tell me more about the Anytime you get into benchmarks, you want to understand the configuration. The workload. Tell me more about that. So we have >>a pretty well path of a standard transaction mix. We call it a retail transaction mix. And so it's the tries to the workload. Is that because it's a simulation right around what you would do in your daily basis? So you're going to make payments you're going to check? Your balance is you're going to see what he's moved on your account. So we do all of that and we run it through a proper production, good environment. And this is really important. This is something we do in the lab you couldn't go live on. This is all all of the horrible, non functional requirements around high availability, >>security, security passes, private wings, all these things. And one thing is, they're doing this for a long time. So this is not like let's define something new for the world. Now, this is something Tony's doing for literally 10, 15 years now, right? >>It was only 15 years, but this >>is your benchmark >>top >>developed Okay, >>so we run it through and, um yeah, some fantastic numbers. And not just on the share sort of top-level numbers 100,000 transactions. A second response time out of it was fantastic. One-millisecond, which is just brilliant. So it means you get these really efficient numbers what that helped us do with, you know, some of the other partners that are involved in the benchmark as well. It meant that our throughput court, which is a really good measure of efficiency, is up to four times better than we ran it three years ago. So in terms of a sustainability piece, which is so important that that's really a huge improvement, that's down to application changes, architect changes as well as using appropriate technology in the right place. >>How important? With things like the number, of course, the memory size is the block sizes. All that stuff. >>We are very tiny. So this is the part. When I talk to people, we have what we call a system in the back of people. Look at me. Um, how many transactions on that one? So, to be fair, three-quarters, we're going to be one quarter or something else because we're still putting some components of and start procedures for disclosure. But when I think Seventy-five 1000 transactions on a single single 80 system, which is thirty-two cause you're saying correctly, something like that. This is a tiny machine in the world of banking. So before this was the main friends and now it's wonderful instance on a W s. And this is really amazing. Costed and environmental footprint is so, so important >>and there's a heavy right heavy environment. >>So the the way we the way we architect the solution is it follows something called a command query responsibility, segregated segregation. So what we do, we do all the commands inappropriate database for that piece, and that was running at about Twenty-five 1000 transactions a second and then we're streaming the data out of that directly into So actually I was doing more than the Seventy-five 1000 queries. A second, which is the part of it was also investing Twenty-five 1000 transactions the second at the same time >>and okay, and the workload had a high locality medium locality. It was just give us a picture of what that's like. Sorry. So, >>yeah, >>we don't have that. Yeah, >>so explain that That's not That's not the mindset for a document. Exactly. >>Exactly. In the document database, you don't have the hot spotting the one single field off the table, which is suddenly hot spotting. And now you have literally and recovery comes up and we say, What goes, goes together, get together belongs together, comes out together. So the number of, for example, it's much, much smaller and the document system, then historically, relationship. >>So it is not a good good indicator, necessarily >>anymore. That's what this is so much reduced. The number of access patterns are smaller, and I mean it is highly optimized, for example, internally as well. The internal structures, so that was very close to a >>traditional benchmark, would have a cash in front of a high cash rate. So 100 and 99% right, That's a high locality reference. But that's that's irrelevant. >>It's gone. There's no cashing in the middle anymore. It goes straight against the database. All these things are out, and that's what makes it so exciting and all the things in a real environment. I think we really need to stress it. It's not a test that at home. It's a real life environment out into the wild with the benchmark driving and driving. >>How did your customers respond? You did this for your recent event? >>Yeah, we did it for our use. A conference, our community for, um, which was a few weeks ago in London. Um, and the You know, the reaction was Certainly it was a great reception, of course, but the main thing that people are fascinated about, how much more efficient the whole platform it's explaining. So you know when we can run and it's a great number that we've got the team pulled out, which is so having doubled throughput on the platform from what we did three years ago, we're actually using 20% less infrastructure to give double the performance. Uh, macro-level, that's a phenomenal achievement. And that means that these changes that we make everything that we're doing benefits all of our customers. So all of the banks, when they take the latest release, is they get these benefits. Everything is that much more efficient. So everybody benefits from every investment, >>and this was running in the cloud. Is that correct? You're running out of this. >>So this was list, Um, 80 on a W s with a W s cases and processes. And so it was a really reality driven environment, >>pure pure cloud-native or using mana services on a W s. And then at least for the peace. It's >>awesome. I mean, uh, So now how convenient for the timing from, uh, the world. How are you socializing with your community? >>We're having this afternoon session as well, where we talk a little bit more detail about that, and he has a session as well tomorrow. So we see a lot of good feedback as well when we bring it up with clients. Obviously some clients get very specific because this reduction footprint is so huge when you think a client has 89 environments from early development systems to production to emergency standby, maybe a different cloud. All these things what day talks about the different Atlas features multi cloud environmentally. All this stuff comes to play. And this is why I'm so excited to work with them. We should bring up as well the other things which are available to ready already with your front and solutions with Infinity services because that's the other part of the modernization, the Michael Services, which Tony so politely not mentioning. So there's a lot of cool technology into that one, which fits to how it works in micros services. Happy I first all these what they called factors. Micro service a p. I cloud-native headless. I think that was the right order now. So all these things are reflected as well. But with their leadership chief now, I think a lot of companies have to play Catch-up now to what Tony and his team are delivering on the bank. This >>gets the modernization. We really haven't explicitly talks about that. Everything you've just said talks to modernization. So you typically in financial services find a lot of relation. Database twenty-year-old, hardened, etcetera, high availability. Give them credit for that. But a lot of times you'll see them just shift that into the cloud. You guys chose not to do that. What was the modernization journey look like? >>So it's a bit of, um yeah, a firm believer in pragmatism and using. I think you touched on earlier the appropriate technology. So >>horses for courses >>exactly right out of my mouth. And I was talking to one of the uh, the investor analysts earlier. And you know, the exact same question comes up, right? So if you've got a relation database or you've got a big legacy system and you're not gonna mainframe or whatever it is and you wanna pull that over when you it's not just a case of moving the data model from one paradigm to another. You need to look at it holistically, and you need to be ambitious. I think the industry has got, you know, quite nervous about some of these transformation projects, but in some ways it might be counter intuitive. I think being ambitious and being in bold is a better way. Better way through, you know, take take of you, look at it holistically. Layout of plan. It is hard. It is hard to do these sorts of transformations, but that's what makes it the challenge. That's what makes it fun. Take take those bold steps. Look at it holistically. Look at the end state and then work out a practical way. You can deliver value to the business and your customers as you deliver on the road. So >>did you migrate from a traditional R D B. M s to go. >>So So, Yeah, this is a conversation. So, uh, in the late nineties, the kind of the phrase document model hasn't really been coined yet. And for some of our work at the time, we refer to as a hierarchical model. Um, And at that point in time, really, if you wanted to sell to a bank, you needed to be running Oracle. So we took this data model and we got it running an article and then other relational databases as well, but actually under the colors there it is, sort of as well. So there is a project that we're looking at to say Well, okay, taking that model, which is in a relational database. And of course, you build over time, you do rely on some of the features of relations databases moving that over to something like, isn't it? You know, it's not quite as simple as just changing the data model. Um, so there's a few bits and pieces that we need to work through, but there is a concept that we are running, which is looking really promising and spurred on by the amazing results from the benchmark. That could be something That's really >>yeah, I think you know, 20 years ago you probably wouldn't even thought about it. It's just too risky. But today, with the modern tools and the cloud and you're talking about micro services and containers, it becomes potentially more feasible. >>But the other side of it is, you know, it's only relatively recently the Mongo who's had transaction support across multiple document multi collection transactions and in banking. As we all know, you know, it's highly regulated. That is, all of your worst possible non functional requirement. Security transaction reality. Thomas City You know, the whole the whole shebang. Your worst possible nightmare is Monday morning for >>us. So and I think one part which is exciting about this Tony is a very good practical example about this large scale modernization and cutting out by cutting off that layer and going back to the hierarchical internal structures. We're simply find a lot of the backing components of our because obviously translation which was done before, it's not need it anymore. And that is as well for me, an exciting example to see how long it takes what it is. So Tony space in my life experiments so to speak >>well, you're right because it used to be those migrations. Where how many line of code? How long do I have to freeze it? And that a lot of times lead people to say, Well, forget it, because the business is going to shut down. >>But now we do that. We do that. So I'm working, obviously, besides the work with a lot of financial clients, and but now it's my job is normally shift and left a pain in the game because the result of the work is when they move everything to the cloud and it was bad before. It will not be better in the cloud only because it's in somebody else's data center. So these modernization and innovation factor is absolutely critical. And it's only said that people get it by now. This shift and left over it is how can I innovate? How can accelerate innovation, and that leads very quickly to the document model discussion. >>Yeah, I think the world practitioners will tell you, if you really want to affect the operational model, have a meaningful impact on your business. You have to really modernized. You can't just lift shift that they're absolutely. You know, what's the difference between hundreds of millions or billions in some cases, versus, you know, some nice little hits here or there. >>So we see as well a lot of clients asking for solutions like the terminal solutions. And like others where there is not anymore discussion about how to move to the The question is how fast how can accelerate. We see the services request the first one. It's amazing. After the event, what we had in London, 100 clients calling us. So it's not our sales people calling upon the clients, the clients coming in. I saw it. How do we get started? And that is for me, from the vendor perspective, so to speak. Amazing moment >>yourself. You go, guys, we're gonna go. Thanks so much for that. You have to have you back and see how that goes. That. Yeah, that's a big story of if you're a great All right, keep it right there. Everybody will be right back. This is David for the Cube. You're watching our live coverage of mongo D B World 20 twenty-two from New York City. >>Yeah, >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>> theCUBE presents Dell technologies World, brought to you by Dell. >> Hey everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022, from the show floor, the Venetian in lively Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. We're having a little reunion with our guests that we haven't seen in a couple years. Please welcome back to theCUBE, Doug Schmitt, President of Dell Technologies and Services. Alex Barretto joins us as well, the Senior Vice President at Emerging Services and Technology. Guys, it's great to see you in 3D. >> I know great to be back. >> Yes. >> Its Awesome to be back. >> Isn't it great? >> And fantastic. >> It is. >> We were talking about how we have to get our sea legs back about, even just interacting with in life. >> That's exactly right. Being able to see everybody be back in person at these events. And it's great to see everybody it's like coming back to family. >> It is, it's been a reunion since Sunday. One of the, obviously the last two years have been quite challenging for everybody, for customers. Dell is coming off it's best year ever in FY22, over 100 billion in revenues, 17% growth year over year, astounding growth. The voice of the customer is always strong here at Dell technologies. But Doug, talk to us about some of the things that have been going on services perspective and how you really stepped in to help customers across industries succeed in the dynamic times we've been living in. >> Well. Yeah, thank you, and you're right. Coming off a very great, great year. And I think as you can see behind us and in the room here just great solutions for our customers. And that's what it's about, delivering the outcomes. And service is a huge piece of that, of making sure we bring all that together, deliver the outcomes our customers are looking for. If you look at the overall services organization just to take a step back just a little bit, we are a team around over 60,000 folks in 170 countries. And look, it's about this life cycle of services we provide. Everything from consulting to deployment to our support, manage services, security, education services, residency services, all the way to asset sustainability and recovery. So we can get all of the material back in and recycle it. So we have a great suite of services, and it's bringing all that together for the customer again to deliver with the products and the solutions and the software, the outcomes they're looking for. You asked a little bit about just to kind of double click that, about what our customers really saying, kind of what they're hearing, what we're hearing. I think there's three things. When I think about what they're looking for, one is the trusted advisor. You heard this during Michael's keynotes speech, that is key. They're navigating through the digital transformation, hybrid cloud, all of these things. Determining what they need to do to deliver their outcomes. And Dell can bring that trusted advisor status to them. So we can consult with them professional services, help bring that. The second thing is really around that life cycle services I talked about, all those different services that we bring. We allow our customers clearly the choice to say what pieces of the services do they need. Now we think we can bring everything together into a managed solution for them, but if there's certain pieces that they need to just, double click on, we can help with that. And then look, the third item that I'm hearing and that we can bring and that we have for them is flexible consumption. They can choose the way they want to consume the technology. You consume it by usage. You can consume by month, by quarter, or if you want the stability of long term contracts one, two, three years we'll do that. So really it's about trusted advisor and choice to help them deliver their outcomes. >> So a lot changed during the isolation economy. You guys obviously had to support new initiatives. First of all, budgets got squeezed in 2020. Then boom back, so they sort of slingshot it, real focus on obviously client solutions, remote work, endpoint security, identity access, VDI. Now in the post isolation economy, it's like, okay, some of the stuff at HQ you maybe needs to be updated, maybe we're rethinking the network. So, what are you hearing from customers? Where are they in their digital transformations, Alex? You know, what's hot. >> Yeah, so we actually recently created an emerging services group. And the reason for that is exactly what you're alluding today. So we actually talked in that group everything in this emerging. So APEX, telco, edge, data management, all the things our customers are asking for and we are convening new solutions, new services to meet their needs, and all that is housing in one unit, and we're thinking about the product management, the technology that goes with it, and we're working partnership with our customers to actually build and develop solutions that they're looking for. >> Yeah, there was no as a service really. I mean, you could do it with financial machinations before, now it's becoming much more mainstream. I mean, I know it's not a hundred percent of your business and maybe never will be. >> Yeah. >> But that's a whole new mindset. What else is changing in the business that you guys see? >> Well, yeah, I think there's, I think that's what comes back to what we saw, first of all we listen to the customers, follow what their needs are, and you're right. As far as the, as a service, I think it's back to that choice. If they want to purchase or consume as flexible or as needed, we'll do that. They want the contracts, the standard CapEx model, we'll do that as well. Look, there's three things. Professional services is really changing as well. We're seeing the needs again for going in and being able to deliver the services to customers, but also manage that in a lot of cases, they're asking us to take the workloads from them so that they can go and change their transformation, and their digitalization is one of the things that we're clearly hearing. And I know you're hearing the second one, security. I mean that is top of mind for everyone. And I, we have launched a lot of services around this. Some of those like MDR or Managed Detection Response our cyber vault, as well as our APEX cyber recovery services as well that we've announced here. So security's number two. And then the third one is this sustainability, again very important for us and our customers, is we have a 2030 goal around this as I'm sure or you've heard, but more importantly, that's something I know my team and I and everyone at Dell, that's a great personal feeling too. When you're getting up and you're doing something that you know, is right, really just doing it to help the customers as well is just an extra added benefit. So those would be the three things professional services changing, doing more and more of the manage take workloads off, two is the security, and the third is the sustainability clearly. >> We talked with JJ Davis yesterday, and we're talking a lot about ESG and how a tremendous percentage of RFPs come in wanting to know what is Dell technologies doing from an environmental, social, governance perspective. That it's really your customers wanting to work with companies like Dell who have a focused clear agenda on ESG. One thing that I'm curious when you talk about the increase in advantage services, the great resignation. We've all, that's been happening now for a couple years. It's probably going to persist for a while. Customers suddenly, labor shortages and the supply chain issues. How have you helped organizations deal with some of the challenges that they're going through from a labor perspective is that why one of the reasons the managed services is we're seeing an increase there. >> Yeah. I'm sure that can be and I wouldn't doubt that, you mean in terms of our customer is wanting more and more the managed and the professional. Yeah, I think that is a piece of it, but I also think part of that is that speed matters and customers are looking for the additional assistance to take things off, that they may have traditionally done so that they can, they can really get this transformation, this hybrid cloud, getting things moving very, very quickly. There's just so much to be done in terms of data management and bringing information to their end user customers. And they want to spend more time doing that. And so I'm hearing that more, but you are right. There's absolutely, there's absolutely the times where we have a residency service, we, and that has been growing very, very fast. And that tends to be why they ask for it, is because people have either left or are leaving >> Alex, Doug really kind of alluded to an area that I want to probe a little bit. And it's that's, I was talking to Jen Felch recently she's going to be on soon. And the, you mentioned security, Doug, as the top initiative clearly. And the distance between number two is widening, but number two is cloud migration. Now I asked Jen about that, because internally Dell has its own cloud. And I said, how do you interpret that? Or how do you, what's your second priority? She goes, well, I would translate that into modernization. So we're essentially building our own cloud is how I interpreted it. So my question to you is, are you seeing that with customers, how closely do you work with your own IT to take those learnings to your customers? And what does modernization actually mean to your customers? >> Yeah, that's a great question. It's actually the essence of why we're here. Talking to our customers and showcasing what we do within services, what we do within IT. Jen and I talk very often about her roadmap, our roadmap, and we want to showcase that to our customers because it's a proof point, it's a proof point of how they can do the transformation on their own. Do we have a whole slue of products from a services standpoint that are tied with what Jen is doing as well? And that's what we bring to market. So whether that's on APEX, that we announced right here two days ago, the cyber recovery services available now, that's working very closely with our IT counterparts. And we have a whole slue of roadmap with high performance computing, to be announced soon and machine learning operations, all that is to meet the customer needs, and what they're asking for. And if you look at the emergence of needs from a customer standpoint, it goes in a multitude of uses. We have telco customers, they have very specific needs and we're looking to meet those needs. We have the traditional customers, which may be going at a slower speed in their adoption of the cloud, we're there to help them. And we're all about to hybrid cloud. Hybrid cloud is a hundred percent of our strategy. So whether you want to go cloud based, whether you want to be OnPrem or you want to be hybrid, we're there to solve your needs. >> What's the partner story in terms of delivering services, we know that the Dell technologies' partner ecosystem is massive. We know how important partners are to the growth. I think I saw 59 billion in revenue came through the channel last year alone. How do you enable partners to deliver some of those key services that you talked about? >> To leverage the partners for the, on the broader ecosystem for that? >> Yes. >> Yes, well, you're right. We do have a very large partner network and we're very flexible on that. Again, it sounds like we are flexible in everything and we are by the way, for our customers and our partners, 'cause look it is about delivering first of all, how our customers want their service. I do like this idea and we talk about modernization, transformation, digitalization all these things are kind of the same thing about going in and looking about how we're improving the overall infrastructure and these outcomes. And to that end, we work with the customer on what they're looking for. And then we'll either do a couple things with working with the partners. Either we take prime and we'll take that and take the pieces that they can deliver and we can deliver together. But again, it's with the customer in mind of how they want to do that, working with the customer. We do have code delivery services as well. And look, we're very open with our partners about if they want to be prime and then leverage those same lifecycle services we have. What this is about is about getting this transformation and this technology and these so into the hands of the customers in the best way possible. >> So, I could white label as a partner. Could I white label your services? >> We don't have the white label. >> Okay. >> We do have co-delivery. >> Okay. So that's what I could do. I can say, okay, I'm bringing this value. Dell's bringing that value. You're visible to the customer. >> That's correct. >> Which is I presume a benefit to the customer. >> Correct, correct. >> The trust that you've built up. >> Now that gets, just the white label you would say like our ProSeries, ProSupport, ProDeploy, ProManage, all of those things. Isn't a white label, but at the same time our customers especially in the professional service side of it could be the prime, which would be the same thing as a label. >> How are client? This is kind of interesting thought I had the other day. How are client services changing? Do you see the point where, I mean, maybe you're doing it already. It's just a full manage all my client devices and just take that away from me, and Dell you take care of that and I'll pay you a monthly fee. >> Well, yeah, we are seeing that. And one of the things that they like the best about is doing that management, is bringing kind of the AI and the BI to it that we can with our support assist and all of the data that we give back, we're actually able to help manage those environments much better. And in terms of an end to end, keep things updated, upgraded, manage it. But more importantly, what we see when we do have those client managed services end to end, the customers are actually coming back and asking us to help improve their operational performance. And, and what I mean by that is, all of a sudden you'll see things where the trouble tickets are coming in 'cause we're seeing that. And we're actually going back in with that information to help alleviate or improve their operational processes, so that they're able to function and spend more time on their business outcomes >> And reduce that complexity, sorry, Dave. >> No worries. How about the tip of the spear, the consulting piece? What are you seeing there? Are we going through and as we modernize, are we going through another wave of application rationalization, people trying to figure out their digital transformation, what to double down on? What to retire? What to sun set? What's that like? >> Yeah, I think it's similar to the managed service conversation we just had. It's really pivoting to technology. Even in the services space, it was all about our physical footprint. Five, six years ago, our physical capabilities, the number of people, depots et cetera that we had, right now, our customers and even internally what we're pivoting towards is technology. They want to know how are you going to do is solve our problems, whether it's consulting or managed services using technology. Precisely to the point that Doug was making, because they want insights, value add from the services we provide, not just consult for me, not just manage my service, but provide me value added service on top of that so that I can actually differentiate my services, my solutions and that's where we're building, that's what delivering really leveraging technology. You look at the number of software engineers we have, data scientists, the algorithms we're building now inside services. It's really become a technology hub, whereas it used to be a physical hub. >> I'm just going to, oh, I'm sorry please. >> No, go ahead. >> Follow up. >> Where it's really headed is, if you look at this it's going to become this outcome based services. When I talk about outcome based services, it's not managing just the IT infrastructure, that you have to do, you have to modernize and transform. However you want to say that to customers. But in addition to that, they're looking for us to take that information and help change their business models as well, with the data and the and the insights we're getting back. >> Their operating model. >> Absolutely. >> But changing that in the last couple years and pivoting over and over again, to survive and to thrive, talk to us, Alex about the emerging services and how you've maybe a particular customer example of how you've helped an organization radically transform in the last two years to be competitive and to be thriving in this new economy in which we're living. >> Yeah. I think a great example is Dish. If you look at Dish, they're actually launching one of the first Open RAN networks. Leveraging the power of 5G. And we're working very closely with them on the services and solutions to enable them to deliver that service to their customers. And that's a new area for us, a new area for them. So we're actually working together in innovating and coming up with solutions and bringing those to the market. It's a great example. >> Lot of collaboration guys, thank you so much for joining us. Great to see you back in person again after couple years, probably three. We appreciate your time and your insights. >> Thanks guys. >> Thanks for having us. >> Our pleasure. Dave Vellante, Lisa Martin here, you're watching theCUBE's live from Dell Technologies World 2022. Stick around. Be right back with our next guest. (gentle music)

>>Well, hi everybody. I'm John Walls here and welcome back to the cubes, continuing coverage and splunk.com 21. And we've talked a lot about data, obviously, um, and a number of partnerships and the point of resources that it's going on in this space. And certainly a very valuable partnership that Splunk has right now is one with Intel. And with me to talk a little bit more about that is Rick Echavarria, who is the vice president of sales and the marketing group at Intel. Rick. Good to see it today. Thanks for joining us on the queue. It's >>Good to see you, John, and thanks for having us. >>You bet. No glad to have you as part of the.com coverage as well. Um, well, first off, let's just for folks at home, uh, who would like to learn more about this relationship, the Splunk Intel partnership, if you would give us that the 30,000 foot picture of it right now, in terms of, of how it began and how it's evolved to the point where it resides today. >>Yeah. Uh, sure. Glad to do that. You know, Splunk is had for many years, uh, position as, as one of the world's best, uh, security information and event management platform. So just like many customers in the cybersecurity space, they're probably trying to retire their technical debt. And, and what are the areas of important focuses to SIM space, right? The SIM segment within cybersecurity. And so the initial engagement between Intel and Splunk started with the information security group at Intel, looking to, again, retire the technical debt, bring next generation SIM technology. And that started, uh, the engagement with Splunk again, to go solve the cybersecurity challenges. One of the things that we quickly learned is that, uh, those flung offers a great platform, you know, from a SIM point of view, as you know, the cyber security segment, the surface area of attack, the number of attacks kids were increased. >>And we quickly realized that this needed to be a collaboration in order for us to be able to work together, to optimize our infrastructure. So it could scale, it could be performance, it could be reliable, uh, to protect Intel's business. And as we started to work with Splunk, we realized, Hey, this is a great opportunity. Intel is benefiting from it. Why don't we start working together and create a reference architecture so that our joint customers also benefit from the collaboration that we have in the cybersecurity space, as we were building the Intel cybersecurity infrastructure platform. So that re that was really the beginning of, uh, of the collaboration around described here and a little bit more, >>Right? So, so you had this, this good working relationship and said, Hey, why don't we get together? Let's get the band together and see what we can do for our car joint clients down the road. Right. So, so what about those benefits that, because you've now you've got this almost as force multiplier right. Of, of Intel's experience. And then what Splunk has been able to do in the data analytics world. Um, what kind of values are being derived, do you think with that partnership? >>Well, obviously we feel much better about our cyber security posture. Um, and, uh, and what's sort of interesting, John, is that we realized that we were what started out as a conversation on SIM. Uh, it really turned out to be an opportunity for us to look at Splunk as a data platform. And, you know, in the technology world, you sometimes hear people talk about the horizontal capabilities. Then the vertical usage is really the security. Uh, the SIM technology. It really became one of several, sorry about the noise in the background. One, uh, became a vertical application. And then we realized that we can apply this platform to some other usages. And in addition to that, you know, when you think about cybersecurity and what we use for SIM that tends to be part of your core systems in it, we started to explore what can we do with what could we do with other data types for other different types of applications. >>And so what we, what we decided to do is we would go explore usages of this data at the edge, uh, of, of the network, and really started to move into much more of that operational technology space. When we realized that Splunk could really, uh, that we could integrate that we can ingest other types of data. And that started a second collaboration around our open Vino technology and our AI capabilities at the edge with the ingestion and the machine learning capabilities of Splunk, so that we can take things like visual data and start creating dashboards for, for example, uh, managing the flow of people, you know, especially in COVID environment. So, uh, and understanding utilization of spaces. So it really started with SIM is moved to the edge. And now we realized that there's a continuum in this data platform that we can build other usages around. >>What was that learning curve like when you went out to the edge, because a lot of people are talking about it, right. And there was a lot of banter about this is where we have to be, but you guys put your money where your mouth was, right? Yeah. You went out, you, you explored that frontier. And, and so what was that like? And, and, and what I guess maybe kind of being early in, uh, what advantage do you think that has given you as that process has matured a little bit? >>Well, it's really interesting John, because what really accelerated our engagement with Splunk in that space was the pandemic. And we had, uh, in 2020 Intel announced the pandemic response technology initiative, where we decided we were going to invest $50 million in accelerating technologies and solutions and partnerships to go solve some of the biggest challenges that depend on them. It was presenting to the world at large. And one of those areas was around companies trying to figure out how to, how to manage spaces, how to manage, you know, the number of people that are in a particular space and social distancing and things of that nature. And, you know, we ended up engaging with Splunk and this collaboration, again, to start looking at visual data, right, integrating that with our open Vino platform and again, their machine learning and algorithms, and start then creating what you would call more operational technology types of application based on visual data. Now these will have other applications that could be used for security usages. It could be used for, again, social distancing, uh, the utilization of acids, but their pandemic and that program that ends the launch is really what became the catalyst for our collaboration with Splunk that allowed us to expand into space. >>Right. And you've done a tremendous amount of work in the healthcare space. I mean, especially in the last year and a half with Penn and the pandemic, um, can you give just a couple of examples of that maybe the variety of uses and the variety of, uh, processes that you've had an influence in, because I think it's pretty impressive. >>Yeah. We, um, there's quite a bit of breadth in the types of solutions we've deployed as part of the pandemic response. John, you can think of some of the, I wouldn't call these things basic things, but you think about telehealth and that improving the telehealth experience all the way to creating privacy aware or sorry, solutions for privacy sensitive usage is where you're doing things like getting multiple institutions to share their data with the right privacy, uh, which, you know, going back to secure and privacy with the right, uh, protections for that data, but being allowed, allowing organization a and organization B partner together use data, create algorithms that both organizations benefit from it. An example of that is, is work we've done around x-ray, uh, and using x-rays to detect COVID on certain populations. So we've gone from those, you know, data protection, algorithm, development, development type of solutions to, to work that we've done in tele-health. So, uh, and, and a lot of other solutions in between, obviously in the high-performance, uh, space we've invested in high-performance computing for, to help the researchers, uh, find cures, uh, for the current pandemic and then looking at future pandemic. So it's been quite a breadth of, uh, uh, of solutions and it's really a Testament also to the breadth of Intel's portfolio and partnerships to be able to, uh, enable so much in such a short amount of time. >>I totally agree, man. Just reading it a little bit about it, about that work, and you talk about the, the breadth of that, the breadth and the depth of that is certainly impressive. So just in general, we'll just put healthcare in this big lump of customers. So what, what do you think the value proposition of your partnership with Splunk is in terms of providing, you know, ultimate value to your customers, because you're dealing with so many different sectors. Um, but if you could just give a summary from your perspective, this is what we do. This is why this power. >>Yeah. Well, customers, uh, talk about transformation. You know, there's a lot of conversation around transformation, right before the pandemic and through and center, but there's a lot of talk about companies wanting to transform and, you know, in order to be able to transform what are the key elements of that is, uh, to be able to capture the right data and then take, turn that data into the right outcomes. And that is something that requires obviously the capabilities and the ability to capture, to ingest, to analyze the data and to do that on an infrastructure that is going to scale with your business, that is going to be reliable. And that is going to be, to give you the flexibility for the types of solutions that you're wanting to apply. And that's really what this blog, uh, collaboration with Intel is going to do. It's, it's just a great example, John, uh, of the strategy that our CEO, pat Gelsinger recently talked about the importance of software to our business. >>This plump collaboration is right in the center of that. They have capabilities in SIM in it observability, uh, in many other areas that his whole world is turning data into, you know, into outcomes into results. But that has to be done on an infrastructure that again, will scale with your business, just like what's the case with Intel and our cybersecurity platform, right? We need to collaborate to make sure that this was going to scale with the demand demands of our business, and that requires close integration of, of hardware and software. The other point that I will make is that the, what started out as a collaboration with between Intel and Splunk, it's also expanding to other partners in the ecosystem. So I like to talk to you a little bit on a work stream that we have ongoing between Intel Splunk, HPE and the Lloyd. >>And why is that important is because, uh, as customers are deploying solutions, they're going to be deploying applications and they're going to have data in multiple environments on premise across multiple clouds. And we have to give, uh, these customers the ability to go gather the data from multiple sources. And that's part of the effort that we're developing with HPE and the Lloyd's will allow people to gather data, perform their analytics, regardless, regardless of their where their data is and be able to deploy the Splunk platform across these multiple environments, whether it's going to be on prem or it's going to be in a pure cloud environment, or it's going to be in a hybrid with multiple clouds, and you're willing to give our customers the most flexibility that we can. And that's where that collaboration with Deloitte and HP is going to come into play. >>Right. And you understand Splunk, right? You will get the workload. I mean, it's, it's totally, there's great familiarity there, which is a great value for that customer base, because you could apply that. So, so, um, obviously you're giving us like multiple thumbs up about the partnership. What excites you the most about going forward? Because as you know, it's all about, you know, where are we going from here? Yes. Now where we've been. So in terms of where you're going together in that partnership, well, what excites you about that? >>Well, first of all, we're excited because it's just a great example of the value that we can deliver to customers when you really understand their pain points and then have the capability to integrate solutions that encompass software and hardware together. So I think that the fact that we've been able to do the work on, on that core SIM space, where we now have a reference architecture that shows how you could really scale and deliver that a Splunk solution for your cybersecurity needs in a, in a scale of one reliable and with high levels of security, of course. And the fact that we then also been able to co-develop fairly quickly solutions for the edge, allows customers now to have that data platform that can scale and can access a lot of different data types from the edge to the cloud. That is really unique. I think it provides a lot of flexibility and it is applicable to a lot of vertical industry segments and a lot of customers >>And be attractive to a lot of customers. That's for sure rec edge of area. We appreciate the time, always a good to see you. And we certainly appreciate your joining us here on the cube to talk about.com for 21. And your relationship with the folks at Splunk. >>Yeah. Thank you, John. >>You bet. Uh, talking about Intel spot, good partnership. Long time, uh, partnership that has great plans going forward, but we continue our coverage here of.com 21. You're watching the cube.

>>From around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm john ferrier host of the cube. Got a great story here. Navigating Covid 19 with Watson advertising and weather channel conversations. Sherry back steen. Who's the gM of Watson advertising in the weather company. Sherry, thanks for coming on the cube. My favorite part of IBM think is to talk about the tech and also the weather company innovations. Thanks for coming on. >>Hi, happy to be here, john >>So COVID-19 obviously some impact for people that working at home. Um normally you guys have been doing a lot of innovation around weather weather data um certainly huge part of it. Right. And so lots been changing with AI and the weather company and IBM so let's first start before we jump in, just a little background about what your team has created because a lot of fascinating things here. Go ahead. >>Yeah. So when the pandemic started, you know we looked at the data that we were seeing and of course in weather accuracy and accurate data is really important trusted data. And so we created a COVID-19 hub on our weather channel app and on weather.com. And essentially what it was is an aggregated area where consumers could get the most up to date information on covid cases, deaths in their area, trends see heat maps uh information from the C. D. C. And what was unique about it. It was to a local level. Right so state level information is helpful but we know that consumers uh me included. I need information around what's happening around me. And so we were able to bring this down to a county level which we thought was really helpful for consumers >>share as watching sports on tv. And recently, a few months ago, the Masters was on and you saw people getting back into real life, It's almost like a weather forecast. Now. You want to know what's going on in the pandemic. People are sharing that. They're getting the vaccine. Um, really interesting. And so I want to understand how this all came together with you guys. Is was it something that has a weather data, a bunch of geeks saying, hey, we should do this for companies, but take us to the thought process with their team. Was it like you saw this as value? How did you get to this? Because this is an interesting user benefit. I want to know the weather, I want to know if it's safe. These are kind of a psychology of a user expectation. How did you guys connect the dots here for this project? >>Well, we certainly do have a very passionate team of people, um some weather geeks included, um and you're absolutely right watching the Masters a few months ago was amazing to see, you know, some sense of normality happening here. But you know, we looked at, you know, IBM, the weather company, like, how do we help during this pandemic? And when we thought about it, we looked at there's an amazing gap of information. And as the weather channel, you know, what we do is bring together data, give people insights and help them make decisions with that. And so it was really part of our mission. It's always been that way to give information to keep people safe. And so all we did is took a different data set and provided the same thing. And so in this case, the covid data set, which we actually had to, you know, aggregate from different sources whether it was the C. D. C. The World Health Organization uh State governments or county governments to provide this to consumers. But it was really really natural for us because we know what consumers want. You know we all want information around where we live, right? And then we want to see like where our friends live, where our relatives live to make sure that they're okay. And then that enables people to make the decisions that are right for their family. And so it was really really natural for us to do that. And then of course we have the technology to be able to scale to hundreds of millions of people. Which is really important. >>It's not obvious until you actually think about that. It's so obvious. Congratulations. What a great innovation. What were the biggest challenges you guys had to face and how did you overcome it? Because I'm curious. I see you've got a lot of, lot of large scale data dealing with diversity of data with weather. What was the challenges with Covid? And how did you overcome it? >>So again, without a doubt it was the data because you're looking at one, we wanted that county level data. So you're looking at multiple sources. So how do we aggregate this data? So first finding that trusted source that that we could use. But then how do you pull it in in an automated way? And the challenge was it with the State Department, the county departments that data came in all kinds of formats. Some counties used maps, some use charts, some use pds to get that information. So we had to pull all this unstructured data, uh, and then that data was updated at different times. So some counties did it twice a day, some did it once day, different time zones. So that really made it challenging. And so then, you know, so what we did is this is where the power of A I really helps because a I can take all of that data, bring in and organize it and then we could put it back out to the consumer in a very digestible way. And so we were able to do that. We built an automated pipeline around that so we can make sure that it was updated. It was fresh and timely, which was really important. But without a doubt looking at that structured data and unstructured data and really helping it to make sense to the consumer was the biggest challenge. And what's interesting about it. Normally it would take us months to do something like that. I challenged the team to say we don't have months, we have days. They turned that around in eight days, which was just an amazing herculean feat. But that's really just the power of, as you said, passionate people coming together to do something so meaningful. >>I love the COVID-19 success stories when people rally around their passion and also their expertise. What was the technology to the team used? Because the theme here at IBM think is transformation innovation, scale. How did you move so fast to make that happen? >>So we move fast by our Ai capabilities and then using IBM cloud and so really there's four key components are like four teams that worked on it. So first there was the weather company team um and because we are a consumer division of IBM, we know what consumers want. So we understand the user experience and the design, but we also know how to build an A. P. I. That can scale because you're talking about being able to scale not only in a weather platform. So in the midst of covid weather still happened, so we still had severe weather record breaking hurricane season. And so those A. P. S. Have to scale to that volume. Then the second team was the AI team. So that used the Watson AI team mixed with the weather Ai team to again bring in that data to organize that data. Um And we used Watson NLP so natural natural language processing in order to create that automated pipeline. Then we had the corralled infrastructure so that platform team that built that architecture and that data repository on IBM cloud. And then the last team was our data privacy office. So making sure that that data was trusted that we have permission to use it uh and just know really that data governance. So it's all of that technology and all of those teams coming together to build this hub for consumers. Um And it worked I mean we would have about four million consumers looking at that hub every single day. Um and even like a year later we still have a couple million people that access that information. So it's really kind of become more like the weather checking the weather's come that daily habit. >>That's awesome. And I gotta I gotta imagine that these discoveries and innovations that was part of this transformation at scale have helped other ways outside the pandemic and you share how this is connected to um other benefits outside the pandemic. >>Yeah so absolutely um you know ai for businesses part of IBM strategy and so really helping organizations to help predict um you know to help take workloads and automate them. So they're high valued employees can work on you know other work. And also you know to bring that personalization to customers. You know, it's really a i when I look at it for my own part of a IBM with the weather company, three things where I'm using this technology. So the first one is around advertising. So the advertising industry is at a really um you know, pivotal part right now, a lot of turmoil and challenges because of privacy legislation because big tech companies are um you know, getting rid of tracking pixels that we normally use to drive the business. So we've created a suite of AI solutions for publishers for you know, different players within the ad tech space, um which is really important because it protects the open web, so like getting covid information or weather information, all of that is free information to the public. We just ask that you underwrite it by seeing advertising so we can keep it free. So those products protect the open red. So really, really important. Then on the consumer side of my business, within the weather channel, we actually used Watson Ai um to connect health with weather. So we know that there's that connection, some health um you know, issues that people have can be impacted by weather, like allergies and flew. So we've actually used Watson Ai to build a um Risk of flu that goes 15 days out. So we can tell people in your local area this one actually goes down to the zip code level, um the risk of flu in your area or the risk of allergies. So help to manage your symptoms, take your prescription. So, um that's a really interesting way. We're using AI and of course weather dot com and our apps are on IBM cloud, so we have this strong infrastructure to support that. And then lastly, you know, our weather forecasting has always been rooted in a i you take 100 different weather models, you apply ai to that to get the best and most accurate forecasts that you deliver. Um and so we are using these technologies every day to, you know, move our business forward and to provide, you know, weather services for people. >>I just love the automation and as users have smartphones and more instrumentation on their bodies, whether it's wearables, people will plan their day around the weather, and retail shops will have a benefit knowing what the stock and or not have on hand and how to adjust that. This, the classic edge computing paradigm, fascinating impact. You wouldn't think about that, but that's a pretty big deal. People are planning >>around >>the weather data and making that available is critical. >>Oh, absolutely. You know, every business needs a weather strategy because whether it impacts your supply chain, um agriculture, should I be watering today or not even around, you know, um, if you think about energy and power lines, you know, the vegetation growth over power lines can bring power lines down and it's a disruption, you know, to customers and power. So there's just when you start thinking about it, you're like, wow, whether really impacts every business, um, not to say just consumers in general and their daily lives. >>And uh, and there's a lot of cloud scale to that can help companies whether it's um be part of a better planet or smarter planet as it's been called, and help with with global warming. I mean, you think about this is all kind of been contextually relevant now more than ever. Super exciting. Um Great stuff. I want to get your take on outside of um the IBM response to the pandemic more broadly outside of the weather. What are you guys doing um to help? Are you guys doing anything else with industry? How could you talk a little bit more about IBM s response more broadly to the pandemic? >>Yeah so IBM has been you know working with government academia, industry is really from the beginning uh in several different ways. Um you know the first one of the first things we did is it opened up our intellectual property. So R. I. P. And our technology our supercomputing To help researchers really try to understand COVID-19 some of the treatments and possible cures so that's been really beneficial as it relates to that. Um Some other things though, that we're doing as well is we created a chat bots that companies and clients could use and this chat but could either be used to help train teachers because they have to work remotely or help other workers as well. Um and also the chatbots was helping as companies started to re enter back to the workforce and getting back to the office. So the chatbots been really helpful there. Um and then, you know, one of the things that we've been doing on the advertising side is we actually have helped the ad council with their vaccine campaign. Um It's up to you is the name of the campaign and we delivered a ad unit that can dynamically assemble a creative in real time to make sure that the right message was getting out the right time to the right person. So it's really helped to maximize that campaign to reach people um and encourage them if it's the right thing for them, you know where the vaccines are available. Um and that you know, they could take those. So a lot of great work that's going on within IBM. Um and actually the most recent thing just actually in the past month is we release the Digital Health Pass in cooperation with the state of new york. Um and this is a fantastic tool because it is a way for individuals to keep their private information around their vaccines or you know, some of the Covid test they've been having on a mobile device that's secure and we think that this is going to be really important as cities start to reopen um to have that information easily accessible. >>Uh sure, great insight, um great innovation navigating Covid 19 a lot of innovation transformation at IBM and obviously Watson and the weather company using AI and also, you know, when we come out of Covid post, post Covid as real life comes back, we're still going to be impacted. We're gonna have new innovations, new expectations, tracking, understanding what's going on, not just the weather. So thanks >>for absolutely great >>work. Um, awesome. Thank you. >>Great. Thanks john good to see you. >>Okay. This is the cubes coverage of IBM. Think I'm john for a host of the cube. Thanks for watching. Yeah.

from around the globe it's thecube covering space and cyber security symposium 2020 hosted by cal poly hello everyone welcome to the space and cyber security symposium 2020 hosted by cal poly where the intersection of space and security are coming together i'm john furrier your host with thecube here in california i want to welcome our featured guest lieutenant general john f thompson with the united states space force approach to cyber security that's the topic of this session and of course he's the commander of the space and missile system center in los angeles air force base also heading up space force general thank you for coming on really appreciate you kicking this off welcome to the symposium hey so uh thank you very much john for that very kind introduction also uh very much thank you to cal poly uh for this opportunity to speak to this audience today also a special shout out to one of the organizers uh dustin brun for all of his work uh helping uh get us uh to this point uh ladies and gentlemen as uh as uh john mentioned uh i'm jt thompson uh i lead the 6 000 men and women of the united states space forces space and missile system center which is headquartered here at los angeles air force base in el segundo if you're not quite sure where that's at it's about a mile and a half from lax this is our main operating location but we do have a number of other operating locations around the country with about 500 people at kirtland air force base in albuquerque new mexico uh and about another 500 people on the front range of the rockies uh between colorado springs and uh and denver plus a smattering of other much smaller operating locations nationwide uh we're responsible for uh acquiring developing and sustaining the united states space force's critical space assets that includes the satellites in the space layer and also on the ground layer our ground segments to operate those satellites and we also are in charge of procuring launch services for the u.s space force and a number of our critical mission partners across the uh department of defense and the intelligence community um just as a couple of examples of some of the things we do if you're unfamiliar with our work we developed and currently sustained the 31 satellite gps constellation that satellite constellation while originally intended to help with global navigation those gps signals have provided trillions of dollars in unanticipated value to the global economy uh over the past three decades i mean gps is everywhere i think everybody realizes that agriculture banking the stock market the airline industry uh separate and distinct navigation systems it's really pervasive across both the capabilities for our department of defense and capabilities for our economy and and individuals billions of individuals across our country and the planet some of the other work we do for instance in the communications sector uh secure communications satellites that we design and build that link america's sons and daughters serving in the military around the world and really enable real-time support and comms for our deployed forces and those of our allies we also acquire uh infrared missile warning satellites uh that monitor the planet for missile launches and provide advanced warning uh to the u.s homeland and to our allies uh in case some of those missile launches are uh nefarious um on a note that's probably a lot closer to home maybe a lot closer to home than many of us want to think about here in the state of california in 2018 smc jumped through a bunch of red tape and bureaucracy uh to partner with the u.s forest service during the two of the largest wildfires in the state's history the camp and woolsey fires in northern california as those fires spread out of control we created processes on the fly to share data from our missile warning satellites those are satellites that are systems that are purpose built to see heat sources from thousands of miles above the planet and we collaborated with the us forest service so that firefighters on the ground uh could track those fires more in real time and better forecast fires and where they were spreading thereby saving lives and and property by identifying hot spots and flare-ups for firefighters that data that we were able to working with our contractors pass to the u.s forest service and authorities here in california was passed in less than an hour as it was collected to get it into the hands of the emergency responders the first responders as quickly as possible and doing that in an hour greatly surpassed what was available from some of the other assets in the airborne and ground-based fire spotters it was really instrumental in fighting those fires and stopping their spread we've continued uh that involvement in recent years using multiple systems to support firefighters across the western u.s this fall as they battled numerous wildfires that unfortunately continue working together with the u.s forest service and with other partners uh we like to make uh we like to think that we made a difference here but there's still a lot more work to go and i think that we should always be asking ourselves uh what else can space data be used for and how can we more rapidly get that space data to uh stakeholders so that they can use it for for purposes of good if you will how else can we protect our nation how else can we protect our friends and allies um i think a major component of the of the discussion that we will have throughout this conference is that the space landscape has changed rapidly and continues to change rapidly um just over the past few years uh john and i were talking before we went live here and 80 nations now have uh space programs 80 nearly 80 space faring nations on the planet um if you just look at one mission area that uh the department of defense is interested in and that's small launch there are currently over a hundred different small launch companies uh within the u.s industrial base vying for commercial dod and civil uh payload capabilities uh mostly to low earth orbit it's it's just truly a remarkable time if you factor in those things like artificial intelligence and machine learning um where we're revolutionary revolutionizing really uh the ways that we generate process and use data i mean it's really remarkable in 2016 so if you think about this four years ago uh nasa estimated that there were 28 terabytes of information transiting their space network each day and that was four years ago um uh obviously we've got a lot of desire to work with a lot of the people in the audience of this congress or in this conference uh we need to work with big thinkers like many of you to answer questions on how best we apply data analytics to extract value and meaning from that data we need new generations of thinkers to help apply cutting edge edge theories of data mining cyber behaviorism and internet of things 2.0 it's just truly a remarkable time uh to be in the space business and the cyber aspects of the states of the space business are truly truly daunting and important to uh to all of us um integrating cyber security into our space systems both commercial and government is a mandate um it's no longer just a nice to have as the us space force and department of the air force leadership has said many times over the past couple of years space is becoming congested and contested and that contested aspect means that we've got to focus on cyber security uh in the same way that the banking industry and cyber commerce focus on uh cyber security day in and day out the value of the data and services provided is really directly tied to the integrity and availability of that data and services from the space layer from the ground control segments associated with it and this value is not just military it's also economic and it's not just american it's also a value for the entire world particularly particularly our allies as we all depend upon space and space systems your neighbors and friends here in california that are employed at the space and missile system center uh work with network defenders we work with our commercial contractors and our systems developers um our international allies and partners to try and build as secure and resilient systems as we can from the ground up that keep the global commons of space free and open for exploration and for commerce um as john and i were talking earlier before we came online there's an aspect of cyber security for space systems especially for some of our legacy systems that's more how do we bolt this on because we fielded those space systems a number of years ago and the the challenges of cyber security in the space domain have grown so we have a part that we have to worry about bolting it on but then we have to worry about building it in as we as we field new systems and build in a flexibility that that realizes that the cyber threat or the cyber security landscape will evolve over time it's not just going to be stagnant there will always be new vulnerabilities and new threat vectors that we always have to look at look uh as secretary barrett who is our secretary of the air force likes to say most americans use space before they have their first cup of coffee in the morning the american way of life really depends on space and as part of the united states space force we work with defense leaders our congress joint and international military teammates and industry to ensure american leadership in space i really thank you for this opportunity to address the audience today john and thanks so much to cal poly for letting me be one of the speakers at this event i really look forward to this for uh several months and so with that i look forward to your questions as we kind of move along here general thank you very much for the awesome uh introductory statement uh for the folks watching on the stream brigadier general carthan is going to be in the chat answering any questions feel free to chat away he's the vice commander of space and missile systems center he'll be available um a couple comments from your keynote before i get to my questions because it just jumped in my head you mentioned the benefits of say space but the fires in california we're living that here that's really real time that's a benefit you also mentioned the ability for more people launching payloads into space and i only imagine moore's law smaller faster cheaper applies to rockets too so i'm imagining you have the benefits of space and you have now more potential objects flying out sanctioned and maybe unsanctioned so you know is it going to be more rules around that i mean this is an interesting question because it's exciting space force but for all the good there is potentially bad out there yeah so i i john i think the uh i think the basics of your question is as space becomes more congested and contested is there a need for more international norms of how satellites fly in space what kind of basic features satellites have to perhaps deorbit themselves what kind of basic protections does do all satellites should all satellites be afforded as part of a peaceful global commons of space i think those are all fantastic questions and i know that u.s and many uh allied policy makers are looking very very hard at those kinds of questions in terms of what are the norms of behavior and how we uh you know how how we field and field is the military term but you know how we uh populate uh using civil or uh commercial terms uh that space layer at different altitudes uh low earth orbit mid mid-earth orbit geosynchronous earth orbit different kinds of orbits uh what the kind of mission areas we accomplish from space that's all things that need to be definitely taken into account as uh as the place gets a little bit not a little bit as the place gets increasingly more popular day in and day out well i'm super excited for space force i know that a new generation of young folks are really interested in it's an emerging changing great space the focus here at this conference is space and cyber security intersection i'd like to get your thoughts on the approach that space force is taking to cyber security and how it impacts our national goals here in the united states yeah yeah so that's a that's a great question john let me let me talk about in two uh two basic ways but number one is and and i know um some people in the audience this might make them a little bit uncomfortable but i have to talk about the threat right um and then relative to that threat i really have to talk about the importance of uh of cyber and specifically cyber security as it relates to that threat um the threats that we face um really represent a new era of warfare and that new era of warfare involves both space and cyber uh we've seen a lot of action in recent months uh from certain countries notably china and russia uh that have threatened what i referred to earlier as the peaceful global commons of space for example uh it through many unclassified sources and media sources everybody should understand that um uh the russians have been testing on orbit uh anti-satellite capabilities it's been very clear if you were following just the week before last the department of defense released its uh 2020 military and security developments involving the people's republic of china um uh and uh it was very clear that china is developing asats electronic jammers directed energy weapons and most relevant to today's discussion offensive cyber uh capabilities there are kinetic threats uh that are very very easy to see but a cyber attack against a critical uh command and control site or against a particular spacecraft could be just as devastating to the system and our war fighters in the case of gps and important to note that that gps system also impacts many civilians who are dependent upon those systems from a first response perspective and emergency services a cyber attack against a ground control site could cause operators to lose control of a spacecraft or an attacker could feed spoofed data to a system to mislead operators so that they send emergency services personnel to the to the wrong address right attacks on spacecraft on orbit whether directly via a network of intrusion or enabled through malware introduced during the systems production uh while we're building the satellite can [ __ ] or corrupt the data denial of service type attacks on our global networks obviously would disrupt our data flow and interfere with ongoing operations and satellite control i mean if gps went down i you know i hesitate to say it this way because we might elicit some screams from the audience but if gps went down a starbucks wouldn't be able to handle your mobile order uber drivers wouldn't be able to find you and domino's certainly certainly wouldn't be able to get there in 30 minutes or less right so with a little bit of tongue-in-cheek there from a military operations perspective it's dead serious um uh we have become accustomed in the commercial world to threats like lance ransomware and malware and those things have unfortunately become commonplace in commercial terrestrial networks and computer systems however what we're seeing is that our adversaries with the increased competition in space these same techniques are being retooled if you will to use against our national security space systems uh day in and day out um as i said during my opening remarks on the importance of cyber the value of these systems is directly tied to their integrity if commanders in the field uh firefighters in california or baristas in in starbucks can't trust the data they see they're receiving then that really harms their decision-making capabilities one of the big trends we've recently seen is the mood move towards proliferated leo uh uh constellations obviously uh spacex's uh starlink uh on the commercial side and on the military side the work that darpa and my organization smc are doing on blackjack and casino as well as some space transport layer constellation work that the space development agency is designing are all really really important types of mesh network systems that will revolutionize how we plan and field warfighting systems and commercial communications and internet providing systems but they're also heavily reliant on cyber security uh we've got to make sure that they are secured to avoid an accident or international damage uh loss of control of these constellations really could be catastrophic from both a mission perspective or from uh you know satellites tumbling out of low earth orbit perspective another trend is introductions in artificial intelligence and machine learning on board spacecraft or at the edge our satellites are really not so much hardware systems with a little software anymore in the commercial sector and in the defense sector they're basically flying boxes full of software right and we need to ensure the data that we're getting out of those flying boxes full of software are helping us base our decisions on accurate data and algorithms govern governing the right actions and that those uh that those systems are impervious to the extent possible uh to nefarious uh modifications so in summation a cyber security is vital element of everything in our national security space goals and i would argue for our national uh goals uh writ large including uh economic and information uh uh dimensions uh the space force leadership at all levels uh from uh some of the brand new second lieutenants that general raymond uh swore into the space force this morning uh ceremonially from the uh air force association's air space and cyberspace conference uh to the various highest levels general raymond uh general d t thompson myself and a number of other senior leaders in this enterprise we've got to make sure that we're all working together to keep cyber security at the forefront of our space systems because it they absolutely depend on it you know you mentioned uh hardware software threats opportunities challenges i want to ask you because you you got me thinking of the minute there around infrastructure i mean we've heard critical infrastructure you know grids here on on earth you're talking about critical infrastructure a redefinition of what critical infrastructure is an extension of what we have so i'd love to get your thoughts about space force's view of that critical infrastructure vis-a-vis the threat vectors because you know the term threat vectors has been kicked around in the cyber space oh yeah threat vectors they're always increasing the surface area well if the surface area is from space it's an unlimited surface area so you got different vectors so you got new critical infrastructure developing real time really fast and you got an expanded threat vector landscape putting that in perspective for the folks that aren't really inside the ropes on these critical issues how would you explain this and how would you talk about those two things well so i tell you um i just like um uh just like uh i'm sure people in the security side or the cyber security side of the business in the banking industry feel they feel like it's uh all possible threat vectors represent a dramatic and protect potentially existential threat to all of the dollars that they have in the banking system to the financial sector on the department of defense side we've got to have sort of the same mindset um that threat vector from to and through space against critical space systems ground segments the launch enterprise or transportation uh to orbit and the various different uh domains within uh within space itself like i mentioned before uh leo mio and geo-based satellites with different orbits all of the different mission areas that are accomplished from space that i mentioned earlier some that i didn't mention like weather tactical or wide band communications uh various new features of space control all of those are things that we have to worry about from a cyber security uh threat perspective and it's a it's a daunting challenge right now right yeah it's awesome and one of the things we've been following on the hardware side here in the on the ground is the supply chain we've seen you know malware being you know really put into really obscure hardware who manufactures it as being outsourced obviously government has restrictions but with the private sector uh you mentioned china and and the us kind of working together across these these peaceful areas but you got to look at the supply chain how does the supply chain the security aspect impact the mission of the u.s space force yeah yeah so so um how about another um just in terms of an example another kind of california-based historical example right um the very first u.s satellite uh explorer one was built by uh the jet propulsion uh laboratory folks uh not far from here in el segundo up in uh up in pasadena um that satellite when it was first built in the late 50s uh weighed a little bit over 30 pounds and i'm sure that each and every part was custom made and definitely made by u.s companies fast forward to today the global supply chain is so tightly coupled and frankly many industries are so specialized almost specialized regionally around the planet we focus every day to guarantee the integrity of every component that we put in our space systems is absolutely critical to the operations of those satellites and we're dependent upon them but it becomes more difficult and more difficult to understand the the heritage if you will of some of the parts that are used the thousands of parts that are used in some of our satellites that are literally school bus sized right the space industry especially uh national security space sector um uh is relatively small compared to other commercial industries and we're moving to towards using more and more parts uh from non-us companies uh cyber security and cyber awareness have to be baked in from the beginning if we're going to be using parts that maybe we don't necessarily um understand 100 percent like an explorer one uh the the lineage of that particular part the environmental difficulties in space are well known the radiation environment the temperature extremes the vacuum those require specialized component and the us military is not the only uh customer in that space in fact we're definitely not the dominant customer uh in space anymore all those factors require us along with our other government partners and many different commercial space organizations to keep a very close eye on our supply chains from a quality perspective a security perspective and availability um there's open source reporting on supply training intrusions from um many different breaches of commercial retailers to the infectious spread of uh you know compromised patches if you will and our adversaries are aware of these techniques as i mentioned earlier with other forms of attack considering our supply chains and development networks really becomes fair game for our adversaries so we have to uh take that threat seriously um between the government and industry sectors here in the u.s we're also working with our industry partners to enact stronger defenses and assess our own vulnerabilities last fall we completed an extensive review of all of our major contracts here at space and missile system center to determine the levels of cyber security requirements we've implemented across our portfolio and it sounds really kind of you know businessy geeky if you will you know hey we looked at our contracts to make sure that we had the right clauses in our contracts to address cyber security as dynamically as we possibly could and so we found ourselves having to add new language to our contracts to require system developers to implement some more advanced uh protective measures in this evolving cyber security environment so that data handling and supply chain perspective uh protections um from contract inception to launch and operations were taken into account uh cyber security really is a key performance parameter for us now it's as important as the the mission performance of the system it's as important as cost it's as important as schedule because if we deliver the perfect system on time and on cost uh it can perform that missile warning or that communications mis mission perfectly but it's not cyber secure if it doesn't have cyber protections built into it or the ability to implement mitigations against cyber uh threats then we've essentially fielded a shoe box in space that doesn't do the k the the war fighter or the nation uh any good um supply chain risk management is a is a major challenge for us uh we're doing a lot to coordinate with our industry partners uh we're all facing it head on uh to try and build secure and trusted components uh that keep our confidence as leaders firefighters and baristas uh as the case may be uh but it is a challenge and we're trying to rise to that challenge you know this so exciting this new area because it really touches everything you know talk about geeking out on on the tech the hardware the systems but also you put your kind of mba hat on you go what's the roi of the extra development and how you how things get built because the always the exciting thing for space geeks is like you're building cool stuff people love it's it's exciting but you still have to build and cyber security has proven that security has to be baked in from the beginning and be thought as a system architecture so you're still building things which means you've got to acquire things you got to acquire parts you got to acquire build software and and sustain it how is security impacting the acquisition and the sustainment of these systems for space yeah from initial development uh through planning for the acquisition design development fielding or production fielding and sustainment it impacts all aspects of of the life cycle john uh we simply especially from the concept of baking in cyber security uh we can't wait until something is built and then try and figure out how to make it cyber secure so we've moved way further uh towards working side by side with our system developers to strengthen cyber security from the very beginning of a system's development cyber security and the resilience associated with it really have to be treated as a key system attribute as i mentioned earlier equivalent with data rates or other metrics of performance we like to talk in uh in the space world about uh mission assurance and mission assurance has always you know sort of taken us as we as we technically geek out right mission assurance has always taken us to the will this system work in space right can it work in a vacuum can it work in you know as it as it uh you know transfers through uh the van allen radiation belt or through the the um the southern hemisphere's electromagnetic anomaly right will it work out in space and now from a resiliency perspective yeah it has to work in space it's got to be functional in space but it's also got to be resistant to these cyber security threats it's it's not just i think uh general dt thompson quoted this term it's not just widget assurance anymore it's mission assurance um uh how does that satellite uh operator that ground control segment operate while under attack so let me break your question a little bit uh just for purposes of discussion into into really two parts uh cyber uh for cyber security for systems that are new and cyber security uh for systems that are in sustainment or kind of old and legacy um obviously there's cyber vulnerabilities that threaten both and we really have to employ different strategies for for defense of of each one for new systems uh we're desperately trying to implement across the department of defense in particular in the space world a kind of a devsecops methodology and practice to delivering software faster and with greater security for our space systems here at smc we have a program called enterprise ground services which is a tool kit basically a collection of tools for common command and control of different satellite systems egs as we call it has an integrated suite for defensive cyber capabilities network operators can use these tools to gain unprecedented insight to data flows and to monitor space network traffic for anomalies or other potential indicators of of bad behavior malicious behavior if you will um uh it's rudimentary at this point but because we're using devsecops and that incremental development approach as we scale it it just becomes more and more capable you know every every product increment that we field here at uh at uh la air force base uh uh we have the united space space forces west coast software factory which we've dubbed kobayashi maru they're using those agile devops uh software development practices uh to deliver uh space awareness software uh to the combined space operations center uh affectionately called the csp that c-spock is just down the road uh from cal poly uh there in san luis obispo at vandenberg air force base they've securely linked the c-spock with other space operation centers around the planet our allies australia canada and the uk uh we're partnering with all of them to enable secure and enhanced combined space operations so lots of new stuff going on as we bake in new development uh capabilities for our our space systems but as i mentioned earlier we've got large constellations on satellite of satellites on orbit right now some of them are well in excess of a decade or more old on orbit and so the design aspects of those satellites are several decades old and so but we still have to worry about them because they're critical to our space capabilities um we've been working with an air force materiel command organization uh called crows which stands for the cyber resiliency office for uh weapon systems to assess all of those legacy platforms from a cyber security perspective and develop defensive strategies and potential hardware and software upgrades to those systems to better enable them to to live through this increasingly cyber security uh concerned era that we currently live in our industry partners have been critical to to both of those different avenues both new systems and legacy systems we're working closely with them to defend and upgrade uh national assets and develop the capabilities to do similar with uh with new national assets coming online the vulnerabilities of our space systems really kind of threaten the way we've done business in the past both militarily and in the case of gps economically the impacts of that cyber security risk are clear in our acquisition and sustainment processes but i've got to tell you it that as the threat vectors change as the vulnerabilities change we've got to be nimble enough agile enough to be able to bounce back and forth we can't just say uh many people in the audience are probably familiar with the rmf or the risk management framework approach to um to reviewing uh the cyber security of a system we can't have program managers and engineers just accomplish an rmf on a system and then hey high five we're all good uh it's a journey not a destination that's cyber security and it's a constant battle rhythm throughout a weapon systems life cycle not just a single event i want to get to this commercial business needs and your needs on the next question but before i go there you mentioned the agile and i see that clearly because when you have accelerated innovation cycles you've got to be faster and we saw this in the computer industry mainframes mini computers and then when you started getting beyond me when the internet hit and pcs came out you saw the big enterprises the banks and and government start to work with startups it used to be a joke in the entrepreneurial circles is that you know there's no way if you're a startup you're ever going to get a contract with a big business enterprise now that used to be for public sector and certainly uh for you guys so as you see startups out there and there's acquisition involved i'm sure would love to love to have a contract with space force there's an roi calculation where if it's in space and you have a sustainment view edit software you might have a new kind of business model that could be attractive to startups could you share your thoughts on the folks who want to be a supplier to you uh whether they're a startup or an existing business that wants to be agile but they might not be that big company we are john that's a fantastic question we are desperately trying to reach out to to those new space advocates to those startups to those um what we sometimes refer to within the department of defense those non-traditional uh defense contractors a couple of things just for uh thinking purposes on some of the things that we're trying to highlight um uh three years ago we created here at uh space and missile system center uh the space enterprise consortium uh to provide a platform uh a contractual vehicle really to enable us to rapidly prototype uh development of space systems and to collaborate uh between the u.s space force uh traditional defense contractors non-traditional vendors like startups and even some academic institutions uh spec as we call it space enterprise consortium uses a specialized contracting tool to get contracts uh awarded quickly many in the audience may be familiar with other transaction agreements and that's what spec is based on and so far in just three years spec has awarded 75 different uh prototyping contracts worth over 800 million dollars with a 36 reduction in time to award and because it's a consortium based competition for um for these kinds of prototyping efforts the barrier to entry for small and non-traditional for startups even for academic institutions to be able to compete for these kinds of prototypings is really lowered right um uh these types of partnerships uh that we've been working through on spec uh have really helped us work with smaller companies who might not have the background or expertise in dealing with the government or in working with cyber security uh for their systems both their developmental systems and the systems that they're designing and trying to build we want to provide ways for companies large and small to partner together and support um uh kind of mutually beneficial uh relationships between all um recently uh at the annual air force association uh conference that i mentioned earlier i moderated a panel with several space industry leaders uh all from big traditional defense contractors by the way and they all stressed the importance of building bridges and partnerships uh between major contractors in the defense industry and new entrants uh and that helps us capture the benefits of speed and agility that come with small companies and startups as well as the expertise and specialized skill sets of some of those uh larger contractors uh that we rely on day in and day out advanced cyber security protections and utilization of secure facilities are just a couple of things that i think we could be prioritizing more so in those collaborations as i mentioned earlier the spec has been very successful in awarding a number of different prototyping contracts and large dollar values and it's just going to get better right there's over 400 members of the space enterprise consortium 80 of them are non-traditional kinds of vendors and we just love working with them another thing that many people in the audience may be familiar with in terms of our outreach to innovators uh if you will and innovators that include uh cyber security experts is our space pitch day events right so we held our first event last november in san francisco uh where we awarded over a two-day period about 46 million dollars to 30 different companies um that had potentially game-changing ideas these were phase two small business innovative research efforts uh that we awarded with cash on the spot uh we're planning on holding our second space pitch day in the spring of 2021. uh we're planning on doing it right here in los angeles uh covent 19 environment permitting um and we think that these are you know fantastic uh uh venues for identifying and working with high-speed startups startups and small businesses who are interested in uh really truly partnering with the us air force it's a as i said before it's a really exciting time to be a part of this business uh and working with the innovation economy uh is something that the department of defense uh really needs to do in that um the innovation that we used to think was ours you know that 80 percent of the industrial-based innovation that came from the department of defense uh the the script has been flipped there and so now more than 70 percent uh particularly in space innovation uh comes from the commercial sector not from uh not from the defense business itself and so um that's a tsunami of uh investment and a tsunami of uh capability and i need to figure out how to get my surfboard out and ride it you know what i mean yeah i mean it's one of those things where the flip the script has been flipped but it's exciting because it's impacting everything are you talking about systems architecture you're talking about software you're talking about a business model you talk about devsecops from a technical perspective but now you have a business model innovation all the theaters of uh are exploding in innovation technical business personnel this brings up the workforce challenge you've got the cyber needs for the u.s space force there's probably a great roi model for new kinds of software development that could be priced into contracts that's a entrepreneurial innovation you got the the business model theater you've got the personnel how does the industry adopt and change you guys are clearly driving this how does the industry adjust to you yeah so um i think a great way to answer that question is to just talk about the kind of people that we're trying to prioritize in the u.s space force from a from an acquisition perspective and in this particular case from a from a cyber security perspective as i mentioned earlier it's the most exciting time to be in space programs uh really since the days of apollo um uh you know just to put it in terms that you know maybe have an impact with the audience uh from 1957 until today approximately 9 000 satellites uh have been launched from the various space faring countries around the planet uh less than two thousand of those nine thousand are still up on orbit and operational and yet in the new space regime um players like spacex have plans to launch you know 12 000 satellites for some of their constellations alone it really is a remarkable time in terms of innovation and fielding of space capabilities and all of those space capabilities whether they're commercial civil or defense are going to require appropriate cyber security uh protections it's just a really exciting time uh to be working in stuff like this and so uh folks like the folks in this audience who have a passion about space and a passion about cyber security are just the kind of people that we want to work with because we need to make sure our systems are are secure and resilient we need folks that have technical and computing expertise engineering skills to be able to design cybersecure systems that can detect and mitigate attacks uh but we also as you alluded to we need people that have that business and um you know business acumen human networking background so that we can launch the startups and work with the non-traditional businesses uh help to bring them on board help to secure both their data and our data and uh and and make sure our processes and systems are are free as much as possible from uh uh from attack um for preparation for for audience members who are young and maybe thinking about getting into this uh trade space um you gotta be smart on digital networking uh you gotta understand basic internet protocols concepts uh programming languages uh database design uh learn what you can from penetration or vulnerability testing and and uh risk assessment i will tell you this and i don't think he will i know he will not mind me telling you this but you've got to be a lifelong learner and so two years ago i'm at home one evening and i get a phone call on my cell phone and it's my boss the commander of air force space command uh general j raymond who is now currently the chief of space operations and he is on temporary duty flying overseas he lands where he's going and he first thing he does when he lands is he calls me and he goes jt um while i was traveling um i noticed that there were e-books available on the commercial airliner i was traveling on and there was an e-book on something called scrumming and agile devsecops and i read it have you read it um and i said no sir but if you tell me what the title of the book is i will read it and so i got to go to my staff meeting um you know the very next week the next time we had a staff meeting and tell everybody in the stab meeting hey if the four star and the three star can read the book about scrumming then i'm pretty sure all of you around this table and all our lieutenants and our captains our gs13s all of our government employees can get smart on uh the scrumming development process and interestingly as another side i had a telephone call with him last year during the holidays where he was trying to take some leave and i said sir what are you up to today are you are you you know making eggnog for the event tonight or whatever and the chief of space operations told me no i'm trying to teach myself python i'm at lesson two and it's not going so well but i'm i'm gonna figure this out and so that kind of thing if the chief of staff or the you know the the the chief of space operations can prioritize scrumming and python language and innovation in his daily schedule then we're definitely looking for other people who can do that and we'll just say lower levels of rank uh throughout our entire space force enterprise um look i i we don't need to need people that can code a satellite from scratch but we need to know we need to have people that have a basic grasp of the programming basics and cyber security requirements and that can turn those things into into meaningful actions obviously in the space domain things like basic physics and orbital mechanics are also important uh space is not an intuitive uh domain so under understanding how things survive uh on orbit is really critical to making the right design and operational decisions and you know i know there's probably a lot because of this conference i know there's a probably a whole lot of high-speed cyber security experts out in the audience and i need those people in the u.s space force the the country is counting on it but i wouldn't discount having people that are just cyber aware or cyber savvy right i have contracting officers and logisticians and program managers and they don't have to be high-end cyber security experts but they have to be aware enough about it to be able to implement cyber security protections um into our space system so the skill set is is really really broad um our adversaries are pouring billions of dollars into uh define designing uh and fielding offensive and destructive space cyber security weapons right they've repeatedly shown really a blatant disregard of safety and international norms for good behavior on orbit and the cyber security aspects of our space systems is really a key battleground going forward so that we can maintain that as i mentioned before peaceful uh global commons of space we really need all hands on deck if you're interested in helping in uniform if you're interested in helping uh not in uniform uh but as a government employee a commercial or civil employee to help us make cyber security more important uh or more cape more able to be developed for our space systems then we'd really love to uh to work with you or have you on the team to build that safe and secure future for our space systems lieutenant general john thompson great insight thank you for sharing all that awesome stories too and motivation for the young next generation the united states space force approach of cyber security really amazing talk thank you for your time final parting question is as you look out and you had your magic wand what's your view for the next few years in terms of things that we could accomplish it's a super exciting time what do you hope for so um um first of all john thanks to you and and thanks to cal poly uh for the invitation and and thanks to everybody for uh for their interest in cyber security especially as it relates to space systems that's here at the conference um uh there's a quote and i'll read it here uh from uh bernard schriever who was the uh the founder if you will uh a legend in uh dod space the founder of the western development division which was a predecessor organization to space and missile systems center general shrever i think captures the essence of what how we see the next couple of years the world has an ample supply of people who can always come up with a dozen good reasons why new ideas will not work and should not be tried but the people who produce progress are breed apart they have the imagination the courage and the persistence to find solutions and so i think if you're hoping that the next few years of space innovation and cyber security innovation are going to be a pony ride at the county fair then perhaps you should look for another line of work because i think the next few years in space and cyber security innovation are going to be more like a rodeo um and a very dynamic rodeo as it goes it is a an awesome privilege to be part of this ecosystem it's really an honor for me to um to be able to play some small role uh in the space ecosystem and trying to improve it uh while i'm trying to improve the chances of uh of the united states of america in a uh in a space war fighting uh uh environment um and so i thank all of you for uh participating today and for this little bit of time that you've allowed me to share with you thank you sir thank you for your leadership and thank you for the for the time for this awesome event space and cyber security symposium 2020 i'm john furrier on behalf of cal poly thanks for watching [Music]

>> Narrator: From around the globe. It's theCUBE covering space in cybersecurity symposium 2020 hosted by Cal Poly. >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to the space and cybersecurity symposium, 2020 hosted by Cal Poly where the intersection of space and security are coming together. I'm John Furrier, your host with theCUBE here in California. I want to welcome our featured guest, Lieutenant General, John F. Thompson with the United States Space Force approach to cybersecurity. That's the topic of this session. And of course he's the commander of the space and missile system center in Los Angeles Air Force Base. Also heading up Space Force. General, thank you for coming on. I really appreciate to you kicking this off. Welcome to the symposium. >> Hey, so thank you very much, John, for that very kind introduction. Also very much thank you to Cal Poly for this opportunity to speak to this audience today. Also a special shout out to one of the organizers, Dustin Debrun, for all of his work, helping get us to this point. Ladies and gentlemen as a John mentioned, I'm JT Thompson. I lead the 6,000 men and women of the United States Space Force's Space and Missile System Center, which is headquartered here at Los Angeles Air Force Base and El Segundo. If you're not quite sure where that's at, it's about a mile and a half from LAX. This is our main operating location, but we do have a number of other operating locations around the country. We're about 500 people at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and an about another 500 people on the front range of the Rockies between Colorado Springs and Denver plus a smattering of other much smaller operating locations nationwide. We're responsible for acquiring, developing and sustaining the United States Space Force's, critical space assets. That includes the satellites in the space layer and also on the ground layer our ground segments to operate those satellites. And we also are in charge of procuring launch services for the US Space Force and a number of our critical mission partners across the Department of Defense and the intelligence community. Just as a couple of examples of some of the things we do, if you're unfamiliar with our work we developed and currently sustain the 31 satellite GPS constellation that satellite constellation, while originally intended to help with global navigation, those GPS signals have provided trillions of dollars in unanticipated value to the global economy over the past three decades. GPS is everywhere. I think everybody realizes that. Agriculture, banking, the stock market, the airline industry, separate and distinct navigation systems. It's really pervasive across both capabilities for our Department of Defense and capabilities for our economy and individuals, billions of individuals across our country and the planet. Some of the other work we do for instance, in the communications sector, secure communications satellites that we designed and build that link America's sons and daughters serving in the military around the world and really enable real time support and comms for our deployed forces. And those of our allies. We also acquire infrared missile warning satellites that monitor the planet for missile launches that provide advanced warning to the US Homeland and to our allies in case some of those missile launches are nefarious. On a note, that's probably a lot closer to home, maybe a lot closer to home than many of us want to think about here in the state of California. In 2018, SMC jumped through a bunch of red tape and bureaucracy to partner with the US Forest Service during two of the largest wildfires in the state's history, the Camp and Woolsey fires in Northern California. As those fires spread out of control, we created processes on the fly to share data from our missile warning satellites. Those are satellites that are systems that are purpose built to see heat sources from thousands of miles above the planet. And we collaborated with the US Forest Service so that firefighters on the ground could track those fires more in real time and better forecast fires and where they were spreading, thereby saving lives and property by identifying hotspots and flareups for firefighters. That data that we were able to working with our contractors pass to the US Forest Service and authorities here in California, was passed in less than an hour as it was collected to get it into the hands of the emergency responders, the first responders as quickly as possible and doing that in an hour greatly surpassed what was available from some of the other assets in the airborne and ground-based fire spotters. It was really instrumental in fighting those fires and stopping their spread. We've continued that involvement in recent years, using multiple systems to support firefighters across the Western US this fall, as they battled numerous wildfires that unfortunately continue. Working together with the US Forest Service and with other partners we'd like to think that we've made a difference here, but there's still a lot more work to go. And I think that we should always be asking ourselves what else can space data be used for and how can we more rapidly get that space data to stakeholders so that they can use it for purposes of good, if you will. How else can we protect our nation? How else can we protect our friends and allies? I think a major component of the discussion that we will have throughout this conference is that the space landscape has changed rapidly and continues to change rapidly. Just over the past few years, John and I were talking before we went live here and 80 nations now have space programs. Nearly 80 space faring nations on the planet. If you just look at one mission area that the Department of Defense is interested in, and that's small launch, there are currently over 100 different small launch companies within the US industrial base vying for commercial DoD and civil payload capabilities, mostly to lower earth orbit. It's truly a remarkable time. If you factor in those things like artificial intelligence and machine learning, where we're revolutionizing really, the ways that we generate process and use data. It's really remarkable. In 2016, so if you think about this four years ago, NASA estimated that there were 28 terabytes of information transiting their space network each day. And that was four years ago. Obviously we've got a lot of desire to work with a lot of the people in the audience in this conference, we need to work with big thinkers, like many of you to answer questions on how best we apply data analytics to extract value and meaning from that data. We need new generations of thinkers to help apply cutting edge theories of data mining, cyber behaviorism, and Internet of Things 2.0, it's just truly a remarkable time to be in the space business and the cyber aspects of the space business are truly, truly daunting and important to all of us. Integrating cyber security into our space systems, both commercial and government is a mandate. it's no longer just a nice to have as the US Space Force and Department of the Air Force leadership has said many times over the past couple of years, space is becoming congested and contested. And that contested aspect means that we've got to focus on cyber security in the same way that the banking industry and cyber commerce focus on cybersecurity day in and day out. The value of the data and services provided is really directly tied to the integrity and availability of that data and services from the space layer, from the ground control segments associated with it. And this value is not just military, it's also economic and it's not just American, it's also a value for the entire world, particularly our allies, as we all depend upon space and space systems. Your neighbors and friends here in California that are employed at the space and missile system center work with network defenders. We work with our commercial contractors and our systems developers, our international allies and partners to try and build as secure and resilient systems as we can from the ground up that keep the global comments of space free and open for exploration and for commerce as John and I were talking earlier, before we came online, there's an aspect of cybersecurity for space systems, especially for some of our legacy systems, that's more, how do we bolt this on? Cause we fielded those space systems a number of years ago, and the challenges of cybersecurity in the space domain have grown. So we have a part that we have to worry about, bolting it on, but then we have to worry about building it in as we field new systems and build in a flexibility that realizes that the cyber threat or the cybersecurity landscape will evolve over time. It's not just going to be stagnant. There will always be new vulnerabilities and new threat vectors that we all have to look at. Look, as Secretary Barrett, who is our secretary of the air force likes to say most Americans use space before they have their first cup of coffee in the morning. The American way of life really depends on space. And as part of the United States Space Force, we work with defense leaders, our Congress joint, and international military teammates and industry to ensure American leadership in space. I really thank you for this opportunity to address the audience today, John, and thanks so much to Cal Poly for letting me be one of the speakers at this event. I've really looked forward to this for several months. And so with that, I look forward to your questions as we kind of move along here. >> General, thank you very much for those awesome introductory statement. For the folks watching on the stream, Brigadier General Carthan's going to be in the chat, answering any questions, feel free to chat away. He's the vice commander of Space and Missile System Center, he'll be available. A couple of comments from your keynote before I get to my questions. Cause it just jumped into my head. You mentioned the benefits of say space with the fires in California. We're living that here. That's really realtime. That's a benefit. You also mentioned the ability for more people launching payloads into space. I'm only imagined Moore's law smaller, faster, cheaper applies to rockets too. So I'm imagining you have the benefits of space and you have now more potential objects flying out sanctioned and maybe unsanctioned. So is it going to be more rules around that? This is an interesting question cause it's exciting Space Force, but for all the good there is potentially bad out there. >> Yeah. So John, I think the basics of your question is as space becomes more congested and contested, is there a need for more international norms of how satellites fly in space? What kind of basic features satellites have to perhaps de orbit themselves? What kind of basic protections should all satellites be afforded as part of a peaceful global commons of space? I think those are all fantastic questions. And I know that US and many allied policy makers are looking very, very hard at those kinds of questions in terms of what are the norms of behavior and how we field, and field as the military term. But how we populate using civil or commercial terms that space layer at different altitudes, lower earth orbit, mid earth orbit, geosynchronous earth orbit, different kinds of orbits, what the kind of mission areas we accomplished from space. That's all things that need to be definitely taken into account as the place gets a little bit, not a little bit as the place gets increasingly more popular day in and day out. >> I'm super excited for Space Force. I know that a new generation of young folks are really interested in it's an emerging, changing great space. The focus here at this conference is space and cybersecurity, the intersection. I'd like to get your thoughts on the approach that a space force is taking to cybersecurity and how it impacts our national goals here in the United States. >> Yeah. So that's a great question John, let me talk about it in two basic ways. At number one is an and I know some people in the audience, this might make them a little bit uncomfortable, but I have to talk about the threat. And then relative to that threat, I really have to talk about the importance of cyber and specifically cyber security, as it relates to that threat. The threats that we face really represented a new era of warfare and that new era of warfare involves both space and cyber. We've seen a lot of action in recent months from certain countries, notably China and Russia that have threatened what I referred to earlier as the peaceful global commons of space. For example, it threw many unclassified sources and media sources. Everybody should understand that the Russians have been testing on orbit anti-satellite capabilities. It's been very clear if you were following just the week before last, the Department of Defense released its 2020 military and security developments involving the People's Republic of China. And it was very clear that China is developing ASATs, electronic jammers, directed energy weapons, and most relevant to today's discussion, offensive cyber capabilities. There are kinetic threats that are very, very easy to see, but a cyber attack against a critical command and control site or against a particular spacecraft could be just as devastating to the system and our war fighters in the case of GPS and important to note that that GPS system also impacts many civilians who are dependent on those systems from a first response perspective and emergency services, a cyber attack against a ground control site could cause operators to lose control of a spacecraft or an attacker could feed spoofed data to assist them to mislead operators so that they sent emergency services personnel to the wrong address. Attacks on spacecraft on orbit, whether directly via a network intrusion or enabled through malware introduced during the system's production while we're building the satellite can cripple or corrupt the data. Denial-of-service type attacks on our global networks obviously would disrupt our data flow and interfere with ongoing operations and satellite control. If GPS went down, I hesitate to say it this way, cause we might elicit some screams from the audience. But if GPS went down a Starbucks, wouldn't be able to handle your mobile order, Uber drivers wouldn't be able to find you. And Domino's certainly wouldn't be able to get there in 30 minutes or less. So with a little bit of tongue in cheek there from a military operations perspective, it's dead serious. We have become accustomed in the commercial world to threats like ransomware and malware. And those things have unfortunately become commonplace in commercial terrestrial networks and computer systems. However, what we're seeing is that our adversaries with the increased competition in space these same techniques are being retooled, if you will, to use against our national security space systems day in and day out. As I said, during my opening remarks on the importance of cyber, the value of these systems is directly tied to their integrity. If commanders in the field, firefighters in California or baristas in Starbucks, can't trust the data they're receiving, then that really harms their decision making capabilities. One of the big trends we've recently seen is the move towards proliferated LEO constellations, obviously Space X's Starlink on the commercial side and on the military side, the work that DARPA and my organization SMC are doing on Blackjack and Casino, as well as some space transport layer constellation work that the space development agency is designing are all really, really important types of mesh network systems that will revolutionaries how we plan and field war fighting systems and commercial communications and internet providing systems. But they're also heavily reliant on cybersecurity. We've got to make sure that they are secured to avoid an accident or international damage. Loss of control of these constellations really could be catastrophic from both a mission perspective or from a satellites tumbling out of low earth orbit perspective. Another trend is introductions in artificial intelligence and machine learning, onboard spacecraft are at the edge. Our satellites are really not so much hardware systems with a little software anymore in the commercial sector and in the defense sector, they're basically flying boxes full of software. And we need to ensure that data that we're getting out of those flying boxes full of software are helping us base our decisions on accurate data and algorithms, governing the right actions and that those systems are impervious to the extent possible to nefarious modifications. So in summation, cybersecurity is a vital element of everything in our national security space goals. And I would argue for our national goals, writ large, including economic and information dimensions, the Space Force leadership at all levels from some of the brand new second lieutenants that general Raymond swore in to the space force this morning, ceremonially from the air force associations, airspace and cyberspace conference to the various highest levels, General Raymond, General DT Thompson, myself, and a number of other senior leaders in this enterprise. We've got to make sure that we're all working together to keep cyber security at the forefront of our space systems cause they absolutely depend on it. >> You mentioned hardware, software threats, opportunities, challenges. I want to ask you because you got me thinking of the minute they're around infrastructure. We've heard critical infrastructure, grids here on earth. You're talking about critical infrastructure, a redefinition of what critical infrastructure is, an extension of what we have. So I'd love to get your thoughts about Space Force's view of that critical infrastructure vis-a-vis the threat vectors, because the term threat vectors has been kicked around in the cyberspace. Oh you have threat vectors. They're always increasing the surface area. If the surface area is from space, it's an unlimited service area. So you got different vectors. So you've got new critical infrastructure developing real time, really fast. And you got an expanded threat vector landscape. Putting that in perspective for the folks that aren't really inside the ropes on these critical issues. How would you explain this and how would you talk about those two things? >> So I tell you, just like, I'm sure people in the security side or the cybersecurity side of the business in the banking industry feel, they feel like it's all possible threat vectors represent a dramatic and protect potentially existential threat to all of the dollars that they have in the banking system, to the financial sector. On the Department of Defense side, we've got to have sort of the same mindset. That threat vector from, to, and through space against critical space systems, ground segments, the launch enterprise, or transportation to orbit and the various different domains within space itself. Like I mentioned before, LEO, MEO and GEO based satellites with different orbits, all of the different mission areas that are accomplished from space that I mentioned earlier, some that I did mention like a weather tactical or wide band communications, various new features of space control. All of those are things that we have to worry about from a cyber security threat perspective. And it's a daunting challenge right now. >> Yeah, that's awesome. And one of the things we've been falling on the hardware side on the ground is the supply chain. We've seen, malware being, really put in a really obscure hardware. Who manufactures it? Is it being outsourced? Obviously government has restrictions, but with the private sector, you mentioned China and the US kind of working together across these peaceful areas. But you got to look at the supply chain. How does the supply chain in the security aspect impact the mission of the US space Force? >> Yeah. Yeah. So how about another, just in terms of an example, another kind of California based historical example. The very first US Satellite, Explorer 1, was built by the jet propulsion laboratory folks, not far from here in El Segundo, up in Pasadena, that satellite, when it was first built in the late 50s weighing a little bit, over 30 pounds. And I'm sure that each and every part was custom made and definitely made by US companies. Fast forward to today. The global supply chain is so tightly coupled, and frankly many industries are so specialized, almost specialized regionally around the planet. We focus every day to guarantee the integrity of every component that we put in our space systems is absolutely critical to the operations of those satellites and we're dependent upon them, but it becomes more difficult and more difficult to understand the heritage, if you will, of some of the parts that are used, the thousands of parts that are used in some of our satellites that are literally school bus sized. The space industry, especially national security space sector is relatively small compared to other commercial industries. And we're moving towards using more and more parts from non US companies. Cybersecurity and cyber awareness have to be baked in from the beginning if we're going to be using parts that maybe we don't necessarily understand 100% like an Explorer one, the lineage of that particular part. The environmental difficulties in space are well known. The radiation environment, the temperature extremes, the vacuum, those require specialized component. And the US military is not the only customer in that space. In fact, we're definitely not the dominant customer in space anymore. All those factors require us along with our other government partners and many different commercial space organizations to keep a very close eye on our supply chains, from a quality perspective, a security perspective and availability. There's open source reporting on supply training intrusions from many different breaches of commercial retailers to the infectious spread of compromised patches, if you will. And our adversaries are aware of these techniques. As I mentioned earlier, with other forms of attack, considering our supply chains and development networks really becomes fair game for our adversaries. So we have to take that threat seriously. Between the government and industry sectors here in the US. We're also working with our industry partners to enact stronger defenses and assess our own vulnerabilities. Last fall, we completed an extensive review of all of our major contracts here at Space and Missile System Center to determine the levels of cyber security requirements we've implemented across our portfolio. And it sounds really kind of businessy geeky, if you will. Hey, we looked at our contracts to make sure that we had the right clauses in our contracts to address cybersecurity as dynamically as we possibly could. And so we found ourselves having to add new language to our contracts, to require system developers, to implement some more advanced protective measures in this evolving cyber security environment. So that data handling and supply chain protections from contract inception to launch and operations were taken into account. Cyber security really is a key performance parameter for us now. Performance of the system, It's as important as cost, it's as important as schedule, because if we deliver the perfect system on time and on cost, it can perform that missile warning or that communications mission perfectly, but it's not cyber secure. If it's doesn't have cyber protections built into it, or the ability to implement mitigations against cyber threats, then we've essentially fielded a shoe box in space that doesn't do the CA the war fighter or the nation any good. Supply chain risk management is a major challenge for us. We're doing a lot to coordinate with our industry partners. We're all facing it head on to try and build secure and trusted components that keep our confidence as leaders, firefighters, and baristas as the case may be. But it is a challenge. And we're trying to rise to that challenge. >> This is so exciting this new area, because it really touches everything. Talk about geeking out on the tech, the hardware, the systems but also you put your kind of MBA hat on you go, what's the ROI of extra development and how things get built. Because the always the exciting thing for space geeks is like, if you're building cool stuff, it's exciting, but you still have to build. And cybersecurity has proven that security has to be baked in from the beginning and be thought as a system architecture. So you're still building things, which means you got to acquire things, you got to acquire parts, you got acquire build software and sustain it. How is security impacting the acquisition and the sustainment of these systems for space? >> Yeah. From initial development, through planning for the acquisition, design, development, our production fielding and sustainment, it impacts all aspects of the life cycle, John. We simply, especially from the concept of baking in cybersecurity, we can't wait until something is built and then try and figure out how to make it cyber secure. So we've moved way further towards working side by side with our system developers to strengthen cybersecurity from the very beginning of a systems development, cyber security, and the resilience associated with it really have to be treated as a key system attribute. As I mentioned earlier, equivalent with data rates or other metrics of performance. We like to talk in the space world about mission assurance and mission assurance has always sort of taken us as we technically geek out. Mission assurance has always taken us to the will this system work in space. Can it work in a vacuum? Can it work in as it transfers through the Van Allen radiation belt or through the Southern hemisphere's electromagnetic anomaly? Will it work out in space? And now from a resiliency perspective, yeah, it has to work in space. It's got to be functional in space, but it's also got to be resistant to these cybersecurity threats. It's not just, I think a General D.T Thompson quoted this term. It's not just widget assurance anymore. It's mission assurance. How does that satellite operator that ground control segment operate while under attack? So let me break your question a little bit, just for purposes of discussion into really two parts, cybersecurity, for systems that are new and cybersecurity for systems that are in sustainment are kind of old and legacy. Obviously there's cyber vulnerabilities that threatened both, and we really have to employ different strategies for defensive of each one. For new systems. We're desperately trying to implement across the Department of Defense and particularly in the space world, a kind of a dev sec ops methodology and practice to delivering software faster and with greater security for our space systems. Here at SMC, we have a program called enterprise ground services, which is a toolkit, basically a collection of tools for common command and control of different satellite systems, EGS as we call it has an integrated suite for defensive cyber capabilities. Network operators can use these tools to gain unprecedented insight to data flows and to monitor space network traffic for anomalies or other potential indicators of a bad behavior, malicious behavior, if you will, it's rudimentary at this point, but because we're using DevSecOps and that incremental development approach, as we scale it, it just becomes more and more capable. Every product increment that we feel. Here at LA Air Force Base, we have the United Space Force's West Coast Software Factory, which we've dubbed the Kobayashi Maru. They're using those agile DevOps software development practices to deliver a space awareness software to the combined space operations center. Affectionately called the CSpock that CSpock is just on the road from Cal Poly there in San Luis Obispo at Vandenberg Air Force Base. They've so securely linked the sea Spock with other space operation centers around the planet, our allies, Australia, Canada, and the UK. We're partnering with all of them to enable secure and enhanced combined space operations. So lots of new stuff going on as we bake in new development capabilities for our space systems. But as I mentioned earlier, we've got large constellations of satellites on orbit right now. Some of them are well in excess of a decade or more or old on orbit. And so the design aspects of those satellites are several decades old. But we still have to worry about them cause they're critical to our space capabilities. We've been working with an air force material command organization called CROWS, which stands for the Cyber Resiliency Office for Weapon Systems to assess all of those legacy platforms from a cyber security perspective and develop defensive strategies and potential hardware and software upgrades to those systems to better enable them to live through this increasingly cybersecurity concerned era that we currently live in. Our industry partners have been critical to both of those different avenues. Both new systems and legacy systems. We're working closely with them to defend and upgrade national assets and develop the capabilities to do similar with new national assets coming online. The vulnerabilities of our space systems really kind of threatened the way we've done business in the past, both militarily and in the case of GPS economically. The impacts of that cybersecurity risk are clear in our acquisition and sustainment processes, but I've got to tell you, as the threat vectors change, as the vulnerabilities change, we've got to be nimble enough, agile enough, to be able to bounce back and forth. We can't just say, many people in the audience are probably familiar with the RMF or the Risk Management Framework approach to reviewing the cyber security of a system. We can't have program managers and engineers just accomplish an RMF on a system. And then, hey, high five, we're all good. It's a journey, not a destination, that's cybersecurity. And it's a constant battle rhythm through our weapon systems lifecycle, not just a single event. >> I want to get to this commercial business needs and your needs on the next question. But before I go there, you mentioned agile. And I see that clearly because when you have accelerated innovation cycles, you've got to be faster. And we saw this in the computer industry, mainframes, mini computers, and then we started getting beyond maybe when the internet hit and PCs came out, you saw the big enterprises, the banks and government start to work with startups. And it used to be a joke in the entrepreneurial circles is that, there's no way if you are a startup you're ever going to get a contract with a big business enterprise. Now that used to be for public sector and certainly for you guys. So as you see startups out there and there's acquisition involved, I'm sure would love to have a contract with Space Force. There's an ROI calculation where if it's in space and you have a sustainment view and it's software, you might have a new kind of business model that could be attractive to startups. Could you share your thoughts on the folks who want to be a supplier to you, whether they're a startup or an existing business that wants to be agile, but they might not be that big company. >> John, that's a fantastic question. We're desperately trying to reach out to those new space advocates, to those startups, to those what we sometimes refer to, within the Department of Defense, those non traditional defense contractors. A couple of things just for thinking purposes on some of the things that we're trying to highlight. Three years ago, we created here at Space and Missile System Center, the Space Enterprise Consortium to provide a platform, a contractual vehicle, really to enable us to rapidly prototype, development of space systems and to collaborate between the US Space Force, traditional defense contractors, non traditional vendors like startups, and even some academic institutions. SPEC, as we call it, Space Enterprise Consortium uses a specialized contracting tool to get contracts awarded quickly. Many in the audience may be familiar with other transaction agreements. And that's what SPEC is based on. And so far in just three years, SPEC has awarded 75 different prototyping contracts worth over $800 million with a 36% reduction in time to award. And because it's a consortium based competition for these kinds of prototyping efforts, the barrier to entry for small and nontraditional, for startups, even for academic institutions to be able to compete for these kinds of prototyping has really lowered. These types of partnerships that we've been working through on spec have really helped us work with smaller companies who might not have the background or expertise in dealing with the government or in working with cyber security for their systems, both our developmental systems and the systems that they're designing and trying to build. We want to provide ways for companies large and small to partner together in support kind of mutually beneficial relationships between all. Recently at the Annual Air Force Association conference that I mentioned earlier, I moderated a panel with several space industry leaders, all from big traditional defense contractors, by the way. And they all stressed the importance of building bridges and partnerships between major contractors in the defense industry and new entrance. And that helps us capture the benefits of speed and agility that come with small companies and startups, as well as the expertise and specialized skill sets of some of those larger contractors that we rely on day in and day out. Advanced cyber security protections and utilization of secure facilities are just a couple of things that I think we could be prioritizing more so in those collaborations. As I mentioned earlier, the SPEC has been very successful in awarding a number of different prototyping contracts and large dollar values. And it's just going to get better. There's over 400 members of the space enterprise consortium, 80% of them are non traditional kinds of vendors. And we just love working with them. Another thing that many people in the audience may be familiar with in terms of our outreach to innovators, if you will, and innovators that include cyber security experts is our space pitch day events. So we held our first event last November in San Francisco, where we awarded over a two day period about $46 million to 30 different companies that had potentially game changing ideas. These were phase two small business innovative research efforts that we awarded with cash on the spot. We're planning on holding our second space pitch day in the spring of 2021. We're planning on doing it right here in Los Angeles, COVID-19 environment permitting. And we think that these are fantastic venues for identifying and working with high-speed startups, and small businesses who are interested in really, truly partnering with the US Air Force. It's, as I said before, it's a really exciting time to be a part of this business. And working with the innovation economy is something that the Department of Defense really needs to do in that the innovation that we used to think was ours. That 80% of the industrial base innovation that came from the Department of Defense, the script has been flipped there. And so now more than 70%, particularly in space innovation comes from the commercial sector, not from the defense business itself. And so that's a tsunami of investment and a tsunami of a capability. And I need to figure out how to get my surfboard out and ride it, you know what I mean? >> Yeah, It's one of those things where the script has been flipped, but it's exciting because it's impacting everything. When you're talking about systems architecture? You're talking about software, you're talking about a business model. You're talking about dev sec opsx from a technical perspective, but now you have a business model innovation. All the theaters are exploding in innovation, technical, business, personnel. This brings up the workforce challenge. You've got the cyber needs for the US Space Force, It's probably great ROI model for new kinds of software development that could be priced into contracts. That's a entrepreneurial innovation, you've got the business model theater, you've got the personnel. How does the industry adopt and change? You guys are clearly driving this. How does the industry adjust to you? >> Yeah. So I think a great way to answer that question is to just talk about the kind of people that we're trying to prioritize in the US Space Force from an acquisition perspective, and in this particular case from a cybersecurity perspective. As I mentioned earlier, it's the most exciting time to be in space programs, really since the days of Apollo. Just to put it in terms that maybe have an impact with the audience. From 1957 until today, approximately 9,000 satellites have been launched from the various space varying countries around the planet. Less than 2000 of those 9,000 are still up on orbit and operational. And yet in the new space regime players like Space X have plans to launch, 12,000 satellites for some of their constellations alone. It really is a remarkable time in terms of innovation and fielding of space capabilities and all of those space capabilities, whether they're commercial, civil, or defense are going to require appropriate cybersecurity protections. It's just a really exciting time to be working in stuff like this. And so folks like the folks in this audience who have a passion about space and a passion about cybersecurity are just the kind of people that we want to work with. Cause we need to make sure our systems are secure and resilient. We need folks that have technical and computing expertise, engineering skills to be able to design cyber secure systems that can detect and mitigate attacks. But we also, as you alluded to, we need people that have that business and business acumen, human networking background, so that we can launch the startups and work with the non traditional businesses. Help to bring them on board help, to secure both their data and our data and make sure our processes and systems are free as much as possible from attack. For preparation, for audience members who are young and maybe thinking about getting into this trade space, you got to be smart on digital networking. You got to understand basic internet protocols, concepts, programming languages, database design. Learn what you can for penetration or vulnerability testing and a risk assessment. I will tell you this, and I don't think he will, I know he will not mind me telling you this, but you got to be a lifelong learner and so two years ago, I'm at home evening and I get a phone call on my cell phone and it's my boss, the commander of Air Force Space command, General, J. Raymond, who is now currently the Chief of Space Operations. And he is on temporary duty, flying overseas. He lands where he's going and first thing he does when he lands is he calls me and he goes JT, while I was traveling, I noticed that there were eBooks available on the commercial airliner I was traveling on and there was an ebook on something called scrumming and agile DevSecOps. And I read it, have you read it? And I said, no, sir. But if you tell me what the title of the book is, I will read it. And so I got to go to my staff meeting, the very next week, the next time we had a staff meeting and tell everybody in the staff meeting, hey, if the four star and the three star can read the book about scrumming, then I'm pretty sure all of you around this table and all our lieutenants and our captains our GS13s, All of our government employees can get smart on the scrumming development process. And interestingly as another side, I had a telephone call with him last year during the holidays, where he was trying to take some leave. And I said, sir, what are you up to today? Are you making eggnog for the event tonight or whatever. And the Chief of Space Operations told me no, I'm trying to teach myself Python. I'm at lesson two, and it's not going so well, but I'm going to figure this out. And so that kind of thing, if the chief of staff or the Chief of Space Operations can prioritize scrumming and Python language and innovation in his daily schedule, then we're definitely looking for other people who can do that. And we'll just say, lower levels of rank throughout our entire space force enterprise. Look, we don't need people that can code a satellite from scratch, but we need to know, we need to have people that have a basic grasp of the programming basics and cybersecurity requirements. And that can turn those things into meaningful actions, obviously in the space domain, things like basic physics and orbital mechanics are also important spaces, not an intuitive domain. So under understanding how things survive on orbit is really critical to making the right design and operational decisions. And I know there's probably a lot, because of this conference. I know there's probably a whole lot of high speed cybersecurity experts out in the audience. And I need those people in the US Space Force. The country is counting on it, but I wouldn't discount having people that are just cyber aware or cyber savvy. I have contracting officers and logisticians and program managers, and they don't have to be high end cybersecurity experts, but they have to be aware enough about it to be able to implement cyber security protections into our space systems. So the skill set is really, really broad. Our adversaries are pouring billions of dollars into designing and fielding offensive and destructive space, cybersecurity weapons. They repeatedly shown really a blatant disregard of safety and international norms for good behavior on orbit. And the cyber security aspects of our space systems is really a key battleground going forward so that we can maintain that. As I mentioned before, peaceful global comments of space, we really need all hands on deck. If you're interested in helping in uniform, if you're interested in helping, not in uniform, but as a government employee, a commercial or civil employee to help us make cyber security more important or more able to be developed for our space systems. And we'd really love to work with you or have you on the team to build that safe and secure future for our space systems. >> Lieutenant General John Thompson, great insight. Thank you for sharing all that awesome stories too, and motivation for the young next generation. The United States Space Force approach to cybersecurity. Really amazing talk, thank you for your time. Final parting question is, as you look out and you have your magic wand, what's your view for the next few years in terms of things that we could accomplish? It's a super exciting time. What do you hope for? >> So first of all, John, thanks to you and thanks to Cal Poly for the invitation and thanks to everybody for their interest in cybersecurity, especially as it relates to space systems, that's here at the conference. There's a quote, and I'll read it here from Bernard Schriever, who was the founder, if you will, a legend in a DoD space, the founder of the Western development division, which was a predecessor organization to Space and Missile System Center, General Schriever, I think captures the essence of how we see the next couple of years. "The world has an ample supply of people "who can always come up with a dozen good reasons "why new ideas will not work and should not be tried, "but the people who produce progress are breed apart. "They have the imagination, "the courage and the persistence to find solutions." And so I think if you're hoping that the next few years of space innovation and cybersecurity innovation are going to be upon a pony ride at the County fair, then perhaps you should look for another line of work, because I think the next few years in space and cybersecurity innovation are going to be more like a rodeo and a very dynamic rodeo as it goes. It is an awesome privilege to be part of this ecosystem. It's really an honor for me to be able to play some small role in the space ecosystem and trying to improve it while I'm trying to improve the chances of the United States of America in a space war fighting environment. And so I thank all of you for participating today and for this little bit of time that you've allowed me to share with you. Thank you. >> Sir, thank you for your leadership and thank you for the time for this awesome event, Space and Cyber Cybersecurity Symposium 2020, I'm John Furrier on behalf of Cal Poly, thanks for watching. (mellow music)

>>from around the globe If the cube with digital coverage of M I t. Chief data officer and Information quality symposium brought to you by Silicon Angle Media >>Hello, everyone. This is Day Volonte and welcome back to our continuing coverage of the M I t. Chief Data Officer CDO I Q event Interpol Bhandari is here. He's a leading voice in the CDO community and a longtime Cubillan Interpol. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on for this. Especially >>program. My pleasure. >>So when you you and I first met, you laid out what I thought was, you know, one of the most cogent frameworks to understand what a CDO is job was where the priority should be. And one of those was really understanding how, how, how data contributes to the monetization of station aligning with lines of business, a number of other things. And that was several years ago. A lot of change since then. You know, we've been doing this conference since probably twenty thirteen and back then, you know, Hadoop was coming on strong. A lot of CEOs didn't want to go near the technology that's beginning to change. CDOs and cto Zehr becoming much more aligned at the hip. The reporting organizations have changed. But I love your perspective on what you've observed as changing in the CDO roll over the last half decade or so. >>Well, did you know that I became chief data officer in two thousand six? December two thousand and six And I have done this job four times four major overnight have created of the organization from scratch each time. Now, in December of two thousand six, when I became chief data officer, there were only four. Chief Data Officer, uh, boom and I was the first in health care, and there were three, three others, you know, one of the Internet one and credit guns one and banking. And I think I'm the only one actually left standing still doing this job. That's a good thing or a bad thing. But like, you know, it certainly has allowed me to love the craft and then also scripted down to the level that, you know, I actually do think of it purely as a craft. That is. I know, going into a mutual what I'm gonna do. They were on the central second. No, the interesting things that have unfolded. Obviously, the professions taken off There are literally thousands off chief data officers now, and there are plenty off changes. I think the main change, but the job is it's, I think, a little less daunting in terms off convincing the senior leadership that it's need it because I think the awareness at the CEO level is much, much, much better than what it waas in two thousand six. Across the world. Now, having said that, I think it is still only awareness and don't think that there's really a deep understanding of those levels. And so there's a lot off infusion, which is why you will. You kind of think this is my period. But you saw all these professions take off with C titles, right? Chief Data officer, chief analytics officer, chief digital officer and chief technology officer. See, I off course is being there for a long time. And but I think these newer see positions. They're all very, very related, and they all kind of went to the same need which had to do with enterprise transformation, digital transformation, that enterprises chief digital officer, that's another and and people were all trying to essentially feel the elephants and they could only see part of it at the senior levels, and they came up with which have a role you know, seemed most meaningful to them. But really, all of us are trying to do the same job, which is to accelerate digital transformation in the enterprise. Your comment about you kind of see that the seat eels and sea deals now, uh, partnering up much more than in the past, and I think that's in available the major driving force full. That is, in my view, anyway. It's is artificial intelligence as people try to infuse artificial intelligence. Well, then it's very technical field. Still, it's not something that you know you can just hand over to somebody who has the business jobs, but not the deep technical chops to pull that off. And so, in the case off chief data officers that do have the technical jobs, you'll see them also pretty much heading up the I effort in total and you know, as I do for the IBM case, will be building the Data and AI Enablement internal platform for for IBM. But I think in other cases you you've got Chief date officers who are coming in from a different angle. You know, they built Marghera but the CTO now, because they have to. Otherwise you cannot get a I infused into the organization. >>So there were a lot of other priorities, obviously certainly digital transformation. We've been talking about it for years, but still in many organisations, there was a sense of, well, not on my watch, maybe a sense of complacency or maybe just other priorities. Cove. It obviously has changed that now one hundred percent of the companies that we talked to are really putting this digital transformation on the front burner. So how has that changed the role of CDO? Has it just been interpolate an acceleration of that reality, or has it also somewhat altered the swim lanes? >>I think I think it's It's It's Bolt actually, so I have a way of looking at this in my mind, the CDO role. But if you look at it from a business perspective, they're looking for three things. The CEO is looking for three things from the CDO. One is you know this person is going to help with the revenue off the company by enabling the production of new products, new products of resulting in new revenue and so forth. That's kind of one aspect of the monetization. Another aspect is the CEO is going to help with the efficiency within the organization by making data a lot more accessible, as well as enabling insights that reduce into and cycle time for major processes. And so that's another way that they have monitor. And the last one is a risk reduction that they're going to reduce the risk, you know, as regulations. And as you have cybersecurity exposure on incidents that you know just keep keep accelerating as well. You're gonna have to also step in and help with that. So every CDO, the way their senior leadership looks at them is some mix off three. And in some cases, one has given more importance than the other, and so far, but that's how they are essentially looking at it now. I think what digital transformation has done is it's managed to accelerate, accelerate all three off these outcomes because you need to attend to all three as you move forward. But I think that the individual balance that's struck for individuals reveals really depends on their ah, their company, their situation, who their peers are, who is actually leading the transformation and so >>forth, you know, in the value pie. A lot of the early activity around CDO sort of emanated from the quality portions of the organization. It was sort of a compliance waited roll, not necessarily when you started your own journey here. Obviously been focused on monetization how data contributes to that. But But you saw that generally, organizations, even if they didn't have a CDO, they had this sort of back office alliance thing that has totally changed the the in the value equation. It's really much more about insights, as you mentioned. So one of the big changes we've seen in the organization is that data pipeline you mentioned and and cycle time. And I'd like to dig into that a little bit because you and I have talked about this. This is one of the ways that a chief data officer and the related organizations can add the most value reduction in that cycle time. That's really where the business value comes from. So I wonder if we could talk about that a little bit and how that the constituents in the stakeholders in that in that life cycle across that data pipeline have changed. >>That's a very good question. Very insightful questions. So if you look at ah, company like idea, you know, my role in totally within IBM is to enable Ibn itself to become an AI enterprise. So infuse a on into all our major business processes. You know, things like our supply chain lead to cash well, process, you know, our finance processes like accounts receivable and procurement that soulful every major process that you can think off is using Watson mouth. So that's the That's the That's the vision that's essentially what we've implemented. And that's how we are using that now as a showcase for clients and customers. One of the things that be realized is the data and Ai enablement spots off business. You know, the work that I do also has processes. Now that's the pipeline you refer to. You know, we're setting up the data pipeline. We're setting up the machine learning pipeline, deep learning blank like we're always setting up these pipelines, And so now you have the opportunity to actually turn the so called EI ladder on its head because the Islander has to do with a first You collected data, then you curated. You make sure that it's high quality, etcetera, etcetera, fit for EI. And then eventually you get to applying, you know, ai and then infusing it into business processes. And so far, But once you recognize that the very first the earliest creases of work with the data those themselves are essentially processes. You can infuse AI into those processes, and that's what's made the cycle time reduction. And although things that I'm talking about possible because it just makes it much, much easier for somebody to then implement ai within a lot enterprise, I mean, AI requires specialized knowledge. There are pieces of a I like deep learning, but there are, you know, typically a company's gonna have, like a handful of people who even understand what that is, how to apply it. You know how models drift when they need to be refreshed, etcetera, etcetera, and so that's difficult. You can't possibly expect every business process, every business area to have that expertise, and so you've then got to rely on some core group which is going to enable them to do so. But that group can't do it manually because I get otherwise. That doesn't scale again. So then you come down to these pipelines and you've got to actually infuse AI into these data and ai enablement processes so that it becomes much, much easier to scale across another. >>Some of the CEOs, maybe they don't have the reporting structure that you do, or or maybe it's more of a far flung organization. Not that IBM is not far flung, but they may not have the ability to sort of inject AI. Maybe they can advocate for it. Do you see that as a challenge for some CEOs? And how do they so to get through that, what's what's the way in which they should be working with their constituents across the organization to successfully infuse ai? >>Yeah, that's it's. In fact, you get a very good point. I mean, when I joined IBM, one of the first observations I made and I in fact made it to a senior leadership, is that I didn't think that from a business standpoint, people really understood what a I met. So when we talked about a cognitive enterprise on the I enterprise a zaydi em. You know, our clients don't really understand what that meant, which is why it became really important to enable IBM itself to be any I enterprise. You know that. That's my data strategy. Your you kind of alluded to the fact that I have this approach. There are these five steps, while the very first step is to come up with the data strategy that enables a business strategy that the company's on. And in my case, it was, Hey, I'm going to enable the company because it wants to become a cloud and cognitive company. I'm going to enable that. And so we essentially are data strategy became one off making IBM. It's something I enterprise, but the reason for doing that the reason why that was so important was because then we could use it as a showcase for clients and customers. And so But I'm talking with our clients and customers. That's my role. I'm really the only role I'm playing is what I call an experiential selling there. I'm saying, Forget about you know, the fact that we're selling this particular product or that particular product that you got GPU servers. We've got you know what's an open scale or whatever? It doesn't really matter. Why don't you come and see what we've done internally at scale? And then we'll also lay out for you all the different pain points that we have to work through using our products so that you can kind of make the same case when you when you when you apply it internally and same common with regard to the benefit, you know the cycle, time reduction, some of the cycle time reductions that we've seen in my process is itself, you know, like this. Think about metadata business metadata generating that is so difficult. And it's again, something that's critical if you want to scale your data because you know you can't really have a good catalogue of data if you don't have good business, meditate. Eso. Anybody looking at what's in your catalog won't understand what it is. They won't be able to use it etcetera. And so we've essentially automated business metadata generation using AI and the cycle time reduction that was like ninety five percent, you know, haven't actually argue. It's more than that, because in the past, most people would not. For many many data sets, the pragmatic approach would be. Don't even bother with the business matter data. Then it becomes just put somewhere in the are, you know, data architecture somewhere in your data leg or whatever, you have data warehouse, and then it becomes the data swamp because nobody understands it now with regard to our experience applying AI, infusing it across all our major business processes are average cycle time reduction is seventy percent, so just a tremendous amount of gains are there. But to your point, unless you're able to point to some application at scale within the enterprise, you know that's meaningful for the enterprise, Which is kind of what the what the role I play in terms of bringing it forward to our clients and customers. It's harder to argue. I'll make a case or investment into A I would then be enterprise without actually being able to point to those types of use cases that have been scaled where you can demonstrate the value. So that's extremely important part of the equation. To make sure that that happens on a regular basis with our clients and customers, I will say that you know your point is vomited a lot off. Our clients and customers come back and say, Tell me when they're having a conversation. I was having a conversation just last week with major major financial service of all nations, and I got the same point saying, If you're coming out of regulation, how do I convince my leadership about the value of a I and you know, I basically responded. He asked me about the scale use cases You can show that. But perhaps the biggest point that you can make as a CDO after the senior readership is can we afford to be left up? That is the I think the biggest, you know, point that the leadership has to appreciate. Can you afford to be left up? >>I want to come back to this notion of seventy percent on average, the cycle time reduction. That's astounding. And I want to make sure people understand the potential impacts. And, I would say suspected many CEOs, if not most understand sort of system thinking. It's obviously something that you're big on but often times within organisations. You might see them trying to optimize one little portion of the data lifecycle and you know having. Okay, hey, celebrate that success. But unless you can take that systems view and reduce that overall cycle time, that's really where the business value is. And I guess my we're real question around. This is Every organization has some kind of Northstar, many about profit, and you can increase revenue are cut costs, and you can do that with data. It might be saving lives, but ultimately to drive this data culture, you've got to get people thinking about getting insights that help you with that North Star, that mission of the company, but then taking a systems view and that's seventy percent cycle time reduction is just the enormous business value that that drives, I think, sometimes gets lost on people. And these air telephone numbers in the business case aren't >>yes, No, absolutely. It's, you know, there's just a tremendous amount of potential on, and it's it's not an easy, easy thing to do by any means. So we've been always very transparent about the Dave. As you know, we put forward this this blueprint right, the cognitive enterprise blueprint, how you get to it, and I kind of have these four major pillars for the blueprint. There's obviously does this data and you're getting the data ready for the consummation that you want to do but also things like training data sets. How do you kind of run hundreds of thousands of experiments on a regular basis, which kind of review to the other pillar, which is techology? But then the last two pillars are business process, change and the culture organizational culture, you know, managing organizational considerations, that culture. If you don't keep all four in lockstep, the transformation is usually not successful at an end to end level, then it becomes much more what you pointed out, which is you have kind of point solutions and the role, you know, the CEO role doesn't make the kind of strategic impact that otherwise it could do so and this also comes back to some of the only appointee of you to do. If you think about how do you keep those four pillars and lock sync? It means you've gotta have the data leader. You also gotta have the technology, and in some cases they might be the same people. Hey, just for the moment, sake of argument, let's say they're all different people and many, many times. They are so the data leader of the technology of you and the operations leaders because the other ones own the business processes as well as the organizational years. You know, they've got it all worked together to make it an effective conservation. And so the organization structure that you talked about that in some cases my peers may not have that. You know, that's that. That is true. If the if the senior leadership is not thinking overall digital transformation, it's going to be difficult for them to them go out that >>you've also seen that culturally, historically, when it comes to data and analytics, a lot of times that the lines of business you know their their first response is to attack the quality of the data because the data may not support their agenda. So there's this idea of a data culture on, and I want to ask you how self serve fits into that. I mean, to the degree that the business feels as though they actually have some kind of ownership in the data, and it's largely, you know, their responsibility as opposed to a lot of the finger pointing that has historically gone on. Whether it's been decision support or enterprise data, warehousing or even, you know, Data Lakes. They've sort of failed toe live up to that. That promise, particularly from a cultural standpoint, it and so I wonder, How have you guys done in that regard? How did you get there? Many Any other observations you could make in that regard? >>Yeah. So, you know, I think culture is probably the hardest nut to crack all of those four pillars that I back up and you've got You've got to address that, Uh, not, you know, not just stop down, but also bottom up as well. As you know, period. Appear I'll give you some some examples based on our experience, that idea. So the way my organization is set up is there is a obviously a technology on the other. People who are doing all the data engineering were kind of laying out the foundational technical elements or the transformation. You know, the the AI enabled one be planning networks, and so so that are those people. And then there is another senior leader who reports directly to me, and his organization is all around adoptions. He's responsible for essentially taking what's available in the technology and then working with the business areas to move forward and make this make and infuse. A. I do the processes that the business and he is looking. It's done in a bottom upwards, deliberately set up, designed it to be bottom up. So what I mean by that is the team on my side is fully empowered to move forward. Why did they find a like minded team on the other side and go ahead and do it? They don't have to come back for funding they don't have, You know, they just go ahead and do it. They're basically empowered to do that. And that particular set up enabled enabled us in a couple of years to have one hundred thousand internal users on our Central data and AI enabled platform. And when I mean hundred thousand users, I mean users who were using it on a monthly basis. We company, you know, So if you haven't used it in a month, we won't come. So there it's over one hundred thousand, even very rapidly to that. That's kind of the enterprise wide storm. That's kind of the bottom up direction. The top down direction Waas the strategic element that I talked with you about what I said, Hey, be our data strategy is going to be to create, make IBM itself into any I enterprise and then use that as a showcase for plants and customers That kind of and be reiterated back. And I worked the senior leadership on that view all the time talking to customers, the central and our senior leaders. And so that's kind of the air cover to do this, you know, that mix gives you, gives you that possibility. I think from a peer to peer standpoint, but you get to these lot scale and to end processes, and that there, a couple of ways I worked that one way is we've kind of looked at our enterprise data and said, Okay, therefore, major pillars off data that we want to go after data, tomato plants, data about our offerings, data about financial data, that s and then our work full student and then within that there are obviously some pillars, like some sales data that comes in and, you know, been workforce. You could have contractors. Was his employees a center But I think for the moment, about these four major pillars off data. And so let me map that to end to end large business processes within the company. You know, the really large ones, like Enterprise Performance Management, into a or lead to cash generation into and risk insides across our full supply chain and to and things like that. And we've kind of tied these four major data pillars to those major into and processes Well, well, yes, that there's a mechanism they're obviously in terms off facilitating, and to some extent one might argue, even forcing some interaction between teams that are the way they talk. But it also brings me and my peers much closer together when you set it up that way. And that means, you know, people from the HR side people from the operation side, the data side technology side, all coming together to really move things forward. So all three tracks being hit very, very hard to move the culture fall. >>Am I also correct that you have, uh, chief data officers that reporting to you whether it's a matrix or direct within the division's? Is that right? >>Yeah, so? So I mean, you know, for in terms off our structure, as you know, way our global company, we're also far flung company. We have many different products in business units and so forth. And so, uh, one of the things that I realized early on waas we are going to need data officers, each of those business units and the business units. There's obviously the enterprise objective. And, you know, you could think of the enterprise objectives in terms of some examples based on what I said in the past, which is so enterprise objective would be We've gotta have a data foundation by essentially making data along these four pillars. I talked about clients offerings, etcetera, you know, very accessible self service. You have mentioned south, so thank you. This is where the South seven speaks. Comes it right. So you can you can get at that data quickly and appropriately, right? You want to make sure that the access control, all that stuff is designed out and you're able to change your policies and you'd swap manual. But, you know, those things got implemented very rapidly and quickly. And so you've got you've got that piece off off the off the puzzle due to go after. And then I think the other aspect off off. This is, though, when you recognize that every business unit also has its own objectives and they are looking at some of those things somewhat differently. So I'll give you an example. We've got data any our product units. Now, those CEOs right there, concern is going to be a lot more around the products themselves And how were monetizing those box and so they're not per se concerned with, You know, how you reduce the enter and cycle time off IBM in total supply chain so that this is my point. So they but they're gonna have substantial considerations and objectives that they want to accomplish. And so I recognize that early on, and we came up with this notion off a data officer council and I helped staff the council s. So this is why that's the Matrix to reporting that we talked about. But I selected some of the key Blair's that we have in those units, and I also made sure they were funded by the unit. So they report into the units because their paycheck is actually determined. Pilot unit and which makes them than aligned with the objectives off the unit, but also obviously part of my central approach so that I can disseminate it out to the organization. It comes in very, very handy when you are trying to do things across the company as well. So when we you know GDP our way, we have to get the company ready for Judy PR, I would say that this mechanism became a key key aspect of what enabled us to move forward and do it rapidly. Trouble them >>be because you had the structure that perhaps the lines of business weren't. Maybe is concerned about GDP are, but you had to be concerned with it overall. And this allowed you to sort of hiding their importance, >>right? Because think of in the case of Jeannie PR, they have to be a company wide policy and implementation, right? And if he did not have that structure already in place, it would have made it that much harder. Do you get that uniformity and consistency across the company, right, You know, So you will have to in the weapon that structure, but we already have it because way said Hey, this is around for data. We're gonna have these types of considerations that they are. And so we have this thing regular. You know, this man network that meat meets regularly every month, actually, and you know, when things like GDP are much more frequently than that, >>right? So that makes sense. We're out of time. But I wonder if we could just close if you could address the M I t CDO audience that probably this is the largest audience, Believe or not, now that it's that's virtual definitely expanded the audience, but it's still a very elite group. And the reason why I was so pleased that you agreed to do this is because you've got one of the more complex organizations out there and you've succeeded. And, ah, a lot of the hard, hard work. So what? What message would you leave the M I t CDO audience Interpol? >>So I would say that you know, it's it's this particular professional. Receiving a profession is, uh, if I have to pick one trait of let me pick two traits, I think what is your A change agent? So you have to be really comfortable with change things are going to change, the organization is going to look to you to make those changes. And so that's what aspect off your job, you know, may or may not be part of me immediately. But the those particular set of skills and characteristics and something that you know, one has to, uh one has to develop or time, And I think the other thing I would say is it's a continuous looming jaw. So you continue sexism and things keep changing around you and changing rapidly. And, you know, if you just even think just in terms off the subject areas, I mean this Syria today you've got to understand technology. Obviously, you've gotta understand data you've got to understand in a I and data science. You've got to understand cybersecurity. You've gotta understand the regulatory framework, and you've got to keep all that in mind, and you've got to distill it down to certain trends. That's that's happening, right? I mean, so this is an example of that is that there's a trend towards more regulation around privacy and also in terms off individual ownership of data, which is very different from what's before the that's kind of weather. Bucket's going and so you've got to be on top off all those things. And so the you know, the characteristic of being a continual learner, I think is a is a key aspect off this job. One other thing I would add. And this is All Star Coleman nineteen, you know, prik over nineteen in terms of those four pillars that we talked about, you know, which had to do with the data technology, business process and organization and culture. From a CDO perspective, the data and technology will obviously from consent, I would say most covert nineteen most the civil unrest. And so far, you know, the other two aspects are going to be critical as we move forward. And so the people aspect of the job has never bean, you know, more important down it's today, right? That's something that I find myself regularly doing the stalking at all levels of the organization, one on a one, which is something that we never really did before. But now we find time to do it so obviously is doable. I don't think it's just it's a change that's here to stay, and it ships >>well to your to your point about change if you were in your comfort zone before twenty twenty two things years certainly taking you out of it into Parliament. All right, thanks so much for coming back in. The Cuban addressing the M I t CDO audience really appreciate it. >>Thank you for having me. That my pleasant >>You're very welcome. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave a lot. They will be right back after this short >>break. You're watching the queue.

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back, you're ready. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are still getting through the year of 2020. It's still the year of COVID and there's no end in sight I think until we get to a vaccine. That said, we're really excited to have one of our favorite guests. We haven't had him on for a while. I haven't talked to him for a long time. He used to I think have the record for the most CUBE appearances of probably any CUBE alumni. We're excited to have him joining us from his house in Palo Alto. Bill Schmarzo, you know him as the Dean of Big Data, he's got more titles. He's the chief innovation officer at Hitachi Vantara. He's also, we used to call him the Dean of Big Data, kind of for fun. Well, Bill goes out and writes a bunch of books. And now he teaches at the University of San Francisco, School of Management as an executive fellow. He's an honorary professor at NUI Galway. I think he's just, he likes to go that side of the pond and a many time author now, go check him out. His author profile on Amazon, the "Big Data MBA," "The Art of Thinking Like A Data Scientist" and another Big Data, kind of a workbook. Bill, great to see you. >> Thanks, Jeff, you know, I miss my time on theCUBE. These conversations have always been great. We've always kind of poked around the edges of things. A lot of our conversations have always been I thought, very leading edge and the title Dean of Big Data is courtesy of theCUBE. You guys were the first ones to give me that name out of one of the very first Strata Conferences where you dubbed me the Dean of Big Data, because I taught a class there called the Big Data MBA and look what's happened since then. >> I love it. >> It's all on you guys. >> I love it, and we've outlasted Strata, Strata doesn't exist as a conference anymore. So, you know, part of that I think is because Big Data is now everywhere, right? It's not the standalone thing. But there's a topic, and I'm holding in my hands a paper that you worked on with a colleague, Dr. Sidaoui, talking about what is the value of data? What is the economic value of data? And this is a topic that's been thrown around quite a bit. I think you list a total of 28 reference sources in this document. So it's a well researched piece of material, but it's a really challenging problem. So before we kind of get into the details, you know, from your position, having done this for a long time, and I don't know what you're doing today, you used to travel every single week to go out and visit customers and actually do implementations and really help people think these through. When you think about the value, the economic value, how did you start to kind of frame that to make sense and make it kind of a manageable problem to attack? >> So, Jeff, the research project was eyeopening for me. And one of the advantages of being a professor is, you have access to all these very smart, very motivated, very free research sources. And one of the problems that I've wrestled with as long as I've been in this industry is, how do you figure out what is data worth? And so what I did is I took these research students and I stick them on this problem. I said, "I want you to do some research. Let me understand what is the value of data?" I've seen all these different papers and analysts and consulting firms talk about it, but nobody's really got this thing clicked. And so we launched this research project at USF, professor Mouwafac Sidaoui and I together, and we were bumping along the same old path that everyone else got, which was inched on, how do we get data on our balance sheet? That was always the motivation, because as a company we're worth so much more because our data is so valuable, and how do I get it on the balance sheet? So we're headed down that path and trying to figure out how do you get it on the balance sheet? And then one of my research students, she comes up to me and she says, "Professor Schmarzo," she goes, "Data is kind of an unusual asset." I said, "Well, what do you mean?" She goes, "Well, you think about data as an asset. It never depletes, it never wears out. And the same dataset can be used across an unlimited number of use cases at a marginal cost equal to zero." And when she said that, it's like, "Holy crap." The light bulb went off. It's like, "Wait a second. I've been thinking about this entirely wrong for the last 30 some years of my life in this space. I've had the wrong frame. I keep thinking about this as an act, as an accounting conversation. An accounting determines valuation based on what somebody is willing to pay for." So if you go back to Adam Smith, 1776, "Wealth of Nations," he talks about valuation techniques. And one of the valuation techniques he talks about is valuation and exchange. That is the value of an asset is what someone's willing to pay you for it. So the value of this bottle of water is what someone's willing to pay you for it. So everybody fixates on this asset, valuation in exchange methodology. That's how you put it on balance sheet. That's how you run depreciation schedules, that dictates everything. But Adam Smith also talked about in that book, another valuation methodology, which is valuation in use, which is an economics conversation, not an accounting conversation. And when I realized that my frame was wrong, yeah, I had the right book. I had Adam Smith, I had "Wealth of Nations." I had all that good stuff, but I hadn't read the whole book. I had missed this whole concept about the economic value, where value is determined by not how much someone's willing to pay you for it, but the value you can drive by using it. So, Jeff, when that person made that comment, the entire research project, and I got to tell you, my entire life did a total 180, right? Just total of 180 degree change of how I was thinking about data as an asset. >> Right, well, Bill, it's funny though, that's kind of captured, I always think of kind of finance versus accounting, right? And then you're right on accounting. And we learn a lot of things in accounting. Basically we learn more that we don't know, but it's really hard to put it in an accounting framework, because as you said, it's not like a regular asset. You can use it a lot of times, you can use it across lots of use cases, it doesn't degradate over time. In fact, it used to be a liability. 'cause you had to buy all this hardware and software to maintain it. But if you look at the finance side, if you look at the pure play internet companies like Google, like Facebook, like Amazon, and you look at their valuation, right? We used to have this thing, we still have this thing called Goodwill, which was kind of this capture between what the market established the value of the company to be. But wasn't reflected when you summed up all the assets on the balance sheet and you had this leftover thing, you could just plug in goodwill. And I would hypothesize that for these big giant tech companies, the market has baked in the value of the data, has kind of put in that present value on that for a long period of time over multiple projects. And we see it captured probably in goodwill, versus being kind of called out as an individual balance sheet item. >> So I don't think it's, I don't know accounting. I'm not an accountant, thank God, right? And I know that goodwill is one of those things if I remember from my MBA program is something that when you buy a company and you look at the value you paid versus what it was worth, it stuck into this category called goodwill, because no one knew how to figure it out. So the company at book value was a billion dollars, but you paid five billion for it. Well, you're not an idiot, so that four billion extra you paid must be in goodwill and they'd stick it in goodwill. And I think there's actually a way that goodwill gets depreciated as well. So it could be that, but I'm totally away from the accounting framework. I think that's distracting, trying to work within the gap rules is more of an inhibitor. And we talk about the Googles of the world and the Facebooks of the world and the Netflix of the world and the Amazons and companies that are great at monetizing data. Well, they're great at monetizing it because they're not selling it, they're using it. Google is using their data to dominate search, right? Netflix is using it to be the leader in on-demand videos. And it's how they use all the data, how they use the insights about their customers, their products, and their operations to really drive new sources of value. So to me, it's this, when you start thinking about from an economics perspective, for example, why is the same car that I buy and an Uber driver buys, why is that car more valuable to an Uber driver than it is to me? Well, the bottom line is, Uber drivers are going to use that car to generate value, right? That $40,000, that car they bought is worth a lot more, because they're going to use that to generate value. For me it sits in the driveway and the birds poop on it. So, right, so it's this value in use concept. And when organizations can make that, by the way, most organizations really struggle with this. They struggle with this value in use concept. They want to, when you talk to them about data monetization and say, "Well, I'm thinking about the chief data officer, try not to trying to sell data, knocking on doors, shaking their tin cup, saying, 'Buy my data.'" No, no one wants your data. Your data is more valuable for how you use it to drive your operations then it's a sell to somebody else. >> Right, right. Well, on of the other things that's really important from an economics concept is scarcity, right? And a whole lot of economics is driven around scarcity. And how do you price for scarcity so that the market evens out and the price matches up to the supply? What's interesting about the data concept is, there is no scarcity anymore. And you know, you've outlined and everyone has giant numbers going up into the right, in terms of the quantity of the data and how much data there is and is going to be. But what you point out very eloquently in this paper is the scarcity is around the resources to actually do the work on the data to get the value out of the data. And I think there's just this interesting step function between just raw data, which has really no value in and of itself, right? Until you start to apply some concepts to it, you start to analyze it. And most importantly, that you have some context by which you're doing all this analysis to then drive that value. And I thought it was really an interesting part of this paper, which is get beyond the arguing that we're kind of discussing here and get into some specifics where you can measure value around a specific business objective. And not only that, but then now the investment of the resources on top of the data to be able to extract the value to then drive your business process for it. So it's a really different way to think about scarcity, not on the data per se, but on the ability to do something with it. >> You're spot on, Jeff, because organizations don't fail because of a lack of use cases. They fail because they have too many. So how do you prioritize? Now that scarcity is not an issue on the data side, but it is this issue on the people resources side, you don't have unlimited data scientists, right? So how do you prioritize and focus on those opportunities that are most important? I'll tell you, that's not a data science conversation, that's a business conversation, right? And figuring out how you align organizations to identify and focus on those use cases that are most important. Like in the paper we go through several different use cases using Chipotle as an example. The reason why I picked Chipotle is because, well, I like Chipotle. So I could go there and I could write it off as research. But there's a, think about the number of use cases where a company like Chipotle or any other company can leverage your data to drive their key business initiatives and their key operational use cases. It's almost unbounded, which by the way, is a huge challenge. In fact, I think part of the problem we see with a lot of organizations is because they do such a poor job of prioritizing and focusing, they try to solve the entire problem with one big fell swoop, right? It's slightly the old ERP big bang projects. Well, I'm just going to spend $20 million to buy this analytic capability from company X and I'm going to install it and then magic is going to happen. And then magic is going to happen, right? And then magic is going to happen, right? And magic never happens. We get crickets instead, because the biggest challenge isn't around how do I leverage the data, it's about where do I start? What problems do I go after? And how do I make sure the organization is bought in to basically use case by use case, build out your data and analytics architecture and capabilities. >> Yeah, and you start backwards from really specific business objectives in the use cases that you outline here, right? I want to increase my average ticket by X. I want to increase my frequency of visits by X. I want to increase the amount of items per order from X to 1.2 X, or 1.3 X. So from there you get a nice kind of big revenue hit that you can plan around and then work backwards into the amount of effort that it takes and then you can come up, "Is this a good investment or not?" So it's a really different way to get back to the value of the data. And more importantly, the analytics and the work to actually call out the information. >> The technologies, the data and analytic technologies available to us. The very composable nature of these allow us to take this use case by use case approach. I can build out my data lake one use case at a time. I don't need to stuff 25 data sources into my data lake and hope there's someone more valuable. I can use the first use case to say, "Oh, I need these three data sources to solve that use case. I'm going to put those three data sources in the data lake. I'm going to go through the entire curation process of making sure the data has been transformed and cleansed and aligned and enriched and met of, all the other governance, all that kind of stuff this goes on. But I'm going to do that use case by use case, 'cause a use case can tell me which data sources are most important for that given situation. And I can build up my data lake and I can build up my analytics then one use case at a time. And there is a huge impact then, huge impact when I build out use case by use case. That does not happen. Let me throw something that's not really covered in the paper, but it is very much covered in my new book that I'm working on, which is, in knowledge-based industries, the economies of learning are more powerful than the economies of scale. Now think about that for a second. >> Say that again, say that again. >> Yeah, the economies of learning are more powerful than the economies of scale. And what that means is what I learned on the first use case that I build out, I can apply that learning to the second use case, to the third use case, to the fourth use case. So when I put my data into my data lake for my first use case, and the paper covers this, well, once it's in my data lake, the cost of reusing that data in a second, third and fourth use cases is basically, you know marginal cost is zero. So I get this ability to learn about what data sets are most important and to reapply that across the organization. So this learning concept, I learn use case by use case, I don't have to do a big economies of scale approach and start with 25 datasets of which only three or four might be useful. But I'm incurring the overhead for all those other non-important data sets because I didn't take the time to go through and figure out what are my most important use cases and what data do I need to support those use cases. >> I mean, should people even think of the data per se or should they really readjust their thinking around the application of the data? Because the data in and of itself means nothing, right? 55, is that fast or slow? Is that old or young? Well, it depends on a whole lot of things. Am I walking or am I in a brand new Corvette? So it just, it's funny to me that the data in and of itself really doesn't have any value and doesn't really provide any direction into a decision or a higher order, predictive analytics until you start to manipulate the data. So is it even the wrong discussion? Is data the right discussion? Or should we really be talking about the capabilities to do stuff within and really get people focused on that? >> So Jeff, there's so many points to hit on there. So the application of data is what's the value, and the queue of you guys used to be famous for saying, "Separating noise from the signal." >> Signal from the noise. Signal from a noise, right. Well, how do you know in your dataset what's signal and what's noise? Well, the use case will tell you. If you don't know the use case and you have no way of figuring out what's important. One of the things I use, I still rail against, and it happens still. Somebody will walk up my data science team and say, "Here's some data, tell me what's interesting in it." Well, how do you separate signal from noise if I don't know the use case? So I think you're spot on, Jeff. The way to think about this is, don't become data-driven, become value-driven and value is driven from the use case or the application or the use of the data to solve that particular use case. So organizations that get fixated on being data-driven, I hate the term data-driven. It's like as if there's some sort of frigging magic from having data. No, data has no value. It's how you use it to derive customer product and operational insights that drive value,. >> Right, so there's an interesting step function, and we talk about it all the time. You're out in the weeds, working with Chipotle lately, and increase their average ticket by 1.2 X. We talk more here, kind of conceptually. And one of the great kind of conceptual holy grails within a data-driven economy is kind of working up this step function. And you've talked about it here. It's from descriptive, to diagnostic, to predictive. And then the Holy grail prescriptive, we're way ahead of the curve. This comes into tons of stuff around unscheduled maintenance. And you know, there's a lot of specific applications, but do you think we spend too much time kind of shooting for the fourth order of greatness impact, instead of kind of focusing on the small wins? >> Well, you certainly have to build your way there. I don't think you can get to prescriptive without doing predictive, and you can't do predictive without doing descriptive and such. But let me throw a really one at you, Jeff, I think there's even one beyond prescriptive. One we're talking more and more about, autonomous, a ton of analytics, right? And one of the things that paper talked about that didn't click with me at the time was this idea of orphaned analytics. You and I kind of talked about this before the call here. And one thing we noticed in the research was that a lot of these very mature organizations who had advanced from the retrospective analytics of BI to the descriptive, to the predicted, to the prescriptive, they were building one off analytics to solve a problem and getting value from it, but never reusing this analytics over and over again. They were done one off and then they were thrown away and these organizations were so good at data science and analytics, that it was easier for them to just build from scratch than to try to dig around and try to find something that was never actually ever built to be reused. And so I have this whole idea of orphaned analytics, right? It didn't really occur to me. It didn't make any sense into me until I read this quote from Elon Musk, and Elon Musk made this statement. He says, " I believe that when you buy a Tesla, you're buying an asset that appreciates in value, not depreciates through usage." I was thinking, "Wait a second, what does that mean?" He didn't actually say it, "Through usage." He said, "He believes you're buying an asset that appreciates not depreciates in value." And of course the first response I had was, "Oh, it's like a 1964 and a half Mustang. It's rare, so everybody is going to want these things. So buy one, stick it in your garage. And 20 years later, you're bringing it out and it's worth more money." No, no, there's 600,000 of these things roaming around the streets, they're not rare. What he meant is that he is building an autonomous asset. That the more that it's used, the more valuable it's getting, the more reliable, the more efficient, the more predictive, the more safe this asset's getting. So there is this level beyond prescriptive where we can think about, "How do we leverage artificial intelligence, reinforcement, learning, deep learning, to build these assets that the more that they are used, the smarter they get." That's beyond prescriptive. That's an environment where these things are learning. In many cases, they're learning with minimal or no human intervention. That's the real aha moment. That's what I miss with orphaned analytics and why it's important to build analytics that can be reused over and over again. Because every time you use these analytics in a different use case, they get smarter, they get more valuable, they get more predictive. To me that's the aha moment that blew my mind. I realized I had missed that in the paper entirely. And it took me basically two years later to realize, dough, I missed the most important part of the paper. >> Right, well, it's an interesting take really on why the valuation I would argue is reflected in Tesla, which is a function of the data. And there's a phenomenal video if you've never seen it, where they have autonomous vehicle day, it might be a year or so old. And he's got his number one engineer from, I think the Microprocessor Group, The Computer Vision Group, as well as the autonomous driving group. And there's a couple of really great concepts I want to follow up on what you said. One is that they have this thing called The Fleet. To your point, there's hundreds of thousands of these things, if they haven't hit a million, that are calling home reporting home every day as to exactly how everyone took the Northbound 101 on-ramp off of University Avenue. How fast did they go? What line did they take? What G-forces did they take? And every one of those cars feeds into the system, so that when they do the autonomous update, not only are they using all their regular things that they would use to map out that 101 Northbound entry, but they've got all the data from all the cars that have been doing it. And you know, when that other car, the autonomous car couple years ago hit the pedestrian, I think in Phoenix, which is not good, sad, killed a person, dark tough situation. But you know, we are doing an autonomous vehicle show and the guy who made a really interesting point, right? That when something like that happens, typically if I was in a car wreck or you're in a car wreck, hopefully not, I learned the person that we hit learns and maybe a couple of witnesses learn, maybe the inspector. >> But nobody else learns. >> But nobody else learns. But now with the autonomy, every single person can learn from every single experience with every vehicle contributing data within that fleet. To your point, it's just an order of magnitude, different way to think about things. >> Think about a 1% improvement compounded 365 times, equals I think 38 X improvement. The power of 1% improvements over these 600,000 plus cars that are learning. By the way, even when the autonomous FSD, the full self-driving mode module isn't turned on, even when it's not turned on, it runs in shadow mode. So it's learning from the human drivers, the human overlords, it's constantly learning. And by the way, not only they're collecting all this data, I did a little research, I pulled out some of their job search ads and they've built a giant simulator, right? And they're there basically every night, simulating billions and billions of more driven miles because of the simulator. They are building, he's going to have a simulator, not only for driving, but think about all the data he's capturing as these cars are riding down the road. By the way, they don't use Lidar, they use video, right? So he's driving by malls. He knows how many cars are in the mall. He's driving down roads, he knows how old the cars are and which ones should be replaced. I mean, he has this, he's sitting on this incredible wealth of data. If anybody could simulate what's going on in the world and figure out how to get out of this COVID problem, it's probably Elon Musk and the data he's captured, be courtesy of all those cars. >> Yeah, yeah, it's really interesting, and we're seeing it now. There's a new autonomous drone out, the Skydio, and they just announced their commercial product. And again, it completely changes the way you think about how you use that tool, because you've just eliminated the complexity of driving. I don't want to drive that, I want to tell it what to do. And so you're saying, this whole application of air force and companies around things like measuring piles of coal and measuring these huge assets that are volume metric measured, that these things can go and map out and farming, et cetera, et cetera. So the autonomy piece, that's really insightful. I want to shift gears a little bit, Bill, and talk about, you had some theories in here about thinking of data as an asset, data as a currency, data as monetization. I mean, how should people think of it? 'Cause I don't think currency is very good. It's really not kind of an exchange of value that we're doing this kind of classic asset. I think the data as oil is horrible, right? To your point, it doesn't get burned up once and can't be used again. It can be used over and over and over. It's basically like feedstock for all kinds of stuff, but the feedstock never goes away. So again, or is it that even the right way to think about, do we really need to shift our conversation and get past the idea of data and get much more into the idea of information and actionable information and useful information that, oh, by the way, happens to be powered by data under the covers? >> Yeah, good question, Jeff. Data is an asset in the same way that a human is an asset. But just having humans in your company doesn't drive value, it's how you use those humans. And so it's really again the application of the data around the use cases. So I still think data is an asset, but I don't want to, I'm not fixated on, put it on my balance sheet. That nice talk about put it on a balance sheet, I immediately put the blinders on. It inhibits what I can do. I want to think about this as an asset that I can use to drive value, value to my customers. So I'm trying to learn more about my customer's tendencies and propensities and interests and passions, and try to learn the same thing about my car's behaviors and tendencies and my operations have tendencies. And so I do think data is an asset, but it's a latent asset in the sense that it has potential value, but it actually has no value per se, inputting it into a balance sheet. So I think it's an asset. I worry about the accounting concept medially hijacking what we can do with it. To me the value of data becomes and how it interacts with, maybe with other assets. So maybe data itself is not so much an asset as it's fuel for driving the value of assets. So, you know, it fuels my use cases. It fuels my ability to retain and get more out of my customers. It fuels ability to predict what my products are going to break down and even have products who self-monitor, self-diagnosis and self-heal. So, data is an asset, but it's only a latent asset in the sense that it sits there and it doesn't have any value until you actually put something to it and shock it into action. >> So let's shift gears a little bit and start talking about the data and talk about the human factors. 'Cause you said, one of the challenges is people trying to bite off more than they can chew. And we have the role of chief data officer now. And to your point, maybe that mucks things up more than it helps. But in all the customer cases that you've worked on, is there a consistent kind of pattern of behavior, personality, types of projects that enables some people to grab those resources to apply to their data to have successful projects, because to your point there's too much data and there's too many projects and you talk a lot about prioritization. But there's a lot of assumptions in the prioritization model that you can, that you know a whole lot of things, especially if you're comparing project A over in group A with project B, with group B and the two may not really know the economics across that. But from an individual person who sees the potential, what advice do you give them? What kind of characteristics do you see, either in the type of the project, the type of the boss, the type of the individual that really lends itself to a higher probability of a successful outcome? >> So first off you need to find somebody who has a vision for how they want to use the data, and not just collect it. But how they're going to try to change the fortunes of the organization. So it always takes a visionary, may not be the CEO, might be somebody who's a head of marketing or the head of logistics, or it could be a CIO, it could be a chief data officer as well. But you've got to find somebody who says, "We have this latent asset we could be doing more with, and we have a series of organizational problem challenges against which I could apply this asset. And I need to be the matchmaker that brings these together." Now the tool that I think is the most powerful tool in marrying the latent capabilities of data with all the revenue generating opportunities in the application side, because there's a countless number, the most important tool that I found doing that is design thinking. Now, the reason why I think design thinking is so important, because one of the things that design thinking does a great job is it gives everybody a voice in the process of identifying, validating, valuing, and prioritizing use cases you're going to go after. Let me say that again. The challenge organizations have is identifying, validating, valuing, and prioritizing the use cases they want to go after. Design thinking is a marvelous tool for driving organizational alignment around where we're going to start and what's going to be next and why we're going to start there and how we're going to bring everybody together. Big data and data science projects don't die because of technology failure. Most of them die because of passive aggressive behaviors in the organization that you didn't bring everybody into the process. Everybody's voice didn't get a chance to be heard. And that one person who's voice didn't get a chance to get heard, they're going to get you. They may own a certain piece of data. They may own something, but they're just waiting and lay, they're just laying there waiting for their chance to come up and snag it. So what you got to do is you got to proactively bring these people together. We call this, this is part of our value engineering process. We have a value engineering process around envisioning where we bring all these people together. We help them to understand how data in itself is a latent asset, but how it can be used from an economics perspective, drive all those value. We get them all fired up on how these can solve any one of these use cases. But you got to start with one, and you've got to embrace this idea that I can build out my data and analytic capabilities, one use case at a time. And the first use case I go after and solve, makes my second one easier, makes my third one easier, right? It has this ability that when you start going use case by use case two really magical things happen. Number one, your marginal cost flatten. That is because you're building out your data lake one use case at a time, and you're bringing all the important data lake, that data lake one use case at a time. At some point in time, you've got most of the important data you need, and the ability that you don't need to add another data source. You got what you need, so your marginal costs start to flatten. And by the way, if you build your analytics as composable, reusable, continuous learning analytic assets, not as orphaned analytics, pretty soon you have all the analytics you need as well. So your marginal cost flatten, but effect number two is that you've, because you've have the data and the analytics, I can accelerate time to value, and I can de-risked projects as I go use case by use case. And so then the biggest challenge becomes not in the data and the analytics, it's getting the all the business stakeholders to agree on, here's a roadmap we're going to go after. This one's first, and this one is going first because it helps to drive the value of the second and third one. And then this one drives this, and you create a whole roadmap of rippling through of how the data and analytics are driving this value to across all these use cases at a marginal cost approaching zero. >> So should we have chief design thinking officers instead of chief data officers that really actually move the data process along? I mean, I first heard about design thinking years ago, actually interviewing Dan Gordon from Gordon Biersch, and they were, he had just hired a couple of Stanford grads, I think is where they pioneered it, and they were doing some work about introducing, I think it was a a new apple-based alcoholic beverage, apple cider, and they talked a lot about it. And it's pretty interesting, but I mean, are you seeing design thinking proliferate into the organizations that you work with? Either formally as design thinking or as some derivation of it that pulls some of those attributes that you highlighted that are so key to success? >> So I think we're seeing the birth of this new role that's marrying capabilities of design thinking with the capabilities of data and analytics. And they're calling this dude or dudette the chief innovation officer. Surprise. >> Title for someone we know. >> And I got to tell a little story. So I have a very experienced design thinker on my team. All of our data science projects have a design thinker on them. Every one of our data science projects has a design thinker, because the nature of how you build and successfully execute a data science project, models almost exactly how design thinking works. I've written several papers on it, and it's a marvelous way. Design thinking and data science are different sides of the same coin. But my respect for data science or for design thinking took a major shot in the arm, major boost when my design thinking person on my team, whose name is John Morley introduced me to a senior data scientist at Google. And I was bottom coffee. I said, "No," this is back in, before I even joined Hitachi Vantara, and I said, "So tell me the secret to Google's data science success? You guys are marvelous, you're doing things that no one else was even contemplating, and what's your key to success?" And he giggles and laughs and he goes, "Design thinking." I go, "What the hell is that? Design thinking, I've never even heard of the stupid thing before." He goes, "I'd make a deal with you, Friday afternoon let's pop over to Stanford's B school and I'll teach you about design thinking." So I went with him on a Friday to the d.school, Design School over at Stanford and I was blown away, not just in how design thinking was used to ideate and bring and to explore. But I was blown away about how powerful that concept is when you marry it with data science. What is data science in its simplest sense? Data science is about identifying the variables and metrics that might be better predictors of performance. It's that might phrase that's the real key. And who are the people who have the best insights into what values or metrics or KPIs you might want to test? It ain't the data scientists, it's the subject matter experts on the business side. And when you use design thinking to bring this subject matter experts with the data scientists together, all kinds of magic stuff happens. It's unbelievable how well it works. And all of our projects leverage design thinking. Our whole value engineering process is built around marrying design thinking with data science, around this prioritization, around these concepts of, all ideas are worthy of consideration and all voices need to be heard. And the idea how you embrace ambiguity and diversity of perspectives to drive innovation, it's marvelous. But I feel like I'm a lone voice out in the wilderness, crying out, "Yeah, Tesla gets it, Google gets it, Apple gets it, Facebook gets it." But you know, most other organizations in the world, they don't think like that. They think design thinking is this Wufoo thing. Oh yeah, you're going to bring people together and sing Kumbaya. It's like, "No, I'm not singing Kumbaya. I'm picking their brains because they're going to help make their data science team much more effective and knowing what problems we're going to go after and how I'm going to measure success and progress. >> Maybe that's the next Dean for the next 10 years, the Dean of design thinking instead of data science, and who knew they're one and the same? Well, Bill, that's a super insightful, I mean, it's so, is validated and supported by the trends that we see all over the place, just in terms of democratization, right? Democratization of the tools, more people having access to data, more opinions, more perspective, more people that have the ability to manipulate the data and basically experiment, does drive better business outcomes. And it's so consistent. >> If I could add one thing, Jeff, I think that what's really powerful about design thinking is when I think about what's happening with artificial intelligence or AI, there's all these conversations about, "Oh, AI is going to wipe out all these jobs. Is going to take all these jobs away." And what we're actually finding is that if we think about machine learning, driven by AI and human empowerment, driven by design thinking, we're seeing the opportunity to exploit these economies of learning at the front lines where every customer engagement, every operational execution is an opportunity to gather not only more data, but to gather more learnings, to empower the humans at the front lines of the organization to constantly be seeking, to try different things, to explore and to learn from each of these engagements. I think it's, AI to me is incredibly powerful. And I think about it as a source of driving more learning, a continuous learning and continuously adapting an organization where it's not just the machines that are doing this, but it's the humans who've been empowered to do that. And my chapter nine in my new book, Jeff, is all about team empowerment, because nothing you do with AI is going to matter of squat if you don't have empowered teams who know how to take and leverage that continuous learning opportunity at the front lines of customer and operational engagement. >> Bill, I couldn't set a better, I think we'll leave it there. That's a great close, when is the next book coming out? >> So today I do my second to last final review. Then it goes back to the editor and he does a review and we start looking at formatting. So I think we're probably four to six weeks out. >> Okay, well, thank you so much, congratulations on all the success. I just love how the Dean is really the Dean now, teaching all over the world, sharing the knowledge and attacking some of these big problems. And like all great economics problems, often the answer is not economics at all. It's completely really twist the lens and don't think of it in that, all that construct. >> Exactly. >> All right, Bill. Thanks again and have a great week. >> Thanks, Jeff. >> All right. He's Bill Schmarzo, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (gentle music)

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >>Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards program. I'm John Furrow, your host of the Cube here in Palo Alto, California In the remote interviews during this pandemic, we have our remote crews and getting all the stories and celebrating the award winners. And here to feature the most innovative connect deployment. We have a center of Canada and the Department of Employment and Social Development of Canada, known as E S D. C guys. Congratulations, Joel. More Children Censure Canada Managing director and Ben while long sdc of Canada Chief Transformation officer. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on. And congratulations on the award. >>Thank you. >>Thank you. >>So, Ashley, during this pandemic, a lot of disruption and a lot of business still needs to go on, including government services. But the citizens and people need to still do their thing. Business got to run, and you got to get things going. But the disruptions caused a little bit of how the user experiences are. So this connect has been interesting. It's been a featured part of where you've been hearing at the Public Sector summit with Theresa Carlson. You guys, this is a key product. Tell us about the award. What is the solution? That disturbing of deserving reward? >>Maybe I'll get I'll go first and then pass it over to Benoit. But I think the solution is Amazon Connect based Virtual Contact Center that we stood up fairly quickly over the course of about four days and really in support of of benefit that the government of Canada was was releasing as part of its economic response to the pandemic. And in the end that, you know, it's a fully functioning featured contact center solution includes an I V r. And, uh, you know, we stood it up for about 1500 to 2000 agents so that that's the crux of the solution. And maybe Benoit can give a bit of insight as to to how it came about so quickly. >>Yeah, happy to actually wear obviously, like every other government, facing enormous pressures at that time to deliver benefits directly to people who were in true need, the jobs are being lost. Our current systems were in trouble because of their age and barricade cake nature. And so the challenge is was quickly how to actually support a lot of people really fast. And so it came through immediately that after our initial payments were made under what was called Canada Emergency Response Benefit, then we have to support our clients directly. And so people turn to the transformation team of all teams. If you wish during a fire firestorm to say, Well, what could you do and how could you help? And so we had an established relationship with a number of other system integrators, including Accenture, and we were able to run a competition very rapidly. Accenture one. And then we deployed. And as you all said, in a matter of four days, what for us was a new, exceptional on high quality solution to a significant client problem. And I say that because I think you can imagine how people feel in the endemic of all of all things. But with the uncertainty that comes with the loss of income, loss of jobs, the question of being able to deal with somebody really a human being, as well as to be able to be efficiently answer a very simple but straightforward questions rapidly and with high quality, with pretty fundamental for us. So the people in the groups that were talking through here are talking, speaking to millions of people who were literally being asked to to accept the pavement rapidly and to be able to connect with us quickly. And without this solution, which was exceptionally well done and deployed and of high quality personally, just a technology, uh, solution. I would not have been possible to even answer any of these queries quickly. >>And while that's a great 0.1 of the things that you see with the pandemic it's a disaster in the quote disaster kind of readiness thing. Unforeseen, right? So, like other things, you can kind of plan for things that hypothetical. You've got scenarios, but this >>is >>truly a case where every day counts. Every minute counts because humans are involved is no our ROI calculation. It's not like it's not like, Well, what's the payback of our system? The old kind of way to think this is really results fast. This is what cloud is all about. This is the promise of cloud. Can I stand up something quick and you did it with a partner. Okay, this is, like, not, like, normal again. It's like it's, you know, it's like, unheard of, right? Four days with critical infrastructure, critical services that were unforeseen. Take us through what was going on in the war room, as you guys knew this was here. Take us through the through what happened. Yeah, >>So I think I can start a Z. You can imagine the set of executives that we're seeing a payment process. Uh, was an exceptional. It was like a bunker. Frankly, for about two weeks, we had to suspend the normal operations off the vast majority of our programming. We had to launch brand new payments and benefits systems and programs that nobody had seen before. The level of simplicity was maximized to delivered the funds quickly. So you could imagine it's a warpath if you wish, because the campaign is really around. A timing. Timing is fundamental. People are are literally losing their jobs. There is no support. There's no funding money for them to be able to buy groceries. So on the trust that people have in the government, Ai's pretty much at risk right there and then in a very straightforward but extraordinarily powerful magic moment. If you wish. If you can deliver a solution, then you make a difference for a long time. And so the speed unheard off on old friends when he came to the call center capability and the ability for us to support and service context the clients that were desperate to reach us on. We're talking hundreds of thousands of calls, right? We're not talking a few 1000 year. Ultimately, at some point we were literally getting in our over over, taken by volumes, call centers. But we had a regular one still operating over a 1,000,000 calls for coming in today with the capacity to answer, um, you know, tens of thousands. And so the reality is that the counselor that we put up here very quickly became capable of answering more calls than our regular costumes. And that speaks to the speed of delivery, the quality of the solution, of course, but the scalability of it and I have to say, maybe unheard of, it may be difficult to replicate. The conditions to lead to this are rare, but I have to say that my bosses and most of the government is probably now wondering why we can't do this more often, like we can't operate with that kind of speed and agility. So I think what you've got is a client in our case, under extreme circumstances. Now, realizing the new normal will never be the same, that these types of solutions and technology. And then there's scalability. There's agility there, the speed of deployment. It's frankly, something we want. We want all the time. Now we'd like to be able to do it under your whole timeline conditions. But even those will be a fraction of what it used to take. It would have taken us well, actually, I can actually tell you because I was the lead, Ah, technologists to deploy at scale for the government. Canada all the call center capabilities under a single software as a service platform. It took us two years to design it two years to procure it and five years to install it. That's the last experience. We have a call center enterprise scale capabilities, and in this case, we went from years to literally days. >>Well, you know, it takes a crisis sometimes to kind of wire up the simplicity solution that you say. Why didn't we do this before? You know, the waterfall meetings, Getting everyone arguing gets kind of gets in the way of the old the old software model. I want to come back to the transformation been wanna minute, cause I think that's gonna be a great success story and some learnings, and I want to get your thoughts on that. But I want to go to Joel because Joel, we've talked to many Accenture executives over the years and most recently this past 24 months. And the message we've been hearing is we're going to be faster. We're not going to be seen as that. You know, a consulting firm taking our times. Try and get a pound of flesh from the client. This is an example. In my opinion of a partner working with a problem statement that kind of matches the cloud speed. So you guys have been doing this. This is not new to a censure. So take us through how you guys reacted because one you got to sync up and get the cadence of what, Ben? What I was trying to do sync up and execute. Take us through what happened on your side. >>Yeah, I mean, so it's It's Ah, it's an unprecedented way of operating for us as well, frankly, and, um and, uh and, you know, we've had to look at to get this specific solution at the door and respond to an RFP and the commercial requirements that go with that way. Had Teoh get pretty agile ourselves internally on on how we go through approvals, etcetera, to make sure that that we were there to support Ben Wan is team. And I think you know that we saw this is a broader opportunity to really respond to it, to help Canada in a time of need. So So I think we, you know, we had to streamline a lot of our internal processes that make quick decisions that normally even for our organization, would have taken, um, could it could have taken weeks, right? And we were down to hours in a lot of instances. So it helps. It forces us to react and act differently as well. But I mean, to Benoit's point, I think this is really going to to hopefully change the way it illustrates the art of the possible and hopefully will change How, How quick We can look at problems and and we reduced deployment timeframes from from years to months and months to weeks, etcetera for solutions like this. Um, and I think that the AWS platform specifically in this case but what touched on a lot of things to beat the market scale ability But just as the benefit itself was, you know has to be simplified to do this quickly. I think one of the one of the benefits of the solution itself is it's simple to use technologically. I mean, we know least retrained. As I said, I think 1600 agents on how to use the platform over the course of a weekend on and and were able, and they're not normal agents. These were people who are firm from other jobs, potentially within the government. So they're not necessarily contact center agents by training. But they became contact center agents over the course of 48 hours, and I think from that perspective, you know, that was important as well have something that people could could use. The answer those calls that we know that when you were gonna come so >>Ben what this is. This is the transformation dream scenario in the sense of capabilities. I know it's under circumstances of the pandemic, and you guys didn't solve a big, big problem really fast and saved lives and help people get on with their day. But transformations about having people closest to the problem execute and the the also the people equation people process technology, as they say, is kind of playing out in real time. This >>is >>the this is kind of the playbook, you know? Amazon came in said, Hey, you want to stand something up? You wired it together. The solution quickly. You're close to it. Looking back now, it's almost like, Hey, why aren't we doing this before? As you said and then you had to bring people in who weren't trained and stood them up and they were delivering the service. This >>is >>the playbook to share your thoughts on this, because this is what you're you're thinking about all the time and it actually playing out in real time. >>Well, I would definitely endorsed the idea that it's a playbook. It's I would say it's an ideal and dream playbook timidly showing up on the basketball court with all the best players in the entire league playing together magically, it is exactly that. So a lot of things have to happen quickly, but also, um, correctly because you know, you can't pull these things properly together without that. So I would say the partnership with the private sector here was fundamental, and I have to applaud the work that Accenture did particularly, I think, as Canadians, we're very proud of the fact that we needed to respond quickly. Everyone was in this, our neighbors, we knew people who were without support and Accenture's team, I mean, all the way up and down across the organization was fundamental and delivering this, but also literally putting themselves into, uh, these roles and to make sure that we would be able to respond quickly to do so. I think the playbook around the readiness for change I was shocked into existence every night. I won't talk about quantum physics, but clearly some some high level of energy was thrown in very quickly, mobilized everybody all at once. Nobody was said. He's sitting around saying, I wonder if we have change management covered off, you know this was changed readiness at its best. And so I think for me from a learning perspective, apart from just the technology side, which is pretty fundamental if you don't have ready enough technology to deploy quickly than the best paid plans in the world won't work. The reality is that to mobilize an organization going for it into that level of of spontaneous driving, change, exception, acceptance and adoption is really what I would aim for. And so our challenge now we'll be continuing that kind of progression going forward, and we now found the way. We certainly use the way to work with private sector in an innovative capacity in the new, innovative ways with brand new solutions that are truly agile and and and scalable to be able to pull all of the organization. All that one's very rapidly, and I have to admit that it is going to shift permanently our planning. We had 10 year plans for our big transformation, so some of our programs are the most important in the country. In many ways. We support people about eight million Canadians a month and on the benefits payments that we deliver, and they're the most marginal needed meeting and and requires our support from senior study, unemployed jobseekers and whatnot. So if you think about that group itself and to be able to support them clearly with the systems that we have is just unsustainable. But the new technologies are clearly going to show us the way that we had never for forecast. And I have to say I had to throw up, like in your plan. And now I'm working my way down from 10 denying date your plants going forward. And so it's exciting and nerve wracking sometimes, but then obviously has a change leader. Our goal is to get there as quickly as possible, so the benefit of all of these solutions could make a difference in people's lives. >>What's interesting is that you can shorten that timetable but also frees you up to be focused on what's contemporary and what's needed at the time. So leverage the people on the resource is You have and take advantage of that versus having something that you're sitting on that need to be refreshed. You can always be on that bleeding edge, and this brings up the Dev ops kind of mindset agility. The lean startup glean company. You know this is a team effort between Amazon and center and SDC. It's pass, shoot, score really fast. So this isn't the new, the new reality. Any commentary from you guys on this, you know, new pass shoot score combination. Because you got speed, you got agility. You're leaner, which makes you more flexible for being contemporary and solving problems. What's your thoughts? >>So my perspective on that is most definitely right. I think what we what we were able to show and what's. You know, what's coming out of a lot of different responses to the pandemic by government is, um, you know, perfection isn't the most important thing out of the gate. Getting something out there that's going to reassure citizens that's gonna allow them to answer their questions or access benefits quickly is what's becoming more important. Obviously, security and privacy. Those things are of the utmost importance as well. But it's ability to get stuff out there, quickly, test it, change it, tested again and and just always be iterating on the solutions. Like I can say what we put out on April 6th within four days is the backbone of what's out there still today. But we've added, you know, we added an integrated workforce management solution from Nice, and we added some other eyes views to do outbound dialing from acquisition, things like that. So the solution has grown from that M v p. And I think that's one other thing that that's going to be a big takeaways if you're not gonna do anything. So you got the final and product out there, then it's going to be here, right? So let's go quickly and let's adapt from there. >>Then we'll talk about that dynamic cause that's about building blocks, fund foundational things and then services. It's the cloud model. >>Yeah, I mean, before the pandemic, I had lunch with Mark Schwarz, which I believe you're quite familiar with, and, you know, I spent an hour and 1/2 with it. We were talking, and he was so exciting and and energized by what the technologies could do. And I was listening to him, and I used to be the chief technology officer for the government can right? And so I've seen a lot of stuff and I said, Well, that's really exciting, and I'm sure it's possible in some other places. And maybe it's some other countries where you know they didn't have infrastructure and legacy. I guess if I see him again soon, I'll have to. I apologize for not believing him enough, I think the building blocks of edge of the building, blocks of sprints and MVP's I mean they're not fundamental to the way we're gonna. So our biggest, various and scariest problems, technologically and then from a business perspective, Service candidate itself has 18,000 employees involved in multiple channels where the work has always been very lethargic, very difficult, arduous. You make change over years, not months, not days for sure. And so I think that that new method is not only a different way of working, it's a completely re HVAC way of assembly solutions, and I think the concept of engineering is probably going to be closer to what we're going to do on. And I have to borrow the Lego metaphor, but the building blocks are gonna be assembled. We now and working. I'm saying this in front of goal. He doesn't know that you should practice partners. We're gonna be assembling MPP maps of an entire long program, and it's gonna be iterative. It is gonna be designed, built. It will be agile as much as we can implement it. But more importantly, and punches weaken govern. It is, you know, the government is we may have changed. A lot of the government is not necessarily can count on to Most of these things approaches, But the reality is that that's where we're heading. And I will say, Oh, close. Perhaps on this on this answer. The biggest reason for doing that apart from we've proved it is the fact that the appetite inside the organization for that level of globalization, speed solution ing and being engaged rapidly you just can't take that away from an organization. Must be a piece of that. Uh, if you let them down, well, they'll remember. And frankly, they do remember now, cause they want more and it's gonna be hard. But it's a better heart. Ah, a better challenge that the one of having to do things over a decade, then to go fast and to kind of iterating quickly through the challenges and the issues and then move on very much to the next one as rapidly as possible. I think the other company, I would add is most of this was driven by a client need, and that's not inconsequential because it mobilized everybody to comment focused. If you have been just about, well, you know, we need to get people on side and solutions in place just to make our lives better, it providers. Yeah, it would have worked, perhaps, but it would have been different than the mobilisation It comes when the client is put in the middle, the client is the focus, and then we drive. Everyone's with that solution, >>you know, shared success and success is contagious. And when you ride the new way to oh, we need a new board, right? So once you get it, it then spreads like wildfire. This is what we've been seeing. And it also translates down to the citizens because again, being contemporary, none of us just looked could feel it's success in performance. So, as you know, people in business start to adopt cloud. It becomes a nice, nice, nice synergy. This is key. I'll take a year on a center. Um, the award winner. You guys did a great job. Final thoughts. >>Yeah. I mean, I think final thoughts would be happy to have the opportunity that help. And it was a It was a complete team effort and continues to be, um, it's not. It's not a bunch of Accenture technologists in the background in this, you know the commitment from everyone to get this in place. And can you continue to improvement from Benoit's team and from other folks across the government has been, uh, has been paramount to the success. So, um um, it's been a fantastic if world win like experience and, uh, look forward to continuing to build on it. And it has been said, I think one thing this is done is it's created demand for speed on some of these larger transformations. So I'm looking forward to continuing to innovate with with Ben wanting. >>Well, congratulations. The most innovative connect deployment. And because you guys from Canada, I have to use the hockey reference. You get multiple people working together in a cohesive manner. It's pass, shoot, score every time. And you know it's contagious. Thank you very much for your time. And congratulations for winning the >>West. Thanks. Thank you. Okay, this is the >>Cube's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Award show. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. Thanks for watching. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >>Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards program. I'm John Furrow, your host of the Cube here in Palo Alto, California In the remote interviews during this pandemic, we have our remote crews and getting all the stories and celebrating the award winners. And here to feature the most innovative connect deployment. We have a center of Canada and the Department of Employment and Social Development of Canada, known as E S D. C guys. Congratulations, Joel. More Children Censure Canada Managing director and Ben while long sdc of Canada Chief Transformation officer. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on. And congratulations on the award. >>Thank you. >>Thank you. >>So, Ashley, during this pandemic, a lot of disruption and a lot of business still needs to go on, including government services. But the citizens and people need to still do their thing. Business got to run, and you got to get things going. But the disruptions caused a little bit of how the user experiences are. So this connect has been interesting. It's been a featured part of what we've been hearing at the public sector summit with Theresa Carlson. You guys, this is a key product. Tell us about the award. What is the solution? That disturbing of deserving reward? >>Maybe I'll get I'll go first and then pass it over to Benoit. But I think the solution is Amazon. Connect a spiritual contact center that we stood up fairly quickly over the course of about four days and really in support of of benefit that the government of Canada was was releasing as part of its economic response to the pandemic. And in the end that, you know, it's a fully functioning featured contact center solution includes an ai VR and, uh, you know, we stood it up for 1500 to 2000 agents so that that's the crux of the solution. And maybe Benoit can give a bit of insight as to to how it came about so quickly. >>Yeah, I'd be happy to actually wear obviously, like every other government, facing enormous pressures at that time to deliver benefits directly to people who were in true need, the jobs are being lost. Our current systems were in trouble because of their age in the arcade cake Nature. And so the challenge is was quickly how to actually support a lot of people really fast. And so it came through immediately that after our initial payments were made under what was called Canada Emergency Response Benefit, then we have to support our clients directly. And so people turn to the transformation team of all teams. If you wish during a fire firestorm to say, Well, what could you do and how could you help? And so we had an established relationship with a number of other system integrators, including Accenture, and we were able to run a competition very rapidly. Accenture one. And then we deployed in, as you all said, in a matter of four days, what for us was a new, exceptional on high quality solution to a significant client problem. And I say that because I think you can imagine how people feel in that endemic of all of all things. But with the uncertainty that comes with the loss of income, loss of jobs, the question of being able to deal with somebody really a human being, as well as to be able to be efficiently answer a very simple but straightforward questions rapidly and with high quality, with pretty fundamental for us. So the people in the groups that were talking through here are talking, speaking to millions of people who were literally being asked to to accept the pavement rapidly and to be able to connect with us quickly. And without this solution, which was exceptionally well done and deployed and of high quality personally, just a technology, uh, solution. I would not have been possible to even answer any of these queries quickly. >>And while that's a great 0.1 of the things that you see with the pandemic it's a disaster in the quote disaster kind of readiness thing. Unforeseen, right? So, like other things, you can kind of plan for things that hypothetical. You've got scenarios, but this >>is >>truly a case where every day counts. Every minute counts because humans are involved is no our ROI calculation. It's not like it's not like, Well, what's the payback of our system? The old kind of way to think this is really results fast. This is what cloud is all about. This is the promise of cloud. Can I stand up something quick and you did it with a partner. Okay, this is, like, not, like, normal again. It's like it's, you know, it's like, unheard of right? Four days with critical infrastructure, critical services that were unforeseen. Take us through what was going on in the war room, as you guys knew this was here. Take us through the through what happened. Yeah, >>So I think I can start a Z. You can imagine the set of executives that we're seeing a payment process. Uh, was an exceptional. It was like a bunker. Frankly, for about two weeks, we had to suspend the normal operations off the vast majority of our programming. We had to launch brand new payments and benefits systems and programs that nobody had seen before. The level of simplicity was maximized to delivered the funds quickly. So you could imagine it's a warpath if you wish, because the campaign is really around. A timing. Timing is fundamental. People are are literally losing their jobs. There is no support. There's no funding money for them to be able to buy groceries. So on the trust that people have in the government, Ai's pretty much at risk right there and then, in a very straightforward but extraordinarily powerful magic moment. If you wish. If you can deliver a solution, then you make a difference for a long time. And so the speed unheard off on old friends when he came to the call center capability and the ability for us to support and service context the clients that were desperate to reach us on. We're talking hundreds of thousands of calls, right? We're not talking a few 1000 year. Ultimately, at some point we were literally getting in our over over, taken by volumes, call centers, but we had a regular one still operating over a 1,000,000 calls for coming in today. Uh, with the capacity to answer, um, you know, tens of thousands. And so the reality is that the counselor that we put up here very quickly became capable of answering more calls than our regular costumes. And that speaks to the speed of delivery, the quality of the solution, of course, but the scalability of it and I have to say, maybe unheard of, it may be difficult to replicate. The conditions to lead to this are rare, but I have to say that my bosses and most of the government is probably now wondering why we can't do this more often like we can't operate with that kind of speed and agility. So I think what you've got is a client in our case, under extreme circumstances. Now, realizing the new normal will never be the same, that these types of solutions and technology. And then there's scalability. There's agility there, the speed of deployment. It's frankly, something we want. We want all the time. Now we'd like to be able to do it under your whole timeline conditions. But even those will be a fraction of what it used to take. It would have taken us well, actually, I can actually tell you because I was the lead. Ah, technologist, to deploy at scale for the government, Canada, all the call center capabilities under a single software as a service platform. It took us two years to design it. Two years to procure it and five years to install it. That's the last experience. We have a call center enterprise scale capabilities, and in this case, we went from years to literally days. >>Well, you know, it takes a crisis sometimes to kind of wire up the simplicity solution that you say. Why didn't we do this before? You know the waterfall meetings, Getting everyone arguing gets kind of gets in the way of the old, the old software model. I want to come back to the transformation been wanna minute, cause I think that's going to be a great success story and some learnings, and I want to get your thoughts on that. But I want to go to Joel because Joel we've talked to many Accenture executives over the years and most recently this past 24 months, And the message we've been hearing is we're going to be faster. We're not going to be seen as that. You know, a consulting firm taking our times. Try and get a pound of flesh from the client. This is an example, in my opinion of a partner working with the problem statement that kind of matches the cloud speed. So you guys have been doing this. This is not new to a censure. So take us through how you guys reacted because one you got to sync up and get the cadence of what? Ben? What I was trying to do, sync up and execute. Take us through what happened on your side. >>Yeah. I mean, so it's It's Ah, It's an unprecedented way of operating for us as well, frankly, and, um and, uh and, you know, we've had to look at to get this specific solution at the door and respond to an RFP and the commercial requirements that go with that way. Had Teoh get pretty agile ourselves internally on on how we go through approvals, etcetera, to make sure that that we were there to support Ben Wan is team. And I think you know that we saw this is a broader opportunity to really respond to it, to help Canada in a time of need. So So I think we, you know, we had to streamline a lot of our internal processes and make quick decisions that normally, even for our organization, would have taken, um, could it could have taken weeks, right? And we were down to hours in a lot of instances. So it helps. It forces us to react and act differently as well. But I mean, to Benoit's point, I think this is really going to to hopefully change the way it illustrates the art of the possible and hopefully will change how, How quickly we can look at problems and and we reduce deployment timeframes from from years to months and months to weeks, etcetera for solutions like this. Um, and I think that the AWS platform specifically in this case but what touched on a lot of things to beat the market scale ability But just as the benefit itself was, you know has to be simplified to do this quickly. I think one of the one of the benefits of the solution itself is it's simple to use technologically. I mean, we know least retrained. As I said, I think 1600 agents on how to use the platform over the course of a weekend on and and were able, and they're not normal agents. These were people who are firm from other jobs, potentially within the government. So they're not necessarily contact center agents by training. But they became contact center agents over the course of 48 hours that I think from that perspective, you know, that was important as well have something that people could could use. The answer those calls that you know that when you're gonna come So, >>Ben, what this is This is the transformation dream scenario in the sense of capabilities. I know it's under circumstances of the pandemic, and you guys didn't solve a big, big problem really fast and saved lives and help people get on with their day. But transformations about having people closest to the problem execute and the the also the people equation. People process technology, as they say, is kind of playing out in real time. This >>is >>the this is kind of the playbook, you know, Amazon came in said, Hey, you want to stand something up? You wired it together. The solution quickly. You're close to it. Looking back now, it's almost like, Hey, why aren't we doing this before? As you said and then you had to bring people in who weren't trained and stood them up and they were delivering the service. This >>is >>the playbook to share your thoughts on this, because this is what you're you're thinking about all the time and it actually playing out in real time. >>Well, I would definitely endorsed the idea that it's a playbook. It's I would say it's an ideal and dream playbook to build like showing up on the basketball court with all the best players in the entire league playing together magically, it is exactly that. So a lot of things have to happen quickly, but also correctly because you know you can't pull these things properly together without that. So I would say the partnership with the private sector here was fundamental. And I have to applaud the work that Accenture did particularly, I think, as Canadians, we're very proud of the fact that we needed to respond quickly. Everyone was in this, our neighbors, we knew people who were without support and Accenture's team, I mean all the way up and down across the organization was fundamental in and delivering this, but also literally putting themselves into, uh, these roles and to make sure that we would be able to respond quickly, do so. I think the playbook around the readiness for change. I was shocked into existence every night. I won't talk about quantum physics, but clearly some some high level of energy was thrown in very quickly, mobilized everybody all at once. Nobody was said. He's sitting around saying, I wonder if we have change management covered off, you know this was changed readiness at its best. And so I think for me from a learning perspective, apart from just the technology side, which is pretty fundamental if you don't have ready enough technology to deploy quickly than the best plans in the world won't work. The reality is that to mobilize an organization going forward into that level of of spontaneous driving, change, exception, acceptance and adoption is really what I would ain't for. And so our challenge Now we'll be continuing that kind of progression going forward, and we now found a way. And we certainly use the way to work with private sector in an innovative capacity and in innovative ways with brand new solutions that are truly agile and and scalable to be able to pull all of the organization. All that one's very rapidly, and I have to admit that it is going to shift permanently our planning. We had 10 year plans for our big transformation, so some of our programs are the most important in the country. In many ways. We support people about eight million Canadians a month and on the benefits payments that we deliver, and they're the most marginal needed meeting and and requires our support from senior studio, unemployed jobseekers and whatnot. So if you think about that group itself and to be able to support them clearly with their systems that we have is just unsustainable. But the new technologies are clearly going to show us the way that we had never for forecast. And I have to say I had to throw up, like in your plan. And now I'm working my way down from 10 denying date your plants going forward. And so it's exciting and nerve wracking sometimes. But then, obviously, as a change leader, our goal is to get there as quickly as possible, so the benefit of all of these solutions could make a difference in people's lives. >>What's interesting is that you can shorten that timetable but also frees you up to be focused on what's contemporary and what's needed at the time. So leverage the people on the resource is You have and take advantage of that versus having something that you're sitting on that need to be refreshed. You can always be on that bleeding edge, and this brings up the Dev ops kind of mindset agility. The lean startup glean company. You know this is a team effort between Amazon and center and SDC. It's pass, shoot, score really fast. So this isn't the new, the new reality. Any commentary from you guys on this, you know, new pass shoot score combination. Because you got speed, you got agility. You're leaner, which makes you more flexible for being contemporary and solving problems. What's your thoughts? >>Yeah, So my perspective on that is most definitely right. I think what we what we were able to show and what's. You know, what's coming out of a lot of different responses to the pandemic by government is, um, you know, perfection isn't the most important thing out of the gate. Getting something out there that's going to reassure citizens that's going to allow them to answer their questions or access benefits quickly is what's becoming more important. Obviously, security and privacy. Those things are of the utmost importance as well. But it's ability to get stuff in there, quickly, test it, change it tested again and just always be iterating on the solutions. Like I can say what we put out on April 6th within four days is the backbone of what's out there still today. But we've added, you know, we added an integrated workforce management solution from Nice, and we added some other eyes views to do outbound dialing from acquisition, things like that. So the solution has grown from that M v p. And I think that's one other thing that that's going to be a big takeaways if you're not gonna do anything. So you got the final and product out there, then it's going to be here, right? So let's go quickly and let's adapt from there. >>Then we'll talk about that dynamic cause that's about building blocks, fund foundational things and then services. It's the cloud model. >>Yeah, I mean, before the pandemic, I had lunch with Mark Schwarz, which I believe you're quite familiar with, and, you know, I spent an hour and 1/2 with it. We were talking, and he was so exciting and and energized by what the technologies could do. And I was listening to him, and I used to be the chief technology officer for the government. Can't right. And so I've seen a lot of stuff and I said, Well, that's really exciting, and I'm sure it's possible in some other places. And maybe it's some other countries where you know they didn't have infrastructure and legacy. I guess if I see him again soon, I'll have to. I apologize for not believing him enough, I think the building blocks of agile, the building blocks of sprints and MVP's I mean, they're not fundamental to the way we're going to solve our biggest various and scariest problems technologically and then from a business perspective. Service candidate itself has 18,000 employees involved in multiple channels, where the work has always been very lethargic, very difficult, arduous. You make change over years, not months, not days for sure. And so I think that that new method is not only a different way of working, it's a completely revamped way of assembly solutions, and I think the concept of engineering is probably going to be closer to what we're going to do. Um, and I have to borrow the Lego metaphor, but the building blocks are gonna be assembled. We now and working. I'm saying this in front of goal. He doesn't know that you should practice partners. We're gonna be assembling MPP maps of an entire long program, and it's gonna be iterative. It is gonna be designed, built. It will be agile as much as we can implement it. But more importantly, and punches weaken govern. It is, you know, the government is we may have changed. A lot of the government is not necessarily can count on to Most of these things approaches. But the reality is that that's where we're headed. And I will say, Oh, close. Perhaps on this on this answer. The biggest reason for doing that apart from we've proved it is the fact that the appetite inside the organization for that level of globalization, speed solution ing and being engaged rapidly you just can't take that away from an organization. Must be a piece of that. Uh, if you let them down, well, they don't remember. And frankly, they do remember now, cause they want more and it's gonna be hard. But it's a better heart. Ah, a better challenge that the one of having to do things over a decade, then to go fast and to kind of iterating quickly through the challenges and the issues and then move on very much to the next one as rapidly as possible. I think The other company, I would add, is most of this was driven by a client need, and that's not inconsequential because it mobilized everybody to comment focused. It could have been just about well, you know, we need to get people on side and solutions in place just to make our lives better. It is his providers. Yeah, it would have worked, perhaps, but it would have been different than the mobilisation It comes when the client is put in the middle. The client is the focus. And then we drive. Everyone's with that, >>you know, shared success and and successes contagious. And when you ride the new way to oh, we need a new board, right? So once you get it, it then spreads like wildfire. This is what we've been seeing. And it also translates down to the citizens because again, being contemporary numbers just look and feel. It's success in performance. So, as you know, people in business start to adopt cloud. It becomes a nice, nice, nice synergy. This is key. I'll take a year on a center. Um, the award winner. You guys did a great job. Final thoughts. >>Yeah. I mean, I think final thoughts would be happy to have the opportunity that help. And it was a It was a complete team effort and continues to be, um, it's not. It's not a bunch of Accenture technologists in the background in this, you know the commitment from everyone to get this in place. And can you continue to improvement from Benoit's team and from other folks across the government has been has been paramount to the success. So, um um, it's been a fantastic world win like experience and, uh, look forward to continuing to build on it. And it has been said, I think one thing this is done is it's created demand for speed on some of these larger transformations. So I'm looking forward to continuing to innovate with with Ben wanting. >>Well, congratulations. The most innovative connect deployment. And because you guys from Canada, I have to use the hockey reference. You get multiple people working together in a cohesive manner. It's pass, shoot, score every time. And you know it's contagious. Thank you very much for your time. And congratulations for winning the West. Thanks. Okay, this is the Cube's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Award show. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. Thanks for watching. Yeah, Yeah, >>yeah, yeah, yeah

>>from around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of AWS Public sector online brought to you by Amazon Web services. Hello and welcome back to the Cube's virtual coverage of AWS Public sector Summit online. Virtual. We're here in the Palo Alto Studios. I'm your host, John Furrier with the Cube with the quarantine crew. We got a great guest Cube alumni. Shannon Kellogg, vice president of Amazon Web Services AWS Public Policy Shannon, Great to see you. >>Hey, John, it's great to be back. I do feel like I'm a bona fide alumnus of the Cube, so thanks for having me. >>It's always great to have you on. You know, we've had many kind of conscious about policy and modernization of government. That's been the big trend kind of waves in your world. Now, with Cove in 19 you cannot ignore this. This was no longer an adjunct of physical spaces or physical realities. This reality is about virtualization, of of data, workloads, work, workforces, workplaces, workloads, work flows, you name it, it's impacted, and certainly this is a tough time for everyone to do work. More importantly, that it shows all the problems with modernization people aren't modern are really suffering. So I want to get your thoughts about as we go through this pandemic and look at stabilizing and coming out of it. A lot of reinvention and a lot of growth strategies that are changing in real time. So I want to get your thoughts on that real quick. >>Yeah, well, John, we've seen more innovation and migration to the cloud in the last few months than we have over the last few years. And, you know, things have been steady the last few years. You know, you've seen organizations continually migrate, Cloud and AWS, but organizations now accelerating, we're seeing at every level of government. We're seeing it in the education sector. We're seeing, of course, in healthcare. And so organizations are trying to transform fast. One of the first problem sets that we were tackling in the early days of the code 19 response was to work with states here in the US as they were trying to set up their unemployment response efforts. And, ah, their you know, their unemployment insurance portals in places where citizens could go in and apply for those benefits. And you had a lot of states that were dealing with some very, um, old legacy systems that had to move quickly. And we, uh, you know, partnered with many of them and in several of our providers service providers to get them set up fast. And so that was one of the first, um, uh, things that we saw, you know, during the early stages of code 19 >>one of the big means going around the Internet, Obviously past couple months, as you know, the cliche of digital transformation or directional mission and then just being celebrated by covert, kind of like, ah, wrecking ball kind of hitting that digital transformation theme. Really kind of exposing people to the reality of it has to happen faster. I want to get your thoughts on this because you published an op ed piece today around the code 19 response on how the federal government should respond to this. And it's titled Rethinking Government Services in the wake of covert 19. You really make some strong points there, and I want to get your thoughts on that. Can you give a quick highlights of the key thoughts on that? Opted? What are you trying to say there? What's the positioning. What's the message? >>Yeah, well, as I mentioned, governments at every level have already started to accelerate their digital transformation effort. And one of the things that I was trying to really emphasize in the op ed today was that there is an opportunity to continue to do that certainly in the federal government, but also at state and local levels. And, um, you know, there have to be some investment in order to continue to enable that transformation, and there has to be continued leadership and focus on it. And, of course, it doesn't end just with government digital transformation. We're seeing it in the education sector. We're seeing it in the health, their sector. And so, uh, what I am trying to emphasize now is that we've come a long way even in a few months, in helping organizations through this transformation provide better citizen services, provide emergency response efforts including, you know, as I mentioned at the state level, getting these unemployment insurance portals set up fast in the virtual call centers organized around those, uh, and certainly at the federal government. We've seen some large scale programmes rolled out without cloud computing. That would not have been successful in several cases. When you think about the billions of dollars and really trillions of dollars that's rolled out through these federal, uh, government relief efforts, uh, I t. Has been a very important part of that. And so now we need to continue to move forward and accelerate this digital transformation across the board. It we owe it, quite frankly, to citizens. And, um, you know, I think that there are a lot of lessons learned that we can draw from covered 19 responses. >>So are you making a case for Congress to allocate money for modernization of these services? >>Yeah, The good news is, John is that Congress for years in a bipartisan way, has been supporting federal I t. Modernization. And now they have an opportunity, especially as you look at what's happening out of the states and again thinking about how some of these old legacy systems really delayed or hurt some of the covered 19 response efforts. The states need funding in order to modernize some of these systems, or it's not every federal agency as the funding that they need either. And there's an opportunity for Congress also to provide some of that funding. I saw that you spoke with my colleague Matt Cornelius over at the Alliance for additional Innovation and talked a lot about the modernizing technologies on it, some of those efforts and how important it is for Congress in a bipartisan way to make sure that the mighty modernization in federal agencies fully funded. And I support that. And I know that many other not only companies but trade associations like the Alliance for Additional Innovation do as well. >>And tomorrow >>I'm and I'm talking about up Skilling, of course, which is an important part. >>Well, I mean, you look at that. Look at the attic being the systems. They're antiquated, their old, you've got unemployment. That's just new jobs need to be filled re Skilling of existing jobs because the cloud is part of it. And then just the local economy is going to be impacted. Just online education, new roles and new responsibilities. So I got to ask you with with what you're seeing, what are the lessons? Have you learned that can keep up the momentum in the government? Because I see this is an accelerant. This pandemic. What lessons? >>In addition to what I was saying earlier on the funding side, having a focus on training and upscaling and re Skilling is really critical. Um, we have a lot of work worse development programmes here at Amazon and AWS that we're rolling out and providing a service or or our public sector customers and colleagues. We're also doing a lot in terms of helping, um, various parts of the population retrain and get involved in the digital economy. One of the I think really great examples of how we've been doing that for several years are the military assistance programs that we have been involved in where we're working with partners, community college level four year education institutions, Teoh provide training and certification for workers that are coming out of the military and or their spouses. That's something that we leave were both again the community college level, but even have partnered with the federal government, the Department of Labor in some of those programs. And we have to continue to do that we and others to accelerate what we're doing in terms of the workforce development effort. Um, you know, across every level of government, right? Frankly, >>you know, I've been doing a lot of virtual cube virtual events covering them, building software for them. Um, and then this is big focus on the remote workers work from home. I get that. That's an I T kind of paradigm. Companies have a focus of their workers, but also there's a remote customer, remote prospect or remote user. So the stakeholders of all these systems now are exposed in the It's pretty obvious who's winning and who's got a good solution. So I got to ask you, What's the learnings? Are you you're seeing over the past few months around this remote worker or remote consumer, because people have to do their jobs. But they also have suppliers in respect to how the Internet has evolved the ecosystem of partners and companies and and stakeholders. There's a lot of learnings here. What would you share the past couple months? >>So John is probably obvious to you that Kobe, 19 has transformed how people are working, obviously, and that's no different here at Amazon. Many of us are working remotely and have been for several months. Certainly, we're seeing, um, a huge transformation in the public sector around remote work. The federal government is you know, for years has had initiatives around Tele work. Uh, champions, like Gerry Connolly, a U S representative from Virginia, have been very focused on trying to move the federal government in that direction. And thank goodness, because I think if if those efforts weren't already in place, you would not have seen a So many people will be able to work from home as fast as they did during covered 19. But still, there's a lot more work to do in our federal agencies to adopt. Hello, work and, um, remote working. Uh, we're seeing that at the state level. We're seeing that in educational institutions, there's a ton more work there to do. And, you know, I think there's an opportunity. Teoh continue through these digital transformation efforts, enabling remote work and tele work. But we also have to have bipartisan collaboration to continue to push forward those efforts at the federal level. >>You know, it's interesting and I want to get your reaction is you're a veteran not only of technology, but also policy. And as I was saying earlier in an interview I was doing this morning around your event, is that on the commercial side. We saw Amazon. I mean, I was a history of Amazon developers. I t enterprise, commercial and now public sector. It's the same movie. Inadequate old systems need to be modernized cloud, certainly helping there. But you look at that. Look at the flywheel of Amazon, infrastructures of service, platforms of service and sass. A lot of people in the public sector are laying down the foundational things around infrastructure, getting on auditing, compliance system that's agile and then building a platform on top for a new workload. So I got to get your reaction to the three things that we're seeing. Changing technology, changing economics and changing expectations and experiences that are happening right now at an accelerated level. All three of those theaters are exploding and change. What's your thoughts and reaction? >>Well, one of the things that I've seen over the years, as you know, you saw first movers in the cloud and you saw organizations adopt these technologies is that sometimes you know when you look at federal workers, for example, or you even look across the public sector. People were a little apprehensive sometimes adopting these new technologies and practices, because they, um you know were adverse the risk or felt that if they did, you know, service a first mover, do something bold that it might come back to potentially, um, you know, hurt them in some way in terms of the risks that they took if something went wrong. And so now, over the last several months, I've seen that apprehension in every organization that we're working with basically not be there, because people recognize that they have to move now, move quickly and adopt these new technologies. Adopt these new practices in order to do their jobs to provide. If you're in government, the right services do your citizens into the people who need those services. If you're in the private sector to move faster, to be able to provide more services more quickly to your customers, I mean, think about a company like ours where we had to scale up very, very fast. We were already scaling rapidly, but we had to scale even more wrap and and so it's really, really important. I think that, you know, we draw on these lessons over the last few months, especially in relation to the public sector, where it's okay to take a risk. It's okay to adopt new technologies and practices. And it's okay to move fast, because you know what? In a situation like over 19 sometimes you're gonna have to move very, very quickly to that remote working environment, or you're gonna have to move very quickly to set up a you know, a digital or virtual call center in order to provide basic services that people need to survive. So it's just a really interesting transformation that I'm seeing out there. >>Yeah, it was interesting out to share some commentary from myself and I want to get your reaction to that is that in the hundreds of people that I've talked to in the DC area, covering public sector of the past many years is has been this younger audience and this younger workforce. And then now look at the pandemic. You look at the impact on education, unemployment in the citizenship of in the communities, not just state, but local. You're seeing an uprising. You're seeing a silent revolution from the younger constituents was saying, you know Hey, I don't care what it takes. Just go faster. Support me. Deliver the kind of serve, Be agile I mean, they're kind of speaking Dev ops in their own way. So a silent revolution is happening and I want to get your thoughts. But I know you and I have talked about this briefly and I use the word summit revolution. But people were younger generation like What are you talking about? Manuals like shipping old procurement methods. What's the problem? What's the blocker? Why is that? There is really no answer to that. So I want to get your thoughts to that cause that's something that we're seeing in this silent revolution is emerging in this I t modernization the government because people will expect faster services. They're >>unemployed. I wanted to be a lot more of the startup mentality. And, you know, I don't think it's, ah, even age restrictive. You know, every organization that we're working with, we have workers at every in every age group, and, you know, we're seeing people just shift to this mentality of okay, I need this service now. I need to move faster, and you know, we have to get access to this remotely in order to do this or to do that. And so to me, it's not you know, necessarily, just in a certain part of our population and everybody is starting. I think that way in every organization that we're working with and they're throwing out some of the, you know, some of the, um uh, old practices or old way of thinking. I mean, I can't tell you how many state officials I've had Call me during this covered 19 response who were asking for help. Like, we've got to do this now. How can we get your help to do this now And and to me, that's just, you know, that start up mentality like we've got to figure this out. No matter if our procurement practices aren't where they should be or our systems aren't where they should be. We have to figure this out. And to me, that's sort of a startup mentality. A you know, a transformational approach that we're seeing across the board. >>I would I would agree with that. Also add that a lot of people want to have a mission and they want to get involved in public service and see a way to contribute. So I see an inward my inbound migration for people getting involved, assault on these public sector problems cause it's a societal impact, and I think you're going to start to see people realizing that they can just taken protest. They can vote, but they also get involved. And I think you're going to see developers. I think it will be a tsunami of of new creative work loads or applications coming quickly. I think that's gonna be very >>interested. John. I I couldn't agree more. I think I think, you know, we're seeing transformation not just in the public sector and how services are providing are provided, but also in our economy and how we interact with people and how we socialize. And, you know, it's just a complete transformation in different way of thinking. And organizations and individuals are out there creating right now, much of it in the cloud, trying to figure out how to innovate, trying to figure out how you know, to come up with new business models and approaches. And so it's It's very exciting, you know, to see some of that also the top there in to talk to people as they're thinking about new ways to do things, you know, it's it's unfortunately very tragic given, You know, the circumstances around Kobe 19. But when things get difficult like this and people, you know, base, uh, challenges like this, you know, they tend to and we all tend to figure out how we can help, how we can maybe think differently, how we can help with the transformation. And we're certainly seeing that in the public sector and through some of these digital transformation efforts. But to your point, we're also seeing it in the private sector. >>What's great about the economy. People solve problems together. And that's one of the best things about America and Free States nations out there. So I want to shift a little bit. As I know this is something that's close to you, your heart as well as mine. You wrote a block post this past year earlier in the year, so we're supporting veterans to get into stem programs. How are you thinking about that and getting them back into the workforce? Certainly for and after the pandemic? >>Yeah, we're really passionate about this area, John. I'm glad you asked. I mentioned a little bit before some of the training that we're doing with colleges and universities and even directly with the government for, um uh, you know, military members that are transferring out. Our folks are already veterans or their spouses. You know. It's also important to remember the families who have been there right at the side of our veterans and those that air service a providing service in the military for the country. And so we're super passionate about that at every level of Amazon and every level, certainly of AWS. We have a lot of programs across Amazon to hire veterans to train veterans, including in above basic skills as well as advanced cloud skills. And we're super excited about all of those programs. I mentioned many of those in the block bus that you're referring to, and I would encourage folks toe look on our AWS public sector blawg for more information on those efforts, we're constantly updating and providing more insight and how those programs are being conduct >>well, Shannon, one of the things that's interesting and just to kind of close out our chat here is sustainability because you look at the carbon footprint, a lot of cars on the road, you see and seeing people being happy about that. But this points to what technology can do to help. Sustainability has had some announcements here at the summit. Can you share highlights on that? >>Yeah. So we have lots going on in sustainability across Amazon. Amazon Web services, or AWS, has been a big part of that. We have, ah, long term goal of being 100% renewable and eventually carbon carbon neutral. Our initial renewable energy goal is in 2025 s. So we've been, um, you know, enabling the availability of a lot more utility scale. Renewable energy is part of that effort just across the river in Virginia. We have multiple solar projects that we've been putting in place and backing financially now for several years as part of that effort. And we're doing that across the country as well as across the world. And that's something that we believe very strongly in. And, you know, the company Amazon just announced a $2 billion climate fund last week that focuses on startups and technology, a new technologies and new companies in this space. And that is also something that we're very proud. So we believe very strongly about this area. I you have been involved for a number of years in sustainability efforts in the in the company and in particular in AWS. Tonight I have the pleasure of also serving on the American Council for Renewable Energy, which does one of the leading non profits and organizations in this space. And there's, you know, there's a lot of momentum for, you know, renewable energy. And even with some of the challenges around code 19 and the economic challenges that industry is is moving forward. And, you know, we as a company are very, very committed to enabling more renewable energy to be available, including right across the river in Virginia. >>Well, Shannon, you got your hands full as the vice president of AWS public policy in d. C. Not only do we have the pandemic, we just got them sea change of massive innovation coming a digital. I know you've got the world down. They're evolving really quickly. Congratulations. And, you know, stay with it and keep keep plugging away for that innovation strategy. Appreciate it, >>John. We appreciate it. Thanks so much for including me and AWS on the queue began during the public sector summit. >>Michael, >>always good to see >>my pleasure. Always. Great societal changes coming. Real impact. This is the focus. Digital technology's going to make a difference. Change the economics. Changing experiences and outcomes for public services. Public in societal change. Kellog Shannon Kellogg, vice President of public Policy here in the Cube. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah.