>> Hello everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE been profiling the leaders in the technology world, women in technology from developers to the boardroom, everything in between. We have two great guests promoting in from Malaysia. Nancy Wang is the general manager, also CUBE alumni from AWS Data Protection, and founder and board chair of Advancing Women in Tech, awit.org. And of course Kate Watts who's the executive director of Advancing Women in Tech.org. So it's awit.org. Nancy, Kate, thanks for coming all the way across remotely from Malaysia. >> Of course, we're coming to you as fast as our internet bandwidth will allow us. And you know, I'm just thrilled today that you get to see a whole nother aspect of my life, right? Because typically we talk about AWS, and here we're talking about a topic near and dear to my heart. >> Well, Nancy, I love the fact that you're spending a lot of time taking the empowerment to go out and help the industries and helping with the advancement of women in tech. Kate, the executive director it's a 501C3, it's nonprofit, dedicating to accelerating the careers of women in groups in tech. Can you talk about the organization? >> Yes, I can. So Advancing Women in Tech was founded in 2017 in order to fix some of the pathway problems that we're seeing on the rise to leadership in the industry. And so we specifically focus on supporting mid-level women in technical roles, get into higher positions. We do that in a few different ways through mentorship programs through building technical skills and by connecting people to a supportive community. So you have your peer network and then a vertical sort of relationships to help you navigate the next steps in your career. So to date we've served about 40,000 individuals globally and we're just looking to expand our reach and impact and be able to better support women in the industry. >> Nancy, talk about the creation, the origination story. How'd this all come together? Obviously the momentum, everyone in the industry's been focused on this for a long time. Where did AWIT come from? Advancing Women in Technology, that's the acronym. Advancing Women in Technology.org, where'd it come from? What's the origination story? >> Yeah, so AWIT really originated from this desire that I had, to Kate's point around, well if you look around right and you know, don't take my word for it, right? Look at stats, look at news reports, or just frankly go on your LinkedIn and see how many women in underrepresented groups are in senior technical leadership roles right out in the companies whose names we all know. And so that was my case back in 2016. And so when I first got the idea and back then I was actually at Google, just another large tech company in the valley, right? It was about how do we get more role models, how we get more, for example, women into leadership roles so they can bring up the next generation, right? And so this is actually part of a longer speech that I'm about to give on Wednesday and part of the US State Department speaker program. In fact, that's why Kate and I are here in Malaysia right now is working with over 200 women entrepreneurs from all over in Southeast Asia, including Malaysia Philippines, Vietnam, Borneo, you know, so many countries where having more women entrepreneurs can help raise the GDP right, and that fits within our overall mission of getting more women into top leadership roles in tech. >> You know, I was talking about Teresa Carlson she came on the program as well for this year this next season we're going to do. And she mentioned the decision between the US progress and international. And she's saying as much as it's still bad numbers, it's worse than outside the United States and needs to get better. Can you comment on the global aspect? You brought that up. I think it's super important to highlight that it's just not one area, it's a global evolution. >> Absolutely, so let me start, and I'd love to actually have Kate talk about our current programs and all of the international groups that we're working with. So as Teresa aptly mentioned there is so much work to be done not just outside the US and North Americas where typically tech nonprofits will focus, but rather if you think about the one to end model, right? For example when I was doing the product market fit workshop for the US State Department I had women dialing in from rice fields, right? So let me just pause there for a moment. They were holding their cell phones up near towers near trees just so that they can get a few minutes of time with me to do a workshop and how to accelerate their business. So if you don't call that the desire to propel oneself or accelerate oneself, not sure what is, right. And so it's really that passion that drove me to spend the next week and a half here working with local entrepreneurs working with policy makers so we can take advantage and really leverage that passion that people have, right? To accelerate more business globally. And so that's why, you know Kate will be leading our contingent with the United Nations Women Group, right? That is focused on women's economic empowerment because that's super important, right? One aspect can be sure, getting more directors, you know vice presidents into companies like Google and Amazon. But another is also how do you encourage more women around the world to start businesses, right? To reach economic and freedom independence, right? To overcome some of the maybe social barriers to becoming a leader in their own country. >> Yes, and if I think about our own programs and our model of being very intentional about supporting the learning development and skills of women and members of underrepresented groups we focused very much on providing global access to a number of our programs. For instance, our product management certification on Coursera or engineering management our upcoming women founders accelerator. We provide both access that you can get from anywhere. And then also very intentional programming that connects people into the networks to be able to further their networks and what they've learned through the skills online, so. >> Yeah, and something Kate just told me recently is these courses that Kate's mentioning, right? She was instrumental in working with the American Council on Education and so that our learners can actually get up to six college credits for taking these courses on product management engineering management, on cloud product management. And most recently we had our first organic one of our very first organic testimonials was from a woman's tech bootcamp in Nigeria, right? So if you think about the worldwide impact of these upskilling courses where frankly in the US we might take for granted right around the world as I mentioned, there are women dialing in from rice patties from other, you know, for example, outside the, you know corporate buildings in order to access this content. >> Can you think about the idea of, oh sorry, go ahead. >> Go ahead, no, go ahead Kate. >> I was going to say, if you can't see it, you can't become it. And so we are very intentional about ensuring that we have we're spotlighting the expertise of women and we are broadcasting that everywhere so that anybody coming up can gain the skills and the networks to be able to succeed in this industry. >> We'll make sure we get those links so we can promote them. Obviously we feel the same way getting the word out. I think a couple things I'd like to ask you guys cause I think you hit a great point. One is the economic advantage the numbers prove that diverse teams perform better number one, that's clear. So good point there. But I want to get your thoughts on the entrepreneurial equation. You mentioned founders and startups and there's also different makeups in different countries. It's not like the big corporations sometimes it's smaller business in certain areas the different cultures have different business sizes and business types. How do you guys see that factoring in outside the United States, say the big tech companies? Okay, yeah. The easy lower the access to get in education than stay with them, in other countries is it the same or is it more diverse in terms of business? >> So what really actually got us started with the US State Department was around our work with women founders. And I love for Kate to actually share her experience working with AWS startups in that capacity. But frankly, you know, we looked at the content and the mentor programs that were providing women who wanted to be executives, you know, quickly realize a lot of those same skills such as finding customers, right? Scaling your product and building channels can also apply to women founders, not just executives. And so early supporters of our efforts from firms such as Moderna up in Seattle, Emergence Ventures, Decibel Ventures in, you know, the Bay Area and a few others that we're working with right now. Right, they believed in the mission and really helped us scale out what is now our existing platform and offerings for women founders. >> Those are great firms by the way. And they also are very founder friendly and also understand the global workforce. I mean, that's a whole nother dimension. Okay, what's your reaction to all that? >> Yes, we have been very intentional about taking the product expertise and the learnings of women and in our network, we first worked with AWS startups to support the development of the curriculum for the recent accelerator for women founders that was held last spring. And so we're able to support 25 founders and also brought in the expertise of about 20 or 30 women from Advancing Women in Tech to be able to be the lead instructors and mentors for that. And so we have really realized that with this network and this individual sort of focus on product expertise building strong teams, we can take that information and bring it to folks everywhere. And so there is very much the intentionality of allowing founders allowing individuals to take the lessons and bring it to their individual circumstances and the cultures in which they are operating. But the product sense is a skill that we can support the development of and we're proud to do so. >> That's awesome. Nancy, I want to ask you some never really talk about data storage and AWS cloud greatness and goodness, here's different and you also work full-time at AWS and you're the founder or the chairman of this great organization. How do you balance both and do you get, they're getting behind you on this, Amazon is getting behind you on this. >> Well, as I say it's always easier to negotiate on the way in. But jokes aside, I have to say the leadership has been tremendously supportive. If you think about, for example, my leaders Wayne Duso who's also been on the show multiple times, Bill Vaas who's also been on the show multiple times, you know they're both founders and also operators entrepreneurs at heart. So they understand that it is important, right? For all of us, it's really incumbent on all of us who are in positions to do so, to create a pathway for more people to be in leadership roles for more people to be successful entrepreneurs. So, no, I mean if you just looked at LinkedIn they're always uploading my vote so they reach to more audiences. And frankly they're rooting for us back home in the US while we're in Malaysia this week. >> That's awesome. And I think that's a good culture to have that empowerment and I think that's very healthy. What's next for you guys? What's on the agenda? Take us through the activities. I know that you got a ton of things happening. You got your event out there, which is why you're out there. There's a bunch of other activities. I think you guys call it the Advancing Women in Tech week. >> Yes, this week we are having a week of programming that you can check out at Advancing Women in Tech.org. That is spotlighting the expertise of a number of women in our space. So it is three days of programming Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday if you are in the US so the seventh through the ninth, but available globally. We are also going to be in New York next week for the event at the UN and are looking to continue to support our mentorship programs and also our work supporting women founders throughout the year. >> All right. I have to ask you guys if you don't mind get a little market data so you can share with us here at theCUBE. What are you hearing this year that's different in the conversation space around the topics, the interests? Obviously I've seen massive amounts of global acceleration around conversations, more video, things like this more stories are scaling, a lot more LinkedIn activity. It just seems like it's a lot different this year. Can you guys share any kind of current trends you're seeing relative to the conversations and topics being discussed across the the community? >> Well, I think from a needle moving perspective, right? I think due to the efforts of wonderful organizations including the Q for spotlighting all of these awesome women, right? Trailblazing women and the nonprofits the government entities that we work with there's definitely more emphasis on creating access and creating pathways. So that's probably one thing that you're seeing is more women, more investors posting about their activities. Number two, from a global trend perspective, right? The rise of women in security. I noticed that on your agenda today, you had Lena Smart who's a good friend of mine chief information security officer at MongoDB, right? She and I are actually quite involved in helping founders especially early stage founders in the security space. And so globally from a pure technical perspective, right? There's right more increasing regulations around data privacy, data sovereignty, right? For example, India's in a few weeks about to get their first data protection regulation there locally. So all of that is giving rise to yet another wave of opportunity and we want women founders uniquely positioned to take advantage of that opportunity. >> I love it. Kate, reaction to that? I mean founders, more pathways it sounds like a neural network, it sounds like AI enabled. >> Yes, and speaking of AI, with the rise of that we are also hearing from many community members the importance of continuing to build their skills upskill learn to be able to keep up with the latest trends. There's a lot of people wondering what does this mean for my own career? And so they're turning to organizations like Advancing Women in Tech to find communities to both learn the latest information, but also build their networks so that they are able to move forward regardless of what the industry does. >> I love the work you guys are doing. It's so impressive. I think the economic angle is new it's more amplified this year. It's always kind of been there and continues to be. What do you guys hope for by next year this time what do you hope to see different from a needle moving perspective, to use your word Nancy, for next year? What's the visual output in your mind? >> I want to see real effort made towards 50-50 representation in all tech leadership roles. And I'd like to see that happen by 2050. >> Kate, anything on your end? >> I love that. I'm going to go a little bit more touchy-feely. I want everybody in our space to understand that the skills that they build and that the networks they have carry with them regardless of wherever they go. And so to be able to really lean in and learn and continue to develop the career that you want to have. So whether that be at a large organization or within your own business, that you've got the potential to move forward on that within you. >> Nancy, Kate, thank you so much for your contribution. I'll give you the final word. Put a plug in for the organization. What are you guys looking for? Any kind of PSA you want to share with the folks watching? >> Absolutely, so if you're in a position to be a mentor, join as a mentor, right? Help elevate and accelerate the next generation of women leaders. If you're an investor help us invest in more women started companies, right? Women founded startups and lastly, if you are women looking to accelerate your career, come join our community. We have resources, we have mentors and who we have investors who are willing to come in on the ground floor and help you accelerate your business. >> Great work. Thank you so much for participating in our International Women's Day 23 program and we'd look to keep this going quarterly. We'll see you next year, next time. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Thanks so much John. >> Thank you. >> Okay, women leaders here. >> Nancy: Thanks for having us >> All over the world, coming together for a great celebration but really highlighting the accomplishments, the pathways the investment, the mentoring, everything in between. It's theCUBE. Bring as much as we can. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hi, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. As part of International Women's Day, we're featuring some of the leading women in business technology from developer to all types of titles and to the executive level. And one topic that's really important is called Getting a Seat at the Table, board makeup, having representation at corporate boards, private and public companies. It's been a big push. And former technology operating executive and corporate board member, she's a board machine Sue Barsamian, formerly with HPE, Hewlett Packard. Sue, great to see you. CUBE alumni, distinguished CUBE alumni. Thank you for coming on. >> Yes, I'm very proud of my CUBE alumni title. >> I'm sure it opens a lot of doors for you. (Sue laughing) We're psyched to have you on. This is a really important topic, and I want to get into the whole, as women advance up, and they're sitting on the boards, they can implement policy and there's governance. Obviously public companies have very strict oversight, and not strict, but like formal. Private boards have to operate, be nimble. They don't have to share all their results. But still, boards play an important role in the success of scaled up companies. So super important, that representation there is key. >> Yes. >> I want to get into that, but first, before we get started, how did you get into tech? How did it all start for you? >> Yeah, long time ago, I was an electrical engineering major. Came out in 1981 when, you know, opportunities for engineering, if you were kind, I went to Kansas State as an undergrad, and basically in those days you went to Texas and did semiconductors. You went to Atlanta and did communication satellites. You went to Boston or you went to Silicon Valley. And for me, that wasn't too hard a choice. I ended up going west and really, I guess what, embarked on a 40 year career in Silicon Valley and absolutely loved it. Largely software, but some time on the hardware side. Started out in networking, but largely software. And then, you know, four years ago transitioned to my next chapter, which is the corporate board director. And again, focused on technology software and cybersecurity boards. >> For the folks watching, we'll cut through another segment we can probably do about your operating career, but you rose through the ranks and became a senior operating executive at the biggest companies in the world. Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and others. Very great career, okay. And so now you're kind of like, put that on pause, and you're moving on to the next chapter, which is being a board director. What inspired you to be a board director for multiple public companies and multiple private companies? Well, how many companies are you on? But what's the inspiration? What's the inspiration? First tell me how many board ships you're on, board seats you're on, and then what inspired you to become a board director? >> Yeah, so I'm on three public, and you are limited in terms of the number of publics that you can do to four. So I'm on three public, and I'm on four private from a tech perspective. And those range from, you know, a $4 billion in revenue public company down to a 35 person private company. So I've got the whole range. >> So you're like freelancing, I mean, what is it like? It's a full-time job, obviously. It's a lot of work involved. >> Yeah, yeah, it's. >> John: Why are you doing it? >> Well, you know, so I retired from being an operating executive after 37 years. And, but I loved, I mean, it's tough, right? It's tough these days, particularly with all the pressures out there in the market, not to mention the pandemic, et cetera. But I loved it. I loved working. I loved having a career, and I was ready to back off on, I would say the stresses of quarterly results and the stresses of international travel. You have so much of it. But I wasn't ready to back off from being involved and engaged and continuing to learn new things. I think this is why you come to tech, and for me, why I went to the valley to begin with was really that energy and that excitement, and it's like it's constantly reinventing itself. And I felt like that wasn't over for me. And I thought because I hadn't done boards before I retired from operating roles, I thought, you know, that would fill the bill. And it's honestly, it has exceeded expectations. >> In a good way. You feel good about where you're at and. >> Yeah. >> What you went in, what was the expectation going in and what surprised you? And were there people along the way that kind of gave you some pointers or don't do this, stay away from this. Take us through your experiences. >> Yeah, honestly, there is an amazing network of technology board directors, you know, in the US and specifically in the Valley. And we are all incredibly supportive. We have groups where we get together as board directors, and we talk about topics, and we share best practices and stories, and so I underestimated that, right? I thought I was going to, I thought I was going to enter this chapter where I would be largely giving back after 37 years. You've learned a little bit, right? What I underestimated was just the power of continuing to learn and being surrounded by so many amazing people. When, you know, when you do, you know, multiple boards, your learnings are just multiplied, right? Because you see not just one model, but you see many models. You see not just one problem, but many problems. Not just one opportunity, but many opportunities. And I underestimated how great that would be for me from a learning perspective and then your ability to share from one board to the other board because all of my boards are companies who are also quite close to each other, the executives collaborate. So that has turned out to be really exciting for me. >> So you had the stressful job. You rose to the top of the ranks, quarterly shot clock earnings, and it's hard charging. It's like, it's like, you know, being an athlete, as we say tech athlete. You're a tech athlete. Now you're taking that to the next level, which is now you're juggling multiple operational kind of things, but not with super pressure. But there's still a lot of responsibility. I know there's one board, you got compensation committee, I mean there's work involved. It's not like you're clipping coupons and having pizza. >> Yeah, no, it's real work. Believe me, it's real work. But I don't know how long it took me to not, to stop waking up and looking at my phone and thinking somebody was going to be dropping their forecast, right? Just that pressure of the number, and as a board member, obviously you are there to support and help guide the company and you feel, you know, you feel the pressure and the responsibility of what that role entails, but it's not the same as the frontline pressure every quarter. It's different. And so I did the first type. I loved it, you know. I'm loving this second type. >> You know, the retirement, it's always a cliche these days, but it's not really like what people think it is. It's not like getting a boat, going fishing or whatever. It's doing whatever you want to do, that's what retirement is. And you've chose to stay active. Your brain's being tested, and you're working it, having fun without all the stress. But it's enough, it's like going the gym. You're not hardcore workout, but you're working out with the brain. >> Yeah, no, for sure. It's just a different, it's just a different model. But the, you know, the level of conversations, the level of decisions, all of that is quite high. Which again, I like, yeah. >> Again, you really can't talk about some of the fun questions I want to ask, like what's the valuations like? How's the market, your headwinds? Is there tailwinds? >> Yes, yes, yes. It's an amazing, it's an amazing market right now with, as you know, counter indicators everywhere, right? Something's up, something's down, you know. Consumer spending's up, therefore interest rates go up and, you know, employment's down. And so or unemployment's down. And so it's hard. Actually, I really empathize with, you know, the, and have a great deal of respect for the CEOs and leadership teams of my board companies because, you know, I kind of retired from operating role, and then everybody else had to deal with running a company during a pandemic and then running a company through the great resignation, and then running a company through a downturn. You know, those are all tough things, and I have a ton of respect for any operating executive who's navigating through this and leading a company right now. >> I'd love to get your take on the board conversations at the end if we have more time, what the mood is, but I want to ask you about one more thing real quick before we go to the next topic is you're a retired operating executive. You have multiple boards, so you've got your hands full. I noticed there's a lot of amazing leaders, other female tech athletes joining boards, but they also have full-time jobs. >> Yeah. >> And so what's your advice? Cause I know there's a lot of networking, a lot of sharing going on. There's kind of a balance between how much you can contribute on the board versus doing the day job, but there's a real need for more women on boards, so yet there's a lot going on boards. What's the current state of the union if you will, state of the market relative to people in their careers and the stresses? >> Yeah. >> Cause you left one and jumped in all in there. >> Yeah. >> Some can't do that. They can't be on five boards, but they're on a few. What's the? >> Well, and you know, and if you're an operating executive, you wouldn't be on five boards, right? You would be on one or two. And so I spend a lot of time now bringing along the next wave of women and helping them both in their career but also to get a seat at the table on a board. And I'm very vocal about telling people not to do it the way I do it. There's no reason for it to be sequential. You can, you know, I thought I was so busy and was traveling all the time, and yes, all of that was true, but, and maybe I should say, you know, you can still fit in a board. And so, and what I see now is that your learnings are so exponential with outside perspective that I believe I would've been an even better operating executive had I done it earlier. I know I would've been an even better operating executive had I done it earlier. And so my advice is don't do it the way I did it. You know, it's worked out fine for me, but hindsight's 2020, I would. >> If you can go back and do a mulligan or a redo, what would you do? >> Yeah, I would get on a board earlier, full stop, yeah. >> Board, singular, plural? >> Well, I really, I don't think as an operating executive you can do, you could do one, maybe two. I wouldn't go beyond that, and I think that's fine. >> Yeah, totally makes sense. Okay, I got to ask you about your career. I know technical, you came in at that time in the market, I remember when I broke into the business, very male dominated, and then now it's much better. When you went through the ranks as a technical person, I know you had some blockers and definitely some, probably some people like, well, you know. We've seen that. How did you handle that? What were some of the key pivot points in your journey? And we've had a lot of women tell their stories here on theCUBE, candidly, like, hey, I was going to tell that professor, I'm going to sit in the front row. I'm going to, I'm getting two degrees, you know, robotics and aerospace. So, but they were challenged, even with the aspiration to do tech. I'm not saying that was something that you had, but like have you had experience like that, that you overcome? What were those key points and how did you handle them and how does that help people today? >> Yeah, you know, I have to say, you know, and not discounting that obviously this has been a journey for women, and there are a lot of things to overcome both in the workforce and also just balancing life honestly. And they're all real. There's also a story of incredible support, and you know, I'm the type of person where if somebody blocked me or didn't like me, I tended to just, you know, think it was me and like work harder and get around them, and I'm sure that some of that was potentially gender related. I didn't interpret it that way at the time. And I was lucky to have amazing mentors, many, many, many of whom were men, you know, because they were in the positions of power, and they made a huge difference on my career, huge. And I also had amazing female mentors, Meg Whitman, Ann Livermore at HPE, who you know well. So I had both, but you know, when I look back on the people who made a difference, there are as many men on the list as there are women. >> Yeah, and that's a learning there. Create those coalitions, not just one or the other. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. >> Well, I got to ask you about the, well, you brought up the pandemic. This has come up on some interviews this year, a little bit last year on the International Women's Day, but this year it's resonating, and I would never ask in an interview. I saw an interview once where a host asked a woman, how do you balance it all? And I was just like, no one asked men that. And so it's like, but with remote work, it's come up now the word empathy around people knowing each other's personal situation. In other words, when remote work happened, everybody went home. So we all got a glimpse of the backdrop. You got, you can see what their personal life was on Facebook. We were just commenting before we came on camera about that. So remote work really kind of opened up this personal side of everybody, men and women. >> Yeah. >> So I think this brings this new empathy kind of vibe or authentic self people call it. Is remote work an opportunity or a threat for advancement of women in tech? >> It's a much debated topic. I look at it as an opportunity for many of the reasons that you just said. First of all, let me say that when I was an operating executive and would try to create an environment on my team that was family supportive, I would do that equally for young or, you know, early to mid-career women as I did for early to mid-career men. And the reason is I needed those men, you know, chances are they had a working spouse at home, right? I needed them to be able to share the load. It's just as important to the women that companies give, you know, the partner, male or female, the partner support and the ability to share the love, right? So to me it's not just a woman thing. It's women and men, and I always tried to create the environment where it was okay to go to your soccer game. I knew you would be online later in the evening when the kids were in bed, and that was fine. And I think the pandemic has democratized that and made that, you know, made that kind of an everyday occurrence. >> Yeah the baby walks in. They're in the zoom call. The dog comes in. The leaf blower going on the outside the window. I've seen it all on theCUBE. >> Yeah, and people don't try to pretend anymore that like, you know, the house is clean, the dog's behaved, you know, I mean it's just, it's just real, and it's authentic, and I think that's healthy. >> Yeah. >> I do, you know, I also love, I also love the office, and you know, I've got a 31 year old and a soon to be 27 year old daughter, two daughters. And you know, they love going into the office, and I think about when I was their age, how just charged up I would get from being in the office. I also see how great it is for them to have a couple of days a week at home because you can get a few things done in between Zoom calls that you don't have to end up piling onto the weekend, and, you know, so I think it's a really healthy, I think it's a really healthy mix now. Most tech companies are not mandating five days in. Most tech companies are at two to three days in. I think that's a, I think that's a really good combination. >> It's interesting how people are changing their culture to get together more as groups and even events. I mean, while I got you, I might as well ask you, what's the board conversations around, you know, the old conferences? You know, before the pandemic, every company had like a user conference. Right, now it's like, well, do we really need to have that? Maybe we do smaller, and we do digital. Have you seen how companies are handling the in-person? Because there's where the relationships are really formed face-to-face, but not everyone's going to be going. But now certain it's clearly back to face-to-face. We're seeing that with theCUBE as you know. >> Yeah, yeah. >> But the numbers aren't coming back, and the numbers aren't that high, but the stakeholders. >> Yeah. >> And the numbers are actually higher if you count digital. >> Yeah, absolutely. But you know, also on digital there's fatigue from 100% digital, right? It's a hybrid. People don't want to be 100% digital anymore, but they also don't want to go back to the days when everybody got on a plane for every meeting, every call, every sales call. You know, I'm seeing a mix on user conferences. I would say two-thirds of my companies are back, but not at the expense level that they were on user conferences. We spend a lot of time getting updates on, cause nobody has put, interestingly enough, nobody has put T&E, travel and expense back to pre-pandemic levels. Nobody, so everybody's pulled back on number of trips. You know, marketing events are being very scrutinized, but I think very effective. We're doing a lot of, and, you know, these were part of the old model as well, like some things, some things just recycle, but you know, there's a lot of CIO and customer round tables in regional cities. You know, those are quite effective right now because people want some face-to-face, but they don't necessarily want to get on a plane and go to Las Vegas in order to do it. I mean, some of them are, you know, there are a lot of things back in Las Vegas. >> And think about the meetings that when you were an operating executive. You got to go to the sales kickoff, you got to go to this, go to that. There were mandatory face-to-faces that you had to go to, but there was a lot of travel that you probably could have done on Zoom. >> Oh, a lot, I mean. >> And then the productivity to the family impact too. Again, think about again, we're talking about the family and people's personal lives, right? So, you know, got to meet a customer. All right. Salesperson wants you to get in front of a customer, got to fly to New York, take a red eye, come on back. Like, I mean, that's gone. >> Yeah, and oh, by the way, the customer doesn't necessarily want to be in the office that day, so, you know, they may or may not be happy about that. So again, it's and not or, right? It's a mix. And I think it's great to see people back to some face-to-face. It's great to see marketing and events back to some face-to-face. It's also great to see that it hasn't gone back to the level it was. I think that's a really healthy dynamic. >> Well, I'll tell you that from our experience while we're on the topic, we'll move back to the International Women's Day is that the productivity of digital, this program we're doing is going to be streamed. We couldn't do this face-to-face because we had to have everyone fly to an event. We're going to do hundreds of stories that we couldn't have done. We're doing it remote. Because it's better to get the content than not have it. I mean it's offline, so, but it's not about getting people to the event and watch the screen for seven hours. It's pick your interview, and then engage. >> Yeah. >> So it's self-service. So we're seeing a lot, the new user experience kind of direct to consumer, and so I think there will be an, I think there's going to be a digital first class citizen with events, so that that matches up with the kind of experience, but the offline version. Face-to-face optimized for relationships, and that's where the recruiting gets done. That's where, you know, people can build these relationships with each other. >> Yeah, and it can be asynchronous. I think that's a real value proposition. It's a great point. >> Okay, I want to get, I want to get into the technology side of the education and re-skilling and those things. I remember in the 80s, computer science was software engineering. You learned like nine languages. You took some double E courses, one or two, and all the other kind of gut classes in school. Engineering, you had the four class disciplines and some offshoots of specialization. Now it's incredible the diversity of tracks in all engineering programs and computer science and outside of those departments. >> Yeah. >> Can you speak to the importance of STEM and the diversity in the technology industry and how this brings opportunity to lower the bar to get in and how people can stay in and grow and keep leveling up? >> Yeah, well look, we're constantly working on how to, how to help the incoming funnel. But then, you know, at a university level, I'm on the foundation board of Kansas State where I got my engineering degree. I was also Chairman of the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering, which was all about diversity in STEM and how do you keep that pipeline going because honestly the US needs more tech resources than we have. And if you don't tap into the diversity of our entire workforce, we won't be able to fill that need. And so we focused a lot on both the funnel, right, that starts at the middle school level, particularly for girls, getting them in, you know, the situation of hands-on comfort level with coding, with robot building, you know, whatever gives them that confidence. And then keeping that going all the way into, you know, university program, and making sure that they don't attrit out, right? And so there's a number of initiatives, whether it's mentoring and support groups and financial aid to make sure that underrepresented minorities, women and other minorities, you know, get through the funnel and stay, you know, stay in. >> Got it. Now let me ask you, you said, I have two daughters. You have a family of girls too. Is there a vibe difference between the new generation and what's the trends that you're seeing in this next early wave? I mean, not maybe, I don't know how this is in middle school, but like as people start getting into their adult lives, college and beyond what's the current point of view, posture, makeup of the talent coming in? >> Yeah, yeah. >> Certain orientations, do you see any patterns? What's your observation? >> Yeah, it's interesting. So if I look at electrical engineering, my major, it's, and if I look at Kansas State, which spends a lot of time on this, and I think does a great job, but the diversity of that as a major has not changed dramatically since I was there in the early 80s. Where it has changed very significantly is computer science. There are many, many university and college programs around the country where, you know, it's 50/50 in computer science from a gender mix perspective, which is huge progress. Huge progress. And so, and to me that's, you know, I think CS is a fantastic degree for tech, regardless of what function you actually end up doing in these companies. I mean, I was an electrical engineer. I never did core electrical engineering work. I went right into sales and marketing and general management roles. So I think, I think a bunch of, you know, diverse CS graduates is a really, really good sign. And you know, we need to continue to push on that, but progress has been made. I think the, you know, it kind of goes back to the thing we were just talking about, which is the attrition of those, let's just talk about women, right? The attrition of those women once they got past early career and into mid-career then was a concern, right? And that goes back to, you know, just the inability to, you know, get it all done. And that I am hopeful is going to be better served now. >> Well, Sue, it's great to have you on. I know you're super busy. I appreciate you taking the time and contributing to our program on corporate board membership and some of your story and observations and opinions and analysis. Always great to have you and call you a contributor for theCUBE. You can jump on on one more board, be one of our board contributors for our analysts. (Sue laughing) >> I'm at capacity. (both laughing) >> Final, final word. What's the big seat at the table issue that's going well and areas that need to be improved? >> So I'll speak for my boards because they have made great progress in efficiency. You know, obviously with interest rates going up and the mix between growth and profitability changing in terms of what investors are looking for. Many, many companies have had to do a hard pivot from grow at all costs to healthy balance of growth and profit. And I'm very pleased with how my companies have made that pivot. And I think that is going to make much better companies as a result. I think diversity is something that has not been solved at the corporate level, and we need to keep working it. >> Awesome. Thank you for coming on theCUBE. CUBE alumni now contributor, on multiple boards, full-time job. Love the new challenge and chapter you're on, Sue. We'll be following, and we'll check in for more updates. And thank you for being a contributor on this program this year and this episode. We're going to be doing more of these quarterly, so we're going to move beyond once a year. >> That's great. (cross talking) It's always good to see you, John. >> Thank you. >> Thanks very much. >> Okay. >> Sue: Talk to you later. >> This is theCUBE coverage of IWD, International Women's Day 2023. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Hello, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Compute Engineered For Your Hybrid World, sponsored by HPE and Intel. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. I'm pleased to be joined by Krista Satterthwaite, SVP and general manager for HPE Mainstream Compute, and Lisa Spelman, corporate vice president, and general manager of Intel Xeon Products, here to discuss the major announcement. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> Great to be here. >> Great to see you guys. And exciting announcement. Krista, Compute continues to evolve to meet the challenges of businesses. We're seeing more and more high performance, more Compute, I mean, it's getting more Compute every day. You guys officially announced this next generation of ProLiant Gen11s in November. Can you share and talk about what this means? >> Yeah, so first of all, thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited about this announcement. And yeah, in November we announced our HPE ProLiant NextGen, and it really was about one thing. It's about engineering Compute for customers' hybrid world. And we have three different design principles when we designed this generation. First is intuitive cloud operating experience, and that's with our HPE GreenLake for Compute Ops Management. And that's all about management that is simple, unified, and automated. So it's all about seeing everything from one council. So you have a customer that's using this, and they were so surprised at how much they could see, and they were excited because they had servers in multiple locations. This was a hotel, so they had servers everywhere, and they can now see all their different firmware levels. And with that type of visibility, they thought their planning was going to be much, much easier. And then when it comes to updates, they're much quicker and much easier, so it's an exciting thing, whether you have servers just in the data center, or you have them distributed, you could see and do more than you ever could before with HPE GreenLake for Compute Ops Management. So that's number one. Number two is trusted security by design. Now, when we launched our HPE ProLiant Gen10 servers years ago, we launched groundbreaking innovative security features, and we haven't stopped, we've continued to enhance that every since then. And this generation's no exception. So we have new innovations around security. Security is a huge focus area for us, and so we're excited about delivering those. And then lastly, performance for every workload. We have a huge increase in performance with HPE ProLiant Gen11, and we have customers that are clamoring for this additional performance right now. And what's great about this is that, it doesn't matter where the bottleneck is, whether it's CPU, memory or IO, we have advancements across the board that are going to make real differences in what customers are going to be able to get out of their workloads. And then we have customers that are trying to build headroom in. So even if they don't need a today, what they put in their environment today, they know needs to last and need to be built for the future. >> That's awesome. Thanks for the recap. And that's great news for folks looking to power those workloads, more and more optimizations needed. I got to ask though, how is what you guys are announcing today, meeting these customer needs for the future, and what are your customers looking for and what are HPE and Intel announcing today? >> Yeah, so customers are doing more than ever before with their servers. So they're really pushing things to the max. I'll give you an example. There's a retail customer that is waiting to get their hands on our ProLiant Gen11 servers, because they want to do video streaming in every one of their retail stores and what they're building, when they're building what they need, we started talking to 'em about what their needs were today, and they were like, "Forget about what my needs are today. We're buying for headroom. We don't want to touch these servers for a while." So they're maxing things out, because they know the needs are coming. And so what you'll see with this generation is that we've built all of that in so that customers can deploy with confidence and know they have the headroom for all the things they want to do. The applications that we see and what people are trying to do with their servers is light years different than the last big announcement we had, which was our ProLiant Gen10 servers. People are trying to do more than ever before and they're trying to do that at the Edge as well as as the data center. So I'll tell you a little bit about the servers we have. So in partnership with Intel, we're really excited to announce a new batch of servers. And these servers feature the 4th Gen Intel Xeon scalable processors, bringing a lot more performance and efficiency. And I'll talk about the servers, one, the first one is a HPE ProLiant DL320 Gen11. Now, I told you about that retail customer that's trying to do video streaming in their stores. This is the server they were looking at. This server is a new server, we didn't have a Gen10 or a Gen10+ version of the server. This is a new server and it's optimized for Edge use cases. It's a rack-based server and it's very, very flexible. So different types of storage, different types of GPU configurations, really designed to take care of many, many use cases at the Edge and doing more at the Edge than ever before. So I mentioned video streaming, but also VDI and analytics at the Edge. The next two servers are some of our most popular servers, our HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen11, and that's our density-optimized server for enterprise. And that is getting an upgrade across the board as well, big, big improvements in terms of performance, and expansion. And for those customers that need even more expansion when it comes to, let's say, storage or accelerators then the DL 380 Gen11 is a server that's new as well. And that's really for folks that need more expandability than the DL360, which is a one use server. And then lastly, our ML350, which is a tower server. These tower servers are typically used at remote sites, branch offices and this particular server holds a world record for energy efficiency for tower servers. So those are some of the servers we have today that we're announcing. I also want to talk a little bit about our Cray portfolio. So we're announcing two new servers with our HPE Cray portfolio. And what's great about this is that these servers make super computing more accessible to more enterprise customers. These servers are going to be smaller, they're going to come in at lower price points, and deliver tremendous energy efficiency. So these are the Cray XD servers, and there's more servers to come, but these are the ones that we're announcing with this first iteration. >> Great stuff. I can talk about servers all day long, I love server innovation. It's been following for many, many years, and you guys know. Lisa, we'll bring you in. Servers have been powered by Intel Xeon, we've been talking a lot about the scalable processors. This is your 4th Gen, they're in Gen11 and you're at 4th Gen. Krista mentioned this generation's about Security Edge, which is essentially becoming like a data center model now, the Edges are exploding. What are some of the design principles that went into the 4th Gen this time around the scalable processor? Can you share the Intel role here? >> Sure. I love what Krista said about headroom. If there's anything we've learned in these past few years, it's that you can plan for today, and you can even plan for tomorrow, but your tomorrow might look a lot different than what you thought it was going to. So to meet these business challenges, as we think about the underlying processor that powers all that amazing server lineup that Krista just went through, we are really looking at delivering that increased performance, the power efficient compute and then strong security. And of course, attention to the overall operating cost of the customer environment. Intel's focused on a very workload-first approach to solving our customers' real problems. So this is the applications that they're running every day to drive their digital transformation, and we really like to focus our innovation, and leadership for those highest value, and also the highest growth workloads. Some of those that we've uniquely focused on in 4th Gen Xeon, our artificial intelligence, high performance computing, network, storage, and as well as the deployments, like you were mentioning, ranging from the cloud all the way out to the Edge. And those are all satisfied by 4th Gen Xeon scalable. So our strategy for architecting is based off of all of that. And in addition to doing things like adding core count, improving the platform, updating the memory and the IO, all those standard things that you do, we've invested deeply in delivering the industry's CPU with the most built-in accelerators. And I'll just give an example, in artificial intelligence with built-in AMX acceleration, plus the framework optimizations, customers can see a 10X performance improvement gen over gen, that's on both training and inference. So it further cements Xeon as the world's foundation for inference, and it now delivers performance equivalent of a modern GPU, but all within your CPU. The flexibility that, that opens up for customers is tremendous and it's so many new ways to utilize their infrastructure. And like Krista said, I just want to say that, that best-in-class security, and security solutions are an absolute requirement. We believe that starts at the hardware level, and we continue to invest in our security features with that full ecosystem support so that our customers, like HPE, can deliver that full stacked solution to really deliver on that promise. >> I love that scalable processor messaging too around the silicon and all those advanced features, the accelerators. AI's certainly seeing a lot of that in demand now. Krista, similar question to you on your end. How do you guys look at these, your core design principles around the ProLiant Gen11, and how that helps solve the challenges for your customers that are living in this hybrid world today? >> Yeah, so we see how fast things are changing and we kept that in mind when we decided to design this generation. We talked all already about distributed environments. We see the intensity of the requirements that are at the Edge, and that's part of what we're trying to address with the new platform that I mentioned. It's also part of what we're trying to address with our management, making sure that people can manage no matter where a server is and get a great experience. The other thing we're realizing when it comes to what's happening is customers are looking at how they operate. Many want to buy as a service and with HPE GreenLake, we see that becoming more and more popular. With HPE GreenLake, we can offer that to customers, which is really helpful, especially when they're trying to get new technology like this. Sometimes they don't have it in the budget. With something like HP GreenLake, there's no upfront costs so they can enjoy this technology without having to come up with a big capital outlay for it. So that's great. Another one is around, I liked what Lisa said about security starting at the hardware. And that's exactly, the foundation has to be secure, or you're starting at the wrong place. So that's also something that we feel like we've advanced this time around. This secure root of trust that we started in Gen10, we've extended that to additional partners, so we're excited about that as well. >> That's great, Krista. We're seeing and hearing a lot about customers challenges at the Edge. Lisa, I want to bring you back in on this one. What are the needs that you see at the Edge from an Intel perspective? How is Intel addressing the Edge? >> Yeah, thanks, John. You know, one of the best things about Xeon is that it can span workloads and environments all the way from the Edge back to the core data center all within the same software environment. Customers really love that portability. For the Edge, we have seen an explosion of use cases coming from all industries and I think Krista would say the same. Where we're focused on delivering is that performant-enough compute that can fit into a constrained environment, and those constraints can be physical space, they can be the thermal environment. The Network Edge has been a big focus for us. Not only adding features and integrating acceleration, but investing deeply in that software environment so that more and more critical applications can be ported to Xeon and HPE industry standard servers versus requiring expensive, proprietary systems that were quite frankly not designed for this explosion of use cases that we're seeing. Across a variety of Edge to cloud use cases, we have identified ways to provide step function improvements in both performance and that power efficiency. For example, in this generation, we're delivering an up to 2.9X average improvement in performance per watt versus not using accelerators, and up to 70 watt power savings per CPU opportunity with some unique power management features, and improve total cost of ownership, and just overall power- >> What's the closing thoughts? What should people take away from this announcement around scalable processors, 4th Gen Intel, and then Gen11 ProLiant? What's the walkaway? What's the main super thought here? >> So I can go first. I think the main thought is that, obviously, we have partnered with Intel for many, many years. We continue to partner this generation with years in the making. In fact, we've been working on this for years, so we're both very excited that it's finally here. But we're laser focused on making sure that customers get the most out of their workloads, the most out of their infrastructure, and that they can meet those challenges that people are throwing at 'em. I think IT is under more pressure than ever before and the demands are there. They're critical to the business success with digital transformation and our job is to make sure they have everything they need, and they could do and meet the business needs as they come at 'em. >> Lisa, your thoughts on this reflection point we're in right now? >> Well, I agree with everything that Krista said. It's just a really exciting time right now. There's a ton of challenges in front of us, but the opportunity to bring technology solutions to our customers' digital transformation is tremendous right now. I think I would also like our customers to take away that between the work that Intel and HPE have done together for generations, they have a community that they can trust. We are committed to delivering customer-led solutions that do solve these business transformation challenges that we know are in front of everyone, and we're pretty excited for this launch. >> Yeah, I'm super enthusiastic right now. I think you guys are on the right track. This title Compute Engineered for Hybrid World really kind of highlights the word, "Engineered." You're starting to see this distributed computing architecture take shape with the Edge. Cloud on-premise computing is everywhere. This is real relevant to your customers, and it's a great announcement. Thanks for taking the time and joining us today. >> Thank you. >> Yeah, thank you. >> This is the first episode of theCUBE's coverage of Compute Engineered For Your Hybrid World. Please continue to check out thecube.net, our site, for the future episodes where we'll discuss how to build high performance AI applications, transforming compute management experiences, and accelerating VDI at the Edge. Also, to learn more about the new HPE ProLiant servers with the 4th Gen Intel Xeon processors, you can go to hpe.com. And check out the URL below, click on it. I'm John Furrier at theCUBE. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech, enterprise coverage. (bright music)

>>mhm. Hello and welcome to the Cubes presentation of Women in text. Global Event Celebrating International Women's Day I'm John for your host of the Cube here in Palo Alto, California and we had a great remote guests coming in from Bahrain in the Middle East. Cather Allegheny, general manager of 9 73 Labs. Uh, thanks for coming in and and being part of the Cube our International Women's Day. You can't get any more international in Bahrain. Thank you for coming on. >>It's my great pleasure and honour to be here. John, thank you so much for this opportunity. >>Well, I'm super excited to chat with you because in our two visits with the Cube in Bahrain covering the summit there the past few years, we notice of surgeon entrepreneurship. Um, it's almost as if the region of AWS has create this revitalization and energy and vitality and and momentum around entrepreneurship. Can you >>share? What's >>the scene down there? What's the What's it like? >>Well, uh, when it comes to my country, we're lucky to have a small population. It's not that large, but we have so many creative people who is eager to try the entrepreneurial journey, and having Amazon as a data centre in Bahrain is a privilege. And they are pushing, uh, to have more entrepreneurial ideas and innovation and solutions within the ecosystem of rain. So definitely with their support, I can I can see that so many youths, they are eager to come in and contribute. >>I noticed that you're also the general manager of, uh, 9 73 labs, but also the founder of a company. So you've got two things going on here. You've got the entrepreneurial thing happening. Um, this seems to be normal. People got entrepreneurial activity and the job doing both. They're both entrepreneurial. Is that normal? >>Yes, Absolutely. Well, I started my entrepreneurial journey back in, uh, four years and I've been appointed as a general manager of 97 3 labs, which is I'm leading on digital innovation. So that compliments my passion of being an entrepreneur. And while we can acquire talented people and support them to create their own solutions the best way they can So basically, uh, following the main pillars of the lab that I'm working on, which is conducting appropriate research and data analytics, innovation and sustainability. So, uh, for my two founded cos it's not only one I've worked in Fintech and also in property as well. >>What inspired you to be an entrepreneur and technology? >>Well, I would say that my inspiration was to think outside the box, and I see problems and gaps as an opportunity. So that helps me to figure out and come up with solutions that can be beneficial for everyone. So analysing detail as well as something that I would really love. And also, um, enhancing my skills and being more creative is my inspiration. >>I know this is a lot of entrepreneur activity in Bahrain. A lot of investors are now coming into the market. Um, what are some of the things that are going on there? Can you share what the entrepreneurial scene is like there what people are working on has cloud computing accelerated that? What's what are some of the things happening there on the ground? >>Um, I would see that there is multiple competitions or hackathons run by multiple financial institutions. Uh, and also, uh, there are so many NGO s as I am a board member and technology and business society and also a member of women empowerment in the field of cheque, we are trying to motivate and accelerate the desire to be within this ecosystem of entrepreneurial journey. So, basically, uh, we have the Supreme Council of Women who is pushing as well women and ladies to be in this, uh, sector, uh, from early age from, uh, university or even high school graduates that they should start on working on their ideas and come up with solutions. So you can see that everyone is up to, uh, being part of the ecosystem by putting in their ideas. >>And the government wants to be digitally completely transformed, and >>by certain >>they're pushing it hard to >>Absolutely. Yes, we have the governmental sector trying to migrate from legacy infrastructure to the cloud. I would say, uh and it's it's more efficient for government and also to the private sector as well. >>You know, one of the things that jumped out at me when I was in my rain visiting was there was a lunch. Uh, I'm sorry. Breakfast for women in tech. And I went there because I always go to those breakfast cause I really want to see and meet people. I had to get kicked out because it wasn't a table space. So I was for all the people that were there, Um, because I was the guy that was spot for women, it was sold out, was lying and lying to get in. So there's a huge interest of women in tech. I saw that firsthand. There are more and more people want to come in. So motivating women to consider Korean tech is really the focus. What steps do you see to make that happen? How do we take that to the next level? What's your view on motivating women to get into tech? How would you talk about that? >>Well, absolutely. I think it's really crucial to have a woman contribution within the field of cheque. But I believe there is some challenges, given our cultural norms of how man perceived woman working in the field of cheque, sometimes society burden woman from, you know, pursuing her passion to be in because it's a demanding field. I would say that it's, uh, equal to the medical field. You have to keep on updating and to be aware about what's going on. Um, so basically, that might create a bit of a burden for specifically married women of looking after her husband or their families. So I think, uh, this is one of the challenges. But the steps to overcome those challenge challenges is why, uh, you know, trying to shift and change the way, uh, society think about where women should position herself and what kind of job should she should be. And, uh, So I think the other thing is by having educational curriculum that we taught in schools, teaching both genders about the importance of, uh, how we are equal and how we can complement each other in that field because the future is in technology. So the young generation should understand this very well. >>How is the women, um, entrepreneurship going? Are they being finance for their ventures out there? What's the what's the What's the momentum and progress on women starting ventures? >>Yes, absolutely. We're lucky to have our first lady, the wife of the king who is heading the Supreme Council of Women who is pushing women to create their own businesses or to come to become an entrepreneur. Also, we have financings becoming through the government with an entity called Temkin will provide different plants and support all through, not financials only, but it covers other areas of businesses as well. So financing is not a problem again for an entrepreneur. Uh, woman. As an entrepreneur, you can always seek multiple options for financing, not necessarily inside. It can be international as well. >>So a lot of good capital there also, this fellowship opportunities. I noticed you were a Halsey in, uh, fellow. The fellowship with the Halsey in organisation. Talk about that. That experience? >>Well, I really loved the experience. We started in fact, last year, and we flew to Washington in July, and we've met with Amazon people who were really supportive. We got solution architects supporting us of how to build the solution that we want to deliver. And I got my CTO to get trained by the Amazon as well. So we found so much value and the courses and the mentorship they provided, uh, and I'm really glad to be part of that family and their CEO. She said, Now, uh, for a lifetime, you are part of our family, and, you know, it's all the support that we needed to get. >>It's a great community. What advice would you give to people who are out there who want to learn and get into cloud computing and take that step towards creating value on whether it's entrepreneurial or within a company. What's the secret formula that you would say our secrets to success? >>Absolutely. I think a cloud is a a massive, and it's a brilliant opportunity for any technology to be built on myself. I believe in the cloud. Most or all of my solutions is built on cloud. And now even me leading the digital lab on building infrastructure on cloud and basically it will give you more room. Uh, identify more gaps. You do assessment. You can utilise the tools that is within cloud, which is artificial intelligence machine learning. Uh, you call it so you can seize the opportunity to the maximum, and you can skill faster. So basically, you're not limited to your, uh, country. You can go across countries as well utilising cloud >>Catherine to talk about what's next for you. What's the next step? >>Well, uh, the next step in my new role or a new job leading on a digital innovation in 973 Labs is to finalise my strategy and also to acquire talented young people And, uh, you know, go through a programme, which is I designed where they get the mentorship, the support till they get a final product that will be invested in. And they can guarantee themselves a carrier, uh, within the digital love that I'm trying to lead on. Uh, and I think the projects that will be covering not specifically only infant IQ, it could be in any other industry. So, uh, we're trying to follow the recent trends, Uh, thanks to Amazon and Google and the other companies that we can extract data and create our own reporting. So to, uh, come up where we should be investing our time. >>That's great. I wanna ask you about the demographics of the folks in Bahrain. I noticed that they're very a lot of young entrepreneurs coming up and learn a lot of them. Um, is that true? >>Yes, Uh, our population, the majority of our youth, uh and I would say, um uh, the average age is in thirties until 35 or 36. So, relatively, we have so many young people or youth who was eager to learn. But again, we need the expertise. We need older people to also mentor and coach the young generation of how they should calculate the risk and come up with a proper business models and brilliant ideas. >>Well, I'm very impressed with the folks down there, I said before the pandemic. Unfortunately, the pandemic it, But we really wanted to have a cube location there, a lot of vitality out of action, a lot of good stuff going on. Certainly with the NWS region in there, it's really create a lot of value. And so we're looking forward to hearing more. And, uh, thanks for coming on and sharing your storey with us and for the folks out there watching. What advice would you give to women who are watching around the world around entrepreneurship? What's going on from your experience? What should we be doing and talking about? What's the Storey? I'll see this theme is bias, uh, inherent bias and in the culture, um, what would you share your thoughts on to the world? >>Well, I think the only advice I can give to all of the women out there just try something new to try to solve a problem. There are so many gaps we have around. Just look around. You just take one step forward and try it. At least once in your life, you can come up with a brilliant, uh, solution that serves all humankind, not only the people of your country. So even if the road is bumpy, just be have the courage, be resilient and go for it. >>And we're all connected on the Internet. So of course, we can communicate with each other and have a good time and and grow the community. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube and celebrating International Women's Day with us as part of our special presentation. Thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it. >>Thank you. It's my pleasure. Thank you so much. >>Okay, this is the cubes presentation of women in text. Global event Celebrating International Women's Day. I'm John for a host of the Cube. Thanks for watching. Yeah,

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this Cube Conversation. I'm Lisa Martin. I'm talking next with Sanzio Bassini, the head of High Performance Computing at Cineca a Dell Technologies customer. Sanzio, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, it's a pleasure. >> Lisa Martin: Likewise. Nice to see you. So tell us a little bit about Cineca, this is a large computing center, but a very large Italian non-profit consortium. Tell us about it. >> Yes, Cineca has been founded 50 years ago, from the university systems in Italy to support the scientific discovery and the industry innovations using the high-performance computing, and the correlated mythologies like intelligence together with the big data processing, and the simulations. We are a corsortium, which means that is a private not-for-profit organization. Currently our member of the consortium, almost all the universities in Italy and also all the national agencies. >> Lisa Martin: And I also read that you are the top 10 out of the top 500 of the world's fastest super computers. That's a pretty big accomplishment. >> Yes. That is a part of our statutory visions in the last 10 to 15 years , we have been to say, frequent buyers in the top 10. The idea is that we're enabling the scientific discovery by mean of the providing the most advanced systems, and the co-designing the the most advanced HPC systems to promote to support the accents in science. And being part of the European high-performance computing ecosystems. >> Now, talk to me about some of the challenges that Cineca is trying to solve in particular, the human brain project. Talk to us a little bit about that and how you're leveraging high-performance computing to accelerate scientific discovery. >> The human brain project is one of the flagship projects that has been co-funded by the European Commission and the participating member states that are two different, right now , flagships together with another that is just in progress, which is the the quantum of flagship we are participating indirectly together with the National Disaster Council. And we are core partners of the HPC constructors , that is the human brain project. One billion euro of investment, co-founded by the participating states and the European Commissions. it's a project that would combine both the technology issues and the designing of a high-performance computing systems that would meet the requirements of the community. And the big scientific challenges, correlated to the physiological functions of the human brains, including different related to the behavior of the, of the human brain, either from the pathological point of view either from the physiological point of view. In order to better understand the aging user, that it would impact the, the health the public health systems, some other that are correlating with what would be the support for the physiological knowledge of the human brains. And finally computational performance, the human brain is more than Exascale systems, but with a average consumption, which is very low. We are talking about some hundred of wards of energy would provide a, an extreme and computational performance. So if we put the organizing the technology high-performance computing in terms of interconnections now we're morphing the computing systems that would represent a tremendous step in order to facing the big challenges of our base and energies, personalized medicine, climate change, food for all those kinds of big social economic challenge that we are facing. >> Which reading them, besides the human brain project, there are other projects going on, such as that you mentioned. I'd like to understand how Cineca is working with Dell Technologies. You have to translate, as you mentioned a minute ago, the scientific requirements for discovery into high-performance computing requirements. Talk to me about how you've been doing that with partners like Dell Technologies. >> In our computing architectures. We had the need to address the capability to facing the big data processing involved with respect of the Human Brain Project and generally speaking that evolved with the respect of the science-driven that would provide cloud access to the systems by means of containers technologies. And the capability also to address what will be the creation of a Federation for high performance computing facility in Europe. So at the end we manage a competitive dialogue procurement the processor, that in a certain sense would share together with the different potential technology providers, what would be the visions and also the constraints with respect to the divisions including budget constraints and at the end Dell had shown the characteristics of the solution, that it will be more, let's say compliant. And at the same time, flexible with respect of the combinations of very different constraints and requirements. >> Dell Technologies has been sounds like a pretty flexible partner because you've got so many different needs and scientific needs to meet for different researchers. Talk to me about how you mentioned that this is a multi-national effort. How does Cineca serve and work with teams not only in Italy, but in other countries and from other institutes? >> The Italian commitment together with the European member states is that by mean of scientific methods and peer review process roughly speaking of the production capacity, would be shared at the European level, that it's a commitment that has been shared together with the France, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland. Where also of course, the Italian scientists, can apply and participate, but in a sort of emulations and the advanced competition for addressing what will be the excellence in science. The remaining 50% of our production capacity is for, for the national community and in somehow to support the Italian community to be competitive on the worldwide scenario that setting up would lead also to the agreement after the international level, with respect of some of the actions that are promoted in progress in the US and in Japan also that means the sharing options with the US researchers or Japanese researchers in an open space. >> It sounds like the human brain project, which the HPC is powering, which has been around since 2013 is really facilitating global collaboration. Talk to me about some of the results that the high-performance computing environment has helped the human brain project to achieve so far. >> The main outcomes that it will be consolidated in the next phase that will be lead by Euro SPC, which is called the phoenix that stands for Federation of a high-performance computing system in Europe. That provide open service based on two concepts One is the sharing of the ID at the European level. So it means that open the access to the Cineca system to the system in France , to UNIX system in Germany, to fifth system in Switzerland, and to the diocese the marine ocean system in Spain that is federated, ID management, others, et cetera, related to what will be the Federation of data access. The scientific community may share their data in a seamless mode, the actions is being supported by genetic, has to do with the two specific target. One is the elaborations of the data that are provided by the lens, laser, laboratory facility in Florence, that is one of the core parts of garnering the data that would come from the mouse brains, the time user for caviar. And the second part is for the meso scale studies of the cortex of the brain. In some situations they combinations of performance capability of the Federation systems for addressing what would be the simulations of the overall being of the human brain would take a lot of performance that are challenging simulation periodically that they would happen combining that they HPC facility as at European level. >> Right. So I was reading there's a case study by the way, on Cineca that Dell Technologies has published. And some of the results you talked about those at the HPC is facilitating research and results on epilepsy, spinal cord injury, brain prosthesis for the blind, as well as new insights into autism. So incredibly important work that you're doing here for the human brain project. One last question for you. What advice would you give to your peers who might be in similar situations that need to, to build and deploy and maintain high-performance computing environments? Where should they start? >> There is a continuous sharing, of knowledge, experience, best practices, where the situation is different in the sense that there are, what would we be the integration of the high-performance computing technology into their production workflow. That is the sharing of the experience in order to provide a spreads and amplifications of the opportunity for supporting the innovation. That is part of our social mission in Italy, but it's also the objective. that is supported by the European Commission. >> Excellent, that sharing and that knowledge transfer and collaboration. It seems to be absolutely fundamental and the environment that you've built, facilitates that. Sanzio, thank you so much for sharing with us, what Cineca is doing and the great research that's going on there. And across a lot of disciplines. We appreciate you joining the program today. Thank you. >> Thank you. Thank you very much. >> Likewise, for Sanzio Bassini. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this Cube Conversation. (upbeat music)

>>Well, hi everybody, John Walls here, continuing our coverage on the cube of splunk.com 21. And then we talked a lot about data these days of companies and enterprise all the way down to small business and the importance of day to day to security data protection. But the public sector also has those very same concerns and some unique worries as well. And with me to talk about the public sector and its data transformation, and of course what's going on in that space is Jeremy Reesey, who was the group vice president of the public sector at Splunk. Jeremy. Good to see you today. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. >>Thanks for making time for me, John. You bet. >>Glad to have you. Well, let's, let's just, if first off, let's just paint the picture for those watching who are kind of focused on the private sector a little bit, just share with some general thoughts about the public sector and what's going on in terms of its digital transformation and what kind of concerns or, um, I guess, challenges you think there are broadly speaking first in the public sector around. >>Thanks, John. There's quite a bit of transformation going on right now in our government. And just like in industry, we've seen the pandemic as a catalyst for a lot of that transformation. Uh, you may have seen that Splunk recently released a report on the state of data innovation. And what we found is that, um, a lot of good things are happening, but the government still has a lot of work to do. And so there were pockets of excellence that we saw in the last 18 months where agencies really responded to things like the requirement for vaccinations and the requirement for monitoring, uh, health status in general. Uh, and we saw tremendous, um, speed in rolling out things like tele-health across, uh, the veterans affairs administration. But, uh, we also saw in our report that there were many agencies that haven't yet been able to modernize in the way that they want. And one of the inhibitors to that, frankly, John is their ability to adopt software as a service. And so we've seen a lot of things happening in the last year that, um, moved agency customers towards software as a service, but there's work yet. >>So, and why is that? So when you're talking about SAS, is it, is it, um, bureaucratic, uh, red tape as a regulatory issues? Or is it just about, uh, this is a large, huge institution that makes independent decisions, you know, HHS might make decisions separate from state separate from deity, uh, and then it's fragmented. I mean, what are those challenges? >>Sure. Well, I think there are two sides of a John. I think that our government is inherently designed to move cautiously and to move in such a way that we don't make mistakes. Uh, you use the word re bureaucratic. I'm not a huge fan of that word, but I understand the sentiment. Uh, I think that there are layers to any decision that any part of the government makes and certainly that support of, um, inhibiting speed. But I think the other part of it is our acquisition rules and regulations. And I think we've seen a number of positive changes made, uh, not only in the last administration, but even in this current administration that are helping our government agencies to take advantage of software as a service. Um, but there's still work to do there as well. Uh, we've seen the rise of things like, uh, other transactional authorities, OTAs. Uh, we've seen the establishment of an agile procurement office inside the general services administration, GSA, uh, but uh, other parts have heritage systems, systems that are working really well. And you don't want to change something that's not broken just for the sake of changing it. You want to change it in such a way, uh, that you really do transform and deliver new capabilities. >>Yeah. And I guess, um, you know, it's a matter of obviously of developing an expertise and, and maybe confidence too, right? Because this is, this is a new world, a new tech world, if you will here in the 21st century. And, um, and maybe I misused the word bureaucratic. Um, and I know you said you don't like it, but, but there's a certain kind of institutional energy or whatever you want to call it that kind of prohibits fast changes and, and is cautious and is conservative because, I mean, these are big dollar decisions and they're important decisions to based on security. So, I mean, how do you wrap your arms around that from a Splunk perspective to deal with the government, you know, at large, uh, when they have those kinds of, um, uh, I guess considerations >>Certainly, well, the beauty of where we find ourselves today is that data is incredibly powerful and there's more data available to our agency customers or to any company than ever before. So Splunk is inherently a data platform. We allow our customers be the agency customers, or be the industry customers to ask questions of data that they collect from any source, be it a structured data or unstructured data using Splunk, a customer can say, what's happening. Why is it happening? Where is it happening? And that's incredibly powerful. And I think, um, in this current age where, uh, the pandemic is forcing us to rethink how we deliver services and citizen services specifically, uh, having a data platform is incredibly powerful because the way that we're answering questions today is different than the way we answered questions last year. And it may be very different the way we have to ask questions a year from now. Uh, and that's really what Splunk's is delivering to our customers is that flexibility to be able to ask any question of any data set, uh, and to ask those questions in the context of today, not just the context that they knew yesterday. >>Yeah. W w and you mentioned the pandemic, what has that impact then? Um, obviously the need of, uh, I think about, you know, vaccination of disease, monitoring of outbreak monitoring, uh, emergency care, ICU units, all these things, um, critically important to the government's role right now, um, and continue to be, so what kind of impact has the, the pandemic had in terms of their modernization plans? Um, I'm guessing some of these had to be put on hold, right? Because you've, you've got, uh, you've got an emergency and so you can't conduct business as usual. >>Sure. So it's caused a shift in priorities as you know, John, and then it's also caused us to rethink what has to be done in person and what can be done remotely. And when we think about what can be done remotely, we're seeing a proliferation of devices. Um, we're seeing a proliferation of, uh, the, the level of network access, uh, that is enabled and supported. And with that, we see new security concerns, right? We are seeing, uh, uh, really, uh, an intriguing rise of thought around authentication and making sure that the right person is coming in from the right device, uh, using the right applications at the right time, that is incredibly challenging for our agency customers. Uh, and they have to think about what's happening in, in ways that they didn't have to last year. >>Let's talk about certification a little bit, and I know you announced a FedRAMP a couple of years ago, and now you've come out with a new iteration, if you will. Um, I hear about that. So walk me through that a little bit in our audience as well. And then just talk about the value of certification. Why does that really matter? What's the importance of that? >>Thanks, John. We did recently announced that we've received a provisional authority to operate, uh, in aisle five impact level five. And that's incredibly exciting. I've, I've never worked for a software company that had FedRAMP certification previously. And I think it demonstrates Splunk's commitment to this market, the public sector market. Uh, we are absolutely, um, committed to delivering our software in any environment at any level of classification that our customers need, and that allows them to rest assured that they can decide anything they want to about their data without worrying about the sanctity of that data itself, or the platform that they're using to process that data. That's incredibly exciting. I hope, >>Yeah. You mentioned, uh, the current administration just a little bit ago, you know, the Biden administration, um, no executive orders, you know, focusing in on, on, um, use of, of, uh, or I guess taking appropriate measures, right. To protect your data cyber from a cyber security perspective. Um, what exactly has that done to change the approach the government is taking now, uh, to protecting data and then how have you adapted to that executive order to provide the right services for governments looking to, to make sure they meet those standards and that criteria? >>Well, it's an exciting time as you, as you point out on May 12th, president Biden's son and executive order on improving the nation's cybersecurity. So, uh, from the highest levels, we're seeing the government sort of set a baseline for what makes sense. And they went further in a memo just released on August 27th, uh, by releasing what they call an enterprise logging maturity model. And it has four levels. And it, it indicates what sorts of data agencies should be storing from, and in their systems and for how long they should be storing it. And that's incredibly exciting because a lot of agencies are using Splunk, uh, to make sense of that data. And so this gives them sort of a baseline for what data do they need to collect? How long do they need to keep it collected for what questions do they need to ask of it? And as a result, um, we're making some offers to our customers about how they use Splunk, uh, how they take advantage of our cloud-based storage within our product, um, how they take advantage of our services in mapping their data strategy to this enterprise logging maturity model. And it represents a great opportunity to sort of take a step forward in cybersecurity for these agency customers. >>Yeah. I'm kind of curious here. I mean, I, I came from the wireless space and we had an active dialogue with the government in terms of, uh, communications, emergency communications, um, and, um, and also in, in services, the rural areas, that kind of thing. But sometimes that collaboration didn't go as smoothly as we would've liked, frankly. And, and so maybe lessons have been learned from that in terms of how the private sector melds with the public sector and works with the policy makers, you know, in that respect, what, how would you characterize just overall the relationship, you know, the public private sector relationship in terms of, you know, the sharing of resources and of information and collaboration? >>Well at the federal government level, uh, there's always been pretty incredible collaboration between industry and government, but I think, um, we at Splunk have been engaged through organizations like the Alliance for digital innovation, uh, the us chamber of commerce, um, act by act the American council for technology and the industry advisory council. And we're seeing a rise actually in university partnerships as well, particularly at the state level where, uh, let's say local governments are saying, Hey, we don't have the capacity to do some of these things that we now know we need to do. And we know that, uh, some of those things could be done in collaboration with our university partners and with our state partners. Um, and that's exciting. I think that it is an era where everyone realizes there are new threats. Uh, there are threats that are, um, hard to handle in a silo and that the more we collaborate, whether it's government industry collaboration, or whether it's cross government collaboration, or whether it's cross industry collaboration, the better, and the more effectively, uh, we'll solve some of these problems that face us as a nation. >>What do you make a great point too? Because, uh, it is about pulling resources at some point, and everybody pulling together, uh, in order to combat what has become a certainly vaccine, uh, challenge to say the least Jeremy, thanks for the time. Uh, I appreciate it. And, uh, wish you all the success down the road. >>Thanks for having me, John, you >>Bet Jeremy Risa joining us, talking about the public sector and sparks just exemplary work in that respect. You're watching the cube. Our coverage continues here of.com for 21.

>>mhm. Here live in Washington D. C. For two days of wall to wall coverage. I'm john for your host of the cube. Got two great guests here, constant Thompson V. P. Of diversity equity inclusion program at a core american council of renewable energy and Blair Anderson, director of public policy industries at AWS. Thanks for coming on the cube. Thanks for having us. So first of all, big announcement on stage max Peterson, head of public sector announced some big news with a core. Tell us what it >>is. Well we are going to be partnered with amazon to do a supply chain study on how we can best diversify the renewable energy supply chain. So we're actually gonna have baseline data on where we should start to be able to create a program that's going to be a model for the renewable energy industry on how to develop and support the success of black women and bipac owned um firms. So >>this program that you're running accelerate accelerate your programs and membership tell more has it worked? And why the successes having, what is amazon's relationship with it Besides funding? Is there other things you can talk about? >>Yeah. So accelerate wouldn't have been possible if it wasn't for people like Shannon Kellogg with a W. S. Um who about a year ago after the George Floyd murders said, you know, what are we doing as a core? He sits on our board um in this area and we had to say nothing. So um Shannon. And a group of leaders got together and workshop this idea. Let's create a membership program for women and minority owned businesses so that they can be successful in renewable energy. Let's pick a cohort and let's do whether it takes to make them successful. Everything from introducing them to business connects, to mentoring them to even legal services for them. >>Well, yeah, this is like an interesting dynamic. Remember Andy Jassy was on stage when he was the ceo of a W S a year ago, I kind of was preaching, you hate that, I said that word, but preaching to the audience build, build, build, there's an entrepreneurship, public sector vibe going on right now, very entrepreneurial across every industry. I mean, this is a real thing that's going on. >>Yeah, so we're super excited about this opportunity, the work that core has done to lead on this program for the last year, especially with Constance coming in, becoming the leader has kind of been able to take this idea that she mentioned that AWS was kind of a founding member at the genesis of it about a year ago. She's taking this idea that many of these folks put on paper And been able to turn it into a really hard substantive efforts to move it forward. So we've been able to have great conversations with many of these 15 companies that have been brought into the program and start building a relationship with them. I think, as you have seen around a WS like we believe strongly in innovation and creativity. the renewable energy industry is very similarly there is a lot of kind of thinking big and innovative spirit that needs to take place in that space and having the diversity at all levels of these companies is kind of an important component to be able to move that entrepreneurship forward. >>You know, cost is one of the things that we've been reporting on until getting on the cube is right in the wheelhouse of what you're doing is a cultural change happening. And that cultural change with amazon and cloud computing is causing structural changes which are opportunities like radical structural changes. So that means old incumbent, the old guard as you guys call it, this can be replaced not because people hate them because they're inadequate. So you start to see this kind of mindset shift, entrepreneurial, impact oriented I can make a change but actually I can level up pretty quick because the people in charge don't know cloud, I mean I hate to put it bluntly like that, but if you're not on that edge, if you're not not on that wave, your driftwood. >>Yeah. You know it's funny you say that I like to call it, our members are making systemic disruptions to the system in a very equitable way, meaning our members are in communities like Chicago Jackson Tennessee there in the north end of texas, they are in um everywhere and they're in the communities, making these systemic disruptions to the way things happen, the way we talk about renewable energy to the way we deploy solar, they're making those kind of changes. So to your point they're doing it, we have to catch up to them because they're already out there, they're moving their entrepreneurial, >>it's like, it's like there's a class of entrepreneurship and evolving and it's like everyone's got the pedigree, this or that knowledge is knowledge and you can apply it in software, you could be shrink wrapped software you put on the shelves called shelf where no successful inventory, give it back cloud computing. If you're not successful. Like right now it's not working. So if you don't have results, no one bought it, it must not work. So it's easy to identify what's working. Yes, so that eliminates a lot of dogma, a lot of weird blocking. It's true, this is a democratization of >>absolutely, I think you're talking about transparency and transparency is one of the tenets of inclusion. If you're truly doing things to be inclusive, transparent and that's where you see the changes, that's exactly what you're talking >>about data driven. That's one thing I love about this data world data is now part of like how apps are built, it's not like a database, then you go fetch a file data is now transparently available. If you know what to look for it if it's available. So the whole old silo mentality, this is one of the amazon strength blair you guys are doing. So I have to ask how is this translating out in the public policy world because you know, when you can make this kind of change quicker, you're gonna have some wins under your belt. Yeah, you gotta double down on those. I >>think, I think there's a lot of transformation we're talking about in this conversation. You take kind of one of the missions we're talking about here, which is around clean energy and the expansion of clean energy, Aws and Amazon. We have procured 10 gigawatts of renewable power and making us the largest corporate procure globally, to kind of put that in maybe a little bit more approachable context, that's the equivalent of powering 2.5 million homes. Um and there's still farther to go to be able to meet that kind of think big that is happening in the industry right now, you have to have a broad, diverse industry to be able to reach all those communities to be, have kind of all types of different leaders in it, because we need everybody at the table both for the industry, but also for the communities that are being served. >>What does sustainability mean to you? Because this is a core focus, I know the energy things huge, but it's not obvious to some people, but it's getting better. What are the what's the core 10ets behind the sustainability strategy? >>Yeah, no, I think there's a lot of different ways you can take a stab at that for us. It's uh probably most uh out there in the public that people talk about is our climate pledge. This is kind of a um goal that we've set to be uh net zero carbon by 2040 which is 10, 10 years ahead of the paris Climate change within that. There are components of that that are related to electric vehicles, clean energy, renewable energy procurement, carbon offset programs around the world. I think throughout all of that is kind of coming back to, as you said, with sustainability and approaching climate change as a as an issue that needs a comprehensive holistic approach to talk >>about some of the stories and the members that you have because is the recruiting strategy climate change? Or is there another like how do you because renewable energy could be a no brainer, but how to get people excited? Like save the world. What's the what's the what's the, what are people aligning with then? What's their reaction? So, >>You know, it's very simply the way we see with our members, most of our members, 87% of them are in the solar area. Many of them when we talk about sustainability, how can people live their lives in a way where they save money on their energy bills? How can communities understand how they can harness their own renewable energy, make a little money from that, but also live their lives in a very peaceful, sustainable, peaceful, sustainable way. Right, so that's part of it as an example, a couple of examples is that we have um 548 capital is a member company. And keep in mind that these are early startup companies. 5 48 capital is in Chicago and their models started off with we want all homes in our communities and these are places in the hood, some of them um son text works with people, it works with spanish speaking customers solely in texas where they explain to them the benefits of renewable energy. They explain the benefits of a sustainability and what it is. I mean that's so that's kind of what we're looking >>at here is just kind of show up and just kind of telling the truth >>exactly and show them the benefits that they've kind of not been leading on. Actually. The other thing is that this is about economics. So this renewable energy movement that we're going through is about economics. It is a it's our next wave of being able to ensure americans are able to live lives in a in a way that's meaningful economic. >>Well you've got visibility on the unit economics event good energy. There's also a community angle. >>Yes, absolutely. >>About some of those stories around the community response to this idea, wow this actually is gettable. Yeah, we >>solar is one of our members and it's owned by the first female community solar own company out of. She's out of Baltimore but she has a solar farm here in D. C. And what she did was was engaged churches in how can you get involved in this renewable energy movement? How can you save money? How can you create a community around around this work? We sold as an example of that um son text, I have to mention them again. They speak with they work with only spanish speaking customers who had no clue about this and who are now making having their lives live better because of it, >>you know, affecting change is hard now you've got a tailwind with structural change in systemic opportunities there. What are the blockers? What are the blockers right now? Is an awareness, is it participation community? >>I'm sorry, it's your show and I've >>interrupted, you know, >>we talk about entrepreneurs in the space, particularly women and those from bipod communities. The first thing that you'll hear is they'll say we don't have access to capital people. The terms around getting capital to start up are tough and their barriers there's so that's one the second is awareness and that's awareness of introducing them to companies that might want to do business with them. So that's something that's a benefit for a core occurs. Members are all people who touch every renewable energy transaction from the finances to the developers to the to the buyers. So this is what makes it unique. So what we're doing with accelerate is breaking down the barriers of access to capital by introducing them to people who can potentially support their work but also introducing them to companies that can help them be a part of their supply chain, which is why the study that max announced is amazing because we're going to be able to have baseline data on what, what are the demographics of the supply chain in the renewable energy and what can we do about it? And we're gonna scale accelerate to be a model for the industry >>and that's the transparency angle. Get the baseline, understand this is classic Amazonian thinking, get the baseline, raise the bar, >>you can see why you get >>so OK, so a lot of great stories, how do people get involved? Obviously amazon is taking the lead leadership role here. What can people do to get involved? >>So if you want to support the program as amazon is a corn dot org accelerate or Thompson at a core dot org. That's my email address. If you'd like to become a member company and accelerate program will be opening up applications towards the latter part of this year november december again a core dot org slash accelerate >>renewable energy. What's the coolest thing you've seen so far in your programme around neutral energy um, could be story, it could be people story could be tech story. What's the coolest thing you've seen spot there? Yeah, you really did. You >>know, I think we have a company called clear look, that's a member there out of Jackson Tennessee and they're actually working with retailers are renewable energy credits to create, to create renewable energy farms in their area. And I, what I think is so cool is that she's disrupting the way that you go about using renewable energy credits. Clear loop dot org. Look them >>up in the new york times. Had a story. I'm just reading California other areas. We have a high density of electric vehicles, it's training the power grid. So this idea of coming in, come back is what it's not sure yet. It's not, this is kind of where it's going. So okay, what's the cool thing you've seen? >>No, for me, I've just enjoyed kind of, I've enjoyed the journey. I think the moment for me where I could see that this was real and this was going to be a impactful program constants organized. It's called a speed dating, a virtual speed dating for us with about eight different companies and it was fascinating to get on, spend some time being able to interact with eight different companies. Um, who we probably would not have ever had kind of introduction to before in the past either. They didn't know how to get in touch with us. We didn't know how to get in touch with them and it kind of opens your eyes to all the different ways. People are approaching this problem and starts the executives who I had in these colors. You can see their wheels spinning the ideas sparking of oh there's some cool ideas here. There's something new that we could do. We should explore further. Nothing I can announce at the moment but lots of lots of good uh I'm >>sure the baseline max got baseline studies. I'm sure there will be a lot of doubling down opportunities on success or not success because you want to have the data, you know what to work on. Its true cause a great mission. I'm really impressed. Congratulations. Thank you announcement and love the programme. Thank you. Take a minute to give a plug anyone or public >>thanks Shannon Kellogg. Shannon was really behind it. He's a member of our board represents a W. S. And was really behind, we gotta do something. It's got to be unique and it's got to be something intentional. And here we are today I want to give a >>great opportunity. Thanks for coming in, appreciate it. Thank you for having more cube coverage here from Washington D. C. Amazon web services, public Sector summit. An event in person where people are face to face. This is great stuff is the cube right back after this short break. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm

>> Narrator: From theCUBES studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE conversation. >> Hello and welcome to the 2021 AWS global public sector partner awards. I'm your host Natalie Erlich. Today we're going to highlight the most valuable valuable Amazon connect appointment. And we are now joined by Steve Careful, adult social care expert PA consulting group and Graham Allen, the director of adults health and care at Hampshire county council. Welcome gentlemen to today's session. >> Thank you Natalie >> I love you Natalie. >> Well by now we are really familiar the call to shelter in place and how it especially affected the most vulnerable of people. Give us some experience or some insight on your experience with that, especially in light of some of the technology that was deployed. Let's start with you, Graham. >> Yeah, Thank you. So just by way of context, Hampshire county council is one of the largest areas of local government in England. So we have a population of 1.4 million people. And when a lockdown was imposed by the national government of England in the 23rd of March 2020. Shortly thereafter the evidence in terms of vulnerabilities around COVID-19 strongly identified that people with a range of clinical conditions were most vulnerable and needed to shield and self issolate. And for the size of our population, we quickly were advised that roughly some 30,000 people in the initial carts because of political vulnerabilities needed to sheild and receive a variety of support shortly after that through the summer of 2020 that number increased some 50,000. And then by January of this year that number further increased based on the scientific and medical evidence to 83,000 people in total. So that represented a huge challenge for us in terms of offering support, being able to make sure that not only practical tasks related to obtaining shopping food and so on and so forth, but also medications but also the real risks of self isolation. Many of the people that we were needing to support when here the two known to us as a social care provider. They were being advised through clinical medical evidence needs and many of those people lived alone. So the real risk of self isolation not seeing anyone potentially for an extended period of time and the risks of their wellbeing was something very significant to us. So we needed very rapidly to develop a solution in terms of making contact, being able to offer that support. >> Yeah and I'd love it now to get your take Steve on how PA consulting group helped deliver on that call on that need. >> True so we have an existing relationship with Graham and the council, we've been working together for number of years, delivering care technology solutions to service users around the county. We were obviously aware there was a major issue as COVID and lockdown began. So we sat down with Graham and his colleagues to ask what we could do to help. We used our relationship with AWS and our knowledge of the connect platform to suggest a mechanism for making outbound calls really at scale. And that was the beginning of the process. We were very quickly in a position where we were able to actually get that service running live. In fact, we had a working prototype within four days and a live service in seven days. And from that point on of those many thousands of people that Graham's alluded to, we were calling up to two and a half thousand a day to ask them did they need any help? Were they okay? If they did need help, If they responded yes, to those, to that question we were then able to put them through to a conventional call handler in our call center where a conversation could take place about what their needs were. And as Graham said, in many cases that was people who couldn't get out to get food shopping, people who were running short of clinical medical supplies, people who needed actually some interesting things pet care came up quite often people who couldn't leave the house home and look after their dog, they just needed some help locally. So we had to integrate with local voluntary services to get those those kinds of results and support delivered to them across the whole of Hampshire and ultimately throughout the whole of the COVID experience. So coming right up until March of this year. >> Right well, as the COVID pandemic progressed and, you know evolved in different stages, you know, with variants and a variety of different issues that came up over the last year or so, you know how did the technology develop how did the relationship develop and, you know tell us about that process that you had with each other. >> So the base service remained very consistent that different points in the year, when there were different issues that may be needed to be communicated to to the service users we were calling we would change and update the script. We would improve the logistics of the service make it simpler for colleagues in the council to get the data into the system, to make the calls. And basically we did that through a constant series of meetings checkpoint, staying in touch and really treating this as a very collaborative exercise. So I don't think for all of us COVID was a constant stream of surprises. Nobody could really predict what was going to happen in a week or a month. So we just have to all stay on our toes keep in touch and be flexible. And I think that's where our preferred way of working and that of AWS and the Hampshire team we were working with we really were able to do something that was special and I'm very fleet of foot and responsive to needs. >> Right and I'd also love to get Graham's insight on this as well. What of results have you seen, you know do you have any statistics on the impact that it made on people? Did you receive any qualitative feedback from the people that use the service? >> Yeah, no, absolutely. We did. And one of the things we were very conscious of from day one was using a system which may have been unfamiliar to people when the first instance in terms of receiving calls, the fact that we were able to use human voice within the call technology, I think really, really assisted. We also did a huge amount of work within a Hampshire county council. Clearly in terms of the work we do day in, day out we're well-known to our local population. We have a huge range of different responsibilities ranging from maintenance of the roads through to the provision of local services, like libraries and so on and so forth, and also social care support. So we were able to use all of that to cover last. And Steve has said through working very collaboratively together with a trusted brand Hampshire county council working with new technology. And the feedback that we received was both very much data-driven in real time, in terms of successful calls and also those going through to call handlers and then the outcomes being delivered through those call handlers to live services out and about around the county but also that qualitative impact that we had. So across Hampshire county council we have some 76 elected members believe me they were very active. They were very interested in the work that we were doing in supporting our most vulnerable residents. And they were receiving literally dozens of phone calls as a thank you by way of congratulating. But as I say, thanking us and our partners PA at district council partners and also the voluntary community sector in terms of the very real support that was being offered to residents. So we had a very fully resolved picture of precisely what was happening literally minute by minute on a live dashboard. In terms of outgoing calls calls going through the call handlers and then successful call completion in terms of the outcomes that were being delivered on the ground around the County of Hampshire. So a phenomenally successful approach well appreciated and well, I think applauded by all those receiving calls. >> Terrific insight. Well, Steve, I'd love to hear from you more about the technology and how you put the focus on the patient on the person really made it more people focused and you know, obviously that's so critical in such a time of need. >> Yeah, you're absolutely right, Natalie. We, I think what we were able to do because I myself and my immediate team have worked with Hampshire and other local authorities on the social care side for so long. We understood the need to be very person focused. I think sometimes with technology, it comes in with it with a particular way of operating that isn't necessarily sensitive to the audience. And we knew we had to get this right from day one. So Graham's already mentioned the use of human voice invoicing the bulk call. that was very, very important. We selected a voice actress who had a very reassuring clear tone recognizing that many of the individuals we were calling would have been would have been older people maybe a little hard of hearing. We needed to have the volume in the call simple things like this were very important. One of the of the debates I remember having very early on was the choice as to whether the response that somebody would give to the question, do you need this? Or that could be by pressing a digital on the phone. We understood that again, because potentially of frailty maybe a little lack of dexterity amongst some of the people we'd be calling that might be a bit awkward for them to take the phone away from their face and find the button and press the button in time. So we pursued the idea of an oral response. So if you want this say, yes if you don't want it to say no and those kinds of small choices around how the technology was deployed I think made a really big difference in terms of of acceptance and adoption and success in the way the service run. >> Terrific. Well Graham I'd like to shift it to you. Could you give us some insight on the lessons that you learned as a result of this pandemic and also trying to move quickly to help people in your community? >> Yeah, I think the lessons in some of the lessons that we've, again learned through our response to the pandemic, are lessons that to a degree have traveled with us over a number of years in terms of the way that we've used technology over a period, working with PA, which is be outcome focused. It's sometimes very easy to get caught up in a brilliant new piece of technology. But as Steve has just said, if it's not meeting the need if we're not thinking about that human perspective and thinking about the humanity and the outcomes that we're seeking to deliver then to some degree it's going to fail And this might certainly did not fail in any way shape or form because of the thoughtfulness that was brought forward. I think what we learned from it is how we can apply that as we go forward to the kinds of work that we do. So, as I've already said we've got a large population, 1.4 million people. We are moving from some really quite traditional ways of responding to that population, accelerated through our response to COVID through using AI technologies. Thinking about how we embed that more generally would a service offer not only in terms of supporting people with social care needs but that interface between ourselves and colleagues within the health sector, the NHS to make sure that we're thinking about outcomes and becoming much more intuitive in terms of how we can engage with our population. It's also, I think about thinking across wider sectors in terms of meeting people's needs. One of the, I think probably unrealized things pre COVID was the using virtual platforms of various kinds of actually increased engagement with people. We always thought in very traditional ways in order to properly support our population we must go out and meet them face to face. What COVID has taught us is actually for many people the virtual world connecting online, having a variety of different technologies made available to support them in their daily living is something that they've absolutely welcomed and actually feel much safer through being able to do the access is much more instant. You're not waiting for somebody to call. You're able to engage with a trusted partner, you know face-to-face over a virtual platform and get an answer more or less then and there. So I think there's a whole range of opportunities that we've learned, some of which we're already embedding into our usual practice. If I can describe anything over the last 15 months as usual but we're taking it forward and we hope to expand upon that at scale and at pace. >> Yeah, that's a really excellent point about the rise of hybrid care, both in the virtual and physical world. What can we expect to see now, moving forward like to shift over to our other guests, you know, what do you see next for technology as a result of the pandemic? >> Well, there's certainly been an uptake in the extent to which people are comfortable using these technologies. And again, if you think about the kind of target group that Graham and his colleagues in the social care world are dealing with these are often older people people with perhaps mobility issues, people with access issues when it comes to getting into their GP or getting into hospital services. The ability for those services to go out to them and interact with them in a much more immediate way in a way that isn't as intrusive. It isn't as time consuming. It doesn't involve leaving the house and finding a ways on public transport to get to see a person who you're going to see for five minutes in a unfamiliar building. I think that that in a sense COVID has accelerated the acceptance that that's actually pretty good for some people. It won't suit everybody and it doesn't work in every context, but I think where it's really worked well and works is a great example of that. Is in triaging and prioritizing. Ultimately the kinds of resources Graham's talked about the people need to access the GPs and the nurses and the care professionals are in short supply. Demand will outstrip will outstrip supply. therefore being able to triage and prioritize in that first interaction, using a technology ruse enables you to ensure you're focusing your efforts on those who've got the most urgent or the greatest need. So it's a kind of win all around. I think there's definitely been a sea change and it's hard to see hard to see people going back just as the debate about, will everybody eventually go back to offices, having spent a working at home? You know, I think the answer is invariably going to be no, some will but many won't. And it's the same with technology. Some will continue to interact through a technology channel. They won't go back to the face-to-face option that they had previously. >> Terrific. Well, thank you both very much. Steve Careful PA consulting group and Graham Allen Hampshire county council really appreciate your, your insights on how this important technology helped people who were suffering in the midst of the pandemic. Thank you. >> Steve: You're welcome. >> Graham: Thank you. >> Well, that's all for this session. Thank you so much for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Welcome back to HPD discovered 2021. The virtual edition. My name is Dave a lot and you're watching the cube. We're here with Omar assad is the vice president, GM of H P S H C I and primary storage and data management business. And Sandeep Singh was the vice president of marketing for HP storage division. Welcome gents. Great to see you. >>Great to be here. Dave, >>it's a pleasure to be here today. >>Hey, so uh, last month you guys, you made a big announcement and and now you're, you know, shining the spotlight on that here at discover Cindy. Maybe you can give us a quick recap, what do we need to know? >>Yeah, Dave. We announced that we're expanding HB Green Lake by transforming HB storage to a cloud native software defined data services business. We unveiled a new vision for data that accelerates data dream of transformation for our customers. Uh and it introduced a and we introduced the data services platform that consists of two game changing innovations are first announcement was data services cloud console. It's a SAS based console that delivers the cut operational agility and it's designed to unify data operations through a suite of cloud data services. Our second announcement is H P E electra. It's cloud native data infrastructure to power your data edge to cloud. And it's managed natively with data services cloud console to bring that cloud operational model to our customers wherever their data lives. Together with the data services >>platform. >>Hp Green Green Lake brings that cloud experience to our customers data across edge and on premises environment and lays the foundation for our customers to shift from managing storage to managing data. >>Well, I think it lays the foundation for the next decade. You know, when we entered this past decade, we we we we keep we use terms like software led that that sort of morphed into. So the software defined data center containers with kubernetes, let's zoom out for a minute. If we can homer, maybe you could describe the problems that you're trying to address with this announcement. >>Thanks dave. It's always a pleasure talking to you on these topics. So in my role as general manager for primary storage, I speak with the hundreds of customers across the board and I consistently hear that data is at the heart of what our customers are doing and they're looking for a data driven transformative approach to their business. But as they engage on these things, there are two challenges that they consistently faced. The first one is that managing storage at scale Is rife with complexity. So while storage has gotten faster in the last 20 years, managing a single array or maybe two or three arrays has gotten simpler over time. But managing storage at scale when you deploy fleet, so storage as customers continue to gather, store and life cycle of that data. This process is extremely frustrating for customers. Still I. T. Administrators are firefighting, they're unable to innovate for their business because now data spans all the way from edge to corridor cloud. And then with the advent of public cloud there's another dimension of multi cloud that has been added to their data sprawl. And then secondly what what we what we consistently hear is that idea administrators need to shift from managing storage to managing data. What this basically means is that I. T. Has a desire to mobilize, protect and provision data seamlessly across its lifecycle and across the locations that it is stored at. This ensures that I. D. Leaders uh and also people within the organization understand the context of the data that they store and they operate upon. Yet data management is an extremely big challenge and it is a web of fragmented data silos across processes across infrastructure all the way from test and dev to administration uh to production uh to back up to lifecycle data advantage. Uh And so up till now data management was tied up with storage management and this needs to change for our customers especially with the diversity of the application workloads as they're growing and as customers are expanding their footprint across a multi cloud environment, >>just had to almost um response there. We recently conducted a survey that was actually done by E. S. She. Um and that was a survey of IT. decision makers. And it's interesting what it showcased, 93% of the respondents indicated that storage and data management complexity is impeding their digital transformation. 95% of the respondents indicated that solving storage and data management complexity is a top 10 business initiative for them And 94% want to bring the cloud experience on premises. >>You know, I'll chime in. I think as you guys move to the sort of software world and container world affinity to developers homer. You talked about, you know, things like data protection and we talk about security being bolted on all the time. Now. It's designed in it's it's done at sort of the point of creation, not as an afterthought and that's a big change that we see coming. Uh Let's talk about, you know what also needs to change as customers make the move from this idea of managing storage to to managing data or maybe you can take that one. >>That's a that's a very interesting problem. Right. What are the things that have to be true in order for us to move into this new data management model? So, dave one of the things that the public cloud got right is the cloud operational model which sets the standard for agility and a fast pace for our customers in a classic I. T. On prime model. If you ever wanted to stand up an application or if you were thinking about standing up a particular workload, uh you're going to file a series of I. T. Tickets uh And then you are at the mercy of whatever complex processes exist within organization and and depending on what the level of approvals are within a particular organization, standing up a workload can take days, weeks or even months in certain cases. So what cloud did was a rock that level of simplicity for someone that wanted to instead she ate an app. This means that the provision of underlying infrastructure that makes that workload possible needs to be reduced to minutes from days and weeks. But so what we are intending to do over here is to bring the best of both worlds together so that the cloud experience can be experienced everywhere with ease and simplicity and the customers don't need to change their operating model. So it's blending the two together. And that's what we are trying to usher in into this new era where we start to differentiate between data management and storage management as two independent. Yes, >>Great. Thank you for that. Omer. So deep. I wonder if you could share with the audience, you know, the vision that you guys unveiled, What does it look like? How are you making it actually substantive and and real? >>Yeah. David, That's also great question. Um across the board it's time to reimagine data management. Everything that homer shared. Those challenges are leading to customers needing to break down the silos and complexity that plagues these distributed data environments. And our vision is to deliver a new data experience that helps customers unleash the power of data. We call this vision unified data obs Unified Data Ops integrates data centric policies to streamline data management cloud native control to bring the cloud operational model to where customers data labs and a I driven insights to make the infrastructure invisible. It delivers a new data experience to simplify and bring that agility of cloud to data infrastructure. Streamline data management and help customers innovate faster than ever before. We're making the promise of unified Data Ops Real by transforming H P E storage to a cloud native software defined data services business and introducing a data services platform that expands Hve Green Lake. >>I mean, you know, you talk about the complexity, I see, I look at it as you kind of almost embracing the complexity saying, look, it's gonna keep getting more complex as the cloud expands to the edge on prem Cross cloud, it gets more complex underneath. What you're doing is you're almost embracing that complexity, putting a layer over it and hiding that complexity from from the end customer that and so they can spend their time doing other things over. I wonder if you can maybe talk a little bit more about the data services console, is it sort of another, you know, software layer to manage infrastructure? What exactly is it? >>It's a lot more than that dave and you're you're 100% right. It's basically we're attempting in this release to attack that complexity. Head on. So simply put data services. Cloud console is a SAS based console that delivers cloud operational model and cloud operational agility uh to our customers, it unifies data operations through a series of cloud data services that are delivered on top of this console to our customers in a continuous innovation stream. Uh And what we have done is going back to the point that I made earlier separating storage and data management and putting the strong suites of each of those together into the SAS delivered console for our customers. So what we have done is we have separated data and infrastructure management away from physical hardware to provide a comprehensive and a unified approach to managing data and infrastructure wherever it lives from a customer's perspective, it could be at the edge, it could be in a coal. Oh, it could be in their data center or it could be a bunch of data services that are deployed within the public cloud. So now our customers with data services, cloud console can manage the entire life cycle of their data from all the way from deployment, upgrading and optimizing it uh from a single console from anywhere in the world. Uh This console is designed to streamline data management with cloud data services that enable access to data, It allows for policy-based data protection, it allows for an organizational wide search on top of your storage assets. And we deliver basically a 360° visibility to all your data from a single console that the customer can experience from anywhere. So, so if you look at the journey, the way we're deciding to deliver this. So the first in its first incarnation, uh data services, cloud console gives you infrastructure and cloud data services to start to do data management along with that. But this is that foundation that we are placing in front of our customers, the SAS console through which we get touch our customers on a daily basis. And now as our customers get access to the SAAS platform on the back end, we will continue to roll in additional services throughout the years on a true SAS based innovation base for our customers. And and these services can will be will be ranging all the way from data protection to multiple out data management, all the way to visibility all the way to understanding the context of your data as it's stored across your enterprise. And in addition to that, we're offering a consistent, revised, unified API which allows for our customers to build automation against their storage infrastructure without ever worrying about that. As infrastructure changes. Uh the A P I proof points are going to break for them. That is never going to happen because they are going to be programming to a single SAS based aPI interface from now on. >>Right. And that brings in this idea of infrastructures coding because you talk about as a service to talk about Green Lake and and my question is always okay. Tell me what's behind that. And if and if and if and if you're talking about boxes and and widgets, that's a it's a problem. And you're not you're talking about services and A P. I. S and microservices and that's really the future model. And infrastructure is code and ultimately data as code is really part of that. So, All right. So you guys, I know some of your branding folks, you guys give deep thought uh, to this. So the second part of the announcement is the new product brands and deep maybe you can talk about that a little bit. >>Sure. Ultimately delivering the cloud operational model requires cognitive data infrastructure and that has been engineered to be natively managed from the cloud. And that's why we have also introduced H. P. E. Electra. Omar. Can you perhaps described HB electro even more? >>Absolutely. Thank you. Sandy. Uh, so with with HB Electoral we're launching a new brand of cloud native hardware infrastructure to power our customers data all the way from edge to the core to the cloud. The releases are smaller models for the edge then at the same time having models for the data center and then expanding those services into the public cloud as well. Right. All these hardware devices, Electoral hardware devices are cloud native. Empowered by our Data services. Cloud Council. We're announcing two models with this launch H. P. E. Electra 9000. Uh, this is for our mission critical workloads. It has its history and bases in H P E primera. It comes with 100% availability guarantee. Uh It's the first of its type in the industry. It comes with standard support contract, No special verb is required. And then we're also launching HB electoral 6000. Uh These are based in our history of uh nimble storage systems. Uh These these are for business critical applications, especially for that mid range of the storage market, optimizing price, performance and efficiency. Both of these systems are full envy, any storage powered by our timeless capabilities with data in place upgrades. And then they both deliver a unified infrastructure and data management experience through the data services, cloud console. Uh and and and at the back end, unified ai Ops experience with H P E info site is seamlessly blended in along with the offering for our customers. >>So this is what I was talking about before. It's sort of not your grandfather's storage business anymore. Is this is this is this is something that is part of that, that unified vision, that layer that I talked about. The AP is the program ability. So you're you're reaching into new territory here. Maybe you can give us an example of how the customers experience what that looks like. >>Excellent, loved her Dave. So essentially what we're doing is we're changing the storage experience to a true cloud operational model for our customers. These recent announcements that we just went through along with, indeed they expand the cloud experience that our customers get with storage as a service with HPD Green Lake. So a couple of examples to make this real. So the first of all is simplified deployment. Uh, so I t no longer has to go through complex startup and deployment processes. Now, all you need to do is these systems shipped and delivered to the customer's data center. Operational staff just need to rack and stack and then leave, connect the power cable, connect the network cable. And the job is done from that point onwards, data services console takes over where you can onboard these systems, you can provision these systems if you have a pre existing organization wide security as well as standard profile setup in data services console, we can automatically apply those on your behalf and bring these systems online. From a customer's perspective, they can be anywhere in the world to onboard these systems, they could be driving in a car, they could be sitting on a beach uh And and you know, these systems are automatically on boarded through this cloud operational model which is delivered through the SAAS application for our customers. Another big example. All that I'd like to shed light on is intent based provisioning. Uh So Dave typically provisioning a workload within a data center is an extremely spreadsheet driven trial and error kind of a task. Which system do I land it on? Uh Is my existing sl is going to be affected which systems that loaded, which systems are loaded enough that I put this additional workload on it and the performance doesn't take. All of these decisions are trial and error on a constant basis with cloud data services console along with the electron new systems that are constantly in a loop back information feeding uh Typical analytics to the console. All you need to do is to describe the type of the workload and the intent of the workload in terms of block size S. L. A. That you would like to experience at that point. Data services console consults with intra site at the back end. We run through thousands of data points that are constantly being given to us by your fleet and we come back with a few recommendations. You can accept the recommendation and at that time we go ahead and fully deploy this workload on your behalf or you can specify a particular system and then we will try to enforce the S. L. A. On that system. So it completely eliminates the guesswork and the planning that you have to do in this regard. Uh And last but not the least. Uh you know, one of the most important things is, you know, upgrades has been a huge problem for our customers. Uh And typically oftentimes when you're not in this constant, you know, loop back communication with your customers. It often is a big challenge to identify which release or which bug fix or which update goes on to which particular machine. All of that has been completely taken away from our customers and fully automated. Uh we run thousands of signatures across are installed base. We identify which upgrades need to be curated for which machines in a fleet for a particular customer. And then if it applies to that customer we presented, and if the customer accepts it, we automatically go ahead and upgrade the system and and and last, but not the least from a global management perspective. Now, a customer has an independent data view of their data estate, independent from a storage estate. And data services. Council can blend the two to give a consistent view or you can just look at the fleet view or the data view. >>It's kind of the Holy Grail. I mean I've been in this business a long time and I think I t. People have dreamt about you know this kind of capability for for a long long time. I wonder if we could sort of stay on the customers for a moment here and and talk about what's enabled. Now everybody's talking digital transformation that I joke about the joke. Not funny. The force marched to digital with Covid uh and we really wasn't planned for but the customers really want to drive now that digital transfer some of them are on the back burner and now they're moving to the front burner. What are the outcomes that are that are enabled here? Omar. >>Excellent. So so on on a typical basis for a traditional I. T. Customer, this cloud operational model means that you know information technology staff can move a lot faster and they can be a lot more productive on the things that are directly relevant to their business. They can get up to 99% of the savings back to spend more time on strategic projects or best of all spend time with their families rather than managing and upgrading infrastructure and fleets of infrastructure. Right. For line of business owners, the new experience means that their data infrastructure can be presented can be provision where the self service on demand type of capability. Uh They necessarily don't have to be in the data center to be able to make those decisions. Capacity management, performance management, all of that is died in and presented to them wherever they are easy to consume SAS based models and especially for data innovators, whether it's D B A s, uh whether it's data analysts, they can start to consume infrastructure and ultimately data as a code to speed up their app development because again, the context that we're bringing forward is the context of data decoupling it from. Actually, storage management, storage management and data management are now two separate domains that can be presented through a single console to tie the end to end picture for a customer. But at the end of the day, what we have felt is that customers really really want to rely and move forward with the data management and leave infrastructure management to machine oriented task, which we have completely automated on their behalf. >>So I'm sure you've heard you got the memo about, you know, H H P going all in on as a service. Uh it's clear that the companies all in. How does this announcement fit in to that overall mission, Sandeep >>Dave. We believe the future is edge to cloud and our mission is to be the edge to cloud platform as a service company and as as HB transforms HP Green Lake is our unified cloud platform. Hp Green Link is how we deliver cloud services and agile cloud experiences to customers, applications and data across the edge to cloud. With the storage announcement that we made recently, we announced that we're expanding HB Green Lake with as a service transformation of the HPV storage business to a cloud native software defined data services business. And this expands storage as a service delivering full cloud experience to our customers data across edge and on prem environment across the board were committed to being a strategic partner for every one of our customers and helping them accelerate their digital transformation. >>Yeah, that's where the puck is going guys. Hey as always great conversation with with our friends from HP storage. Thanks so much for the collaboration and congratulations on the announcements and I know you're not done yet. >>Thanks. Dave. Thanks. Dave. All right. Dave. It's a pleasure to be here. >>You're very welcome. And thank you for being with us for hp. You discovered 2021. You're watching the cube, the leader digital check coverage. Keep it right there, but right back. >>Mhm. Mhm.

>>Welcome back to HPD discovered 2021. The virtual edition. My name is Dave Volonte and you're watching the cube. We're here with Omar assad is the vice president GM of H P S H C I and primary storage and data management business. And Sandeep Singh was the vice president of marketing for HP storage division. Welcome gents. Great to see you. >>Great to be here. Dave, >>It's a pleasure to be here today. >>Hey, so uh, last month you guys, you made a big announcement and and now you're, you know, shining the spotlight on that here at discover Cindy. Maybe you can give us a quick recap, what do we need to know? >>Yeah, Dave. We announced that we're expanding HB Green Lake by transforming HB storage to a cloud native software defined data services business. We unveiled a new vision for data that accelerates data, dream of transformation for our customers. Uh and it introduced a and we introduced the data services platform that consists of two game changing innovations are first announcement was Data services cloud console. It's a SAS based console that delivers the cut operational agility and it's designed to unify data operations through a suite of cloud data services. Our 2nd announcement is HPE. Electra. It's cloud native data infrastructure to power your data edge to cloud. And it's managed natively with data services cloud console to bring that cloud operational model to our customers wherever their data lives together with the data services platform. Hp Green Green Lake brings that cloud experience to our customers data across edge and on premises environment and lays the foundation for our customers to shift from managing storage to managing data. >>Well, I think it lays the foundation for the next decade. You know, when we entered this past decade, we we were Ricky bobby's terms like software led that that sort of morphed into. So the software defined data center containers with kubernetes, Let's zoom out for a minute. If we can homer maybe you could describe the problems that you're trying to address with this announcement. >>Thanks dave. It's always a pleasure talking to you on these topics. So in my role as general manager for primary storage, I speak with the hundreds of customers across the board and I consistently hear that data is at the heart of what our customers are doing and they're looking for a data driven transformative approach to their business. But as they engage on these things, there are two challenges that they consistently faced. The first one is that managing storage at scale Is rife with complexity. So while storage has gotten faster in the last 20 years, managing a single array or maybe two or three arrays has gotten simpler over time. But managing storage at scale when you deploy fleet. So storage as customers continue to gather, store and lifecycle that data. This process is extremely frustrating for customers. Still I. T. Administrators are firefighting, they're unable to innovate for their business because now data spans all the way from edge to corridor cloud. And then with the advent of public cloud there's another dimension of multi cloud that has been added to their data sprawl. And then secondly what what we what we consistently hear is that idea administrators need to shift from managing storage to managing data. What this basically means is that I. D. Has a desire to mobilize, protect and provision data seamlessly across its lifecycle and across the locations that it is stored at. Uh This ensures that I. D. Leaders uh and also people within the organization understand the context of the data that they store and they operate upon. Yet data management is an extremely big challenge and it is a web of fragmented data silos across processes across infrastructure all the way from test and dev to administration uh to production uh to back up to lifecycle data management. Uh And so up till now data management was tied up with storage management and this needs to change for our customers especially with the diversity of the application workloads as they're growing and as customers are expanding their footprint across a multi cloud environment >>just to add to almost uh response there. We recently conducted a survey that was actually done by E. S. She. Um and that was a survey of IT. decision makers. And it's interesting what it showcased, 93% of the respondents indicated that storage and data management complexity is impeding their digital transformation. 95% of the respondents indicated that solving storage and data management complexity is a top 10 business initiative for them and 94% want to bring the cloud experience on premises, >>you know, al china. And I think as you guys move to the sort of software world and container world affinity to developers homer, you talked about, you know, things like data protection and we talk about security being bolted on all the time. Now. It's designed in it's it's done at sort of the point of creation, not as an afterthought. And that's a big change that we see coming. Uh But let's talk about, you know, what also needs to change as customers make the move from this idea of managing storage to to managing data or maybe you can take that one. >>That's a that's a that's a very interesting problem. Right. What are the things that have to be true in order for us to move into this new data management model? So, dave one of the things that the public cloud got right is the cloud operational model uh which sets the standard for agility and a fast pace for our customers in a classic I. T. On prime model, if you ever wanted to stand up an application or if you were thinking about standing up a particular workload, uh you're going to file a series of I. T. Tickets and then you're at the mercy of whatever complex processes exist within organization and and depending on what the level of approvals are within a particular organization, standing up a workload can take days, weeks or even months in certain cases. So what cloud did was they brought that level of simplicity for someone that wanted to instead she ate an app. This means that the provisioning of underlying infrastructure that makes that workload possible needs to be reduced to minutes from days and weeks. But so what we are intending to do over here is to bring the best of both worlds together so that the cloud experience can be experienced everywhere with ease and simplicity and the customers don't need to change their operating model. So it's blending the two together. And that's what we are trying to usher in into this new era where we start to differentiate between data management and storage management as two independent things. >>Great, thank you for that. Omer sometimes I wonder if you could share with the audience, you know, the vision that you guys unveiled, What does it look like? How are you making it actually substantive and and real? >>Yeah. Dave. That's also great question. Um across the board it's time to reimagine data management. Everything that homer shared. Those challenges are leading to customers needing to break down the silos and complexity that plagues these distributed data environments. And our vision is to deliver a new data experience that helps customers unleash the power of data. We call this vision unified data jobs, Unified Data Ops integrates data centric policies to streamline data management, cloud native control to bring the cloud operational model to where customers data labs and a I driven insights to make the infrastructure invisible. It delivers a new data experience to simplify and bring that agility of cloud to data infrastructure. Streamline data management and help customers innovate faster than ever before. We're making the promise of Unified Data Ops Real by transforming Hve storage to a cloud native software defined data services business and introducing a data services platform that expands Hve Green Lake. >>I mean, you know, you talk about the complexity, I see, I look at it as you kind of almost embracing the complexity saying, look, it's gonna keep getting more complex as the cloud expands to the edge on prem Cross cloud, it gets more complex underneath. What you're doing is you're almost embracing that complexity and putting a layer over it and hiding that complexity from from the end customer that and so they can spend their time doing other things over. I wonder if you can maybe talk a little bit more about the data services console, Is it sort of another software layer to manage infrastructure? What exactly is it? >>It's a lot more than that, Dave and you're you're 100% right. It's basically we're attempting in this release to attack that complexity head on. So simply put data services. Cloud console is a SAS based console that delivers cloud operational model and cloud operational agility uh to our customers. It unifies data operations through a series of cloud data services that are delivered on top of this console to our customers in a continuous innovation stream. Uh And what we have done is going back to the point that I made earlier separating storage and data management and putting the strong suites of each of those together into the SAS delivered console for our customers. So what we have done is we have separated data and infrastructure management away from physical hardware to provide a comprehensive and a unified approach to managing data and infrastructure wherever it lives. From a customer's perspective, it could be at the edge, it could be in a coal. Oh, it could be in their data center or it could be a bunch of data services that are deployed within the public cloud. So now our customers with data services. Cloud console can manage the entire life cycle of their data from all the way from deployment, upgrading and optimizing it uh from a single console from anywhere in the world. Uh This console is designed to streamline data management with cloud data services that enable access to data. It allows for policy-based data protection, it allows for an organizational wide search on top of your storage assets. And we deliver basically a 360° visibility to all your data from a single console that the customer can experience from anywhere. So, so if you look at the journey the way we're deciding to deliver this. So the first, in its first incarnation, uh Data services, Cloud console gives you infrastructure and cloud data services to start to do data management along with that. But this is that foundation that we are placing in front of our customers, the SAS console, through which we get touch our customers on a daily basis. And now as our customers get access to the SAAS platform on the back end, we will continue to roll in additional services throughout the years on a true SAS based innovation base for our customers. And and these services can will be will be ranging all the way from data protection to multiple out data management, all the way to visibility all the way to understanding the context of your data as it's stored across your enterprise. And in addition to that, we're offering a consistent revised unified Api which allows for our customers to build automation against their storage infrastructure. Without ever worrying about that. As infrastructure changes, uh, the A. P I proof points are going to break for them. That is never going to happen because they are going to be programming to a single SAS based aPI interface from now on. >>Right. And that brings in this idea of infrastructure as code because you talk about as a service to talk about Green Lake and and my question is always okay. Tell me what's behind that. And if and if and if and if you're talking about boxes and and widgets, that's a it's a problem. And you're not, you're talking about services and A P. I. S and microservices and that's really the future model and infrastructure is code and ultimately data as code is really part of that. So, All right. So you guys, I know some of your branding folks, you guys give deep thought to this. So the second part of the announcement is the new product brands and deep maybe you can talk about that a little bit. >>Sure. Ultimately delivering the cloud operational model requires cognitive data infrastructure and that has been engineered to be natively managed from the cloud. And that's why we have also introduced H. P. E. Electra. Omar, Can you perhaps described HB electro even more. >>Absolutely. Thank you. Sandy. Uh, so with with HB Electoral we're launching a new brand of cloud native hardware infrastructure to power our customers data all the way from edge to the core to the cloud. The releases are smaller models for the edge then at the same time having models for the data center and then expanding those services into the public cloud as well. Right. All these hardware devices, Electoral hardware devices are cloud native and powered by our data services. Cloud Council, we're announcing two models with this launch H. P. E Electoral 9000. Uh, this is for our mission critical workloads. It has its history and bases in H P E. Primera. It comes with 100% availability guarantee. Uh It's the first of its type in the industry. It comes with standard support contract, no special verb is required. And then we're also launching HB Electoral 6000. Uh These are based in our history of uh nimble storage systems. Uh These these are for business critical applications, especially for that mid range of the storage market, optimizing price, performance and efficiency. Both of these systems are full envy any storage powered by our timeless capabilities with data in place upgrades. And then they both deliver a unified infrastructure and data management experience through the data services, cloud console. Uh And and and at the back end unified Ai Ops experience with H P. E. Info site is seamlessly blended in along with the offering for our >>customers. So this is what I was talking about before. It's sort of not your grandfather's storage business anymore. This is this is this is something that is part of that, that unified vision, that layer that I talked about, the A. P. I. Is the program ability. So you're you're reaching into new territory here. Maybe you can give us an example of how the customers experience what that looks like. >>Excellent. Love to Dave. So essentially what we're doing is we're changing the storage experience to a true cloud operational model for our customers. These recent announcements that we just went through along with, indeed they expand the cloud experience that our customers get with storage as a service with HP Green Lake. So a couple of examples to make this real. So the first of all is simplified deployment. Uh So I t no longer has to go through complex startup and deployment processes. Now all you need to do is these systems shipped and delivered to the customer's data center. Operational staff just need to rack and stack and then leave connect the power cable, connect the network cable. And the job is done. From that point onwards, data services console takes over where you can onboard these systems, you can provision these systems if you have a pre existing organization wide security as well as standard profile setup in data services console, we can automatically apply those on your behalf and bring these systems online. From a customer's perspective, they can be anywhere in the world to onboard these systems, they could be driving in a car, they could be sitting on a beach. Uh And and you know, these systems are automatically on boarded through this cloud operational model which is delivered through the SAAS application for our customers. Another big example. All that I'd like to shed light on is intent based provisioning. Uh So Dave typically provisioning a workload within a data center is an extremely spreadsheet driven trial and error kind of a task. Which system do I land it on? Uh Is my existing sl is going to be affected which systems that loaded which systems are loaded enough that I put this additional workload on it and the performance doesn't take. All of these decisions are trial and error on a constant basis with cloud Data services console along with the electron new systems that are constantly in a loop back information feeding uh Typical analytics to the console. All you need to do is to describe the type of the workload and the intent of the workload in terms of block size S. L. A. That you would like to experience at that point. Data services console consults with intra site at the back end. We run through thousands of data points that are constantly being given to us by your fleet and we come back with a few recommendations. You can accept the recommendation and at that time we go ahead and fully deploy this workload on your behalf or you can specify a particular system and then people try to enforce the S. L. A. On that system. So it completely eliminates the guesswork and the planning that you have to do in this regard. Uh And last but not the least. Uh You know, one of the most important things is, you know, upgrades has been a huge problem for our customers. Uh And typically oftentimes when you're not in this constant, you know, loop back communication with your customers. It often is a big challenge to identify which release or which bug fix or which update goes on to which particular machine, all of that has been completely taken away from our customers and fully automated. Uh We run thousands of signatures across are installed base. We identify which upgrades need to be curated for which machines in a fleet for a particular customer. And then if it applies to that customer we presented, and if the customer accepts it, we automatically go ahead and upgrade the system and and and last, but not the least from a global management perspective. Now, a customer has an independent data view of their data estate, independent from a storage estate and data services. Council can blend the two to give a consistent view or you can just look at the fleet view or the data view. >>It's kind of the holy Grail. I mean I've been in this business a long time and I think I. T. People have dreamt about you know this kind of capability for for a long long time. I wonder if we could sort of stay on the customers for a moment here and and talk about what's enabled. Now. Everybody's talking digital transformation. I joke about the joke. Not funny. The force marched to digital with Covid. Uh and we really wasn't planned for but the customers really want to drive now that digital transfer some of them are on the back burner and now they're moving to the front burner. What are the outcomes that are that are enabled here? Omar. >>Excellent. So so on on a typical basis for a traditional I. T. Customer this cloud operational model means that you know information technology staff can move a lot faster and they can be a lot more productive on the things that are directly relevant to their business. They can get up to 99% of the savings back to spend more time on strategic projects or best of all spend time with their families rather than managing and upgrading infrastructure and fleets of infrastructure. Right for line of business owners, the new experience means that their data infrastructure can be presented can be provision where the self service on demand type of capability. Uh They necessarily don't have to be in the data center to be able to make those decisions. Capacity management, performance management, all of that is died in and presented to them wherever they are easy to consume. SaS based models and especially for data innovators, whether it's D B A s, whether it's data analysts, they can start to consume infrastructure and ultimately data as a code to speed up their app development because again, the context that we're bringing forward is the context of data decoupling it from. Actually, storage management, storage management and data management are now two separate domains that can be presented through a single console to tie the end to end picture for a customer. But at the end of the day, what we have felt is that customers really, really want to rely and move forward with the data management and leave infrastructure management to machine oriented task, which we have completely automated on their behalf. >>So I'm sure you've heard you got the memo about, you know, H H p going all in on as a service. Uh it is clear that the companies all in. How does this announcement fit in to that overall mission? Cindy >>dave We believe the future is edge to cloud and our mission is to be the edge to cloud platform as a service company and as as HB transforms HP Green Lake is our unified cloud platform. Hp Green Link is how we deliver cloud services and agile cloud experiences to customers applications and data across the edge to cloud. With the storage announcement that we made recently, we announced that we're expanding HB Green Lake with as a service transformation of the HPV storage business to a cloud native software defined data services business. And this expands storage as a service, delivering full cloud experience to our customers data across edge and on prem environment across the board were committed to being a strategic partner for every one of our customers and helping them accelerate their digital transformation. >>Yeah, that's where the puck is going guys. Hey as always great conversation with with our friends from HP storage. Thanks so much for the collaboration and congratulations on the announcements and and I know you're not done yet. >>Thanks. Dave. Thanks. Dave. >>Thanks. Dave. It's a pleasure to be here. >>You're very welcome. And thank you for being with us for hp. You discovered 2021 you're watching the cube, the leader digital check coverage. Keep it right there, but right back. >>Yeah. Yeah.

>>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 for your host of the cube, had a great line up here talking sustainability. Kary musa ph d general manager of AI applications and block chains, career great to see you and wayne both the vice president of corporate environmental affairs and chief sustainability officer, among other things involved in the products around that. Wait and korean, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you for having us. >>Well, I'll start with you. What's driving? IBMS investment sustainability as a corporate initiative. We know IBM has been active, we've covered this many times, but there's more drivers now as IBM has more of a larger global scope and continues to do that with hybrid cloud, it's much more of a global landscape. What's driving today's investments in sustainability, >>you know, johN what drives IBM in this area has always been a longstanding, mature and deep seated belief in corporate responsibility. That's the bedrock foundation. So, you know, IBM is 100 10 year old company. We've always strived to be socially responsible, But what's not as well known is that for the last 50 years, IBM has truly regarded environmental sustainability is a strategic imperative. Okay, It's strategic because hey, environmental problems require a strategic fix. It's long term imperative because you have to be persistent with environmental problems, you don't necessarily solve them overnight. And it's imperative because business cannot succeed in a world of environmental degradation, that really is the main tenant of sustainable development. You can't have successful economies with environmental degradation, you can't solving environmental problems without successful economies. So, and IBM's case as a long standing company, We were advantaged because 50 years ago our ceo at the time, Tom Watson put in place the company's first policy for environmental, our stewardship and we've been at it ever since. And he did that in 1971 and that was just six months after the U. S. C. P. A. Was created. It was a year before the Stockholm Conference on the Environment. So we've been added for that long. Um in essence really it's about recognizing that good environmental management makes good business sense. It's about corporate responsibility and today it's the E of E. S. G. >>You know, wayne. That's a great call out, by the way, referencing thomas Watson that IBM legend. Um people who don't may not know the history, he was really ahead of its time and that was a lot of the culture they still see around today. So great to see that focus and great, great call out there. But I will ask though, as you guys evolved in today's modern error. How is that evolved in today's focus? Because you know, we see data centers, carbon footprint, global warming, you now have uh A I and analytics can measure everything. So I mean you can you can measure everything now. So as the world gets larger in the surface area of what is contributing to the sustainable equation is larger, what's the current IBM focus? >>So, you know, these days we continually look at all of the ways in which IBM s day to day business practices intersect with any matter of the environment, whether it's materials waste water or energy and climate. And IBM actually has 21 voluntary goals that drive us towards leadership. But today john as you know, uh the headline is really climate change and so we're squarely focused like many others on that. And that's an imperative. But let me say before I just before I briefly tell you our current goals, it's also important to have context as to where we have been because that helps people understand what we're doing today. And so again, climate change is a topic that the men and women of IBM have paid attention to for a long time. Yeah, I was think about it. It was back in 1992 that the U. S. C. P. A. Created something called Energy Star. People look at that and they say, well, what's that all about? Okay, that's all about climate change. Because the most environmentally friendly energy you can get is the energy that you don't really need to consume. IBM was one of eight companies that helped the U. S. C. P. A. Launched that program 1992. Today we're all disclosing C. 02 emissions. IBM began doing that in 1994. Okay. In 2007, 13 years ago, I'd be unpublished. Its position on climate change, calling for urgent action around the world. We supported the Paris agreement 2015. We reiterated that support in 2017 for the us to remain a partner. 2019, we became a founding member of Climate Leadership Council, which calls for a carbon tax and a carbon dividend. So that's all background context. Today, we're working on our third renewable electricity goal, our fifth greenhouse gas emissions reduction goal and we set a new goal to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions. Each of those three compels IBM to near term >>action. That's awesome wayne as corporate environmental affairs and chief sustainable, great vision and awesome work. Karim dr Karim use if I wanna. We leave you in here, you're the general manager. You you've got to make this work because of the corporate citizenship that IBM is displaying. Obviously world world class, we know that's been been well reported and known, but now it's a business model. People realize that it's good business to have sustainability, whether it's carbon neutral footprints and or intersecting and contributing for the world and their employees who want mission driven companies ai and Blockchain, that's your wheelhouse. This is like you're in the big wave, wow, this is happening, give us your view because you're commercializing this in real time. >>Yeah, look as you've already said and it's the way well articulated, this is a business imperative, right? Is key to all companies corporate strategies. So the first step when you think about operationalized in this is what we've been doing, is to really step back and kind of break this down into what we call five key needs or focus areas that we've understood that we work with our clients. Remember in this context, Wayne is indeed my clients as well. Right. And so when you think about it, the five needs, as we like to lay them out, we talk about the sustainability strategy first of all, how are you approaching it as you saw from Wayne, identifying your key goals and approaches right against that, you begin to get into various areas and dimensions. Climate risk management is becoming increasingly important, especially in asset heavy industries electrification, energy and emissions management, another key focus area where we can bring technology to bear resilient infrastructure and operations, sustainable supply chain, all of these kind of come together to really connect with our clients business operations and allows us to bring together the technologies and the context of ai Blockchain and the key business operations. We can support to kind of begin to address specific news cases in the context of those needs. >>You know, I've covered it in the past and written about and also talked about the cube about sustainability on the supply chain side with Blockchain, whether it's your tracking, you know, um you know, transport of goods with with Blockchain and making sure that that kind of leads your kind of philosophy works because this waste involved is also disruption to business a security issues. But when you really move into the Ai side, how does a company scale that Corinne? Because now, you know, I have to one operationalize it and then scale it. Okay, so that's transformed, innovate and scale. How do I take take me through the examples of how that works >>well, I think really key to that, and this is really key to our ethos, it's enabling ai for business by integrating ai directly into business operations and decision making. So it's not really how can I put this? We try to make it so that the client isn't fixating on trying to deploy ai, they're just leveraging Ai. So as you say, let's take some practical examples. You talked about sustainable supply chains and you know, the key needs around transparency and provenance. Right? So we have helped clients like a tear with their seafood network or the shrimp sustainability network, where there's a big focus on understanding where are things being sourced and how they're moving through the supply chain. We also have a responsible sourcing business network that's being used for cobalt in batteries as an example from mine to manufacturing and here our technologies are allowing us to essentially track, trace and prove the provenance Blockchain serves as kind of that key shared ledger to pull all this information together. But we're leveraging AI to begin to quickly assess based upon the data inputs, the actual state of inventory, how to connect dots across multiple suppliers and as you onboard them and off board them off the network. So that's how we begin to put A. I in action so that the client begins to fixate on the work and the decisions they need to make. Not the AI itself. Another quick example would be in the context of civil infrastructure. One of our clients son and Belt large, maximum client of ours, he uses maximum to really focus on the maintenance and sustainable maintenance of their bridges. Think about how much money is spent setting up to do bridge inspections right. When you think about how much they have to invest the stopping of the traffic that scaffolding. We have been leveraging AI to do things like visual inspection, actually fly drones, take pictures, assess those images to identify cracks and use that to route and prioritized work. Similar examples are occurring in energy and utilities focused on vegetation management where we're leveraging ai to analyse satellite imagery, weather data and bringing it together so that work can be optimally prior authorized and deployed um for our clients. >>It's interesting. One of the themes coming out of think that I'm observing is this notion of transformation is innovation and innovation is about scale. Right? So it's not just innovation for innovating sake. You can transform from whether it's bridge inspections to managing any other previous pre existing kind of legacy condition and bring that into a modern error and then scale it with data. This is a common theme. It applies to to your examples. Kareem, that's super valuable. Um how do you how do you tie that together with partnering? Because wayne you were talking about the corporate initiative, that's just IBM we learned certainly in cybersecurity and now these other areas like sustainability, it's a team sport, you have to work on a global footprint with other industries and other leaders. How was I being working across the industry to connect and work with other, either initiatives or companies or governments. >>Sure. And there have been john over the years and at present a number of diverse collaborations that we seek out and we participate in. But before I address that, I just want to amplify something Kareem said, because it's so important, as I look back at the environmental movement over the last 50 years, frankly, since the first earth day in 1970, I, you know, with the benefit of hindsight, I observed there have really been three different hair, It's in the very beginning, global societies had to enact laws to control pollution that was occurring. That was the late 60s 1970s, into the early 1980s and around the early 1980s through to the first part of this century, that era of let's get control of this sort of transformed, oh, how can we prevent stuff from happening given the way we've always done business and that area ran for a while. But now, thanks to technology and data and things like Blockchain and ai we all have the opportunity to move into this era of innovation, which differs from control in which differs from traditional prevention. Innovation is about changing the way you get the same thing done. And the reason that's enabled is because of the tools that you just spoke about with korean. So how do we socialize these opportunities? Well to your question, we interact with a variety of diverse teams, government, different business associations, NGos and Academia. Some examples. There's an organization named the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, which IBM is a founding member of its Business Leadership Council. Its predecessor was the Q Centre on global climate change. We've been involved with that since 1998. That is a cross section of people from all these different constituencies who are looking for solutions to climate. Many Fortune 102000s in there were part of the green grid. The green grid is an organization of companies involved with data centers and it's constantly looking at how do you measure energy efficiency and data centers and what are best practices to reduce consumption of energy at data centers where a member of the renewable energy buyers alliance? Many Fortune 100 200 Zar in that trying to apply scale to procure more renewable electricity to actually come to our facilities I mentioned earlier were part of the Climate Leadership Council calling for a carbon tax were part of the United Nations Environment programs science policy business form that gets us involved with many ministers of environment from countries around the world. We recently joined the new MITt Climate and sustainability consortium. Mitt Premier Research University. Many key leaders are part of that. Looking at how academic research can supercharge this opportunity for innovation and then the last one, I'm just wrap up call for code. You may be familiar with IBM s involvement in call for code. Okay. The current challenge under Call for Code in 2021 calls for solutions targeted the climate change. So that's that's a diverse set of different constituents, different types of people. But we try to get involved with all of them because we learn and hopefully we contribute something along the way as well. >>Awesome Wayne. Thank you very much, Karim, the last 30 seconds we got here. How do companies partner with IBM if they want to connect in with the mission and the citizenship that you guys are doing? How do they bring that to their company real quick. Give us a quick overview. >>Well, you know, it's really quite simple. Many of these clients are already clients of ours were engaging with them in the marketplace today, right, trying to make sure we understand their needs, trying to ensure that we tune what we've got to offer both in terms of product and consulting services with our GPS brethren, you know, to meet their needs, linking that in as well to IBM being in what we like to turn clients zero. We're also applying these same technologies and capabilities to support IBM efforts. And so as they engage in all these associations, what IBM is doing, that also provides a way to really get started. It's really fixate on those five imperatives or needs are laid out, picked kind of a starting point and tie it to something that matters. That changes how you're doing something today. That's really the key. As far as uh we're concerned, >>Karim, we thank you for your time on sustainability. Great initiative. Congratulations on the continued mission. Going back to the early days of IBM and the Watson generation continuing out in the modern era. Congratulations and thanks for sharing. >>Thank you john. >>Okay. It's the cubes coverage. I'm sean for your host. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm.

>>Mhm Yes. Hi lisa Martin here with the cube we are covering Dell technologies world, the digital event experience. I have two guests here with me today that are new to the program. So I would like to welcome David Lowe, the Director of product management for Dell Technologies. David. Welcome to the >>program. Hi, how are you >>doing well? And Catherine Ward is here as well, customer experience strategist at Dell Technologies Catherine, it's great to have you join us. Thanks. Happy to be here lisa. So we're talking about embracing as a service. That was a big announcement at Dell Technologies World as we were talking before we went live just a few months ago in the end of 2020 where the new Dell Technologies cloud console was announced. David start with our audience in terms of describing the apex council, what it is when it was launched and give us some color around that. >>Absolutely. Back in october we announced the Dell Technologies cloud console as part of unveiling the apex vision and this was really uh in response to what we heard from our customers about the need to be able to take advantage of cloud and as a service, operating models, being able to take advantage of our products and services around infrastructure in a way that really uh you know, met their needs in terms of the business results that they were trying to drive the kind of flexibility that they needed about how to get those offerings in place and be able to to run them having simplicity and how they managed those offers while also having just a greater degree of control, of course, that's afforded by having infrastructure running on premises versus uh in the public cloud. So with the apex console today, again, we're just listening to what customers say about being able to double down on that vision and provide even more functionality and capabilities on top of additional services that we're making available in the apex console today, >>Captain, let's get some point of view from the customers. David mentioned them a number of times. Obviously this is why you're doing this, but how does apex designed to help simplify operations? What are some of the things that you're hearing from the customer experience about it being able to simplify ops? >>Yeah, absolutely. So we've we've talked to many customers that's part of my team's job to ensure we're delivering a great experience. We've really heard >>that customers >>appreciate that they can now subscribe to services and and that the Dell offers. Um we've heard a lot from customers and sales folks that tells us that not every project they want to do is funded in a complex way. And so one of the great benefits of Dell clouds offers and the apex console is being able to get things in an op X way so they can pay on a subscription, uh sorry, so they can play on a subscription basis uh to meet, you know, their business needs is one major positive that we've been hearing from customers. >>One of the things that I read when apex launched a few months ago was this really as a way to demonstrate cloud as an operating model rather than a destination and lets you get both of your opinions on that and since launched what you thought, David, we'll start with you. >>Yeah, Well that's it's a great it's a great concept that customers really that really resonates with customers. So I mean, you know, cloud as an operating model has been something that many companies have moved towards over the last, you know, 10, 15 years, where there are fundamental characteristics of cloud that are defined as being on demand, being self service, providing easier access with elastic scale and then also just paying for what you use. And and and these are the things that customers really care about. And so as part of the apex vision and unveiling today in the in the apex console where offering services, for example, like apex storage services, where customers will have the ability to subscribe to that service on demand through the Apex Council in a self service way, they'll be able to take advantage of it in a way they pay for what they use because on top of a a committed storage capacity, it's an on demand usage model, uh and they have the ability to come in at any time and increase as their business demands what storage is available to them. So we really are capitalizing on those cloud characteristics that customers want to be able to take advantage of but doing so, you know, on top of uh, infrastructure products from Dell that customers have trusted for decades. >>Right. So one of the things that we've talked about so many times in the last year is the acceleration that we've seen in every industry with perspective digital transformation and seeing so many businesses in every industry pivot multiple times here. And that speed up, you know, like, you know, here we are using SAS applications to communicate and to reach customers. I'd love to know Katherine, what some of the things are that you've learned since the initial launch. Kind of given the interesting times that we're in, what are some of the things that you've learned from customer feedback that are going to be utilized to help uh, uh, kind of modify the product going forward? >>Yeah, absolutely. So one thing is customers echoing David, really value self serve. They want to be able to do things on their time when they want. And one of the great things that customers can do through the console is build solutions, choose services that best meet their needs, they don't have to involve sales, they obviously can if they want to, but they don't have to. And that is a big selling point key, you know, meets a key need of that. We've heard from customers, I'd say. The second thing that we've heard from folks is that they really like how we have set up our role based access >>and identity >>management capabilities. Uh and I'll give you an example, So there are company very large companies, let's say who may have one finance department and they are the only people who are empowered to sign off on orders, let's say. So maybe a more purchaser type role, you may have an entire separate set of folks who are more technical folks who understand how to configure an offer, how to put it all together and those, but those folks can't buy. Um And so we have built in some workflows um to help support those processes that we've heard from customers that they have, and by doing that they can ensure appropriate separation of duties according to their internal policies as well as help them get a handle on unexpected spend from I. T. Services. >>Catherine is really touching on an incredibly important point there that customers over the last 10 years as they've used cloud services from other providers. We know that the democratization of cloud, that said that anybody can come in off the street with a credit card and start using services. That's a great way for people to get up and running. But that also leads to the problem of shadow I. T. It also leads to uh you know, an unbounded expenses and and you know difficulty in managing costs and unpredictable expenditure. So we've seen over time how even other cloud providers have had to come back laser and based on customer feedback, start adding governance, start adding policies, start adding, you know budget management and spend controls, uh Start ensuring that the kind of workflow that Catherine mentioned is in place around uh you know, ordering And we decided to put that in just from day 1. So when customers come to the apex console, they're going to be coming in the context of a company or an organization where there will be users that have specific roles. And as Catherine mentioned, they'll have specific permissions that might align with their particular job function and there will be governance that an administrator can implement to ensure that only certain people can perform certain tasks, which, you know, we already know from customer feedback is incredibly important to give customers that kind of control that they might not get or that they might have been asking for from other cloud providers in order to ensure that this is truly like an enterprise grade level of servants. >>Yeah. And just to play off that David, you know, I've talked also while I also, I talked to customers a lot also make sure I interact quite a bit with our sales team so to get their views as well. And there's a university customer that we have who has this exact problem of shadow it. And they were, their goal was to unify and get all their main campuses on same system, following same policies, same procedures, same infrastructure. Um And one of the key challenges that they have is people, developers get excited, they want to build stuff and they will go to the public cloud, use a credit card for example and just get up and running. And now this company realizes that a those folks kind of going off and doing some of that on their own are actually spending more than their central it spends. So again I think it's a real world problem that we think we're we're well positioned to solve. >>Yeah, those guardrails seem really outstanding for customers to be able to get that. You both mentioned shadow I. T. And that's one of the things that we know so easy to spin up services. But yet you then disconnect I thi from different business units which is always a challenge for organizations. So having the governance and the role based access controls really provides your customers with more of a chance to, as you said I think a minute ago David consume and only pay for what they're consuming but also have that line of sight that visibility across who's using these services. What are we paying? Are we are we getting what we need and are we ensuring that we're getting more control over our environment? I can't even imagine how much more important that is these days with so many people still scattered and remote. >>Yeah and and and and and and it's it's just really part of the whole customer lifecycle as they work with our services. So after customer is able to subscribe to something like apex data storage services and after it has been deployed at their data center they'll be able to come in to the apex council, they'll be able to see information about that subscription and about the infrastructure that they're running including having health monitoring and alerts and be able to see the capacity usage of that service. Uh And with that telemetry and insight then be able to take action. Uh Perhaps as you say to you know either uh you know put in place additional controls within their teams on on spending or consumption or increase the available storage that they have to ensure that it meets uh their business needs. And and as we build out this end and life cycle within the apex console customers will see more and more features coming to help with you know tagging of expenditure for show back purpose is to simplify the way in which uh you know both I. T. Teams and financial uh personnel within a company are able to ensure that they're being responsible and and have that governance over over what's being consumed and spent. >>Yeah. Absolutely critical. Catherine talked to us about for existing Dell customers, how can they access the apex console? What's the what's the process there that you advise? >>Yeah. Great great question. So the good news is if you already have a Dell account, whether you're an existing premier customer or perhaps you visit us through Dell dot com your credentials will work. All you need to do is talk to your sales team, your sales representative and ask them to be enabled and the process typically goes that they will sales will help enable an administrator and from there the administrator at your company can start giving access and assigning those roles as as as you as you need. >>Just a little bit of a pivot on that. And what are we talking about in terms of time frame when we think of cloud services being able to spend them up knowing that there's still so much remote work going on. How quickly can Adele customer follow that process that you just mentioned and activate these services? >>Yeah, that's a great question. So our goal is to be able to, once, you know, we have your interest, we understand what you want to get you equipment and get you up and running within 14 days is our is our goal and our target. Um It's a lot depends on on what the customer needs and if they can get, you know, if they can accept delivery that quickly and all that. But but that is our that's our goal is get you up and running in 14 days. >>Excellent. That time to values David. Go ahead. >>Oh yeah, the the getting access to the council can be can be can be, you know, certainly a lot faster. But as Catherine said, you know, once you get into the console and you want to be able to consume the services, especially for those infrastructure services that are going to show up and be deployed at your data center. Uh You know, we we include features like integrated site survey that customers are going to see shortly when they're able to go through the subscription process and enter information about their physical data center. Maybe uh you know, physical access characteristics or power or networking configurations that they have So that our deployment services team knows what to expect when they show up. We can get everything wrapped and stacked and ready to go put it on the truck and have it uh you know, to the customer as quickly as possible as Catherine said, with the time to value promise of 14 days. >>Excellent. And that fast access last question David, before we wrap up, talk to us about what's next? This was only announced in the last 67 months so lots of Development and progress, lots of customer feedback helping to tune the services. What can customers expect you know going out the rest of 20 calendar year 2021 >>more. Just I mean you know we'll have access for more customers in more countries to be able to consume more services and more capabilities within the console to provide that richer and to end experience today we already have access Uh for the console within 17 countries around the world with customers from the US and. UK. and France and Germany already able to subscribe to certain services. We have access for apex data storage services and other countries uh Coming very soon. Uh So we'll be adding more countries or languages will be adding more services uh in the coming months. And as we alluded to earlier more capabilities to ensure that the end and experience that customers have crosses all of the different boundaries within their organizations and supports all of the different roles who need to be able to come in and do everything from discover services. Subscribe to them, provision, resources, uh manage, operate support and and and build solutions on on top of what they have. So it really is all about ensuring that it's a single consistent and to end life cycle within the apex console. >>Well, that word more was perfect when I said, what's coming next book? And folks expect more? It's like that. But wait, there's >>more. So I'm sure >>folks will will get a lot more information as the event unfolds in the weeks after David and Catherine. Thank you for joining me talking to me about all of the progress that's happened in such a short amount of time with apex concept. We look forward to seeing what's next. >>Thanks lisa. >>Thanks for having us. >>My pleasure for David Lo and Catherine Ward. I'm lisa martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of Dell technologies world, The virtual event experience. Yeah, yeah.

>>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 for your host of the cube. We had a great line up here talking sustainability, kary musa ph d general manager of AI applications and block chains going great to see you and wayne, both the vice president of corporate environmental affairs and chief sustainability officer, among other things involved in the products around that. Wait and korean, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you for having us. >>Well, I'll start with you what's driving? IBMS investment in sustainability as a corporate initiative. We know IBM has been active, we've covered this many times, but there's more drivers now as IBM has more of a larger global scope and continues to do that with hybrid cloud, it's much more of a global landscape. What's driving today's investments in sustainability, >>You know, jOHn what drives IBM in this area has always been a longstanding, mature and deep seated belief in corporate responsibility. That's the bedrock foundation. So, you know, IBM 110 year old company, we've always strived to be socially responsible, But what's not as well known is that for the last 50 years, IBM has truly regarded environmental sustainability is a strategic imperative. Okay, It's strategic because hey, environmental problems require a strategic fix. It's a long term imperative because you have to be persistent with environmental problems, you don't necessarily solve them overnight. And it's imperative because business cannot succeed in a world of environmental degradation that really is the main tenant of sustainable development. You can't have successful economies with environmental degradation, you can't solving environmental problems without successful economies. So, and IBM's case as a long standing company, We were advantaged because 50 years ago our ceo at the time, Tom Watson put in place the company's first policy for environmental a stewardship and we've been at it ever since. And he did that in 1971 and that was just six months after the U. S. E. P. A. Was created. It was a year before the Stockholm Conference on the Environment. So we've been added for that long. Um in essence, really it's about recognizing that good environmental management makes good business sense, It's about corporate responsibility and today it's the E of E. S. G. >>You know, wayne. That's a great call out, by the way, referencing thomas Watson, the IBM legend. Um people who don't may not know the history, he was really ahead of its time and that was a lot of the culture they still see around today. So great to see that focus and great, great call out there. But I will ask though, as you guys evolved in today's modern error, how has that evolved in today's focus? Because, you know, we see data centers, carbon footprint, global warming, you now have a I and analytics can measure everything. So I mean you can you can measure everything now. So as the world gets larger in the surface area of what is contributing to the sustainable equation is larger, what's the current IBM focus? >>So these days we continually look at all of the ways in which IBM s day to day business practices intersect with any matter of the environment, whether it's materials, waste water or energy and climate. And IBM actually has 21 voluntary goals that drive us towards leadership. But today john as you know, uh the headline is really climate change and so we're squarely focused like many others on that and that's an imperative. But let me say before I just before I briefly tell you our current goals, it's also important to have context as to where we have been because that helps people understand what we're doing today. And so again, climate change is a topic that the men and women of IBM have paid attention to for a long time. Yeah, I was think about it. It was back in 1992 that the U. S. C. P. A. Created something called Energy Star. People look at that and they said, well, what's that all about? Okay, that's all about climate change. Because the most environmentally friendly energy you can get is the energy that you don't really need to consume. IBM was one of eight companies that helped the U. S. C. P. A. Launched that program 1992. Today we're all disclosing C. 02 emissions. IBM began doing that in 1994. Okay. In 2007, 13 years ago, I'd be unpublished. Its position on climate change, calling for urgent action around the world. He supported the Paris Agreement 2015. We reiterated that support in 2017 for the us to remain a partner. 2019, we became a founding member of Climate Leadership Council which calls for a carbon tax and a carbon dividend. So that's all background context. Today, we're working on our third renewable electricity goal, our fifth greenhouse gas emissions reduction goal and we set a new goal to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions. Each of those three compels IBM to near term action. >>That's awesome wayne as corporate environmental affairs and chief sustainable, great vision and awesome work. Karim dr Karim use if I wanna we leave you in here, you're the general manager. You you got to make this work because of the corporate citizenship that IBM is displaying. Obviously world world class, we know that's been been well reported and known, but now it's a business model. People realize that it's good business to have sustainability, whether it's carbon neutral footprints and or intersecting and contributing for the world and their employees who want mission driven companies ai and Blockchain, that's your wheelhouse. This is like you're on the big wave, wow, this is happening, give us your view because you're commercializing this in real time. >>Yeah, look as you've already said and it's the way well articulated, this is a business imperative, right is key to all companies corporate strategies. So the first step when you think about operationalized in this is what we've been doing, is to really step back and kind of break this down into what we call five key needs or focus areas that we've understood that we work with our clients. Remember in this context, Wayne is indeed my clients as well. Right. And so when you think about it, the five needs, as we like to lay them out, we talk about the sustainability strategy first of all, how are you approaching it as you saw from Wayne, identifying your key goals and approaches right against that, you begin to get into various areas and dimensions. Climate risk management is becoming increasingly important, especially in asset heavy industries electrification, energy and emissions management, another key focus area where we can bring technology to bear resilient infrastructure and operations, sustainable supply chain, All of these kind of come together to really connect with our clients business operations and allows us to bring together the technologies and context of ai Blockchain and the key business operations. We can support to kind of begin to address specific news cases in the context of those >>needs. You know, I've covered it in the past and written about and also talked about on the cube about sustainability on the supply chain side with Blockchain, whether it's your tracking, you know, um you know, transport of goods with with Blockchain and making sure that that kind of leads your kind of philosophy works because there's waste involved is also disruption to business, a security issues, but when you really move into the Ai side, how does a company scale that Corinne, because now, you know, I have to one operationalize it and then scale it. Okay, so that's transformed, innovate and scale. How do I take take me through the examples of how that works >>well, I think really key to that, and this is really key to our ethos, it's enabling ai for business by integrating ai directly into business operations and decision making. So it's not really how can I put this? We try to make it so that the client isn't fixating on trying to deploy ai, they're just leveraging Ai. So as you say, let's take some practical examples. You talked about sustainable supply chains and you know, the key needs around transparency and provenance. Right. So we have helped clients like a tear with their seafood network or the shrimp sustainability network where there's a big focus on understanding where are things being sourced and how they're moving through the supply chain. We also have a responsible sourcing business network that's being used for cobalt in batteries as an example from mine to manufacturing and here our technologies are allowing us to essentially track, trace and prove the provenance Blockchain serves as kind of that key shared ledger to pull all this information together. But we're leveraging AI to begin to quickly assess based upon the data inputs, the actual state of inventory, how to connect dots across multiple suppliers and as you on board in an off board them off the network. So that's how we begin to put A I in action so that the client begins to fixate on the work and the decisions they need to make. Not the AI itself. Another quick example would be in the context of civil infrastructure. One of our clients son and Belt large, maximum client of ours he uses maximum too rarely focus on the maintaining sustainable maintenance of their bridges. Think about how much money is spent setting up to do bridge inspections right. When you think about how much they have to invest the stopping of the traffic that scaffolding. We have been leveraging AI to do things like visual inspection. Actually fly drones, take pictures, assess those images to identify cracks and use that to route and prioritized work. Similar examples are occurring in energy and utilities focused on vegetation management where we're leveraging AI to analyse satellite imagery, weather data and bringing it together so that work can be optimally prior authorized and deployed for our >>clients. It's interesting. One of the themes coming out of think that I'm observing is this notion of transformation is innovation and innovation is about scale. Right? So it's not just innovation for innovating sake. You can transform from whether it's bridge inspections to managing any other previous pre existing kind of legacy condition and bring that into a modern error and then scale it with data. This is a common theme. It applies to to your examples. Kareem, that's super valuable. Um how do you how do you tie that together with partnering? Because wayne you were talking about the corporate initiative, that's just IBM we learned certainly in cybersecurity and now these other areas like sustainability, it's a team sport, you have to work on a global footprint with other industries and other leaders. How was I being working across the industry to connect and work with other, either initiatives or companies or governments. >>Sure. And there have been john over the years and at present a number of diverse collaborations that we seek out and we participate in. But before I address that, I just want to amplify something Kareem said, because it's so important, as I look back at the environmental movement over the last 50 years, frankly, since the first earth day in 1970, I, you know, with the benefit of hindsight, I observed there have really been three different hair, it's in the very beginning, global societies had to enact laws to control pollution that was occurring. That was the late 60s 1970s, into the early 1980s and around the early 1980s through to the first part of this century, that era of let's get control of this sort of transformed, oh how can we prevent stuff from happening given the way we've always done business and that area ran for a while. But now thanks to technology and data and things like Blockchain and ai we all have the opportunity to move into this era of innovation which differs from control in which differs from traditional prevention. Innovation is about changing the way you get the same thing done. And the reason that's enabled is because of the tools that you just spoke about with Korean. So how do we socialize these opportunities? Well to your question, we interact with a variety of diverse teams, government, different business associations, Ngos and Academia. Some examples, there's an organization named the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, which IBM is a founding member of its Business Leadership Council. Its predecessor was the Q Centre on global climate change. We've been involved with that since 1998. That is a cross section of people from all these different constituencies who are looking for solutions to climate. Many Fortune 102000s in there were part of the green grid. The green grid is an organization of companies involved with data centers and it's constantly looking at how do you measure energy efficiency and data centers and what are best practices to reduce consumption of energy at data centers where a member of the renewable energy buyers alliance? Many Fortune 100 200 Zarin that trying to apply scale to procure more renewable electricity to actually come to our facilities I mentioned earlier were part of the Climate Leadership Council calling for a carbon tax were part of the United Nations Environment Programs science Policy business form that gets us involved with many ministers of Environment from countries around the world. We recently joined the new MITt Climate and sustainability consortium. Mitt Premier Research University. Many key leaders are part of that. Looking at how academic research can supercharge this opportunity for innovation and then the last one, I'll just wrap up call for code. You may be familiar with IBM s involvement in call for code. Okay. The current challenge under call for code in 2021 calls for solutions targeted the climate change. So that's, that's a diverse set of different constituents, different types of people. But we try to get involved with all of them because we learn and hopefully we contribute something along the way as well. >>Awesome Wayne. Thank you very much Karim, the last 30 seconds we got here. How do companies partner with IBM if they want to connect in with the mission and the citizenship that you guys are doing? How do they bring that to their company real quick. Give us a quick overview. >>Well, you know, it's really quite simple. Many of these clients are already clients of ours were engaging with them in the marketplace today, right, trying to make sure we understand their needs, trying to ensure that we tune what we've got to offer, both in terms of product and consulting services with our GPS brethren, you know, to meet their needs, linking that in as well to IBM being and what we like to turn client zero. We're also applying these same technologies and capabilities to support IBM efforts. And so as they engage in all these associations, what IBM is doing that also provides a way to really get started. It's really fixate on those five imperatives or needs are laid out, picked kind of a starting point and tie it to something that matters. That changes how you're doing something today. That's really the key. As far as uh we're concerned, >>Karim, we thank you for your time on sustainability. Great initiative, Congratulations on the continued mission. Going back to the early days of IBM and the Watson generation continuing out in the modern era. Congratulations and thanks for sharing. >>Thank you john. >>Okay. It's the cubes coverage. I'm sean for your host. Thanks for watching. >>Mm. Mhm.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting Cuban cloud brought to you by silicon angle. >>We continue >>with Cuban Cloud. We're here with Milan Thompson Bukovec, who's the vice president? Block and object storage at A W s, which comprise comprises elastic block storage, AWS s three and Amazon Glacier. Milan. Great to see you again. Thanks so much for coming on the program. >>Nice to be here. Thanks for having me, David. >>You're very welcome it So here we are. We're unpacking the future of cloud. And we'd love to get your perspectives on how customers should think about the future of infrastructure, things like applying machine intelligence to their data. But just to set the stage when we look back at the history of storage in the Cloud is obviously started with us three. And then a couple years later was introduced CBS for block storage. And those are the most well known services in the portfolio. But there's there's Mawr, this cold storage and new capabilities that you announced recently. It reinvent around, you know, super duper block storage and in tearing is another example. But it looks like AWS is really starting to accelerate and pick up the pace of customer >>options in >>storage. So my first question is, how should we think about this expanding portfolio? >>Well, I think you have to go all the way back to what customers air trying to do with their data. Dave, The path to innovation is paved by data. If you don't have data, you don't have machine learning. You don't have the next generation of analytics applications. That helps you chart a path forward into a world that seems to be changing every week. And so in orderto have that insight in orderto have that predictive forecasting that every company needs, regardless of what industry that you're in today. It all starts from data, and I think the key shift that I've seen is how customers are thinking about that data about being instantly usable, whereas in the past it might have been a backup. Now it's part of a data lake, and if you could bring that data into a data lake, you can have not just analytics or machine learning or auditing applications. It's really what does your application do for your business, and how can it take advantage of that vast amount of shared data set in your business. Awesome. >>So thank you. So I wanna I wanna make sure we're hitting on the big trends that you're seeing in the market. That kind of informing your strategy around the portfolio and what you're seeing with customers Instant usability. You you bring in machine learning into the equation. I think, um, people have really started to understand the benefits of of of cloud storage as a service on the pay paid by the drink and that whole whole model, obviously co vid has accelerated that cloud migration has accelerated. Anything else we're missing there. What are the other big trends that you see if any? >>Well, Dave, you did a good job of capturing a lot of the drivers. The one thing I would say that just sits underneath All of it is the massive growth of digital data year over year I. D. C. Says digital data is growing at a rate of 40% year over year, and that has been true for a while. And it's not going to stop. It's gonna keep on growing because the sources of that data acquisition keeps on expanding and whether it's coyote devices whether it is content created by users. That data is going to grow, and everything you're talking about depends on the ability to not just capture it and store it. But as you say, use it well, >>you know, and we talk about data growth a lot, and sometimes it becomes bromide. But I think the interesting thing that I've observed over the last a couple of decades really is that the growth is nonlinear on. It's really the curve is starting. Thio used to shape exponentially. You guys always talk about that flywheel. Effect it. It's really hard to believe, You know, people say trees don't grow to the moon. It seems like data does. >>It does. And what's interesting about working in the world of AWS storage Dave is that it's counterintuitive. But our goal without data growth is to make it cost effective. And so year over year, how could we make it cheaper and cheaper? Just have customers store more and more data so they can use it. But it's also to think about the definition of usage. And what kind of data is that? Eyes being tapped by businesses for their insights and make that easier than it's ever been before. Let me ask >>you a follow up question on that my life could I get asked this a lot? Or guy here comments a lot that yes, A W s continuously and rigorously reduces pricing. But it's just >>kind of >>following the natural curve of Moore's law or, you know, whatever. How >>do you >>respond to that? And there are other factors involved. Obviously, labor is another cost reducing factor. But what's the trend line say, >>Well, cost efficiencies in our DNA, Dave. We come to work every day and aws across all of our services, and we ask ourselves, How can we lower our costs and be able to pass that along to customers? As you say, there are many different aspects to cost. There's the cost of the storage itself is the cost of the data center. And that's really what we've seen impact a lot of customers that were slower or just getting started with removed. The cloud is they entered 2020 and then they found out exactly how expensive that data center was to maintain because they had to put in safety equipment and they had to do all the things that you have to do in a pandemic in a data center. And so sometimes that cost is a little bit hidden or won't show up until you really don't need to have it land. But the cost of managing that explosive growth of data is very riel. And when we're thinking about cost, we're thinking about cost in terms of how can I lower it on a per gigabyte per month basis? But we're also building into the product itself adaptive discounts like we have a storage class in S three that's called intelligent hearing. And in intelligence hearing, we have built in monitoring where, if particular objects aren't frequently accessed in a given month, ah, customer will automatically get a discounted price for that storage or a customer Can you know, as of late last year, say that they wanna automatically move storage in the storage class that has been stored, for example, longer than 100 and 80 days and saves 95% by moving it into archive storage, deep archives storage? And so it's not just, you know, relentlessly going after and lowering the cost of storage. It's also building into the products these new ways where we can adaptive Lee discount storage based on what a customer's storage is actually doing >>well. And I would, I would add to our audience, is the other thing that does has done is it's really forced transparency almost the same way that Amazon has done on retail. And now my mom, When we talked last I mentioned that s three was an object store. And of course, that's technically technically correct. But your comment to me was Dave. It's more than that. And you started to talk about sage Maker and AI and bringing in machine learning. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the future of how storage is gonna be leveraged in the cloud that's may be different than what we've been, you know, used to in the early days of s three and how your customers should be thinking about infrastructure not as bespoke services but as a suite of capabilities and maybe some of those adjacent adjacent services that you see as most leverage a ble for customers And why? >>Well, to tell this story, dude, we're gonna have to go a little bit back in time all the way back to the 19 nineties. Or before then, when all you had waas, a set of hardware appliance vendors that sold you appliances that you put in your data center and inherently created a data silo because those hardware appliances were hardwired to your application. And so an individual application that was dealing with auditing as an example wouldn't really be able to access the storage for another application. Because you know, the architecture er of that legacy world is tied to a data silo and s tree came out launched in 2000 and six and introduced very low cost storage. That is an object. And I'll tell you, Dave, you know, over the last 10 plus years, we have seen all kinds of data come into us three, whereas before it might have been backups or it might have been images and videos. Now a pretty substantial data set is our parquet files and orc files. Thes files are there for business analytics for more real time type of processing. And that has really been the trend of the future. Is taking these different files putting them in a shared file layer, So any application today or in the future can tap into that data. And so this idea of the shared file layer is a major trend that has been taking off for the last. I would say five or six years, and I expect that to not only keep on going, but to really open up the type of services that you can then do on that shared file layer and whether that sage maker or some of the machine learning introduced by our connect service, it's bringing together the data as a starting point. And then the applications can evolve very rapidly. On top of that, I want to >>ask your opinion about big data architectures. One of our guests, Jim Octagon E. She's amazing, uh, data architect, and she's put forth this notion of a distributed global mesh, and I picked him picking up on some of the comments. Andy Jassy made it at reinvent How essentially Hey, we're bringing a W s to the edge. We see the data center is just another edge. Notes. You're seeing this massive distributed system evolving. You guys have talked about that for a while, and data by its very nature is distributed. But we've had this tendency to put into it monolithic Data Lake or a data warehouse on bits sort of antithetical to that distributed nature. So how >>do >>you see that playing out? What do you see customers in the future doing in terms of their big data architectures? And what does that mean for storage? >>It comes down to the nature of the data and again, the usage and Dave. That's where I see the biggest difference in these modern data architectures from the legacy of 20 years ago is the idea that the data need drives the data storage. So let's taken example of the type of data that you always wanna have on the edge. We have customers today that need tohave storage in the field and whether the field of scientific research or oftentimes, it's content creation in the in the film industry or if it's for military operations. There's a lot of data that needs to be captured and analyzed in the field and for us, what that means is that you know we have a suite of products called Snowball and whether it's snowball or snow cone, take your pick. That whole portfolio of AWS services is targeted at customers that need to do work with storage at the edge. And so it you know, if you think about the need for multiple applications acting on the same data set, that's when you keep it in an AWS region. And what we've done in AWS storage is we've recognized that depending on the need of usage, where you put your data and how you interactive, it may vary. But we've built a whole set of services like data transfer to help make sure that we can connect data from, for example, that new snow cone into a region automatically. And so our goal Dave, is to make sure that when customers air operating at the edge or they're operating in the region, they have the same quality of storage service, and they have easy ways to go between them. You shouldn't have to pick. You should be able to do it all. >>So in the spirit of do it all, this is sort of age old dynamic in the tech business, where you've got the friction between the the best of breed and the integrated suite, and my question is around what you're optimizing for for customers. And can you have your cake and eat it too? In other words, why A W S storage does what makes a compelling? Is it because it's kind of a best of breed storage service? Or is it because it's integrated with a W S? Would you ever sub optimize one in in order to get an advantage to the other? Or can you actually, >>you >>know, have your cake and eat it, too? >>The way that we build storage is to focus on being both the breath of capabilities on the depth of capabilities. And so where we identify ah, particular need where we think that it takes a whole new service to deliver, we'll go build that service and example for that is FTP, our AWS sftp service, which you know there's a lot of sftp usage out there and there will be for a while because of the you know, the Legacy B two b type of architectures that still live in the business world today. And so we looked at that problem. We said, How are we gonna build that in the best depth way and the best focus? And we launched a separate service for them. And so our goal is to take the individual building blocks of CBS and Glacier and s three and make the best of class and the most comprehensive in the capabilities of what we can dio and where we identify very specific need. We'll go build a service for. But, Dave, you know, as an example for that idea of both depths and breath s three storage lands is a great example of that s three storage lands is a new capability that we launched last year. And what it does is it lets you look across all your regions and all your accounts and get a summary view of all your s three storage and whether that's buckets or, you know, the most active prefixes that you have and be able to drill down from that and that is built in to the S three service and available for any customer that wants to turn it on in the AWS Management Council. >>Right? And we we saw just recently made I called it super duper block storage. But you made some, you know, improvements and really addressing the highest performance. Um, I want to ask you So we've all learned about an experience the benefits of cloud over the last several years, and especially in the last 10 months during the pandemic. But one >>of >>the challenges, and it's particularly acute with bio is, of course, Leighton see and moving data around and accessing data remotely. It's It's a challenge for customers, you know, due to speed of light, etcetera. So my question is, how was a W s thinking about all that data that still resides on premises? I think we heard that reinvent. That's still 90% of the opportunities or or the workloads. They're still on Prem that live inside a customer's data center. So how do you tap into those and help customers innovate with on Prem data, particularly from a storage >>angle? Well, we always want to provide the best of class solution for those little Leighton see workloads, and that's why we launched Block Express just late last year. It reinvent and Black expresses a new capability and preview on top of our Iot to provisioned eye ops volume type, and what's really interesting about Block Express Dave, is that the way that we're able to deliver the performance of Block Express, which is sound performance with cloud elasticity, is that we went all the way down to the network layer and we customize the hardware software. And at the network Lehrer, we built a Block Express on something called SRD, which stands for a scalable, reliable diagrams. And basically, what is letting us to do is offload all of our EBS operations for Block Express on the Nitro card on hardware. And so that type of innovation where we're able Thio, you know, take advantage of modern cop commodity, multi tenant data center networks where we're sending in this new network protocol across a large number of network paths, and that that type of innovation all the way down to that protocol level helps us innovate in a way that's hard. In fact, I would say impossible for for other sound providers to kind of really catch up and keep up. And so we feel that the amount of innovation that we have for delivering those low latency workloads in our AWS cloud storage is is unlimited, really, Because of that ability to customize software, hardware and network protocols as we go along without requiring upgrades from a customer it just gets better and the customer benefits. Now if you want to stay in your data center, that's why we built outposts. And for outpost, we have EBS and we have s three for outposts. And our goal there is that some customers will have workloads where they want to keep them resident in the data center And for those customers, we want to give them that AWS storage opportunities as well. So >>thank you for coming back to block Express. So you call it in sand in the cloud eso Is that essentially you've you've comprises a custom built, essentially storage storage network. Is that is that right? What kind of what you just described? SRD? I think you call it. >>Yeah, it's SRT is used by other AWS services as well, but it is a custom network protocol that we designed to deliver the lowest latency experience on We're taking advantage of it with Block Express >>sticking with traditional data centers for a moment, I'm interested in your thoughts on the importance of the cloud you know, pricing approach I e. The consumption model to paid by the drink. Obviously, it's one of the most attractive features But But And I ask that because we're seeing what Andy Jassy first, who is the old Guard Institute? Flexible pricing models. Two of the biggest storage companies HP with Green Lake and Dell has this thing called Apex. They've announced such models for on Prem and and presumably, Cross Cloud. How >>do you think >>this is going to impact your customers Leverage of AWS cloud storage? Is it something that you have ah, opinion on? >>Yeah, I think it all comes down to again that usage of the storage And this is where I think there is an inherent advantage for our cloud storage. So there might be an attempt by the old guard toe lower prices or add flexibility. But the end of the day it comes down to what the customer actually needs to to. And if you think about gp three, which is the new E. B s volume, the idea with GP three is we're gonna pass along savings to the customer by making the storage 20% cheaper than GP two. And we're gonna make the product better by giving a great, reliable baseline performance. But we're also going to let customers who want to run work clothes like Cassandra on TBS tune their throughput separately, for example, from their capacity. So if you're running Cassandra, sometimes you don't need to change your capacity. Your storage capacity works just fine, but what happens with for example, Cassandra were quote is that you may need more throughput. And if you're buying hardware appliance, you just have to buy for your peak. You have to buy for the max of what you think, your throughput in the max of what your storage is and this inherent flexibility that we have for AWS storage and being able to tune throughput separate from IOP, separate from capacity like you do for GP three. That is really where the future is for customers having control over costs and control over customer experience without compromising or trading off either one. >>Awesome. Thank you for that. So another time we have remaining my line. I want to talk about the topic of diversity. Uh, social impact on Daz. Ah, woman leader, women executive on. I really wanna get your perspectives on this, and I've shared with the audience previously. One of my breaking analysis segments your your boxing video, which is awesome and eso so you've got a lot of unique, non traditional aspects to your to your life, and and I love it. But I >>want to >>ask you this. So it's obviously, you know, certainly politically and socially correct to talk about diversity, the importance of diversity. There's data that suggests that that that diversity is good both economically, not just socially. And of course, it's the right thing to do. But there are those. Peter Thiel is probably the most prominent, but there are others who say, You know what, >>But >>get that. Just hire people just like you will be able to go faster, ramp up more quickly, hit escape velocity. It's natural. And that's what you should dio. Why is that not the right approach? Why is diversity both course socially responsible, but also good for business? >>For Amazon, we think about diversity as something that is essential toe how we think about innovation. And so, Dave, you know, as you know, from listening to some of the announcements I reinvent, we launched a lot of new ideas, new concepts and new services in AWS and just bringing that lends down to storage U. S. Tree has been reinventing itself every year since we launched in 2000 and six. PBS introduced the first Son on the Cloud late last year and continues to reinvent how customers think about block storage. We would not be able Thio. Look at a product in a different way and think to ourselves Not just what is the legacy system dio in a data center today. But how do we want to build this new distributed system in a way that helps customers achieve not just what they're doing today, but what they want to do in five and 10 years? You can't get that innovative mindset without bringing different perspectives to the table. And so we strongly believe in hiring people who are from underrepresented groups and whether that's gender or it's related racial equality or if its geographic, uh, diversity and bringing them in tow have the conversation. Because those divers viewpoints inform how we can innovate at all levels in a W s >>right. And so I really appreciate the perspectives on that, and we've had a zoo. You probably know the Cube has been, you know, a very big advocate of diversity, you know, generally, but women in tech Specifically, we participated a lot. And you know, I often ask this question is, you know, as a smaller company, uh, I and some of my other colleagues in in small business Sometimes we struggle. Um and so my question is, how >>how do >>you go beyond What's your advice for going beyond, you know, the good old boys network? I think its large companies like AWS and the big players you've got a responsibility to that. You can put somebody in charge and make it you know, their full time job. How should smaller companies, um, that are largely white, male dominated? How should they become more diverse? What should they do? Thio increase that diversity? >>Well, I think the place to start his voice. A lot of what we try to dio is make sure that the underrepresented voice is heard. And so, Dave, any small business owner of any industry can encourage voice for your under represented or your unheard populations. And honestly, it is a simple as being in a meeting and looking around that table, we're on your screen as it were and asking yourself Who hasn't talked? Who hasn't weighed in particularly if the debate is contentious or even animated. And you will see, particularly if you note this. Over time you will see that there may be somebody and whether it's an underrepresented, a group or its ah woman whose early career or it's it's not. It's just a member of your team who happens to be a white male to who's not being hurt. And you can ask that person for their perspective. And that is a step that every one of us can and should do, which is asked toe, have everyone's voice at the table, toe listen and to weigh in on it. So I think that is something everyone should dio. I think if you are a member of an underrepresented groups, as for example, I'm Vietnamese American and I'm the female in Tech. I think it z something to think about how you can make sure that you're always taking that bold step forward. And it's one of the topics that we covered it at reinvent. We had a great discussion with a group of women CEOs, and a lot of it we talked about is being bolt, taking the challenge of being bold in tough situations, and that is an important thing, I think, for anybody to keep in mind, but especially for members of underrepresented groups, because sometimes Dave, that bold step that you kind of think of is like, Oh, I don't know if I should ask for that promotion or I don't know if I should volunteer for that project It's not. It's not a big ask, but it's big in your head. And so if you can internalize as a member of some, you know, a group that maybe hasn't heard or seen as much how you can take those bold challenges and step forward and learn, maybe fell also because that's how you learn. Then that is a way toe. Also have people learn and develop and become leaders in whatever industry it ISS. It's >>great advice, and I reminds me of, I mean, I think most of us can relate to that my land, because when we started in the industry, we may be timid. You didn't want to necessarily speak up, and I think it's incumbent upon those in a position of power. And by the way, power might just be running a meeting agenda to maybe calling those folks that are. Maybe it's not diversity of gender or, you know, our or race. And maybe it's just the underrepresented. Maybe that's a good way to start building muscle memory. So that's unique advice that I hadn't heard before. So thank you very much for that. Appreciate it. And, uh hey, listen, thanks so much for coming on the Cuban cloud. Uh, we're out of time and and really, always appreciate your perspectives. And you're doing a great job, and thank you. >>Great. Thank you, Dave. Thanks for having me and have a great day. >>All right? And keep it right, everybody. You're watching the cube on cloud right back.

>> From around the globe, it's The Cube, presenting Cube on Cloud, brought to you by SiliconANGLE. >> Welcome back to Cube on Cloud. I'm Paul Gillin, enterprise editor of SiliconANGLE. As we look ahead at what is in store for the cloud this year, one of the intriguing possibilities that has emerged is the rise of vertical clouds. IBM has been a leader in this area with its launch in late '19 of the IBM Financial Services cloud. That's a services-ready public cloud with exceptional security, as well as a policy framework for certifying compliance and services from the IBM subsidiary, Promontory. Now, with the IBM Financial Services cloud, that has been a major focus of our next guest, Hillery Hunter. She is the Vice President and CTO of IBM Cloud, an IBM Fellow, and a veteran of, I believe, three previous appearances on The Cube. Am I right, Hillery? >> Yep, sounds about right. Great to be back here today. >> Thanks for joining us. So let's start with getting an update on the IBM Financial Services cloud. What progress have you made in signing up customers and your ecosystem of partners? >> Yeah, we've made really significant progress advancing the IBM Cloud for Financial Services since we last talked, and we're really at that place of establishing a trusted platform for the industry. Just in some specifics, in addition to Bank of America which we had talked about as our U.S. anchor partner for the program, we've announced several global banks that are partnering with us for the global expansion of the program, including BNP party bar, which is one of Europe's largest banks. More than 70 ASVs are signed up with us now as part of the program and adopting IBM Cloud for Financial Services. This level of ecosystem is exciting because it means that banks will have the opportunity to transform what they're doing, but do so in a way which is driven by security and compliance so that they can be confident in those deployments on IBM Cloud for Financial Services. We also released the IBM Cloud policy framework for Financial Services. This is both the security and compliance posture of the environment, as well as guidance on controls, reference architectures, automation to help people onboard. And so both ISVs and banks now are able to onboard to this environment, and offer their wares and deploy their workloads. So it's a really exciting state for us on the program, and we're really in a place where there'll be an ongoing cadence of additional releases and announcements of additional partnerships and clients. So it's an exciting time in the program. >> One of the distinctive features, I think, of this launch is that you're working actively with your customers. They're working with you on building policy frameworks, as well as, I imagine, the features that you're offering on the cloud. How do you orchestrate all of these different customers and get them involved in, actually, co-development. >> Yeah, the ecosystem conversation and the partnership conversation are two of the fundamental aspects of the program. Like you said, this isn't just us sitting off in a bubble and inventing the future. We're working internally with partners within IBM, like IBM Promontory, which is a consultancy that has deep, deep regulatory expertise in jurisdictions globally, with IBM Security Services, and then with these individual partners and banks and clients. One of the ways that we bring everything together is through our council. So our council, our Cloud Council for Financial Services, is where we have global, systemically important financial institutions partnered with us and working together with one another, and that covers CIOs, it covers chief security officers, risk officers, et cetera. So we have some formality around how we work with all of these partners, really, as a body and as a group. >> And what have you learned from this experience? If you were to go into other vertical clouds, what have been the lessons? >> Ecosystem is so important. As I look at this space, I see that everyone has an existing business. They have a platform they're running, they have clients they're trying to service, but the software providers into this space are looking, themselves, to transform. They're looking to transform from being software vendors to being SaaS providers. The banks and financial institutions themselves are looking to transform from working on their own premises to benefit from the elasticity and the scale and the optionality that being in public cloud provides. So there's a lot of parties themselves that are trying to transform, and a lot of vendors into the financial space that are looking to transform. And in that time of a lot of change, ecosystem is absolutely key. And so the ISE and SaaS providers providing their wares on the cloud for financial services is really just as important as those financial services institutions, so that everyone can make that transition together, and so that banks that are looking to digitally transform can leverage partners that are really at the forefront of that change and that innovation in platforms for the industry. >> Would you say that there are- Is this the first of many? Are there going to be other vertical IBM clouds, or is the range of industries that really need that kind of specificity, limited? I think it's actually not limited, though I will say that within the space of industries that are heavily regulated, there's obviously a deeper need for specific cloud embodiments and cloud implementation, so regulated industries like insurance, like telco, health care, et cetera, these are the ones, I think, where there's the greatest opportunity to do verticals that are specific to industry. But as we look at this, this is absolutely part of an IBM Cloud strategy to deliver industry-specific clouds. And this comes from our decades of expertise. Even in financial services, being able to leverage those other entities within IBM that I mentioned, our regulatory background with companies, having helped them address regulatory needs for specific industries, and then translating that into cloud and cloud technologies. And then coming up from the other side, in terms of the technologies themselves, we've partnered with key industries to deliver security, and data protection, and cryptography technologies, and such, on premises, and we're contextualizing that now for cloud and public cloud deployments. And so it brings together the pieces of decades of expertise in platforms, and technology, and regulations, and contextualizes it into cloud, and I absolutely think that's an opportunity for other industries as well. >> Can you give us a bit of a preview? Do you have specific industries in mind? Is there a timeframe? >> Yeah, so late last year we did announce a second industry-specific cloud initiative, and that was IBM Cloud for Telco. So we have in that ecosystem, now, over 40 partners that are now, that are working with IBM and with Red Hat, especially with clients and partners that are looking to help with that transition into 5G and increasing use of IOT. 5G is really this disruptive opportunity for that industry, and also just for many other different types of companies and institutions that are looking to deploy with more efficiency, better operational efficiency, deploy with AI capabilities, really being able to do things at cellular network EDGE, and the places that they're doing business using IOT devices, and 5G will enable much of that to really transform and flourish. So a couple of the partners, initially, in addition to that ecosystem that I mentioned in Cloud for Telco, we've got Samsung working with us, Nokia, AT&T, et cetera, and so these partnerships and capabilities around network EDGE and specific capabilities in Cloud for Telco are that second public announcement that we've made around industry-specific cloud. >> And as far as your competitive position is concerned, are you taking away business from your competitors when you partner with these telcos and these banks, or is this an entirely new line of business that was not previously in the cloud? >> Yeah, these are really, I think, in, by and large, new opportunities. As we look at, for example, how we, as customers, expect to engage with our bank, we are looking to increasingly engage with a bank in a digital way, use our applications, use mobile devices. We're looking for individual bank outlets, branch outlets of a banking institution, to be increasingly smart, to service our needs more quickly, et cetera. And so as we look at 5G and telco EDGE, it's about delivery of smarter capabilities and such. I think much of it really is about, in this digital transformation space, about creating new capabilities, creating new experiences, creating new ways of engagement, and engagement and opportunity to customize and personalize, I think most of those are new experiences and new capabilities for most companies. >> So speak about IBM's positioning right now. You're not one of the big three cloud providers, unlikely to become one, but you do have a big cloud business, and you've got the verticals, you've got the multicloud. I know IBM has been a big champion of multicloud. How is IBM distinctively positioned in the cloud market right now? >> Yeah, we are all-in on hybrid cloud and AI, and if you listen to our CEO and chairman, you'll hear that. It is a really consistent message since he came into his role as as our CEO. So being all-in on hybrid cloud and AI, we really are looking to help our clients transform into holistic cloud architecture. So when I say all-in on hybrid cloud, I mean that there's been a lot of, I jokingly say, random acts of cloud usage. People have ended up using cloud because there's some SaaS function that they want, or some particular line of business has been highly motivated to pursue some service on a particular cloud. And hybrid cloud is really about taking a step back, having a holistic architecture for cloud consumption. And in that sense, clouds are IBM's partners. And we're really looking to enable our clients to have consistency in their deployments, to consolidate across their IT estate and across their cloud deployments so that they can have a common platform, so they can have efficiency in how their developers deploy capabilities, so they can deploy more quickly with security and compliance patterns, and have oversight over everything that's going on in a consistent way that really enables them to have that velocity in their business. And so when we then position things like industry cloud, we're leveraging IBM-specific technologies to deliver differentiated capabilities in data privacy, data protection, security and compliance, for these industries, in public cloud, yes, but it's in the context of helping our clients overall across all the different things, some of which may not need all of that data privacy or be leveraging particular SaaS content. We're looking to help them really have cloud architecture, have a holistic conversation across hybrid cloud, and yet to still be able to choose particular cloud deployments on our cloud for industries that enables data protection and policy for the most sensitive and enterprise grade things that they're looking to do at the core of their business. >> So speaking of hybrid hybrid cloud, the major cloud providers, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle's another one, all have on-premises offerings right now. Several of them are working with telcos to expand their reach out into co-location and into telecom data centers, all of this being to enable this distributed cloud fabric, a hybrid cloud fabric. What's IBM's play in this area? Do you have a similar strategy or is it different? >> Yeah, I really think, and I think you maybe wanted to get a little bit into trends and predictions here in this conversation, and we absolutely see that need for distributed cloud, for cloud to really be alive in all the places where it needs to be, in all the places that someone is doing business, and in a consistent way across cloud environments, to be one of those major trends that's emerging as a really hot conversation. We have introduced IBM Cloud Satellite, that is IBM's hybrid cloud, as a service platform. It enables our clients to leverage OpenShift and Kubernetes environments, developer tooling, consistency in a cloud catalog, visibility and control over all their resources across different environments, and to be able to run end-to-end with consistency from on-premises, to EDGE, to different public cloud providers, and this is absolutely something that, across industries but within, also, those industries, that we're focused on in particular, that we're seeing a lot of interesting conversations emerge, because if cloud is everywhere, if cloud is distributed and can be on premises and in public cloud, it enables this consistency and this parity, really that brings together that seamlessness, not just the random acts of cloud usage. It means that using cloud can be something that drives speed of release of new product. It means that you can deliver more capability and functionality into a retail outlet where you're doing business, or a banking brick-and-mortar location. You can have AI for IT ops and understand what's going on across those different environments, and ensure things are kept secure, and patched, and updated, and you're responding to incidents in efficient ways. And so, really, having a consistent cloud environment and a distributed cloud environment across different locations, it's really key to leveraging the promises of what everyone had originally hoped to get out of cloud computing. >> And of course, one of IBM's distinctive advantages in this area is, you've got a huge hardware install base out there. How do all those 360 mainframes figure into this? >> Yeah, with the OpenShift capabilities and our (audio skips) relations with Red Hat in this area, we are able to actually help our clients leverage Kubernetes, and Linux, and all those things, even on the mainframe. So across the mainframe family, the IBM power family, where folks may also have AIX or IBM i deployments, people can now do Linux, they can do OpenShift, they can do Kubernetes, and we have core technologies that enable that really to be stitched together, and I think that's one of the unique perspectives that IBM has in this whole conversation about hybrid cloud. There are many different definitions of hybrid cloud, but we really view it as stretching from the traditional enterprise IT, like you said, there's a lot of IT out there, and being able to also incorporate OpenShift and Kubernetes in a common cloud platform, on traditional enterprise IT, on private cloud, on fresh deployments, on private cloud, Amazon public cloud, that really is the whole IT estate. So when we talk about hybrid cloud, when we talk about distributed cloud, we're really talking about the entirety of the IT state, not just new deployments of SaaS, or something like that. >> So as someone who's on the front lines of what customers are asking about cloud, do you see customer, the questions that they're asking, changing? Are their decision criteria changing for how they choose a cloud provider? >> Yeah, I think that there's definitely a lot more conversation, and especially in this current era where there's an accelerated rate of cloud adoption, there's a lot more conversation around things like security, data protection, data privacy, being able to run in an environment that you trust not just, is it a cloud and what does it do, but can I trust it? Do I understand how my data is protected, how my workloads are secured? That's really why we started Cloud for Financial Services, because that industry shepherds such vital data, so the reason that they are highly regulated is because of the importance of what they are stewarding, very important data and financial information. So we began there with the Cloud for Regulated Industries, there with with Financial Services, but I see that across all industries. I was participating on a panel with a bunch of CIOs, and I was there interviewing some CIOs who were from a much more consumer-facing, and also from from foods industry, et cetera, and their conversation was exactly the same as I have with many other clients, which is that their cloud choices, their efficiency in cloud deployment, now are largely driven by the ability to get to a secure posture and the ability to demonstrate to their internal security and risk teams that they understand their data protection and data privacy posture. So we are seeing lots of pickup and conversation opportunity around confidential computing, specifically, and that's really about enabling our clients to have full authority and privacy in their computing, in their code, in their data, even when running in a cloud environment. And so I do see a shift. Everyone's more concerned about security, and I think we have great technologies, and we've been working with core partners to establish, and harden, and create generations of technology that can really answer those questions. >> I have to ask you about that term, confidential computing. I haven't heard that before. What does that involve? >> Yeah, it is a buzzword to watch out here for in 2021. So confidential computing means being able to run in an environment where there are others, in a cloud computing environment, for example, but still have full privacy and authority over what you're doing. So you are effectively in an enclave. Imagine yourself protected and secured. And so our confidential computing technology is, we're actually on, basically, our fourth generation of the hardware and software technologies to create that strong degree of isolation. This enables us to deliver a really rich portfolio, frankly, the richest portfolio in the industry, of actual services delivered using confidential computing and secure enclaves. And so we can enable our customers to solution things in a way, for example, where their data can not even be visible to our cloud operators, or where they retain full control over a database, and have full privacy as they're running in that environment. These are really great considerations, but they impact everything from health care, financial services. We have other partners and clients who are working to protect consumer data through these means, et cetera. And so across different industries, everyone's really looking at this topic of data privacy and data protection. And so we have a whole suite and a whole family of confidential computing-based services that we're able to offer, to offer those assurances and that privacy to them in their cloud computing. >> I do have to ask you about the multicloud, because this is a topic of constant debate in the industry of whether customers want to shift workloads across multiple clouds to protect themselves from lock-in. Is that a fantasy? Is that too restrictive? This has been a key part of IBM strategy is enabling the multicloud. How do you see customer attitudes developing right now? How do they want to use multiple clouds, or, in fact, do they? Are they concentrating perhaps more of their workloads in one or two? >> Yeah, we believe vendor lock-in goes against the true spirit of hybrid cloud, that desire to have consistency across environments, that desire to- and the business need to have continuity and resiliency and operations, et cetera, and so I do see this as a really important topic. From the perspective of managing environments, I think in multicloud, I think folks are starting to realize that multicloud isn't necessarily a strategy, it's a reality. People have deployments in lots of different cloud environments that happen somewhat organically, in many cases, and so the key question is how to then get to visibility and control over those resources. I think two of the core topics in that are multicloud management, being able to understand clusters, and virtual machines, and other things that are deployed across different environments, and manage them with a common set of policies, for example. And then, in addition to multicloud management, AI for IT operations is another really important topic in multicloud, being able to respond to incidents, understand and analyze and leverage AI for understanding what's going on across those environments is another really core topic. And then as you said, distributed cloud is a means of getting that consistency. Having a common control and deployment plane across those different environments can help it not just be accidental usage of multiple cloud environments, but very intentional deployment, based on the needs of particular workloads to the environment that they're best suited to. And that's really what you want to aim for. Not that multicloud is necessarily, I guess I would say, is a- It is a complexity that is manageable through these new types of technologies and multicloud management, and such like that, and distributed cloud. >> Well, Hillery 'tis the season for predictions, it's January. Everyone's prognosticating about what the future will look like. What do you think are going to be the main trend lines in cloud this year? >> Yeah, I sprinkled a few in there as we were talking, but I really do think that the conversation around hybrid cloud, number one, how to have an open innovation ecosystem for cloud, where you have consistency across environments, not just random acts of cloud usage, but intentional and holistic architecture. I really see that as the transition, as the second wave of of cloud adoption. And then, secondly, is we were talking earlier about security. Everyone is wondering about data policy, data privacy. We've always taken a strong stance that our client's data is their data. We are not going to be using their data to further develop our AI services on our cloud, or something. We have deployed technologies in confidential computing that enable them to keep full control over their keys so that even our cloud operators don't have access to data, computing in secure enclaves where they have a strong degree of isolation and full privacy and authority over their workload. I really think these two topics, open and secure hybrid computing and with consistency across environments, with distributed cloud technology, and secondly, security. I think these are really important topics for 2021. And they may seem a little bit obvious, but I think it's important as people look at this to look for technologies that are multiple generations into this journey, partner with folks who are committed very clearly to an open ecosystem and open source innovation on the one hand, and secondly, when we talk about security and data protection, you want to know that that provider is several generations into that journey so you really know that that technology has been vetted out, is at production scale, and has a stable basis. And so I think this is the year when folks are transitioning from cloud adoption to consistency in cloud, and security and privacy in cloud. >> A final question, and it has nothing to do with cloud. You're an IBM Fellow, and I see that term turn up occasionally with other other people I've spoken to from IBM. What is an IBM Fellow, how do you become one, and what privileges and responsibilities does it entail? >> Yeah, it's an exciting opportunity to be an IBM Fellow. There's about a hundred active IBM Fellows right now, so there aren't too many of us, but there is a small community of us. IBM Fellow is IBM's highest technical designation within our technical population, so I do have a role within our cloud business, but as one of our technical leaders, get to interact with the other Fellows, work on strategy for IBM in technology overall as a company, and I also get to be a trusted advisor to many of our clients, and so I get to work with CTOs and CIOs and VP of Application Development profiles, and VP of IT, and things like that, in our different clients, and really help them wrestle through those struggles of future IT transformation. And so part of what I enjoy most about the role, and the Fellow role, is being able to be that trusted advisor to many of our clients. There's been so much change in this last year for everyone, and being able to also help our technical population through that, in various means, and then help our clients through all of that change, and really being able to take and grasp onto the opportunities that this last year has had in the way that we work has changed, and the way that companies are looking to deliver capabilities has changed. So that's, for me, the exciting part of the role. >> Well, you're one in a hundred, then, and you do a great job of articulating the IBM strategy, and also the cloud landscape. Hillery Hunter, VP and CTO, excuse me, CTO of IBM Cloud, thank you so much for joining us today on Cube on Cloud. >> Thanks so much for having me. It was a pleasure. >> I'm Paul Gillin, stick with us. (upbeat music)