(light upbeat music) >> Hey, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's day long coverage of Women in Data Science 2023. Live from Stanford University, I'm Lisa Martin. We've had some amazing conversations today with my wonderful co-host, as you've seen. Tracy Zhang joins me next for a very interesting and inspiring conversation. I know we've been bringing them to you, we're bringing you another one here. Dr. Irene Dankwa-Mullan joins us, the Chief Medical Officer at Marti Health, and a speaker at WIDS. Welcome, Irene, it's great to have you. >> Thank you. I'm delighted to be here. Thank you so much for this opportunity. >> So you have an MD and a Master of Public Health. Covid must have been an interesting time for you, with an MPH? >> Very much so. >> Yeah, talk a little bit about you, your background, and Marti Health? This is interesting. This is a brand new startup. This is a digital health equity startup. >> Yes, yes. So, I'll start with my story a little bit about myself. So I was actually born in Ghana. I finished high school there and came here for college. What would I say? After I finished my undergraduate, I went to medical school at Dartmouth and I always knew I wanted to go into public health as well as medicine. So my medical education was actually five years. I did the MPH and my medical degree, at the same time, I got my MPH from Yale School of Public Health. And after I finished, I trained in internal medicine, Johns Hopkins, and after that I went into public health. I am currently living in Maryland, so I'm in Bethesda, Maryland, and that's where I've been. And really enjoyed public health, community health, combining that aspect of sort of prevention and wellness and also working in making sure that we have community health clinics and safety net clinics. So a great experience there. I also had the privilege, after eight years in public health, I went to the National Institute of Health. >> Oh, wow. >> Where I basically worked in clinical research, basically on minority health and health disparities. So, I was in various leadership roles and helped to advance the science of health equity, working in collaboration with a lot of scientists and researchers at the NIH, really to advance the science. >> Where did your interest in health equity come from? Was there a defining moment when you were younger and you thought "There's a lot of inequities here, we have to do something about this." Where did that interest start? >> That's a great question. I think this influence was basically maybe from my upbringing as well as my family and also what I saw around me in Ghana, a lot of preventable diseases. I always say that my grandfather on my father's side was a great influence, inspired me and influenced my career because he was the only sibling, really, that went to school. And as a result, he was able to earn enough money and built, you know, a hospital. >> Oh wow. >> In their hometown. >> Oh my gosh! >> It started as a 20 bed hospital and now it's a 350 bed hospital. >> Oh, wow, that's amazing! >> In our hometown. And he knew that education was important and vital as well for wellbeing. And so he really inspired, you know, his work inspired me. And I remember in residency I went with a group of residents to this hospital in Ghana just to help over a summer break. So during a summer where we went and helped take care of the sick patients and actually learned, right? What it is like to care for so many patients and- >> Yeah. >> It was really a humbling experience. But that really inspired me. I think also being in this country. And when I came to the U.S. and really saw firsthand how patients are treated differently, based on their background or socioeconomic status. I did see firsthand, you know, that kind of unconscious bias. And, you know, drew me to the field of health disparities research and wanted to learn more and do more and contribute. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. So, I was curious. Just when did the data science aspect tap in? Like when did you decide that, okay, data science is going to be a problem solving tool to like all the problems you just said? >> Yeah, that's a good question. So while I was at the NIH, I spent eight years there, and precision medicine was launched at that time and there was a lot of heightened interest in big data and how big data could help really revolutionize medicine and healthcare. And I got the opportunity to go, you know, there was an opportunity where they were looking for physicians or deputy chief health officer at IBM. And so I went to IBM, Watson Health was being formed as a new business unit, and I was one of the first deputy chief health officers really to lead the data and the science evidence. And that's where I realized, you know, we could really, you know, the technology in healthcare, there's been a lot of data that I think we are not really using or optimizing to make sure that we're taking care of our patients. >> Yeah. >> And so that's how I got into data science and making sure that we are building technologies using the right data to advance health equity. >> Right, so talk a little bit about health equity? We mentioned you're with Marti Health. You've been there for a short time, but Marti Health is also quite new, just a few months old. Digital health equity, talk about what Marti's vision is, what its mission is to really help start dialing down a lot of the disparities that you talked about that you see every day? >> Yeah, so, I've been so privileged. I recently joined Marti Health as their Chief Medical Officer, Chief Health Officer. It's a startup that is actually trying to promote a value-based care, also promote patient-centered care for patients that are experiencing a social disadvantage as a result of their race, ethnicity. And were starting to look at and focused on patients that have sickle cell disease. >> Okay. >> Because we realize that that's a population, you know, we know sickle cell disease is a genetic disorder. It impacts a lot of patients that are from areas that are endemic malaria. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> And most of our patients here are African American, and when, you know, they suffer so much stigma and discrimination in the healthcare system and complications from their sickle cell disease. And so what we want to do that we feel like sickle cell is a litmus test for disparities. And we want to make sure that they get in patient-centered care. We want to make sure that we are leveraging data and the research that we've done in sickle cell disease, especially on the continent of Africa. >> Okay. >> And provide, promote better quality care for the patients. >> That's so inspiring. You know, we've heard so many great stories today. Were you able to watch the keynote this morning? >> Yes. >> I loved how it always inspires me. This conference is always, we were talking about this all day, how you walk in the Arrillaga Alumni Center here where this event is held every year, the vibe is powerful, it's positive, it's encouraging. >> Inspiring, yeah. >> Absolutely. >> Inspiring. >> Yeah, yeah. >> It's a movement, WIDS is a movement. They've created this community where you feel, I don't know, kind of superhuman. "Why can't I do this? Why not me?" We heard some great stories this morning about data science in terms of applications. You have a great application in terms of health equity. We heard about it in police violence. >> Yes. >> Which is an epidemic in this country for sure, as we know. This happens too often. How can we use data and data science as a facilitator of learning more about that, so that that can stop? I think that's so important for more people to understand all of the broad applications of data science, whether it's police violence or climate change or drug discovery or health inequities. >> Irene: Yeah. >> The potential, I think we're scratching the surface. But the potential is massive. >> Tracy: It is. >> And this is an event that really helps women and underrepresented minorities think, "Why not me? Why can't I get involved in that?" >> Yeah, and I always say we use data to make an make a lot of decisions. And especially in healthcare, we want to be careful about how we are using data because this is impacting the health and outcomes of our patients. And so science evidence is really critical, you know? We want to make sure that data is inclusive and we have quality data. >> Yes. >> And it's transparent. Our clinical trials, I always say are not always diverse and inclusive. And if that's going to form the evidence base or data points then we're doing more harm than good for our patients. And so data science, it's huge. I mean, we need a robust, responsible, trustworthy data science agenda. >> "Trust" you just brought up "trust." >> Yeah. >> I did. >> When we talk about data, we can't not talk about security and privacy and ethics but trust is table stakes. We have to be able to evaluate the data and trust in it. >> Exactly. >> And what it says and the story that can be told from it. So that trust factor is, I think, foundational to data science. >> We all see what happened with Covid, right? I mean, when the pandemic came out- >> Absolutely. >> Everyone wanted information. We wanted data, we wanted data we could trust. There was a lot of hesitancy even with the vaccine. >> Yeah. >> Right? And so public health, I mean, like you said, we had to do a lot of work making sure that the right information from the right data was being translated or conveyed to the communities. And so you are totally right. I mean, data and good information, relevant data is always key. >> Well- >> Is there any- Oh, sorry. >> Go ahead. >> Is there anything Marti Health is doing in like ensuring that you guys get the right data that you can put trust in it? >> Yes, absolutely. And so this is where we are, you know, part of it would be getting data, real world evidence data for patients who are being seen in the healthcare system with sickle cell disease, so that we can personalize the data to those patients and provide them with the right treatment, the right intervention that they need. And so part of it would be doing predictive modeling on some of the data, risk, stratifying risk, who in the sickle cell patient population is at risk of progressing. Or getting, you know, they all often get crisis, vaso-occlusive crisis because the cells, you know, the blood cell sickles and you want to avoid those chest crisis. And so part of what we'll be doing is, you know, using predictive modeling to target those at risk of the disease progressing, so that we can put in preventive measures. It's all about prevention. It's all about making sure that they're not being, you know, going to the hospital or the emergency room where sometimes they end up, you know, in pain and wanting pain medicine. And so. >> Do you see AI as being a critical piece in the transformation of healthcare, especially where inequities are concerned? >> Absolutely, and and when you say AI, I think it's responsible AI. >> Yes. >> And making sure that it's- >> Tracy: That's such a good point. >> Yeah. >> Very. >> With the right data, with relevant data, it's definitely key. I think there is so much data points that healthcare has, you know, in the healthcare space there's fiscal data, biological data, there's environmental data and we are not using it to the full capacity and full potential. >> Tracy: Yeah. >> And I think AI can do that if we do it carefully, and like I said, responsibly. >> That's a key word. You talked about trust, responsibility. Where data science, AI is concerned- >> Yeah. >> It has to be not an afterthought, it has to be intentional. >> Tracy: Exactly. >> And there needs to be a lot of education around it. Most people think, "Oh, AI is just for the technology," you know? >> Yeah, right. >> Goop. >> Yes. >> But I think we're all part, I mean everyone needs to make sure that we are collecting the right amount of data. I mean, I think we all play a part, right? >> We do. >> We do. >> In making sure that we have responsible AI, we have, you know, good data, quality data. And the data sciences is a multi-disciplinary field, I think. >> It is, which is one of the things that's exciting about it is it is multi-disciplinary. >> Tracy: Exactly. >> And so many of the people that we've talked to in data science have these very non-linear paths to get there, and so I think they bring such diversity of thought and backgrounds and experiences and thoughts and voices. That helps train the AI models with data that's more inclusive. >> Irene: Yes. >> Dropping down the volume on the bias that we know is there. To be successful, it has to. >> Definitely, I totally agree. >> What are some of the things, as we wrap up here, that you're looking forward to accomplishing as part of Marti Health? Like, maybe what's on the roadmap that you can share with us for Marti as it approaches the the second half of its first year? >> Yes, it's all about promoting health equity. It's all about, I mean, there's so much, well, I would start with, you know, part of the healthcare transformation is making sure that we are promoting care that's based on value and not volume, care that's based on good health outcomes, quality health outcomes, and not just on, you know, the quantity. And so Marti Health is trying to promote that value-based care. We are envisioning a world in which everyone can live their full life potential. Have the best health outcomes, and provide that patient-centered precision care. >> And we all want that. We all want that. We expect that precision and that personalized experience in our consumer lives, why not in healthcare? Well, thank you, Irene, for joining us on the program today. >> Thank you. >> Talking about what you're doing to really help drive the volume up on health equity, and raise awareness for the fact that there's a lot of inequities in there we have to fix. We have a long way to go. >> We have, yes. >> Lisa: But people like you are making an impact and we appreciate you joining theCUBE today and sharing what you're doing, thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you- >> Thank you for having me here. >> Oh, our pleasure. For our guest and Tracy Zhang, this is Lisa Martin from WIDS 2023, the eighth Annual Women in Data Science Conference brought to you by theCUBE. Stick around, our show wrap will be in just a minute. Thanks for watching. (light upbeat music)

>> Welcome back to SuperCloud2. This is Dave Vellante, and we're here with Jack Greenfield. He's the Vice President of Enterprise Architecture and the Chief Architect for the global technology platform at Walmart. Jack, I want to thank you for coming on the program. Really appreciate your time. >> Glad to be here, Dave. Thanks for inviting me and appreciate the opportunity to chat with you. >> Yeah, it's our pleasure. Now we call what you've built a SuperCloud. That's our term, not yours, but how would you describe the Walmart Cloud Native Platform? >> So WCNP, as the acronym goes, is essentially an implementation of Kubernetes for the Walmart ecosystem. And what that means is that we've taken Kubernetes off the shelf as open source, and we have integrated it with a number of foundational services that provide other aspects of our computational environment. So Kubernetes off the shelf doesn't do everything. It does a lot. In particular the orchestration of containers, but it delegates through API a lot of key functions. So for example, secret management, traffic management, there's a need for telemetry and observability at a scale beyond what you get from raw Kubernetes. That is to say, harvesting the metrics that are coming out of Kubernetes and processing them, storing them in time series databases, dashboarding them, and so on. There's also an angle to Kubernetes that gets a lot of attention in the daily DevOps routine, that's not really part of the open source deliverable itself, and that is the DevOps sort of CICD pipeline-oriented lifecycle. And that is something else that we've added and integrated nicely. And then one more piece of this picture is that within a Kubernetes cluster, there's a function that is critical to allowing services to discover each other and integrate with each other securely and with proper configuration provided by the concept of a service mesh. So Istio, Linkerd, these are examples of service mesh technologies. And we have gone ahead and integrated actually those two. There's more than those two, but we've integrated those two with Kubernetes. So the net effect is that when a developer within Walmart is going to build an application, they don't have to think about all those other capabilities where they come from or how they're provided. Those are already present, and the way the CICD pipelines are set up, it's already sort of in the picture, and there are configuration points that they can take advantage of in the primary YAML and a couple of other pieces of config that we supply where they can tune it. But at the end of the day, it offloads an awful lot of work for them, having to stand up and operate those services, fail them over properly, and make them robust. All of that's provided for. >> Yeah, you know, developers often complain they spend too much time wrangling and doing things that aren't productive. So I wonder if you could talk about the high level business goals of the initiative in terms of the hardcore benefits. Was the real impetus to tap into best of breed cloud services? Were you trying to cut costs? Maybe gain negotiating leverage with the cloud guys? Resiliency, you know, I know was a major theme. Maybe you could give us a sense of kind of the anatomy of the decision making process that went in. >> Sure, and in the course of answering your question, I think I'm going to introduce the concept of our triplet architecture which we haven't yet touched on in the interview here. First off, just to sort of wrap up the motivation for WCNP itself which is kind of orthogonal to the triplet architecture. It can exist with or without it. Currently does exist with it, which is key, and I'll get to that in a moment. The key drivers, business drivers for WCNP were developer productivity by offloading the kinds of concerns that we've just discussed. Number two, improving resiliency, that is to say reducing opportunity for human error. One of the challenges you tend to run into in a large enterprise is what we call snowflakes, lots of gratuitously different workloads, projects, configurations to the extent that by developing and using WCNP and continuing to evolve it as we have, we end up with cookie cutter like consistency across our workloads which is super valuable when it comes to building tools or building services to automate operations that would otherwise be manual. When everything is pretty much done the same way, that becomes much simpler. Another key motivation for WCNP was the ability to abstract from the underlying cloud provider. And this is going to lead to a discussion of our triplet architecture. At the end of the day, when one works directly with an underlying cloud provider, one ends up taking a lot of dependencies on that particular cloud provider. Those dependencies can be valuable. For example, there are best of breed services like say Cloud Spanner offered by Google or say Cosmos DB offered by Microsoft that one wants to use and one is willing to take the dependency on the cloud provider to get that functionality because it's unique and valuable. On the other hand, one doesn't want to take dependencies on a cloud provider that don't add a lot of value. And with Kubernetes, we have the opportunity, and this is a large part of how Kubernetes was designed and why it is the way it is, we have the opportunity to sort of abstract from the underlying cloud provider for stateless workloads on compute. And so what this lets us do is build container-based applications that can run without change on different cloud provider infrastructure. So the same applications can run on WCNP over Azure, WCNP over GCP, or WCNP over the Walmart private cloud. And we have a private cloud. Our private cloud is OpenStack based and it gives us some significant cost advantages as well as control advantages. So to your point, in terms of business motivation, there's a key cost driver here, which is that we can use our own private cloud when it's advantageous and then use the public cloud provider capabilities when we need to. A key place with this comes into play is with elasticity. So while the private cloud is much more cost effective for us to run and use, it isn't as elastic as what the cloud providers offer, right? We don't have essentially unlimited scale. We have large scale, but the public cloud providers are elastic in the extreme which is a very powerful capability. So what we're able to do is burst, and we use this term bursting workloads into the public cloud from the private cloud to take advantage of the elasticity they offer and then fall back into the private cloud when the traffic load diminishes to the point where we don't need that elastic capability, elastic capacity at low cost. And this is a very important paradigm that I think is going to be very commonplace ultimately as the industry evolves. Private cloud is easier to operate and less expensive, and yet the public cloud provider capabilities are difficult to match. >> And the triplet, the tri is your on-prem private cloud and the two public clouds that you mentioned, is that right? >> That is correct. And we actually have an architecture in which we operate all three of those cloud platforms in close proximity with one another in three different major regions in the US. So we have east, west, and central. And in each of those regions, we have all three cloud providers. And the way it's configured, those data centers are within 10 milliseconds of each other, meaning that it's of negligible cost to interact between them. And this allows us to be fairly agnostic to where a particular workload is running. >> Does a human make that decision, Jack or is there some intelligence in the system that determines that? >> That's a really great question, Dave. And it's a great question because we're at the cusp of that transition. So currently humans make that decision. Humans choose to deploy workloads into a particular region and a particular provider within that region. That said, we're actively developing patterns and practices that will allow us to automate the placement of the workloads for a variety of criteria. For example, if in a particular region, a particular provider is heavily overloaded and is unable to provide the level of service that's expected through our SLAs, we could choose to fail workloads over from that cloud provider to a different one within the same region. But that's manual today. We do that, but people do it. Okay, we'd like to get to where that happens automatically. In the same way, we'd like to be able to automate the failovers, both for high availability and sort of the heavier disaster recovery model between, within a region between providers and even within a provider between the availability zones that are there, but also between regions for the sort of heavier disaster recovery or maintenance driven realignment of workload placement. Today, that's all manual. So we have people moving workloads from region A to region B or data center A to data center B. It's clean because of the abstraction. The workloads don't have to know or care, but there are latency considerations that come into play, and the humans have to be cognizant of those. And automating that can help ensure that we get the best performance and the best reliability. >> But you're developing the dataset to actually, I would imagine, be able to make those decisions in an automated fashion over time anyway. Is that a fair assumption? >> It is, and that's what we're actively developing right now. So if you were to look at us today, we have these nice abstractions and APIs in place, but people run that machine, if you will, moving toward a world where that machine is fully automated. >> What exactly are you abstracting? Is it sort of the deployment model or, you know, are you able to abstract, I'm just making this up like Azure functions and GCP functions so that you can sort of run them, you know, with a consistent experience. What exactly are you abstracting and how difficult was it to achieve that objective technically? >> that's a good question. What we're abstracting is the Kubernetes node construct. That is to say a cluster of Kubernetes nodes which are typically VMs, although they can run bare metal in certain contexts, is something that typically to stand up requires knowledge of the underlying cloud provider. So for example, with GCP, you would use GKE to set up a Kubernetes cluster, and in Azure, you'd use AKS. We are actually abstracting that aspect of things so that the developers standing up applications don't have to know what the underlying cluster management provider is. They don't have to know if it's GCP, AKS or our own Walmart private cloud. Now, in terms of functions like Azure functions that you've mentioned there, we haven't done that yet. That's another piece that we have sort of on our radar screen that, we'd like to get to is serverless approach, and the Knative work from Google and the Azure functions, those are things that we see good opportunity to use for a whole variety of use cases. But right now we're not doing much with that. We're strictly container based right now, and we do have some VMs that are running in sort of more of a traditional model. So our stateful workloads are primarily VM based, but for serverless, that's an opportunity for us to take some of these stateless workloads and turn them into cloud functions. >> Well, and that's another cost lever that you can pull down the road that's going to drop right to the bottom line. Do you see a day or maybe you're doing it today, but I'd be surprised, but where you build applications that actually span multiple clouds or is there, in your view, always going to be a direct one-to-one mapping between where an application runs and the specific cloud platform? >> That's a really great question. Well, yes and no. So today, application development teams choose a cloud provider to deploy to and a location to deploy to, and they have to get involved in moving an application like we talked about today. That said, the bursting capability that I mentioned previously is something that is a step in the direction of automatic migration. That is to say we're migrating workload to different locations automatically. Currently, the prototypes we've been developing and that we think are going to eventually make their way into production are leveraging Istio to assess the load incoming on a particular cluster and start shedding that load into a different location. Right now, the configuration of that is still manual, but there's another opportunity for automation there. And I think a key piece of this is that down the road, well, that's a, sort of a small step in the direction of an application being multi provider. We expect to see really an abstraction of the fact that there is a triplet even. So the workloads are moving around according to whatever the control plane decides is necessary based on a whole variety of inputs. And at that point, you will have true multi-cloud applications, applications that are distributed across the different providers and in a way that application developers don't have to think about. >> So Walmart's been a leader, Jack, in using data for competitive advantages for decades. It's kind of been a poster child for that. You've got a mountain of IP in the form of data, tools, applications best practices that until the cloud came out was all On Prem. But I'm really interested in this idea of building a Walmart ecosystem, which obviously you have. Do you see a day or maybe you're even doing it today where you take what we call the Walmart SuperCloud, WCNP in your words, and point or turn that toward an external world or your ecosystem, you know, supporting those partners or customers that could drive new revenue streams, you know directly from the platform? >> Great questions, Dave. So there's really two things to say here. The first is that with respect to data, our data workloads are primarily VM basis. I've mentioned before some VMware, some straight open stack. But the key here is that WCNP and Kubernetes are very powerful for stateless workloads, but for stateful workloads tend to be still climbing a bit of a growth curve in the industry. So our data workloads are not primarily based on WCNP. They're VM based. Now that said, there is opportunity to make some progress there, and we are looking at ways to move things into containers that are currently running in VMs which are stateful. The other question you asked is related to how we expose data to third parties and also functionality. Right now we do have in-house, for our own use, a very robust data architecture, and we have followed the sort of domain-oriented data architecture guidance from Martin Fowler. And we have data lakes in which we collect data from all the transactional systems and which we can then use and do use to build models which are then used in our applications. But right now we're not exposing the data directly to customers as a product. That's an interesting direction that's been talked about and may happen at some point, but right now that's internal. What we are exposing to customers is applications. So we're offering our global integrated fulfillment capabilities, our order picking and curbside pickup capabilities, and our cloud powered checkout capabilities to third parties. And this means we're standing up our own internal applications as externally facing SaaS applications which can serve our partners' customers. >> Yeah, of course, Martin Fowler really first introduced to the world Zhamak Dehghani's data mesh concept and this whole idea of data products and domain oriented thinking. Zhamak Dehghani, by the way, is a speaker at our event as well. Last question I had is edge, and how you think about the edge? You know, the stores are an edge. Are you putting resources there that sort of mirror this this triplet model? Or is it better to consolidate things in the cloud? I know there are trade-offs in terms of latency. How are you thinking about that? >> All really good questions. It's a challenging area as you can imagine because edges are subject to disconnection, right? Or reduced connection. So we do place the same architecture at the edge. So WCNP runs at the edge, and an application that's designed to run at WCNP can run at the edge. That said, there are a number of very specific considerations that come up when running at the edge, such as the possibility of disconnection or degraded connectivity. And so one of the challenges we have faced and have grappled with and done a good job of I think is dealing with the fact that applications go offline and come back online and have to reconnect and resynchronize, the sort of online offline capability is something that can be quite challenging. And we have a couple of application architectures that sort of form the two core sets of patterns that we use. One is an offline/online synchronization architecture where we discover that we've come back online, and we understand the differences between the online dataset and the offline dataset and how they have to be reconciled. The other is a message-based architecture. And here in our health and wellness domain, we've developed applications that are queue based. So they're essentially business processes that consist of multiple steps where each step has its own queue. And what that allows us to do is devote whatever bandwidth we do have to those pieces of the process that are most latency sensitive and allow the queue lengths to increase in parts of the process that are not latency sensitive, knowing that they will eventually catch up when the bandwidth is restored. And to put that in a little bit of context, we have fiber lengths to all of our locations, and we have I'll just use a round number, 10-ish thousand locations. It's larger than that, but that's the ballpark, and we have fiber to all of them, but when the fiber is disconnected, When the disconnection happens, we're able to fall back to 5G and to Starlink. Starlink is preferred. It's a higher bandwidth. 5G if that fails. But in each of those cases, the bandwidth drops significantly. And so the applications have to be intelligent about throttling back the traffic that isn't essential, so that it can push the essential traffic in those lower bandwidth scenarios. >> So much technology to support this amazing business which started in the early 1960s. Jack, unfortunately, we're out of time. I would love to have you back or some members of your team and drill into how you're using open source, but really thank you so much for explaining the approach that you've taken and participating in SuperCloud2. >> You're very welcome, Dave, and we're happy to come back and talk about other aspects of what we do. For example, we could talk more about the data lakes and the data mesh that we have in place. We could talk more about the directions we might go with serverless. So please look us up again. Happy to chat. >> I'm going to take you up on that, Jack. All right. This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier and the Cube community. Keep it right there for more action from SuperCloud2. (upbeat music)

>> Welcome back to SuperCloud2. This is Dave Vellante, and we're here with Jack Greenfield. He's the Vice President of Enterprise Architecture and the Chief Architect for the global technology platform at Walmart. Jack, I want to thank you for coming on the program. Really appreciate your time. >> Glad to be here, Dave. Thanks for inviting me and appreciate the opportunity to chat with you. >> Yeah, it's our pleasure. Now we call what you've built a SuperCloud. That's our term, not yours, but how would you describe the Walmart Cloud Native Platform? >> So WCNP, as the acronym goes, is essentially an implementation of Kubernetes for the Walmart ecosystem. And what that means is that we've taken Kubernetes off the shelf as open source, and we have integrated it with a number of foundational services that provide other aspects of our computational environment. So Kubernetes off the shelf doesn't do everything. It does a lot. In particular the orchestration of containers, but it delegates through API a lot of key functions. So for example, secret management, traffic management, there's a need for telemetry and observability at a scale beyond what you get from raw Kubernetes. That is to say, harvesting the metrics that are coming out of Kubernetes and processing them, storing them in time series databases, dashboarding them, and so on. There's also an angle to Kubernetes that gets a lot of attention in the daily DevOps routine, that's not really part of the open source deliverable itself, and that is the DevOps sort of CICD pipeline-oriented lifecycle. And that is something else that we've added and integrated nicely. And then one more piece of this picture is that within a Kubernetes cluster, there's a function that is critical to allowing services to discover each other and integrate with each other securely and with proper configuration provided by the concept of a service mesh. So Istio, Linkerd, these are examples of service mesh technologies. And we have gone ahead and integrated actually those two. There's more than those two, but we've integrated those two with Kubernetes. So the net effect is that when a developer within Walmart is going to build an application, they don't have to think about all those other capabilities where they come from or how they're provided. Those are already present, and the way the CICD pipelines are set up, it's already sort of in the picture, and there are configuration points that they can take advantage of in the primary YAML and a couple of other pieces of config that we supply where they can tune it. But at the end of the day, it offloads an awful lot of work for them, having to stand up and operate those services, fail them over properly, and make them robust. All of that's provided for. >> Yeah, you know, developers often complain they spend too much time wrangling and doing things that aren't productive. So I wonder if you could talk about the high level business goals of the initiative in terms of the hardcore benefits. Was the real impetus to tap into best of breed cloud services? Were you trying to cut costs? Maybe gain negotiating leverage with the cloud guys? Resiliency, you know, I know was a major theme. Maybe you could give us a sense of kind of the anatomy of the decision making process that went in. >> Sure, and in the course of answering your question, I think I'm going to introduce the concept of our triplet architecture which we haven't yet touched on in the interview here. First off, just to sort of wrap up the motivation for WCNP itself which is kind of orthogonal to the triplet architecture. It can exist with or without it. Currently does exist with it, which is key, and I'll get to that in a moment. The key drivers, business drivers for WCNP were developer productivity by offloading the kinds of concerns that we've just discussed. Number two, improving resiliency, that is to say reducing opportunity for human error. One of the challenges you tend to run into in a large enterprise is what we call snowflakes, lots of gratuitously different workloads, projects, configurations to the extent that by developing and using WCNP and continuing to evolve it as we have, we end up with cookie cutter like consistency across our workloads which is super valuable when it comes to building tools or building services to automate operations that would otherwise be manual. When everything is pretty much done the same way, that becomes much simpler. Another key motivation for WCNP was the ability to abstract from the underlying cloud provider. And this is going to lead to a discussion of our triplet architecture. At the end of the day, when one works directly with an underlying cloud provider, one ends up taking a lot of dependencies on that particular cloud provider. Those dependencies can be valuable. For example, there are best of breed services like say Cloud Spanner offered by Google or say Cosmos DB offered by Microsoft that one wants to use and one is willing to take the dependency on the cloud provider to get that functionality because it's unique and valuable. On the other hand, one doesn't want to take dependencies on a cloud provider that don't add a lot of value. And with Kubernetes, we have the opportunity, and this is a large part of how Kubernetes was designed and why it is the way it is, we have the opportunity to sort of abstract from the underlying cloud provider for stateless workloads on compute. And so what this lets us do is build container-based applications that can run without change on different cloud provider infrastructure. So the same applications can run on WCNP over Azure, WCNP over GCP, or WCNP over the Walmart private cloud. And we have a private cloud. Our private cloud is OpenStack based and it gives us some significant cost advantages as well as control advantages. So to your point, in terms of business motivation, there's a key cost driver here, which is that we can use our own private cloud when it's advantageous and then use the public cloud provider capabilities when we need to. A key place with this comes into play is with elasticity. So while the private cloud is much more cost effective for us to run and use, it isn't as elastic as what the cloud providers offer, right? We don't have essentially unlimited scale. We have large scale, but the public cloud providers are elastic in the extreme which is a very powerful capability. So what we're able to do is burst, and we use this term bursting workloads into the public cloud from the private cloud to take advantage of the elasticity they offer and then fall back into the private cloud when the traffic load diminishes to the point where we don't need that elastic capability, elastic capacity at low cost. And this is a very important paradigm that I think is going to be very commonplace ultimately as the industry evolves. Private cloud is easier to operate and less expensive, and yet the public cloud provider capabilities are difficult to match. >> And the triplet, the tri is your on-prem private cloud and the two public clouds that you mentioned, is that right? >> That is correct. And we actually have an architecture in which we operate all three of those cloud platforms in close proximity with one another in three different major regions in the US. So we have east, west, and central. And in each of those regions, we have all three cloud providers. And the way it's configured, those data centers are within 10 milliseconds of each other, meaning that it's of negligible cost to interact between them. And this allows us to be fairly agnostic to where a particular workload is running. >> Does a human make that decision, Jack or is there some intelligence in the system that determines that? >> That's a really great question, Dave. And it's a great question because we're at the cusp of that transition. So currently humans make that decision. Humans choose to deploy workloads into a particular region and a particular provider within that region. That said, we're actively developing patterns and practices that will allow us to automate the placement of the workloads for a variety of criteria. For example, if in a particular region, a particular provider is heavily overloaded and is unable to provide the level of service that's expected through our SLAs, we could choose to fail workloads over from that cloud provider to a different one within the same region. But that's manual today. We do that, but people do it. Okay, we'd like to get to where that happens automatically. In the same way, we'd like to be able to automate the failovers, both for high availability and sort of the heavier disaster recovery model between, within a region between providers and even within a provider between the availability zones that are there, but also between regions for the sort of heavier disaster recovery or maintenance driven realignment of workload placement. Today, that's all manual. So we have people moving workloads from region A to region B or data center A to data center B. It's clean because of the abstraction. The workloads don't have to know or care, but there are latency considerations that come into play, and the humans have to be cognizant of those. And automating that can help ensure that we get the best performance and the best reliability. >> But you're developing the dataset to actually, I would imagine, be able to make those decisions in an automated fashion over time anyway. Is that a fair assumption? >> It is, and that's what we're actively developing right now. So if you were to look at us today, we have these nice abstractions and APIs in place, but people run that machine, if you will, moving toward a world where that machine is fully automated. >> What exactly are you abstracting? Is it sort of the deployment model or, you know, are you able to abstract, I'm just making this up like Azure functions and GCP functions so that you can sort of run them, you know, with a consistent experience. What exactly are you abstracting and how difficult was it to achieve that objective technically? >> that's a good question. What we're abstracting is the Kubernetes node construct. That is to say a cluster of Kubernetes nodes which are typically VMs, although they can run bare metal in certain contexts, is something that typically to stand up requires knowledge of the underlying cloud provider. So for example, with GCP, you would use GKE to set up a Kubernetes cluster, and in Azure, you'd use AKS. We are actually abstracting that aspect of things so that the developers standing up applications don't have to know what the underlying cluster management provider is. They don't have to know if it's GCP, AKS or our own Walmart private cloud. Now, in terms of functions like Azure functions that you've mentioned there, we haven't done that yet. That's another piece that we have sort of on our radar screen that, we'd like to get to is serverless approach, and the Knative work from Google and the Azure functions, those are things that we see good opportunity to use for a whole variety of use cases. But right now we're not doing much with that. We're strictly container based right now, and we do have some VMs that are running in sort of more of a traditional model. So our stateful workloads are primarily VM based, but for serverless, that's an opportunity for us to take some of these stateless workloads and turn them into cloud functions. >> Well, and that's another cost lever that you can pull down the road that's going to drop right to the bottom line. Do you see a day or maybe you're doing it today, but I'd be surprised, but where you build applications that actually span multiple clouds or is there, in your view, always going to be a direct one-to-one mapping between where an application runs and the specific cloud platform? >> That's a really great question. Well, yes and no. So today, application development teams choose a cloud provider to deploy to and a location to deploy to, and they have to get involved in moving an application like we talked about today. That said, the bursting capability that I mentioned previously is something that is a step in the direction of automatic migration. That is to say we're migrating workload to different locations automatically. Currently, the prototypes we've been developing and that we think are going to eventually make their way into production are leveraging Istio to assess the load incoming on a particular cluster and start shedding that load into a different location. Right now, the configuration of that is still manual, but there's another opportunity for automation there. And I think a key piece of this is that down the road, well, that's a, sort of a small step in the direction of an application being multi provider. We expect to see really an abstraction of the fact that there is a triplet even. So the workloads are moving around according to whatever the control plane decides is necessary based on a whole variety of inputs. And at that point, you will have true multi-cloud applications, applications that are distributed across the different providers and in a way that application developers don't have to think about. >> So Walmart's been a leader, Jack, in using data for competitive advantages for decades. It's kind of been a poster child for that. You've got a mountain of IP in the form of data, tools, applications best practices that until the cloud came out was all On Prem. But I'm really interested in this idea of building a Walmart ecosystem, which obviously you have. Do you see a day or maybe you're even doing it today where you take what we call the Walmart SuperCloud, WCNP in your words, and point or turn that toward an external world or your ecosystem, you know, supporting those partners or customers that could drive new revenue streams, you know directly from the platform? >> Great question, Steve. So there's really two things to say here. The first is that with respect to data, our data workloads are primarily VM basis. I've mentioned before some VMware, some straight open stack. But the key here is that WCNP and Kubernetes are very powerful for stateless workloads, but for stateful workloads tend to be still climbing a bit of a growth curve in the industry. So our data workloads are not primarily based on WCNP. They're VM based. Now that said, there is opportunity to make some progress there, and we are looking at ways to move things into containers that are currently running in VMs which are stateful. The other question you asked is related to how we expose data to third parties and also functionality. Right now we do have in-house, for our own use, a very robust data architecture, and we have followed the sort of domain-oriented data architecture guidance from Martin Fowler. And we have data lakes in which we collect data from all the transactional systems and which we can then use and do use to build models which are then used in our applications. But right now we're not exposing the data directly to customers as a product. That's an interesting direction that's been talked about and may happen at some point, but right now that's internal. What we are exposing to customers is applications. So we're offering our global integrated fulfillment capabilities, our order picking and curbside pickup capabilities, and our cloud powered checkout capabilities to third parties. And this means we're standing up our own internal applications as externally facing SaaS applications which can serve our partners' customers. >> Yeah, of course, Martin Fowler really first introduced to the world Zhamak Dehghani's data mesh concept and this whole idea of data products and domain oriented thinking. Zhamak Dehghani, by the way, is a speaker at our event as well. Last question I had is edge, and how you think about the edge? You know, the stores are an edge. Are you putting resources there that sort of mirror this this triplet model? Or is it better to consolidate things in the cloud? I know there are trade-offs in terms of latency. How are you thinking about that? >> All really good questions. It's a challenging area as you can imagine because edges are subject to disconnection, right? Or reduced connection. So we do place the same architecture at the edge. So WCNP runs at the edge, and an application that's designed to run at WCNP can run at the edge. That said, there are a number of very specific considerations that come up when running at the edge, such as the possibility of disconnection or degraded connectivity. And so one of the challenges we have faced and have grappled with and done a good job of I think is dealing with the fact that applications go offline and come back online and have to reconnect and resynchronize, the sort of online offline capability is something that can be quite challenging. And we have a couple of application architectures that sort of form the two core sets of patterns that we use. One is an offline/online synchronization architecture where we discover that we've come back online, and we understand the differences between the online dataset and the offline dataset and how they have to be reconciled. The other is a message-based architecture. And here in our health and wellness domain, we've developed applications that are queue based. So they're essentially business processes that consist of multiple steps where each step has its own queue. And what that allows us to do is devote whatever bandwidth we do have to those pieces of the process that are most latency sensitive and allow the queue lengths to increase in parts of the process that are not latency sensitive, knowing that they will eventually catch up when the bandwidth is restored. And to put that in a little bit of context, we have fiber lengths to all of our locations, and we have I'll just use a round number, 10-ish thousand locations. It's larger than that, but that's the ballpark, and we have fiber to all of them, but when the fiber is disconnected, and it does get disconnected on a regular basis. In fact, I forget the exact number, but some several dozen locations get disconnected daily just by virtue of the fact that there's construction going on and things are happening in the real world. When the disconnection happens, we're able to fall back to 5G and to Starlink. Starlink is preferred. It's a higher bandwidth. 5G if that fails. But in each of those cases, the bandwidth drops significantly. And so the applications have to be intelligent about throttling back the traffic that isn't essential, so that it can push the essential traffic in those lower bandwidth scenarios. >> So much technology to support this amazing business which started in the early 1960s. Jack, unfortunately, we're out of time. I would love to have you back or some members of your team and drill into how you're using open source, but really thank you so much for explaining the approach that you've taken and participating in SuperCloud2. >> You're very welcome, Dave, and we're happy to come back and talk about other aspects of what we do. For example, we could talk more about the data lakes and the data mesh that we have in place. We could talk more about the directions we might go with serverless. So please look us up again. Happy to chat. >> I'm going to take you up on that, Jack. All right. This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier and the Cube community. Keep it right there for more action from SuperCloud2. (upbeat music)

>> TheCUBE presents Ignite 22 brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everyone. We're glad you're with us. This is theCUBE live at Palo Alto Ignite 22 at the MGM Grant in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante, day one of our coverage. We've had great conversations. The cybersecurity landscape is so interesting Dave, it's such a challenging problem to solve but it's so diverse and dynamic at the same time. >> You know, Lisa theCUBE started in May of 2010 in Boston. We called it the chowder event, chowder and Lobster. It was a EMC world, 2010. BJ Jenkins, who's here, of course, was a longtime friend of theCUBE and made the, made the transition into from, well, it's still data, data to, to cyber. So >> True. And BJ is back with us. BJ Jenkins, president Palo Alto Networks great to have you back on theCUBE. >> It is great to be here in person on theCube >> Isn't it great? >> In Vegas. It's awesome. >> And we can tell by your voice will be, will be gentle. You, you've been in Vegas typical Vegas occupational hazard of losing the voice. >> Yeah. It was one of the benefits of Covid. I didn't lose my voice at home sitting talking to a TV. You lose it when you come to Vegas. >> Exactly. >> But it's a small price to pay. >> So things kick off yesterday with the partner summit. You had a keynote then, you had a customer, a CISO on stage. You had a keynote today, which we didn't get to see. But talk to us a little bit about the lay of the land. What are you hearing from CISOs, from CIOs as we know security is a board level conversation. >> Yeah, I, you know it's been an interesting three or four months here. Let me start with that. I think, cybersecurity in general is still front and center on CIOs and CISO's minds. It has to be, if you saw Wendy's presentation today and the threats out there companies have to have it front and center. I do think it's been interesting though with the macro uncertainty. We've taken to calling this year the revenge of the CFO and you know these deals in cybersecurity are still a top priority but they're getting finance and procurements, scrutiny which I think in this environment is a necessity but it's still a, you know, number one number two imperative no matter who you talked to, in my mind >> It was interesting what Nikesh was saying in the last conference call that, hey we just have to get more approvals. We know this. We're, we're bringing more go-to-market people on board. We, we have, we're filling the pipeline 'cause we know they're going to split up deals big deals go into smaller chunks. So the question I have for you is is how are you able to successfully integrate those people so that you can get ahead of that sort of macro transition? >> Yeah I, you know, I think there's two things I'd say about uncertain macro situations and Dave, you know how old I am. I'm pretty old. I've been through a lot of cycles. And in those cycles I've always found stronger companies with stronger value proposition separate themselves actually in uncertain, economic times. And so I think there's actually an opportunity here. The message tilts a little bit though where it's been about innovation and new threat vectors to one of you have 20, 30, 40 vendors you can consolidate become more effective in your security posture and save money on your TCOs. So one of the things as we bring people on board it's training them on that business value proposition. How do you take a customer who's got 20 or 30 tools take 'em down to 5 or 10 where Palo is more central and strategic and be able to demonstrate that value. So we do that through, we're making a huge investment in our people but macroeconomic times also puts some stronger people back on the market and we're able to incorporate them into the business. >> What are the conditions that are necessary for that consolidation? Like I would imagine if you're, if you're a big customer of a big, you know, competitor of yours that that migration is going to be harder than if you're dealing with lots of little point tools. Do those, do those point tools, are they sort of is it the end of the subscription? Is it just stuff that's off the books now? What's, the condition that is ripe for that kind of consolidation? >> Look, I think the challenge coming into this year was skills. And so customers had all of these point products. It required a lot more human intervention as Nikesh was talking about to integrate them or make them work. And as all of us know finding people with cybersecurity skills over the last 12 months has been incredibly hard. That drove, if you know, if you think about that a CIO and a CISO sitting there going, I have all all this investment in tools. I don't have the people to operate 'em. What do I need to do? What we tried to do is elevate that conversation because in a customer, everybody who's bought one of those, they they bought it to solve a problem. And there's people with affinity for that tool. They're not just going to say I want to get consolidated and give up my tool. They're going to wrap their arms around it. And so what we needed to do and this changed our ecosystem strategy too how we leverage partners. We needed to get into the CIO and CISO and say look at this chaos you have here and the challenges around people that it's, it's presenting you. We can help solve that by, by standardizing, consolidating taking that integration away from you as Nikesh talked about, and making it easier for your your high skill people to work on high skill, you know high challenges in there. >> Let chaos reign, and then reign in the chaos. >> Yes. >> Andy Grove. >> I was looking at some stats that there's 26 million developers but less than 3 million cybersecurity professionals. >> Talked about that skills gap and what CISOs and CIOs are facing is do you consider from a value prop perspective Palo Alto Networks to be a, a facilitator of helping organizations deal with that skills gap? >> I think there's a short term and a long term. I think Nikesh today talked about the long term that we'll never win this battle with human beings. We're going to have to win it with automation. That, that's the long term the short term right here and now is that people need people with cybersecurity skills. Now what we're trying to do, you know, is multifaceted. We work with universities to standardize programs to develop skills that people can come into the marketplace with. We run our own programs inside the company. We have a cloud academy program now where we take people high aptitude for sales and technical aptitude and we will put them through a six month boot camp on cloud and they'll come out of that ready to really work with the leading experts in cloud security. The third angle is partners, right, there are partners in the marketplace who want to drive their business into high services areas. They have people, they know how to train. We give them, we partner with them to give them training. Hopefully that helps solve some of the short-term gaps that are out there today. >> So you made the jump from data storage to security and >> Yeah. >> You know, network security, all kinds of security. What was that like? What you must have learned a lot in the last better part of a decade? >> Yeah. >> Take us through that. >> You know, so the first jump was from EMC. I was 15 years there to be CEO of Barracuda. And you know, it was interesting because EMC was, you know large enterprise for the most part. At Barracuda we had, you know 250,000 small and mid-size enterprises. And it was, it's interesting to get into security in small and mid-size businesses because, you know Wendy today was talking about nation states. For small and mid-size business, it's common thievery right? It's ransomware, it's, and, those customers don't have, you know, the human and financial resources to keep up with the threat factor. So, you know, Nikesh talked about how it's taken 'em four and a half years to get into cybersecurity. I remember my first week at Barracuda, I was talking with a customer who had, you know, breached data shut down. There wasn't much bitcoin back then so it was just a pure ransom. And I'm like, wow, this is, you know, incredible industry. So it's been a good, you know, transition for me. I still think data is at the heart of all of this. Right? And I have always believed there's a strong connection between the things I learned growing up at EMC and what I put into practice today at Palo Alto Networks. >> And how about a culture because I, you know I know have observed the EMC culture >> Yeah. >> And you were there in really the heyday. >> Yeah. >> Right? Which was an awesome place. And it seems like Palo Alto obviously, different times but you know, similar like laser focus on solving problems, you know, obviously great, you know value sellers, you know, you guys aren't the commodity >> Yeah. For Product. But there seemed to be some similarities from afar. I don't know Palo Alto as well as I know EMC. >> I think there's a lot. When I joined EMC, it was about, it was 2 billion in in revenue and I think when I left it was over 20, 20, 21. And, you know, we're at, you know hopefully 5, 5 5 in revenue. I feel like it's this very similar, there's a sense of urgency, there's an incredible focus on the customer. you know, Near and Moche are definitely different individuals but the both same kind of disruptive, Israeli force out there driving the business. There are a lot of similarities. I, you know, the passion, I feel privileged as a, you know go to market person that I have this incredible portfolio to go, you know, work with customers on. It's a lucky position to be in, but very I feel like it is a movie I've seen before. >> Yeah. And but, and the course, the challenges from the, the target that you're disrupting is different. It was, you know, EMC had a lot of big, you know IBM obviously was, you know, bigger target whereas you got thousands of, you know, smaller companies. >> Yes. >> And, and so that's a different dynamic but that's why the consolidation play is so important. >> Look at, that's why I joined Palo Alto Networks when I was at Barracuda for nine years. It just fascinated me, that there was 3000 plus players in security and why didn't security evolve like the storage market did or the server market or network where working >> Yeah, right. >> You know, two or three big gorillas came to, to dominate those markets. And it's, I think it's what Nikesh talked about today. There was a new problem in best of breed. It was always best of breed. You can never in security go in and, you know, say, Hey it's good I saved us some money but I got the third best product in the marketplace. And there was that kind of gap between products. I, believe in why I joined here I think this is my last gig is we have a chance to change that. And this is the first company as I look from the outside in that had best of breed as, you know Nikesh said 13 categories. >> Yeah. >> And you know, we're in the leaders quadrant and it's a conversation I have with customers. You don't have to sacrifice best of breed but get the benefits of a platform. And I, think that resonates today. I think we have a chance to change the industry from that viewpoint. >> Give us a little view of the voice of the customer. You had, was it Sabre? >> Yeah. >> That was on >> Scott Moser, The CISO from Sabre. >> Give us a view, what are you hearing from the voice of the customer? Obviously they're quite a successful customer but challenges, concerns, the partnership. >> Yeah. Look, I think security is similar to industries where we come up with magic marketing phrases and, you know, things to you know, make you want to procure our solutions. You know, zero trust is one. And you know, you'll talk to customers and they're like, okay, yes. And you know, the government, right? Joe, Joe Biden's putting out zero trust executive orders. And the, the problem is if you talk to customers, it's a journey. They have legacy infrastructure they have business drivers that you know they just don't deal with us. They've got to deal with the business side who's trying to make the money that keeps the, the company going. it's really helped them draw a map from where they're at today to zero trust or to a better security architecture. Or, you know, they're moving their apps into the cloud. How am I going to migrate? Right? Again, that discussion three years ago was around lift and shift, right? Today it's about, well, no I need cloud native developed apps to service the business the way I want to, I want to service it. How do I, so I, I think there's this element of a trusted partner and relationship. And again, I think this is why you can't have 40 or 50 of those. You got to start narrowing it down if you want to be able to meet and beat the threats that are out there for you. So I, you know, the customers, I see a lot of 'em. It's, here's where I'm at help me get here to a better position. And they know it's, you know Scott said in our keynote today, you don't just, you know have layer three firewall policies and decide, okay tomorrow I'm going to go to layer seven. That, that's not how it works. Right? There's, and, and by the way these things are a mission critical type areas. So there's got to be a game plan that you help customers go through to get there. >> Definitely. Last question, my last question for you is, is security being a board level conversation I was reading some stats from a survey I think it was the what's new in Cypress survey that that Palo Alto released today that showed that while significant numbers of organizations think they've got a cyber resiliency playbook, there's a lot of disconnect or lack of alignment at the boardroom. Are you in those conversations? How can you help facilitate that alignment between the executive team and the board when it comes to security being so foundational to any business? >> Yeah, it's, I've been on three, four public company boards. I'm on, I'm on two today. I would say four years ago, this was a almost a taboo topic. It was a, put your head in the sand and pray to God nothing happened. And you know, the world has changed significantly. And because of the number of breaches the impact it's had on brand, boards have to think about this in duty of care and their fiduciary duty. Okay. So then you start with a board that may not have the technical skills. The first problem the security industry had is how do I explain your risk profile in a way you can understand it. I'm, I'm on the board of Generac that makes home generators. It's a manufacturing, you know, company but they put Wifi modules in their boxes so that the dealers could help do the maintenance on 'em. And all of a sudden these things were getting attacked. Right? And they're being used for bot attacks. >> Yeah. >> Everybody on their board had a manufacturing background. >> Ah. >> So how do you help that board understand the risk they have that's what's changed over the last four years. It's a constant discussion. It's one I have with CISOs where they're like help us put it in layman's terms so they understand they know what we're doing and they feel confident but at the same time understand the marketplace better. And that's a journey for us. >> That Generac example is a great one because, you know, think about IOT Technologies. They've historically been air gaped >> Yes. >> By design. And all of a sudden the business comes in and says, "Hey we can put wifi in there", you know >> Connect it to a home Wifi system that >> Make our lives so much easier. Next thing you know, it's being used to attack. >> Yeah. >> So that's why, as you go around the world are you discerning, I know you were just in Japan are you discerning significant differences in sort of attitudes toward, towards cyber? Whether it's public policy, you know things like regulation where you, they don't want you sharing data, but as as a cyber company, you want to share that data with you know, public and private? >> Look it, I, I think around the world we see incredible government activity first of all. And I think given the position we're in we get to have some unique conversations there. I would say worldwide security is an imperative. I, no matter where I go, you know it's in front of everybody's mind. The, on the, the governance side, it's really what do we need to adapt to make sure we meet local regulations. And I, and I would just tell you Dave there's ways when you do that, and we talk with governments that because of how they want to do it reduce our ability to give them full insight into all the threats and how we can help them. And I do think over time governments understand that we can anonymize the data. There's, but that, that's a work in process. Definitely there is a balance. We need to have privacy, we need to have, you know personal security for people. But there's ways to collect that data in an anonymous way and give better security insight back into the architectures that are out there. >> All right. A little shift the gears here. A little sports question. We've had some great Boston's sports guests on theCUBE right? I mean, Randy Seidel, we were talking about him. Peter McKay, Snyk, I guess he's a competitor now but you know, there's no question got >> He got a little funding today. I saw that. >> Down round. But they still got a lot of money. Not of a down round, but they were, but yeah, but actually, you know, he was on several years ago and it was around the time they were talking about trading Brady. He said Never trade Brady. And he got that right. We, I think we can agree Brady's the goat. >> Yes. >> The big question I have for you is, Belichick. Do you ever question Has your belief in him as the greatest coach of all time wavered, you know, now that- No. Okay. >> Never. >> Weigh in on that. >> Never, he says >> Still the Goat. >> I'll give you my best. You know, never In Bill we trust. >> Okay. Still. >> All right >> I, you know, the NFL is a unique property that's designed for parody and is designed, I mean actively designed to not let Mr. Craft and Bill Belichick do what they do every year. I feel privileged as a Boston sports fan that in our worst years we're in the seventh playoff spot. And I have a lot of family in Chicago who would kill for that position, by the way. And you know, they're in perpetual rebuilding. And so look, and I think he, you know the way he's been able to manage the cap and the skill levels, I think we have a top five defense. There's different ways to win titles. And if I, you know, remember in Brady's last title with Boston, the defense won us that Super Bowl. >> Well thanks for weighing in on that because there's a lot of crazy talk going on. Like, 'Hey, if he doesn't beat Arizona, he's got to go.' I'm like, what? So, okay, I'm sometimes it takes a good good loyal fan who's maybe, you know, has >> The good news in Boston is we're emotional fans too so I understand you got to keep the long term long term in mind. And we're, we're in a privileged position in Boston. We've got Celtics, we've got Bruins we've got the Patriots right on the edge of the playoffs and we need the Red Sox to get to work. >> Yeah, no, you know they were last, last year so maybe they're going to win it all like they usually do. So >> Fingers crossed. >> Crazy worst to first. >> Exactly. Well you said, in Bill we trust it sounds like from our conversation in BJ we trust from the customers, the partners. >> I hope so. >> Thank you so much BJ, for coming back on theCUBE giving us the lay of the land, what's new, the voice of the customer and how Palo Alto was really differentiated in the market. We always appreciate your, coming on the show you >> Honor and privilege seeing you here. Thanks. >> You may be thinking that you were watching ESPN just now but you know, we call ourselves the ESPN at Tech News. This is Lisa Martin for Dave Vellante and our guest. You're watching theCUBE, the Leader and live emerging in enterprise tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>Prior to the pandemic, organizations were largely optimized for efficiency as the best path to bottom line profits. Many CIOs tell the cube privately that they were caught off guard by the degree to which their businesses required greater resiliency beyond their somewhat cumbersome disaster recovery processes. And the lack of that business resilience has actually cost firms because they were unable to respond to changing market forces. And certainly we've seen this dynamic with supply chain challenges and there's a little doubt. We're also seeing it in the area of cybersecurity generally, and data recovery. Specifically. Over the past 30 plus months, the rapid adoption of cloud to support remote workers and build in business resilience had the unintended consequences of expanding attack vectors, which brought an escalation of risk from cyber crime. Well, security in the public clouds is certainly world class. The result of multi-cloud has brought with it multiple shared responsibility models, multiple ways of implementing security policies across clouds and on-prem. >>And at the end of the day, more, not less complexity, but there's a positive side to this story. The good news is that public policy industry collaboration and technology innovation is moving fast to accelerate data protection and cybersecurity strategies with a focus on modernizing infrastructure, securing the digital supply chain, and very importantly, simplifying the integration of data protection and cybersecurity. Today there's heightened awareness that the world of data protection is not only an adjacency to, but it's becoming a fundamental component of cybersecurity strategies. In particular, in order to build more resilience into a business, data protection, people, technologies, and processes must be more tightly coordinated with security operations. Hello and welcome to the future of Multi-Cloud Data Protection Made Possible by Dell in collaboration with the Cube. My name is Dave Valante and I'll be your host today. In this segment, we welcome into the Cube, two senior executives from Dell who will share details on new technology announcements that directly address these challenges. >>Jeff Boudreaux is the president and general manager of Dell's Infrastructure Solutions Group, isg, and he's gonna share his perspectives on the market and the challenges he's hearing from customers. And we're gonna ask Jeff to double click on the messages that Dell is putting into the marketplace and give us his detailed point of view on what it means for customers. Now Jeff is gonna be joined by Travis Vhi. Travis is the senior Vice President of product management for ISG at Dell Technologies, and he's gonna give us details on the products that are being announced today and go into the hard news. Now, we're also gonna challenge our guests to explain why Dell's approach is unique and different in the marketplace. Thanks for being with us. Let's get right into it. We're here with Jeff Padro and Travis Behill. We're gonna dig into the details about Dell's big data protection announcement. Guys, good to see you. Thanks >>For coming in. Good to see you. Thank you for having us. >>You're very welcome. Right. Let's start off, Jeff, with a high level, you know, I'd like to talk about the customer, what challenges they're facing. You're talking to customers all the time, What are they telling you? >>Sure. As you know, we do, we spend a lot of time with our customers, specifically listening, learning, understanding their use cases, their pain points within their specific environments. They tell us a lot. Notice no surprise to any of us, that data is a key theme that they talk about. It's one of their most important, important assets. They need to extract more value from that data to fuel their business models, their innovation engines, their competitive edge. So they need to make sure that that data is accessible, it's secure in its recoverable, especially in today's world with the increased cyber attacks. >>Okay. So maybe we could get into some of those, those challenges. I mean, when, when you talk about things like data sprawl, what do you mean by that? What should people know? Sure. >>So for those big three themes, I'd say, you know, you have data sprawl, which is the big one, which is all about the massive amounts of data. It's the growth of that data, which is growing at an unprecedented rates. It's the gravity of that data and the reality of the multi-cloud sprawl. So stuff is just everywhere, right? Which increases that service a tax base for cyber criminals. >>And and by gravity you mean the data's there and people don't wanna move it. >>It's everywhere, right? And so when it lands someplace, I think edge, core or cloud, it's there and that's, it's something we have to help our customers with. >>Okay, so just it's nuanced cuz complexity has other layers. What, what are those >>Layers? Sure. When we talk to our customers, they tell us complexity is one of their big themes. And specifically it's around data complexity. We talked about that growth and gravity of the data. We talk about multi-cloud complexity and we talk about multi-cloud sprawl. So multiple vendors, multiple contracts, multiple tool chains, and none of those work together in this, you know, multi-cloud world. Then that drives their security complexity. So we talk about that increased attack surface, but this really drives a lot of operational complexity for their teams. Think about we're a lack consistency through everything. So people, process, tools, all that stuff, which is really wasting time and money for our customers. >>So how does that affect the cyber strategies and the, I mean, I've often said the ciso now they have this shared responsibility model, they have to do that across multiple clouds. Every cloud has its own security policies and, and frameworks and syntax. So maybe you could double click on your perspective on that. >>Sure. I'd say the big, you know, the big challenge customers have seen, it's really inadequate cyber resiliency. And specifically they're feeling, feeling very exposed. And today as the world with cyber tax being more and more sophisticated, if something goes wrong, it is a real challenge for them to get back up and running quickly. And that's why this is such a, a big topic for CEOs and businesses around the world. >>You know, it's funny, I said this in my open, I, I think that prior to the pandemic businesses were optimized for efficiency and now they're like, Wow, we have to actually put some headroom into the system to be more resilient. You know, I you hearing >>That? Yeah, we absolutely are. I mean, the customers really, they're asking us for help, right? It's one of the big things we're learning and hearing from them. And it's really about three things, one's about simplifying it, two, it's really helping them to extract more value from their data. And then the third big, big piece is ensuring their data is protected and recoverable regardless of where it is going back to that data gravity and that very, you know, the multicloud world just recently, I don't know if you've seen it, but the global data protected, excuse me, the global data protection index gdp. >>I, Yes. Jesus. Not to be confused with gdpr, >>Actually that was released today and confirms everything we just talked about around customer challenges, but also it highlights an importance of having a very cyber, a robust cyber resilient data protection strategy. >>Yeah, I haven't seen the latest, but I, I want to dig into it. I think this is, you've done this many, many years in a row. I like to look at the, the, the time series and see how things have changed. All right. At, at a high level, Jeff, can you kind of address why Dell and from your point of view is best suited? >>Sure. So we believe there's a better way or a better approach on how to handle this. We think Dell is uniquely positioned to help our customers as a one stop shop, if you will, for that cyber resilient multi-cloud data protection solution in needs. We take a modern, a simple and resilient approach, >>But what does that mean? What, what do you mean by modern? >>Sure. So modern, we talk about our software defined architecture, right? It's really designed to meet the needs not only of today, but really into the future. And we protect data across any cloud in any workload. So we have a proven track record doing this today. We have more than 1700 customers that trust us to protect them more than 14 exabytes of their data in the cloud today. >>Okay, so you said modern, simple and resilient. What, what do you mean by simple? Sure. >>We wanna provide simplicity everywhere, going back to helping with the complexity challenge, and that's from deployment to consumption to management and support. So our offers will deploy in minutes. They are easy to operate and use, and we support flexible consumption models for whatever the customer may desire. So traditional subscription or as a service. >>And when you, when you talk about resilient, I mean, I, I put forth that premise, but it's hard because people say, Well, that's gonna gonna cost us more. Well, it may, but you're gonna also reduce your, your risk. So how, what's your point of view on resilience? >>Yeah, I think it's, it's something all customers need. So we're gonna be providing a comprehensive and resilient portfolio of cyber solutions that are secured by design. We have some ver some unique capabilities in a combination of things like built in amenability, physical and logical isolation. We have intelligence built in with AI par recovery and just one, I guess fun fact for everybody is we have our cyber vault is the only solution in the industry that is endorsed by Sheltered Harbor that meets all the needs of the financial sector. >>So it's interesting when you think about the, the NIST framework for cyber security, it's all about about layers. You're sort of bringing that now to, to data protection, correct? Yeah. All right. In a minute we're gonna come back with Travis and dig into the news. We're gonna take a short break. Keep it right there. Okay. We're back with Jeff and Travis Vehill to dig deeper into the news. Guys, again, good to see you. Travis, if you could, maybe you, before we get into the news, can you set the business context for us? What's going on out there? >>Yeah, thanks for that question, Dave. To set a little bit of the context, when you look at the data protection market, Dell has been a leader in providing solutions to customers for going on nearly two decades now. We have tens of thousands of people using our appliances. We have multiple thousands of people using our latest modern simple power protect data managers software. And as Jeff mentioned, we have, you know, 1700 customers protecting 14 exabytes of data in the public clouds today. And that foundation gives us a unique vantage point. We talked to a lot of customers and they're really telling us three things. They want simple solutions, they want us to help them modernize and they want us to add as the highest priority, maintain that high degree of resiliency that they expect from our data protection solutions. So tho that's the backdrop to the news today. And, and as we go through the news, I think you'll, you'll agree that each of these announcements deliver on those pillars. And in particular today we're announcing the Power Protect data manager appliance. We are announcing power protect cyber recovery enhancements, and we are announcing enhancements to our Apex data storage >>Services. Okay, so three pieces. Let's, let's dig to that. It's interesting appliance, everybody wants software, but then you talk to customers and they're like, Well, we actually want appliances because we just wanna put it in and it works, right? Performs great. So, so what do we need to know about the appliance? What's the news there? Well, >>You know, part of the reason I gave you some of those stats to begin with is that we have at this strong foundation of, of experience, but also intellectual property components that we've taken that have been battle tested in the market. And we've put them together in a new simple integrated appliance that really combines the best of the target appliance capabilities we have with that modern simple software. And we've integrated it from the, you know, sort of taking all of those pieces, putting them together in a simple, easy to use and easy to scale interface for customers. >>So the premise that I've been putting forth for, you know, months now, probably well, well over a year, is that, that that data protection is becoming an extension of your, your cybersecurity strategies. So I'm interested in your perspective on cyber recovery. You, you have specific news that you have there? >>Yeah, you know, we, we are, in addition to simplifying things via the, the appliance, we are providing solutions for customers no matter where they're deploying. And cyber recovery, especially when it comes to cloud deployments, is an increasing area of interest and deployment that we see with our customers. So what we're announcing today is that we're expanding our cyber recovery services to be available in Google Cloud with this announcement. It means we're available in all three of the major clouds and it really provides customers the flexibility to secure their data no matter if they're running, you know, on premises in a colo at the edge in the public cloud. And the other nice thing about this, this announcement is that you have the ability to use Google Cloud as a cyber recovery vault that really allows customers to isolate critical data and they can recover that critical data from the vault back to on-premises or from that vault back to running their cyber cyber protection or their data protection solutions in the public cloud. >>I always invoke my, my favorite Matt Baker here. It's not a zero sum game, but this is a perfect example where there's opportunities for a company like Dell to partner with the public cloud provider. You've got capabilities that don't exist there. You've got the on-prem capabilities. We could talk about edge all day, but that's a different topic. Okay, so Mike, my other question Travis, is how does this all fit into Apex? We hear a lot about Apex as a service, it's sort of the new hot thing. What's happening there? What's the news around Apex? >>Yeah, we, we've seen incredible momentum with our Apex solutions since we introduced data protection options into them earlier this year. And we're really building on that momentum with this announcement being, you know, providing solutions that allow customers to consume flexibly. And so what we're announcing specifically is that we're expanding Apex data storage services to include a data protection option. And it's like with all Apex offers, it's a pay as you go solution really streamlines the process of customers purchasing, deploying, maintaining and managing their backup software. All a customer really needs to do is, you know, specify their base capacity, they specify their performance tier, they tell us do they want a a one year term or a three year term and we take it from there. We, we get them up and running so they can start deploying and consuming flexibly. And it's, as with many of our Apex solutions, it's a simple user experience all exposed through a unified Apex console. >>Okay. So it's you keeping it simple, like I think large, medium, small, you know, we hear a lot about t-shirt sizes. I I'm a big fan of that cuz you guys should be smart enough to figure out, you know, based on my workload, what I, what I need, how different is this? I wonder if you guys could, could, could address this. Jeff, maybe you can, >>You can start. Sure. I'll start and then pitch me, you know, Travis, you you jump in when I screw up here. So, awesome. So first I'd say we offer innovative multi-cloud data protection solutions. We provide that deliver performance, efficiency and scale that our customers demand and require. We support as Travis at all the major public clouds. We have a broad ecosystem of workload support and I guess the, the great news is we're up to 80% more cost effective than any of the competition. >>80%. 80%, That's a big number, right. Travis, what's your point of view on this? Yeah, >>I, I think number one, end to end data protection. We, we are that one stop shop that I talked about. Whether it's a simplified appliance, whether it's deployed in the cloud, whether it's at the edge, whether it's integrated appliances, target appliances, software, we have solutions that span the gamut as a service. I mentioned the Apex solution as well. So really we can, we can provide solutions that help support customers and protect them, any workload, any cloud, anywhere that data lives edge core to cloud. The other thing that we hear as a, as a, a big differentiator for Dell and, and Jeff touched on on this a little bit earlier, is our intelligent cyber resiliency. We have a unique combination in, in the market where we can offer immutability or protection against deletion as, as sort of that first line of defense. But we can also offer a second level of defense, which is isolation, talking, talking about data vaults or cyber vaults and cyber recovery. And the, at more importantly, the intelligence that goes around that vault. It can look at detecting cyber attacks, it can help customers speed time to recovery and really provides AI and ML to help early diagnosis of a cyber re attack and fast recovery should a cyber attack occur. And, and you know, if you look at customer adoption of that solution specifically in the clouds, we have over 1300 customers utilizing power protect cyber recovery. >>So I think it's fair to say that your, I mean your portfolio has obvious been a big differentiator whenever I talk to, you know, your finance team, Michael Dell, et cetera, that end to end capability that that, that your ability to manage throughout the supply chain. We actually just did a a, an event recently with you guys where you went into what you're doing to make infrastructure trusted. And so my take on that is you, in a lot of respects, you're shifting, you know, the client's burden to your r and d now they have a lot of work to do, so it's, it's not like they can go home and just relax, but, but that's a key part of the partnership that I see. Jeff, I wonder if you could give us the, the, the final thoughts. >>Sure. Dell has a long history of being a trusted partner with it, right? So we have unmatched capabilities. Going back to your point, we have the broadest portfolio, we have, you know, we're a leader in every category that we participate in. We have a broad deep breadth of portfolio. We have scale, we have innovation that is just unmatched within data protection itself. We are the trusted market leader, no if and or bots, we're number one for both data protection software in appliances per idc. And we would just name for the 17th consecutive time the leader in the, the Gartner Magic Quadrant. So bottom line is customers can count on Dell. >>Yeah, and I think again, we're seeing the evolution of, of data protection. It's not like the last 10 years, it's really becoming an adjacency and really a key component of your cyber strategy. I think those two parts of the organization are coming together. So guys, really appreciate your time. Thanks for Thank you sir. Thanks Dave. Travis, good to see you. All right, in a moment I'm gonna come right back and summarize what we learned today, what actions you can take for your business. You're watching the future of multi-cloud data protection made possible by Dell and collaboration with the cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage right back >>In our data driven world. Protecting data has never been more critical to guard against everything from cyber incidents to unplanned outages. You need a cyber resilient, multi-cloud data protection strategy. >>It's not a matter of if you're gonna get hacked, it's a matter of when. And I wanna know that I can recover and continue to recover each day. >>It is important to have a cyber security and a cyber resiliency plan in place because the threat of cyber attack are imminent. >>Power protects. Data manager from Dell Technologies helps deliver the data protection and security confidence you would expect from a trusted partner and market leader. >>We chose Power Protect Data Manager because we've been a strategic partner with Dell Technologies for roughly 20 years now. Our partnership with Dell Technologists has provided us with the ability to scale and grow as we've transitioned from 10 billion in assets to 20 billion. >>With Power Protect Data Manager, you can enjoy exceptional ease of use to increase your efficiency and reduce costs. >>Got installed it by myself, learned it by myself with very intuitive >>While restoring a machine with Power Protect Data Manager is fast. We can fully manage Power Protect through the center. We can recover a whole machine in seconds. >>Data Manager offers innovation such as Transparent snapshots to simplify virtual machine backups and it goes beyond backup and restore to provide valuable insights and to protected data workloads and VMs. >>In our previous environment, it would take anywhere from three to six hours at night to do a single backup of each vm. Now we're backing up hourly and it takes two to three seconds with the transparent snapshots. >>With Power Protects Data Manager, you get the peace of mind knowing that your data is safe and available whenever you need it. >>Data is extremely important. We can't afford to lose any data. We need things just to work. >>Start your journey to modern data protection with Dell Power Protect Data manager. Visit dell.com/power Protect Data Manager. >>We put forth the premise in our introduction that the world's of data protection in cybersecurity must be more integrated. We said that data recovery strategies have to be built into security practices and procedures and by default this should include modern hardware and software. Now in addition to reviewing some of the challenges that customers face, which have been pretty well documented, we heard about new products that Dell Technologies is bringing to the marketplace that specifically address these customer concerns. There were three that we talked about today. First, the Power Protect Data Manager Appliance, which is an integrated system taking advantage of Dell's history in data protection, but adding new capabilities. And I want to come back to that in the moment. Second is Dell's Power Protect cyber recovery for Google Cloud platform. This rounds out the big three public cloud providers for Dell, which joins AWS and and Azure support. >>Now finally, Dell has made its target backup appliances available in Apex. You might recall earlier this year we saw the introduction from Dell of Apex backup services and then in May at Dell Technologies world, we heard about the introduction of Apex Cyber Recovery Services. And today Dell is making its most popular backup appliances available and Apex. Now I wanna come back to the Power Protect data manager appliance because it's a new integrated appliance. And I asked Dell off camera really what is so special about these new systems and what's really different from the competition because look, everyone offers some kind of integrated appliance. So I heard a number of items, Dell talked about simplicity and efficiency and containers and Kubernetes. So I kind of kept pushing and got to what I think is the heart of the matter in two really important areas. One is simplicity. >>Dell claims that customers can deploy the system in half the time relative to the competition. So we're talking minutes to deploy and of course that's gonna lead to much simpler management. And the second real difference I heard was backup and restore performance for VMware workloads. In particular, Dell has developed transparent snapshot capabilities to fundamentally change the way VMs are protected, which leads to faster backup and restores with less impact on virtual infrastructure. Dell believes this new development is unique in the market and claims that in its benchmarks the new appliance was able to back up 500 virtual machines in 47% less time compared to a leading competitor. Now this is based on Dell benchmarks, so hopefully these are things that you can explore in more detail with Dell to see if and how they apply to your business. So if you want more information, go to the data protectionPage@dell.com. You can find that at dell.com/data protection. And all the content here and other videos are available on demand@thecube.net. Check out our series on the blueprint for trusted infrastructure, it's related and has some additional information. And go to silicon angle.com for all the news and analysis related to these and other announcements. This is Dave Valante. Thanks for watching the future of multi-cloud protection made possible by Dell in collaboration with the Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>>Hello everyone and welcome back to Motor City, Michigan. We're live from the Cube and my name is Savannah Peterson. Joined this afternoon with my co-host John Ferer. John, how you doing? Doing >>Great. This next segment's gonna be awesome about application modernization, scaling pluses. This is what's gonna, how are the next generation software revolution? It's gonna be >>Fun. You know, it's kind of been a theme of our day today is scale. And when we think about the complex orchestration platform that is Kubernetes, everyone wants to scale faster, quicker, more efficiently, and our guests are here to tell us all about that. Please welcome to Char and Andy, thank you so much for being here with us. You were on the Red Hat OpenShift team. Yeah. I suspect most of our audience is familiar, but just in case, let's give 'em a quick one-liner pitch so everyone's on the same page. Tell us about OpenShift. >>I, I'll take that one. OpenShift is our ES platform is our ES distribution. You can consume it as a self-managed platform or you can consume it as a managed service on on public clouds. And so we just call it all OpenShift. So it's basically Kubernetes, but you know, with a CNCF ecosystem around it to make things more easier. So maybe there's two >>Lights. So what does being at coupon mean for you? How does it feel to be here? What's your initial takes? >>Exciting. I'm having a fantastic time. I haven't been to coupon since San Diego, so it's great to be back in person and see old friends, make new friends, have hallway conversations. It's, it's great as an engineer trying to work in this ecosystem, just being able to, to be in the same place with these folks. >>And you gotta ask, before we came on camera, you're like, this is like my sixth co con. We were like, we're seven, you know, But that's a lot of co coupons. It >>Is, yes. I mean, so what, >>Yes. >>Take us status >>For sure. Where we are now. Compare and contrast co. Your first co con, just scope it out. What's the magnitude of change? If you had to put a pin on that, because there's a lot of new people coming in, they might not have seen where it's come from and how we got here is maybe not how we're gonna get to the next >>Level. I've seen it grow tremendously since the first one I went to, which I think was Austin several years ago. And what's great is seeing lots of new people interested in contributing and also seeing end users who are trying to figure out the best way to take advantage of this great ecosystem that we have. >>Awesome. And the project management side, you get the keys to the Kingdom with Red Hat OpenShift, which has been successful. Congratulations by the way. Thank you. We watched that grow and really position right on the wave. It's going great. What's the update on on the product? Kind of, you're in a good, good position right now. Yeah, >>No, we we're feeling good about it. It's all about our customers. Obviously the fact that, you know, we have thousands of customers using OpenShift as the cloud native platform, the container platform. We're very excited. The great thing about them is that, I mean you can go to like OpenShift Commons is kind of a user group that we run on the first day, like on Tuesday we ran. I mean you should see the number of just case studies that our customers went through there, you know? And it is fantastic to see that. I mean it's across so many different industries, across so many different use cases, which is very exciting. >>One of the things we've been reporting here in the Qla scene before, but here more important is just that if you take digital transformation to the, to its conclusion, the IT department and developers, they're not a department to serve the business. They are the business. Yes. That means that the developers are deciding things. Yeah. And running the business. Prove their code. Yeah. Okay. If that's, if that takes place, you gonna have scale. And we also said on many cubes, certainly at Red Hat Summit and other ones, the clouds are distributed computer, it's distributed computing. So you guys are focusing on this project, Andy, that you're working on kcp. >>Yes. >>Which is, I won't platform Kubernetes platform for >>Control >>Planes. Control planes. Yes. Take us through, what's the focus on why is that important and why is that relate to the mission of developers being in charge and large scale? >>Sure. So a lot of times when people are interested in developing on Kubernetes and running workloads, they need a cluster of course. And those are not cheap. It takes time, it takes money, it takes resources to get them. And so we're trying to make that faster and easier for, for end users and everybody involved. So with kcp, we've been able to take what looks like one normal Kubernetes and partition it. And so everybody gets a slice of it. You're an administrator in your little slice and you don't have to ask for permission to install new APIs and they don't conflict with anybody else's APIs. So we're really just trying to make it super fast and make it super flexible. So everybody is their own admin. >>So the developer basically looks at it as a resource blob. They can do whatever they want, but it's shared and provisioned. >>Yes. One option. It's like, it's like they have their own cluster, but you don't have to go through the process of actually provisioning a full >>Cluster. And what's the alternative? What's the what's, what's the, what's the benefit and what was the alternative to >>This? So the alternative, you spin up a full cluster, which you know, maybe that's three control plane nodes, you've got multiple workers, you've got a bunch of virtual machines or bare metal, or maybe you take, >>How much time does that take? Just ballpark. >>Anywhere from five minutes to an hour you can use cloud services. Yeah. Gke, E Ks and so on. >>Keep banging away. You're configuring. Yeah. >>Those are faster. Yeah. But it's still like, you still have to wait for that to happen and it costs money to do all of that too. >>Absolutely. And it's complex. Why do something that's been done, if there's a tool that can get you a couple steps down the path, which makes a ton of sense. Something that we think a lot when we're talking about scale. You mentioned earlier, Tohar, when we were chatting before the cams were alive, scale means a lot of different things. Can you dig in there a little bit? >>Yeah, I >>Mean, so when, when >>We talk about scale, >>We are talking about from a user perspective, we are talking about, you know, there are more users, there are more applications, there are more workloads, there are more services being run on Kubernetes now, right? So, and OpenShift. So, so that's one dimension of this scale. The other dimension of the scale is how do you manage all the underlying infrastructure, the clusters, the name spaces, and all the observability data, et cetera. So that's at least two levels of scale. And then obviously there's a third level of scale, which is, you know, there is scale across not just different clouds, but also from cloud to the edge. So there is that dimension of scale. So there are several dimensions of this scale. And the one that again, we are focused on here really is about, you know, this, the first one that I talk about is a user. And when I say user, it could be a developer, it could be an application architect, or it could be an application owner who wants to develop Kubernetes applications for Kubernetes and wants to publish those APIs, if you will, and make it discoverable and then somebody consumes it. So that's the scale we are talking about >>Here. What are some of the enterprise, you guys have a lot of customers, we've talked to you guys before many, many times and other subjects, Red Hat, I mean you guys have all the customers. Yeah. Enterprise, they've been there, done that. And you know, they're, they're savvy. Yeah. But the cloud is a whole nother ballgame. What are they thinking about? What's the psychology of the customer right now? Because now they have a lot of choices. Okay, we get it, we're gonna re-platform refactor apps, we'll keep some legacy on premises for whatever reasons. But cloud pretty much is gonna be the game. What's the mindset right now of the customer base? Where are they in their, in their psych? Not the executive, but more of the the operators or the developers? >>Yeah, so I mean, first of all, different customers are at different levels of maturity, I would say in this. They're all on a journey how I like to describe it. And in this journey, I mean, I see a customers who are really tip of the sphere. You know, they have containerized everything. They're cloud native, you know, they use best of tools, I mean automation, you know, complete automation, you know, quick deployment of applications and all, and life cycle of applications, et cetera. So that, that's kind of one end of this spectrum >>Advanced. Then >>The advances, you know, and, and I, you know, I don't, I don't have any specific numbers here, but I'd say there are quite a few of them. And we see that. And then there is kind of the middle who are, I would say, who are familiar with containers. They know what app modernization, what a cloud application means. They might have tried a few. So they are in the journey. They are kind of, they want to get there. They have some other kind of other issues, organizational or talent and so, so on and so forth. Kinds of issues to get there. And then there are definitely the quota, what I would call the lag arts still. And there's lots of them. But I think, you know, Covid has certainly accelerated a lot of that. I hear that. And there is definitely, you know, more, the psychology is definitely more towards what I would say public cloud. But I think where we are early also in the other trend that I see is kind of okay, public cloud great, right? So people are going there, but then there is the so-called edge also. Yeah. That is for various regions. You, you gotta have a kind of a regional presence, a edge presence. And that's kind of the next kind of thing taking off here. And we can talk more >>About it. Yeah, let's talk about that a little bit because I, as you know, as we know, we're very excited about Edge here at the Cube. Yeah. What types of trends are you seeing? Is that space emerges a little bit more firmly? >>Yeah, so I mean it's, I mean, so we, when we talk about Edge, you're talking about, you could talk about Edge as a, as a retail, I mean locations, right? >>Could be so many things edges everywhere. Everywhere, right? It's all around us. Quite literally. Even on the >>Scale. Exactly. In space too. You could, I mean, in fact you mentioned space. I was, I was going to >>Kinda, it's this world, >>My space actually Kubernetes and OpenShift running in space, believe it or not, you know, So, so that's the edge, right? So we have Industrial Edge, we have Telco Edge, we have a 5g, then we have, you know, automotive edge now and, and, and retail edge and, and more, right? So, and space, you know, So it's very exciting there. So the reason I tag back to that question that you asked earlier is that that's where customers are. So cloud is one thing, but now they gotta also think about how do I, whatever I do in the cloud, how do I bring it to the edge? Because that's where my end users are, my customers are, and my data is, right? So that's the, >>And I think Kubernetes has brought that attention to the laggards. We had the Laed Martin on yesterday, which is an incredible real example of Kubernetes at the edge. It's just incredible story. We covered it also wrote a story about it. So compelling. Cuz it makes it real. Yes. And Kubernetes is real. So then the question is developer productivity, okay, Things are starting to settle in. We've got KCP scaling clusters, things are happening. What about the tool chains? And how do I develop now I got scale of development, more code coming in. I mean, we are speculating that in the future there's so much code in open source that no one has to write code anymore. Yeah. At some point it's like this gluing things together. So the developers need to be productive. How are we gonna scale the developer equation and eliminate the, the complexity of tool chains and environments. Web assembly is super hyped up at this show. I don't know why, but sounds good. No one, no one can tell me why, but I can kind of connect the dots. But this is a big thing. >>Yeah. And it's fitting that you ask about like no code. So we've been working with our friends at Cross Plain and have integrated with kcp the ability to no code, take a whole bunch of configuration and say, I want a database. I want to be a, a provider of databases. I'm in an IT department, there's a bunch of developers, they don't wanna have to write code to create databases. So I can just take, take my configuration and make it available to them. And through some super cool new easy to use tools that we have as a developer, you can just say, please give me a database and you don't have to write any code. I don't have to write any code to maintain that database. I'm actually using community tooling out there to get that spun up. So there's a lot of opportunities out there. So >>That's ease of use check. What about a large enterprise that's got multiple tool chains and you start having security issues. Does that disrupt the tool chain capability? Like there's all those now weird examples emerging, not weird, but like real plumbing challenges. How do you guys see that evolving with Red >>Hat and Yeah, I mean, I mean, talking about that, right? The software, secure software supply chain is a huge concern for everyone after, especially some of the things that have happened in the past few >>Years. Massive team here at the show. Yeah. And just within the community, we're all a little more aware, I think, even than we were before. >>Before. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I think the, so to step back, I mean from, so, so it's not just even about, you know, run time vulnerability scanning, Oh, that's important, but that's not enough, right? So we are talking about, okay, how did that container, or how did that workload get there? What is that workload? What's the prominence of this workload? How did it get created? What is in it? You know, and what, what are, how do I make, make sure that there are no unsafe attack s there. And so that's the software supply chain. And where Red Hat is very heavily invested. And as you know, with re we kind of have roots in secure operating system. And rel one of the reasons why Rel, which is the foundation of everything we do at Red Hat, is because of security. So an OpenShift has always been secure out of the box with things like scc, rollbacks access control, we, which we added very early in the product. >>And now if you kind of bring that forward, you know, now we are talking about the complete software supply chain security. And this is really about right how from the moment the, the, the developer rights code and checks it into a gateway repository from there on, how do you build it? How do you secure it at each step of the process, how do you sign it? And we are investing and contributing to the community with things like cosign and six store, which is six store project. And so that secures the supply chain. And then you can use things like algo cd and then finally we can do it, deploy it onto the cluster itself. And then we have things like acs, which can do vulnerability scanning, which is a container security platform. >>I wanna thank you guys for coming on. I know Savannah's probably got a last question, but my last question is, could you guys each take a minute to answer why has Kubernetes been so successful today? What, what was the magic of Kubernetes that made it successful? Was it because no one forced it? Yes. Was it lightweight? Was it good timing, right place at the right time community? What's the main reason that Kubernetes is enabling all this, all this shift and goodness that's coming together, kind of defacto unifies people, the stacks, almost middleware markets coming around. Again, not to use that term middleware, but it feels like it's just about to explode. Yeah. Why is this so successful? I, >>I think, I mean, the shortest answer that I can give there really is, you know, as you heard the term, I think Satya Nala from Microsoft has used it. I don't know if he was the original person who pointed, but every company wants to be a software company or is a software company now. And that means that they want to develop stuff fast. They want to develop stuff at scale and develop at, in a cloud native way, right? You know, with the cloud. So that's, and, and Kubernetes came at the right time to address the cloud problem, especially across not just one public cloud or two public clouds, but across a whole bunch of public clouds and infrastructure as, and what we call the hybrid clouds. I think the ES is really exploded because of hybrid cloud, the need for hybrid cloud. >>And what's your take on the, the magic Kubernetes? What made it, what's making it so successful? >>I would agree also that it came about at the right time, but I would add that it has great extensibility and as developers we take it advantage of that every single day. And I think that the, the patterns that we use for developing are very consistent. And I think that consistency that came with Kubernetes, just, you have so many people who are familiar with it and so they can follow the same patterns, implement things similarly, and it's just a good fit for the way that we want to get our software out there and have, and have things operate. >>Keep it simple, stupid almost is that acronym, but the consistency and the de facto alignment Yes. Behind it just created a community. So, so then the question is, are the developers now setting the standards? That seems like that's the new way, right? I mean, >>I'd like to think so. >>So I mean hybrid, you, you're touching everything at scale and you also have mini shift as well, right? Which is taking a super macro micro shift. You ma micro shift. Oh yeah, yeah, exactly. It is a micro shift. That is, that is fantastic. There isn't a base you don't cover. You've spoken a lot about community and both of you have, and serving the community as well as your engagement with them from a, I mean, it's given that you're both leaders stepping back, how, how Community First is Red Hat and OpenShift as an organization when it comes to building the next products and, and developing. >>I'll take and, and I'm sure Andy is actually the community, so I'm sure he'll want to a lot of it. But I mean, right from the start, we have roots in open source. I'll keep it, you know, and, and, and certainly with es we were one of the original contributors to Kubernetes other than Google. So in some ways we think about as co-creators of es, they love that. And then, yeah, then we have added a lot of things in conjunction with the, I I talk about like SCC for Secure, which has become part security right now, which the community, we added things like our back and other what we thought were enterprise features needed because we actually wanted to build a product out of it and sell it to customers where our customers are enterprises. So we have worked with the community. Sometimes we have been ahead of the community and we have convinced the community. Sometimes the community has been ahead of us for other reasons. So it's been a great collaboration, which is I think the right thing to do. But Andy, as I said, >>Is the community well set too? Are well said. >>Yes, I agree with all of that. I spend most of my days thinking about how to interact with the community and engage with them. So the work that we're doing on kcp, we want it to be a community project and we want to involve as many people as we can. So it is a heavy focus for me and my team. And yeah, we we do >>It all the time. How's it going? How's the project going? You feel good >>About it? I do. It is, it started as an experiment or set of prototypes and has grown leaps and bounds from it's roots and it's, it's fantastic. Yeah. >>Controlled planes are hot data planes control planes. >>I >>Know, I love it. Making things work together horizontally scalable. Yeah. Sounds like cloud cloud native. >>Yeah. I mean, just to add to it, there are a couple of talks that on KCP at Con that our colleagues s Stephan Schemanski has, and I, I, I would urge people who have listening, if they have, just Google it, if you will, and you'll get them. And those are really awesome talks to get more about >>It. Oh yeah, no, and you can tell on GitHub that KCP really is a community project and how many people are participating. It's always fun to watch the action live to. Sure. Andy, thank you so much for being here with us, John. Wonderful questions this afternoon. And thank all of you for tuning in and listening to us here on the Cube Live from Detroit. I'm Savannah Peterson. Look forward to seeing you again very soon.

(upbeat music) >> TheCUBE presents UiPath Forward 5. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Hello and welcome back to TheCUBE's coverage of UiPath Forward 5. We're here in Las Vegas at the Venetian Convention Center. This is day two. We're wrapping up Dave Nicholson and Dave Vellante. This is the fourth time theCUBE has been at UiPath Forward. And we've seen the transformation of the company from, essentially, what was a really interesting and easy to adopt point product to now one through acquisitions, IPO, has made a number of enhancements to its platform. David Cardenas is here. Deputy Director of Operations for County of Los Angeles, the Department of Public Health. David, good to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me on guys. Appreciate it. >> So what is your role? What does it have to do with automation? >> So I had been, actually started off in the IT space within the public health. Had served as a CIO previously, but now been moving into broader operations. And I basically manage all of the back office operations for the department, HR, IT, finance, all that. >> So you've had a wild ride in the last couple of years. >> Yeah, I think, like I've been talking earlier, it's just been, the last two years have just been horrendous. It's been a really difficult experience for us. >> Yeah, and I mean, the scars are there, and maybe permanently. But it also had major effects on organizations, on operations that, again, seem to be permanent. How would you describe the situation in your organization? >> So I think it, the urgency that came along with the pandemic response, kind of required us to look at things, you know, differently. We had to be, realize we had to be a lot more nimble than when we were and try to figure out how to enhance our operations. But really look at the core of what we're doing and figure out how it is to be more efficient. So I think we've kind of seen it as an opportunity to really examine ourselves a little bit more deeply and see what things we need to do to kind of, to fix our operations and get things on a better path. >> You know, I think a lot of organizations we talked to say that. But I want to understand how you handle this is, you didn't have time to sit back in the middle of the pandemic. >> Yeah. >> And then as you exit, what I call the isolation economy, people are so burned out, you know? So how do you deal with that organizational trauma? Say, okay now, let's sit back and think about this. Do people, are they eager to do so? Do they have the appetite for it? What's that dynamic like? >> So I think certainly there's a level of exhaustion inside the organization. I can't say that there isn't because it's just been, you know, two years of 24/7/365 kind of work. And that's tough on any organization. But I think what we realize is that there's, you know, we need to move into action quickly 'cause we don't know what's going to come next, right? And we're expecting that this is just a sign of what's to come and that we're just at the start of that stage of, we're just going to see a lot more outbreaks, we're going to see a lot more conditions kind of hitting us. And if we're not prepared for that, we're not going to be able to respond for the, and preserve the health and safety of our citizens, right? So I think we're taking a very active, like, look at these opportunities and see what we've done and say how do we now make the changes that we made in response to the pandemic permanent so that the next time this comes at us, we won't have to be struggling the way that we were to try to figure things out because we'll have such a better foundation in place to be able to move things forward. >> I mean, I've never served in the military, but I imagine that when you're in the military, you're always prepared for some kind of, you know, in your world, code red, right? >> Yeah. >> So it's like this code red culture. And that seems to have carried through, right? People are, you know, constantly aware that, wow. We got caught off guard and we don't want that to happen again. Because that was a big part of the trauma was just the unknown- >> Right. >> and the lack of preparedness. So thinking about technology and its role in helping you to prepare for that type of uncertainty. Can you describe how you're applying technology to prepare for the next unknown? >> So I think, so that first part of what you said, I think the difficulty we've always had in the public health side is that there's the, generally the approach to healthcare is very reactionary, right? Your first interface with the healthcare system is, "I'm going to go see my doctor; I'm going to go to the hospital." The work that we do in public health is to try to do everything we can to keep you out of that, right? So it's broad-based messaging, social media now is going to put us out there. But also, to be able to surveil disease in a different way. And so the holy grail for us in healthcare has always been, at least on the public health side, has been to try to see how can we tap in more actively that when you go see the doctor or when you go to the hospital, how can I get access to that information very, very quickly so that I know, and can see, and surveil my entire county in my jurisdiction and know, oh, there's an outbreak of disease happening in this section of the county. We're 10 million people with, you know, hundreds of square miles inside of LA. There are places where we can see very, you know, specific targets that we know we have to hit. But the data's a little stale and we find out several months after. We need to figure out a way to do that more actively. Technology's going to be our path to be able to capture that information more actively and come up on something a little bit, so we can track things faster and be able to respond more quickly. So that's our focus for all our technology implementations, automation like UiPath has offered us and other things, is around how to gather that information more quickly and put that into action so we can do quick interventions. >> People have notoriously short memories. Please tell me (chuckles) any of the friction that you may have experienced in years past before the pandemic. That those friction points where people are thinking, "Eh, what are the odds?" >> Yeah. "Eh, I've got finite budget, I think I'm going to spend it on this thing over here." Do you, are you able to still ride sort of the wave of mind share at this point when putting programs together for the future? >> So whatever friction was there during the pandemic wiped away. I mean, we had amazing collaboration with the medical provider community, our hospital partners. The healthcare system in LA was working very closely with us to make sure that we were responding. And there is that wave that we are trying to make sure that we use this as an opportunity to kind of ride it so that we can implement all the things that we want. 'Cause we don't know how long that's going to last us. The last time that I saw anything this large was after the anthrax attacks and the bioterrorism attacks that we had after 9/11. >> How interesting. >> Public health was really in lens at that point. And we had a huge infusion of funding, a lot of support from stakeholders, both politically and within the healthcare system. And we were able to make some large steps in movement at that point. This feels the same but in a larger scale because now it touched every part of the infrastructure. And we saw how society really had to react to what was going on in a different way than anyone has ever prepared for. And so now is we think is a time where we know that people are making more investments. And our success is going to be their success in the longterm. >> And you have to know that expectations are now set- >> Extremely high. >> at a completely different level, right? >> Yes, absolutely. >> There is no, "Oh, we don't have enough PPE." >> Correct. >> Right? >> David: Correct. >> The the expectation level is, hey, you should have learned from all of- >> We should have it; we can deliver it, We'll have it at the ready when we need to provide it. Yes, absolutely. >> Okay, so I sort of mentioned, we're, David cubed on theCUBE (all laughing). So three Daves. You spoke today at the conference? >> Actually I'm speaking later actually in the session in an hour or so. >> Oh Okay. My understanding is that you've got this concept of putting humans at the center of the automation. What does that mean? Why is that important? Help us understand that. >> So I think what we found in the crisis is that the high demand for information was something we hadn't seen before, right? We're one of the largest media markets in the United States. And what we really had trouble with is trying to figure out how to serve the residents, to provide them the information that we needed to provide to them. And so what we had traditionally done is press releases, you know, just general marketing campaigns, billboards, trying to send our message out. And when you're talking about a pandemic where on a daily basis, hour-by-hour people wanted to know what was going on in their local communities. Like, we had to change the way that we focused on. So we started thinking about, what is the information that the residents of our county need? And how can we set up an infrastructure to sustain the feeding of that? Because if we can provide more information, people will make their own personal decisions around their personal risk, their personal safety measures they need to take, and do so more actively. More so than, you know, one of us going on camera to say, "This is what you should do." They can look for themselves and look at the data that's in front of them and be able to make those choices for themselves, right? And so we needed to make sure that everything that we were doing wasn't built around feeding it to our political stakeholders, which are important stakeholders. We needed to make sure that they're aware and are messaging out, and our leadership are aware. But it's what could we give the public to be able to make them have access to information that we were collecting on an every single day basis to be able to make the decisions for their lives. And so the automation was key to that. We were at the beginning of the pandemic just had tons and tons of resources that we were throwing at the problem that was, our systems were slow, we didn't have good ability to move data back and forth between our systems, and we needed a stop-gap solution to really fill that need and be able to make the data cycles to meet the data cycles. We had basically every day had to deliver reports and analytics and dashboards by like 10 o'clock in the morning because we knew that the 12 an hour and the five-hour news cycles were going to hit and the press were going to then take those and message out. And the public started to kind of come in at that same time and look at 10 and 11 o'clock and 12 o'clock. >> Yeah. >> We could see it from how many hits were hitting our website, looking for that information. So when we failed and had a cycle where that data cycle didn't work and we couldn't deliver, the public would let us know, the press would let us know, the stakeholders would let us know. We had never experienced anything like that before, right. Where people had like this voracious appetite for the information. So we needed to have a very bulletproof process to make sure that every single 24 hours we were delivering that data, making it available at the ready. >> Software robots enabled that. >> Exactly. >> Okay. And so how were you able to implement that so quickly within such a traumatic environment? >> So I think, I guess necessity is always the mother of invention. It kind of drove us to go real quickly to look at what we had. We had data entry operations set up where we had dozens and dozens of people whose sole job in life on a 24-hour cycle was to receive medical reports that we we're getting, interview data that's coming from our case interviews, hospitalization data that was coming in through all these different channels. And it was all coming in in various forms. And they were entering that into our systems of record. And that's what we were using, extracts from that system of record, what was using to generate the data analyses in our systems and our dashboards. And so we couldn't rely on those after a while because the data was coming in at such high volume. There wasn't enough data entry staff to be able to fit the need, right? And so we needed to replace those humans and take them out of that data entry cycle, pop in the bots. And so what we started to look at is, let's pick off the, where it is that that data entry cycle starts and see what we could do to kind of replace that cycle. And we started off with a very discreet workload that was focused on some of our case interview data that was being turned into PDFs that somebody was using to enter into our systems. And we said, "Well before you do that," since we can't import into the systems 'cause it wasn't working, the import utilities weren't working. We got 'em into simple Excel spreadsheets, mapped those to the fields in our systems and let the bots do that over and over again. And we just started off with that one-use case and just tuned it and went cycle after cycle. The bots just got better and better to the point where we had almost like 95% success rates on each submission of data transactions that we did every day. >> Okay, and you applied that automation, I don't know, how many bots was it roughly? >> We're now at like 30; we started with about five. >> Okay, oh, interesting. So you started with five and you applied 'em to this specific use case to handle the velocity and volume of data- >> Correct. >> that was coming in. But that's obviously dynamic and it's changed. >> Absolutely. >> I presume it's shifted to other areas now. So how did you take what you learned there and then apply it to other use cases in other parts of the organization? >> So, fortunately for us, the process that was being used to capture the information to generate the dashboards and the analyses for the case interview data, which is what we started with- >> Yeah. >> Was essentially being used the same for the hospitalization data that we were getting and for tracking deaths as they were coming in as well. And so the bots essentially were just, we just took one process, take the same bots, copy them over essentially, and had them follow the very same process. We didn't try to introduce any different workflow than what was being done for the first one so we could replicate quickly. So I think it was lucky for us a lot- >> Dave V.: I was going to say, was that luck or by design? >> It was the same people doing the same analyses, right? So in the end they were thinking about how to be efficient themselves. So they kind of had coalesced around a similar process. And so it was kind of like fortunate, but it was by design in terms of how they- >> Dave V.: It was logical to them. >> Logical to them to make it. >> Interesting. >> So for us to be able to insert the bots became pretty easy on the front end. It's just now as we're trying to now expand to other areas that were now encountering like unique processes that we just can't replicate that quickly. We're having to like now dig into. >> So how are you handling that? First of all, how are you determining which processes? Is it sort of process driven? Is it data driven? How do you determine that? >> So obviously right now the focus still is COVID. So the the priorities scale that we've set internally for analyzing those opportunities really is centered around, you know, which things are really going to help our pandemic response, right? We're expecting another surge that's going to happen probably in the next couple of weeks. That'll probably take us through December. Hopefully, at that point, things start to calm down. But that means high-data volume again; these same process. So we're looking at optimizing the processes that we have, what can we do to make those cycles better, faster, you know, what else can we add? The data teams haven't stopped to try to figure out how else can they turn out new data reports, new data analysis, to give us a different perspective on the new variants and the new different outbreaks and hotspots that are popping up. And so we also have to kind of keep up with where they're going on these data dashboards. So they're adding more data into these reports so we know we have to optimize that. And then there's these kind of tangential work. So for example, COVID brought about, unfortunately, a lot of domestic violence reports. And so we have a lot of domestic violence agencies that we work with and that we have interactions with and to monitor their work, we have certain processes. So that's kind of like COVID-adjacent. But it's because it's such a very critical task, we're looking at how we can kind of help in those processes and areas. Same thing in like in our substance abuse area. We have substance use disorder treatment services that we provide. And we're delivering those at a higher rate because COVID kind of created more of a crisis than we would've liked. And so that's how we're prioritizing. It's really about what is the social need, what does the community need, and how can we put the technology work in those areas? >> So how do you envision the future of automation in your organization and the future of your organization? What does that look like? Paint a picture for us. >> So I'm hoping that it really does, you know, so we're going to take everything that's COVID related in the disease control areas, both in terms of our laboratory operations, in terms of our clinic operations, the way we respond, vaccination campaigns, things of that nature. And we're going to look at it to see what can efficiencies can we do there because it's a natural outgrowth of everything we've done on COVID up to this point. So, you know, it's almost like it's as simple as you're just replicating it with another disease. The disease might have different characteristics, but the work process that we follow is very similar. It's not like we're going to change everything and do something completely different for a respiratory condition as we would for some other type of foodborne condition or something else that might happen. So we certainly see very easy opportunities to just to grow out what we've already done in terms of the processes is to do that. So that's wave one, is really focus on that grow out. The second piece I think is to look at these kind of other general kind of community-based type of operations and see what operations we can do there to kind of implement some improvements there. And then I'm certainly in my new role of, in Deputy Director of Operation, I'm a CIO before. Now that I'm in this operations role, I have access to the full administrative apparatus for the department. And believe me, there's enough to keep me busy there. (Dave V. Laughing) And so that's going to be kind of my third prong is to kind of look at the implement there. >> Awesome. Go ahead, Dave. >> Yeah, so, this is going to be taking a step back, kind of a higher level view. If we could direct the same level of rigor and attention towards some other thing that we've directed towards COVID, if you could snap your fingers and make that happen, what would that thing be in the arena of public health in LA County in particular, or if you want California, United States. What is something that you feel maybe needs more attention that it's getting right now? >> So I think I touched on it a little bit earlier, but I think it's the thing we've been always been trying to get to is how to really become just very intentional about how we share data more actively, right? I don't have to know everything about you, but there are certain things I care about when you go to the doctor for that doctor and that physician to tell me. Our physicians, our healthcare system as you know, is always under a lot of pressure. Doctors don't have the time to sit down and write a form out for me and tell me everything that's going on. During COVID they did because they were, they cared about their patients so much and knew, I need to know what's going on at every single moment. And if I don't tell you what's going on in my office, you'll never know and can't tell us what's going on in the community. So they had a vested interest in telling us. But on a normal day-to-day, they don't have the time for that. I got to replace that. We got to make sure that when we get to, not me only, but everyone in this public health community has to be focused and working with our healthcare partners to automate the dissemination and the distribution of information so that I have the information at my fingers, that I can then tell you, "Here's what's going on in your local community," down to your neighborhood, down to your zip code, your census tracked, down to your neighbors' homes. We'll be able to tell you, "This is your risk. Here are the things that are going on. This is what you have to watch out for." And the more that we can be more that focused and laser-focused on meeting that goal, we will be able to do our job more effectively. >> And you can do that while preserving people's privacy. >> Privacy, absolutely. >> Yeah, absolutely. But if people are informed then they can make their own decisions. >> Correct. >> And they're not frustrated at the systems. David, we got to wrap. >> Sure. >> But maybe you can help us. What's your impression of the, first of all, is this your first Forward? You've been to others? >> This is my first time. >> Okay. >> My first time. >> What's your sort of takeaway when you go back to the office or home and people say, "Hey, how was the show? What, what'd you learn?" What are you going to say? >> Well, from just seeing all the partners here and kind of seeing all the different events I've been able to go to and the sessions there's, you don't know many times I've gone to and say, "We've got to be doing that." And so there's certainly these opportunities for, you know, more AI, more automation opportunities that we have not, we just haven't even touched on really. I think that we really need to do that. I have to be able to, as a public institution at some point our budgets get capped. We only have so much that we're going to receive. Even riding this wave, there's only so much we're going to be able to get. So we have to be very efficient and use our resources more. There's a lot more that we can do with AI, a lot more with the tools that we saw, some of the work product that are coming out at this conference that we think we can directly apply to kind of take the humans out of that, their traditional roles, get them doing higher level work so I can get the most out of them and have this other more mundane type of work, just have the systems just do it. I don't need anybody doing that necessarily, that work. I need to be able to leverage them for other higher level capabilities. >> Well thank you for that. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and really appreciate. Dave- >> It's been great talking to you guys, thank you. >> Dave, you know, I love software shows because the business impact is so enormous and I especially love cool software shows. You know, this first of all, the venue. 3,500 people here. Very cool venue. I like the fact that it's not like booth in your face, booth competition. I mean I love VMware, VMworld, VMware Explore. But it's like, "My booth is bigger than your booth." This is really nice and clean, and it's all about the experience. >> A lot of steak, not as much sizzle. >> Yeah, definitely. >> A lot of steak. >> And the customer content at the UiPath events is always outstanding. But we are entering a new era for UiPath, and we're talking. We heard a lot about the Enterprise platform. You know, the big thing is this company's been in this quarterly shock-lock since last April when it went public. And it hasn't all been pretty. And so new co-CEO comes in, they've got, you know, resetting priorities around financials, go to market, they've got to have profitable growth. So watching that that closely. But also product innovation so the co-CEOs will be able to split that up, split their duties up. Daniel Dines the product visionary, product guru. Rob Enslin, you know- making the operations work. >> Operations execution business, yeah. >> We heard that Carl Eschenbach did the introduction. Carl's a major operator, wanted that DNA into the company. 'Cause they got to keep product innovation. And I want to, I want to see R&D spending, stay relatively high. >> Product innovation, but under the heading of platform. And that's the key thing is just not being that tool set. The positioning has been, I think, accurate that, you know, over history, we started with these RPA tools and now we've moved into business process automation and now we're moving into new frontiers where, where truly, AI and ML are being leveraged. I love the re-infer story about going in and using natural national (chuckles) national, natural language processing. I can't even say it, to go through messaging. That's sort of a next-level of intelligence to be able to automate things that couldn't be automated before. So that whole platform story is key. And they seem to have made a pretty good case for their journey into platform as far as I'm concerned. >> Well, yeah, to me again. So it's always about the customers, want to come to an event like this, you listen to what they say in the keynotes and then you listen to what the customers say. And there's a very strong alignment in the UiPath community between, you know, the marketing and the actual implementation. You know, marketing's always going to be ahead. But, we saw this a couple of years ago with platform. And now we're seeing it, you know, throughout the customer base, 10,000+ customers. I think this company could have, you know, easily double, tripled, maybe even 10x that. All right, we got to wrap. Dave Nicholson, thank you. Two weeks in a row. Good job. And let's see. Check out siliconangle.com for all the news. Check out thecube.net; wikibon.com has the research. We'll be on the road as usual. theCUBE, you can follow us. UiPath Forward 5, Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson. We're out and we'll see you next time. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Welcome back to everyone, to "theCUBE's" coverage here in Seattle, Washington for Amazon Web Services Partner Marketplace Seller Conference, combining their partner network with Marketplace forming a new organization called AWS Partner Organization. This is "theCUBE" coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host. We've got great "Cube" alumni here from Zscaler, a very successful cloud company doing great work. Stelio D'Alo, senior director of cloud business development and Raveesh Chugh, VP of Public Cloud Partnerships at Zscaler. Welcome back to "theCUBE." Good to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thanks having us, John. >> So we've been doing a lot of coverage of Zscaler, what a great success story. I mean, the numbers are great. The business performance, it's in the top two, three, one, two, three in all metrics on public companies, SaaS. So you guys, check. Good job. >> Yes, thank you. >> So you guys have done a good job. Now you're here, selling through the Marketplace. You guys are a world class performing company in cloud SaaS, so you're in the front lines doing well. Now, Marketplace is a procurement front end opportunity for people to buy. Hey, self-service, buy and put things together. Sounds novel, what a great concept. Great cloud life. >> Yes. >> You guys are participating and now sellers are coming together. The merger of the public, the partner network with Marketplace. It feels like this is a second act for AWS to go to the next level. They got their training wheels done with partners. Now they're going to the next level. What do you guys think about this? >> Well, I think you're right, John. I think it is very much something that is in keeping with the way AWS does business. Very Amazonian, they're working back from the customer. What we're seeing is, our customers and in general, the market is gravitating towards purchase mechanisms and route to market that just are lower friction. So in the same way that companies are going through their digital transformations now, really modernizing the way they host applications and they reach the internet. They're also modernizing on the purchasing side, which is super exciting, because we're all motivated to help customers with that agility. >> You know, it's fun to watch and again I'm being really candid and props to you guys as a company. Now, everyone else is kind of following that. Okay, lift and shift, check, doing some things. Now they go, whoa, I can really build on this. People are building their own apps for their companies. Going to build their own stuff. They're going to use piece parts. They're going to put it together in a really scalable way. That's the new normal. Okay, so now they go okay, I'm going to just buy through the market, I get purchasing power. So you guys have been a real leader with AWS. Can you share what you guys are doing in the Marketplace? I think you guys are a nice example of how to execute the Marketplace. Take us through. What are you guys offering there? What's the contract look like? Is it multi-pronged? What's the approach? What do customers get if they go to the marketplace for Zscaler? >> Yeah, so it's been a very exciting story and been a very pleasing one for us with AWS marketplace. We see a huge growth potentially. There are more than 350,000 customers that are actively buying through Marketplace today. We expect that number to grow to around a million customers by the next, I would say, five to ten years and we want to be part of this wave. We see AWS Marketplace to be a channel where not only our resalers or our channel partners can come and transact, but also our GSIs like Accenture want to transact through this channel. We are doing a lot, in terms of bringing new customers through Marketplace, who want to not only close their deals, but close it in the next few hours. That's the beauty of Marketplace, the agility, the flexibility in terms of pricing that it provides to ISVs like us. If a customer wants to delay their payments by a couple of quarters, Marketplace supports that. If a customer wants to do monthly payments, Marketplace supports that. We are seeing lot of customers, big customers, that have signed EDPs, enterprise discount plans with AWS. These are multi-year cloud commits coming to us and saying we can retire our EDPs with AWS if we transact your solution through AWS Marketplace. So what we have done, as of today, we have all of our production services enabled through AWS Marketplace. What that means for customers, they can now retire their EDPs by buying Zscaler products through AWS Marketplace and in return get the full benefit of maximizing their EDP commits with AWS. >> So you guys are fully committed, no toe on the water, as we heard. You guys are all in. >> Absolutely, that's exactly the way to put it. We're all in, all of our solutions are available in the marketplace. As you mentioned, we're a SaaS provider. So we're one of the vendors in the Marketplace that have SaaS solutions. So unlike a lot of customers and even the market in general, associate the Marketplace for historical reasons, the way it started with a lot of monthly subscriptions and just dipping your toe in it from a consumer perspective. Whereas we're doing multimillion dollar, multi-year SaaS contracts. So the most complicated kinds of transactions you'd normally associate with enterprise software, we're doing in very low friction ways. >> On the Zscaler side going in low friction. >> Yep, yeah, that's right. >> How about the customer experience? >> So it is primarily the the customer that experiences. >> Driving it? >> Yeah, they're driving it and it's because rather than traditional methods of going through paperwork, purchase orders- >> What are some of the things that customers are saying about this, bcause I see two benefits, I'll say that. The friction, it's a channel, okay, for Zscaler. Let's be clear, but now you have a customer who's got a lot of Amazon. They're a trusted partner too. So why wouldn't they want to have one point of contact to use their purchasing power and you guys are okay with that. >> We're absolutely okay with it. The reason being, we're still doing the transaction and we can do the transaction with our... We're a channel first company, so that's another important distinction of how people tend to think of the Marketplace. We go through channel. A lot of our transactions are with traditional channel partners and you'd be surprised the kinds of, even the Telcos, carrier providers, are starting to embrace Marketplace. So from a customer perspective, it's less paperwork, less legal work. >> Yeah, I'd love to get your reaction to something, because I think this highlights to me what we've been reporting on with "theCUBE" with super cloud and other trends that are different in a good way. Taking it to the next level and that is that if you look at Zscaler, SaaS, SaaS is self-service, the scale, there's efficiencies. Marketplace first started out as a self-service catalog, a website, you know, click and choose, but now it's a different. He calls it a supply chain, like the CICD pipeline of buying software. He mentions that, there's also services. He put the Channel partners can come in. The GSIs, global system integrators can come in. So it's more than just a catalog now. It's kind of self-service procurement more than it is just a catalog of buy stuff. >> Yes, so yeah, I feel CEOs, CSOs of today should understand what Marketplace brings to the bear in terms of different kinds of services or Zscaler solutions that they can acquire through Marketplace and other ISV solutions, for that matter. I feel like we are at a point, after the pandemic, where there'll be a lot of digital exploration and companies can do more in terms of not just Marketplace, but also including the channel partners as part of deals. So you talked about channel conflict. AWS addressed this by bringing a program called CPPO in the picture, Channel Partner Private Offers. What that does is, we are not only bringing all our channel partners into deals. For renewals as well, they're the partner of record and they get paid alongside with the customer. So AWS does all the heavy lifting, in terms of disbursements of payments to us, to the channel partner, so it's a win-win situation for all. >> I mean, private offers and co-sale has been very popular. >> It has been, and that is our bread and butter in the Marketplace. Again, we do primarily three year contracts and so private offers work super well. A nice thing for us as a vendor is it provides a great amount of flexibility. Private Offer gives you a lot of optionality, in terms of how the constructs of the deal and whether or not you're working with a partner, how the partner is utilizing as well to resell to the end user. So, we've always talked about AWS giving IT agility. This gives purchasing and finance business agility. >> Yeah, and I think this comes up a lot. I just noticed this happening a lot more, where you see dedicated sessions, not just on DevOps and all the goodies of the cloud, financial strategy. >> Yeah. >> Seeing a lot more conversation around how to operationalize the business transactions in the cloud. >> Absolutely. >> This is the new, I mean it's not new, it's been thrown around, but not at a tech conference. You don't see that. So I got to ask you guys, what's the message to the CISOs and executives watching the business people about Zscaler in the Marketplace? What should they be looking at? What is the pitch for Zscaler for the Marketplace buyer? >> So I would say that we are a cloud-delivered network security service. We have been in this game for more than a decade. We have years of early head start with lots of features and functionality versus our competitors. If customers were to move into AWS Cloud, they can get rid of their next-gen firewalls and just have all the traffic routed through our Zscaler internet access and use Zscaler private access for accessing their private applications. We feel we have done everything in our capacity, in terms of enabling customers through Marketplace and will continue to participate in more features and functionality that Marketplace has to offer. We would like these customers to take advantage of their EDPs as well as their retirement and spend for the multi-commit through AWS Marketplace. Learn about what we have to offer and how we can really expedite the motion for them, if they want to procure our solutions through Marketplace >> You know, we're seeing an ability for them to get more creative, more progressive in terms of the purchasing. We're also doing, we're really excited about the ability to serve multiple markets. So we've had an immense amount of success in commercial. We also are seeing increasing amount of public sector, US federal government agencies that want to procure this way as well for the same reasons. So there's a lot of innovation going on. >> So you have the FedRAMP going on, you got all those certifications. >> Exactly right. So we are the first cloud-native solution to provide IL5 ATO, as well as FedRAMP pie and we make that all available, GSA schedule pricing through the AWS Marketplace, again through FSIs and other resellers. >> Public private partnerships have been a big factor, having that span of capability. I got to ask you about, this is a cool conversation, because now you're like, okay, I'm selling through the Marketplace. Companies themselves are changing how they operate. They don't just buy software that we used to use. So general purpose, bundled stuff. Oh yeah, I'm buying this product, because this has got a great solution and I have to get forced to use this firewall, because I bought this over here. That's not how companies are architecting and developing their businesses. It's no longer buying IT. They're building their company digitally. They have to be the application. So they're not sitting around, saying hey, can I get a solution? They're building and architecting their solution. This is kind of like the new enterprise that no one's talking about. They kind of, got to do their own work. >> Yes. >> There's no general purpose solution that maps every company. So they got to pick the best piece parts and integrate them. >> Yes and I feel- >> Do you guys agree with that? >> Yeah, I agree with that and customers don't want to go for point solutions anymore. They want to go with a platform approach. They want go with a vendor that can not only cut down their vendors from multi-dozens to maybe a dozen or less and that's where, you know, we kind of have pivoted to the platform-centric approach, where we not only help customers with Cloud Network Security, but we also help customers with Cloud Native Application Protection Platform that we just recently launched. It's going by the name of the different elements, including Cloud Security Posture Management, Cloud Identity Event Management and so we are continuously doing more and more on the configuration and vulnerability side space. So if a customer has an AWS S3 bucket that is opened it can be detected and can be remediated. So all of those proactive steps we are taking, in terms of enhancing our portfolio, but we have come a long way as a company, as a platform that we have evolved in the Marketplace. >> What's the hottest product? >> The hottest product? >> In Marketplace right now. >> Well, the fastest growing products include our digital experience products and we have new Cloud Protection. So we've got Posture and Workload Protection as well and those are the fastest growing. For AWS customers a strong affinity also for ZPA, which provides you zero trust access to your workloads on AWS. So those are all the most popular in Marketplace. >> Yeah. >> So I would like to add that we recently launched and this has been a few years, a couple of years. We launched a product called Zscaler Digital X, the ZDX. >> Mm-hmm. >> What that product does is, let's say you're making a Zoom call and your WiFi network is laggy or it's a Zoom server that's laggy. It kind of detects where is the problem and it further tells the IT department you need to fix either the server on which Zoom is running, or fix your home network. So that is the beauty of the product. So I think we are seeing massive growth with some of our new editions in the portfolio, which is a long time coming. >> Yeah and certainly a lot of growth opportunities for you guys, as you come in. Where do you see Zscaler's big growth coming from product-wise? What's the big push? Actually, this is great upside for you here. >> Yeah. >> On the go to market side. Where's the big growth for Zscaler right now? So I think we are focused as a company on zero trust architecture. We want to securely connect users to apps, apps to apps, workloads to workloads and machines to machines. We want to give customers an experience where they have direct access to the apps that's hidden from the outside world and they can securely connect to the apps in a very succinct fashion. The user experience is second to none. A lot of customers use us on the Microsoft Office 365 side, where they see a lag in connecting to Microsoft Office 365 directly. They use the IE service to securely connect. >> Yeah, latency kills. >> Microsoft Office 365. >> Latency kills, as we always say, you know and security, you got to look at the pattern, you want to see that data. >> Yeah, and emerging use cases, there is an immense amount of white space and upside for us as well in emerging use cases, like OT, 5G, IOT. >> Yeah. >> Federal government, DOD. >> Oh god, tactical edge government. >> Security at the edge, absolutely, yeah. >> Where's the big edge? What's the edge challenge right now, if you have to put your finger on the edge, because right now that's the hot area, we're watching that. It's going to be highly contested. It's not yet clear, I mean certainly hybrid is the operating model, cloud, distributing, computing, but edge has got unique things that you can't really point to on premises that's the same. It's highly dynamic, you need high bandwidth, low latency, compute at the edge. The data has to be processed right there. What's the big thing at the edge right now? >> Well, so that's probably an emerging answer. I mean, we're working with our customers, they're inventing and they're kind of finding the use cases for those edge, but one of the good things about Zscaler is that we are able to, we've got low latency at the edge. We're able to work as a computer at the edge. We work on Outpost, Snowball, Snowcone, the Snow devices. So we can be wherever our customers need us. Mobile devices, there are a lot of applications where we've got to be either on embedded devices, on tractors, providing security for those IOT devices. So we're pretty comfortable with where we are being the- >> So that's why you guys are financially doing so well, performance wise. I got to ask you though, because I think that brings up the great point. If this is why I like the Marketplace, if I'm a customer, the edge is highly dynamic. It's changing all the time. I don't want to wait to buy something. If I got my solution architects on a product, I need to know I'm going to have zero trust built in and I need to push the button on Zscaler. I don't want to wait. So how does the procurement side impact? What have you guys seen? Share your thoughts on how Marketplace is working from the procurement standpoint, because it seems to me to be fast. Is that right, or is it still slow on their side? On the buyer side, because this to me would be a benefit to developers, if we say, hey, the procurement can just go really fast. I don't want to go through a bunch of PO approvals or slow meetings. >> It can be, that manifests itself in several ways, John. It can be, for instance, somebody wants to do a POC and traditionally you could take any amount of time to get budget approval, take it through. What if you had a pre-approved cloud budget and that was spent primarily through AWS Marketplace, because it's consolidated data on your AWS invoice. The ability to purchase a POC on the Marketplace could be done literally within minutes of the decision being made to go forward with it. So that's kind of a front end, you know, early stage use case. We've got examples we didn't talk about on our recent earnings call of how we have helped customers bring in their procurement with large million dollar, multimillion dollar deals. Even when a resaler's been involved, one of our resaler partners. Being able to accelerate deals, because there's so much less legal work and traditional bureaucratic effort. >> Agility. >> That agility purchasing process has allowed our customers to pull into the quarter, or the end of month, or end of quarter for them, deals that would've otherwise not been able to be done. >> So this is a great example of where you can set policy and kind of create some guard rails around innovation and integration deals, knowing if it's something that the edge is happening, say okay, here's some budget. We approved it, or Amazon gives credits and partnership going on. Then I'd say, hey, well green light this, not to exceed a million dollars, or whatever number in their range and then let people have the freedom to execute. >> You're absolutely right, so from the purchasing side, it does give them that agility. It eliminates a lot of the processes that would push out a purchase in actual execution past when the business decision is made and quite frankly, to be honest, AWS has been very accommodative. They're a great partner. They've invested a lot in Marketplace, Marketplace programs, to help customers do the right thing and do it more quickly as well as vendors like us to help our customers make the decisions they need to. >> Rising tide, a rising tide floats all boats and you guys are a great example of an independent company. Highly successful on your own. >> Yep. >> Certainly the numbers are clear. Wall Street loves Zscaler and economics are great. >> Our customer CSAT numbers are off the scale as well. >> Customers are great and now you've got the Marketplace. This is again, a new normal. A new kind of ecosystem is developing where it's not like the old monolithic ecosystems. The value creation and extraction is happening differently now. It's kind of interesting. >> Yes and I feel we have a long way to go, but what I can tell you is that Zscaler is in this for the long run. We are seeing some of the competitors erupt in the space as well, but they have a long way to go. What we have built requires years worth of R&D and features and thousands of customer's use cases which kind of lead to something what Zscaler has come up with today. What we have is very unique and is going to continuously be an innovation in the market in the years to come. In terms of being more cloud-savvy or more cloud-focused or more cloud-native than what the market has seen so far in the form of next-gen firewalls. >> I know you guys have got a lot of AI work. We've had many conversations with Howie over there. Great stuff and really appreciate you guys participating in our super cloud event we had and we'll see more of that where we're talking about the next generation clouds, really enabling that new disruptive, open-spanning capabilities across multiple environments to run cloud-native modern applications at scale and secure. Appreciate your time to come on "theCUBE". >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks, I totally appreciate it. Zscaler, leading company here on "theCUBE" talking about their relationship with Marketplace as they continue to grow and succeed as technology goes to the next level in the cloud. Of course "theCUBE's" covering it here in Seattle. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (peaceful electronic music)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Welcome back to everyone, to "theCUBE's" coverage here in Seattle, Washington for Amazon Web Services Partner Marketplace Seller Conference, combining their partner network with Marketplace forming a new organization called AWS Partner Organization. This is "theCUBE" coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host. We've got great "Cube" alumni here from Zscaler, a very successful cloud company doing great work. Stelio D'Alo, senior director of cloud business development and Raveesh Chugh, VP of Public Cloud Partnerships at Zscaler. Welcome back to "theCUBE." Good to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thanks having us, John. >> So we've been doing a lot of coverage of Zscaler, what a great success story. I mean, the numbers are great. The business performance, it's in the top two, three, one, two, three in all metrics on public companies, SaaS. So you guys, check. Good job. >> Yes, thank you. >> So you guys have done a good job. Now you're here, selling through the Marketplace. You guys are a world class performing company in cloud SaaS, so you're in the front lines doing well. Now, Marketplace is a procurement front end opportunity for people to buy. Hey, self-service, buy and put things together. Sounds novel, what a great concept. Great cloud life. >> Yes. >> You guys are participating and now sellers are coming together. The merger of the public, the partner network with Marketplace. It feels like this is a second act for AWS to go to the next level. They got their training wheels done with partners. Now they're going to the next level. What do you guys think about this? >> Well, I think you're right, John. I think it is very much something that is in keeping with the way AWS does business. Very Amazonian, they're working back from the customer. What we're seeing is, our customers and in general, the market is gravitating towards purchase mechanisms and route to market that just are lower friction. So in the same way that companies are going through their digital transformations now, really modernizing the way they host applications and they reach the internet. They're also modernizing on the purchasing side, which is super exciting, because we're all motivated to help customers with that agility. >> You know, it's fun to watch and again I'm being really candid and props to you guys as a company. Now, everyone else is kind of following that. Okay, lift and shift, check, doing some things. Now they go, whoa, I can really build on this. People are building their own apps for their companies. Going to build their own stuff. They're going to use piece parts. They're going to put it together in a really scalable way. That's the new normal. Okay, so now they go okay, I'm going to just buy through the market, I get purchasing power. So you guys have been a real leader with AWS. Can you share what you guys are doing in the Marketplace? I think you guys are a nice example of how to execute the Marketplace. Take us through. What are you guys offering there? What's the contract look like? Is it multi-pronged? What's the approach? What do customers get if they go to the marketplace for Zscaler? >> Yeah, so it's been a very exciting story and been a very pleasing one for us with AWS marketplace. We see a huge growth potentially. There are more than 350,000 customers that are actively buying through Marketplace today. We expect that number to grow to around a million customers by the next, I would say, five to ten years and we want to be part of this wave. We see AWS Marketplace to be a channel where not only our resalers or our channel partners can come and transact, but also our GSIs like Accenture want to transact through this channel. We are doing a lot, in terms of bringing new customers through Marketplace, who want to not only close their deals, but close it in the next few hours. That's the beauty of Marketplace, the agility, the flexibility in terms of pricing that it provides to ISVs like us. If a customer wants to delay their payments by a couple of quarters, Marketplace supports that. If a customer wants to do monthly payments, Marketplace supports that. We are seeing lot of customers, big customers, that have signed EDPs, enterprise discount plans with AWS. These are multi-year cloud commits coming to us and saying we can retire our EDPs with AWS if we transact your solution through AWS Marketplace. So what we have done, as of today, we have all of our production services enabled through AWS Marketplace. What that means for customers, they can now retire their EDPs by buying Zscaler products through AWS Marketplace and in return get the full benefit of maximizing their EDP commits with AWS. >> So you guys are fully committed, no toe on the water, as we heard. You guys are all in. >> Absolutely, that's exactly the way to put it. We're all in, all of our solutions are available in the marketplace. As you mentioned, we're a SaaS provider. So we're one of the vendors in the Marketplace that have SaaS solutions. So unlike a lot of customers and even the market in general, associate the Marketplace for historical reasons, the way it started with a lot of monthly subscriptions and just dipping your toe in it from a consumer perspective. Whereas we're doing multimillion dollar, multi-year SaaS contracts. So the most complicated kinds of transactions you'd normally associate with enterprise software, we're doing in very low friction ways. >> On the Zscaler side going in low friction. >> Yep, yeah, that's right. >> How about the customer experience? >> So it is primarily the the customer that experiences. >> Driving it? >> Yeah, they're driving it and it's because rather than traditional methods of going through paperwork, purchase orders- >> What are some of the things that customers are saying about this, bcause I see two benefits, I'll say that. The friction, it's a channel, okay, for Zscaler. Let's be clear, but now you have a customer who's got a lot of Amazon. They're a trusted partner too. So why wouldn't they want to have one point of contact to use their purchasing power and you guys are okay with that. >> We're absolutely okay with it. The reason being, we're still doing the transaction and we can do the transaction with our... We're a channel first company, so that's another important distinction of how people tend to think of the Marketplace. We go through channel. A lot of our transactions are with traditional channel partners and you'd be surprised the kinds of, even the Telcos, carrier providers, are starting to embrace Marketplace. So from a customer perspective, it's less paperwork, less legal work. >> Yeah, I'd love to get your reaction to something, because I think this highlights to me what we've been reporting on with "theCUBE" with super cloud and other trends that are different in a good way. Taking it to the next level and that is that if you look at Zscaler, SaaS, SaaS is self-service, the scale, there's efficiencies. Marketplace first started out as a self-service catalog, a website, you know, click and choose, but now it's a different. He calls it a supply chain, like the CICD pipeline of buying software. He mentions that, there's also services. He put the Channel partners can come in. The GSIs, global system integrators can come in. So it's more than just a catalog now. It's kind of self-service procurement more than it is just a catalog of buy stuff. >> Yes, so yeah, I feel CEOs, CSOs of today should understand what Marketplace brings to the bear in terms of different kinds of services or Zscaler solutions that they can acquire through Marketplace and other ISV solutions, for that matter. I feel like we are at a point, after the pandemic, where there'll be a lot of digital exploration and companies can do more in terms of not just Marketplace, but also including the channel partners as part of deals. So you talked about channel conflict. AWS addressed this by bringing a program called CPPO in the picture, Channel Partner Private Offers. What that does is, we are not only bringing all our channel partners into deals. For renewals as well, they're the partner of record and they get paid alongside with the customer. So AWS does all the heavy lifting, in terms of disbursements of payments to us, to the channel partner, so it's a win-win situation for all. >> I mean, private offers and co-sale has been very popular. >> It has been, and that is our bread and butter in the Marketplace. Again, we do primarily three year contracts and so private offers work super well. A nice thing for us as a vendor is it provides a great amount of flexibility. Private Offer gives you a lot of optionality, in terms of how the constructs of the deal and whether or not you're working with a partner, how the partner is utilizing as well to resell to the end user. So, we've always talked about AWS giving IT agility. This gives purchasing and finance business agility. >> Yeah, and I think this comes up a lot. I just noticed this happening a lot more, where you see dedicated sessions, not just on DevOps and all the goodies of the cloud, financial strategy. >> Yeah. >> Seeing a lot more conversation around how to operationalize the business transactions in the cloud. >> Absolutely. >> This is the new, I mean it's not new, it's been thrown around, but not at a tech conference. You don't see that. So I got to ask you guys, what's the message to the CISOs and executives watching the business people about Zscaler in the Marketplace? What should they be looking at? What is the pitch for Zscaler for the Marketplace buyer? >> So I would say that we are a cloud-delivered network security service. We have been in this game for more than a decade. We have years of early head start with lots of features and functionality versus our competitors. If customers were to move into AWS Cloud, they can get rid of their next-gen firewalls and just have all the traffic routed through our Zscaler internet access and use Zscaler private access for accessing their private applications. We feel we have done everything in our capacity, in terms of enabling customers through Marketplace and will continue to participate in more features and functionality that Marketplace has to offer. We would like these customers to take advantage of their EDPs as well as their retirement and spend for the multi-commit through AWS Marketplace. Learn about what we have to offer and how we can really expedite the motion for them, if they want to procure our solutions through Marketplace >> You know, we're seeing an ability for them to get more creative, more progressive in terms of the purchasing. We're also doing, we're really excited about the ability to serve multiple markets. So we've had an immense amount of success in commercial. We also are seeing increasing amount of public sector, US federal government agencies that want to procure this way as well for the same reasons. So there's a lot of innovation going on. >> So you have the FedRAMP going on, you got all those certifications. >> Exactly right. So we are the first cloud-native solution to provide IL5 ATO, as well as FedRAMP pie and we make that all available, GSA schedule pricing through the AWS Marketplace, again through FSIs and other resellers. >> Public private partnerships have been a big factor, having that span of capability. I got to ask you about, this is a cool conversation, because now you're like, okay, I'm selling through the Marketplace. Companies themselves are changing how they operate. They don't just buy software that we used to use. So general purpose, bundled stuff. Oh yeah, I'm buying this product, because this has got a great solution and I have to get forced to use this firewall, because I bought this over here. That's not how companies are architecting and developing their businesses. It's no longer buying IT. They're building their company digitally. They have to be the application. So they're not sitting around, saying hey, can I get a solution? They're building and architecting their solution. This is kind of like the new enterprise that no one's talking about. They kind of, got to do their own work. >> Yes. >> There's no general purpose solution that maps every company. So they got to pick the best piece parts and integrate them. >> Yes and I feel- >> Do you guys agree with that? >> Yeah, I agree with that and customers don't want to go for point solutions anymore. They want to go with a platform approach. They want go with a vendor that can not only cut down their vendors from multi-dozens to maybe a dozen or less and that's where, you know, we kind of have pivoted to the platform-centric approach, where we not only help customers with Cloud Network Security, but we also help customers with Cloud Native Application Protection Platform that we just recently launched. It's going by the name of the different elements, including Cloud Security Posture Management, Cloud Identity Event Management and so we are continuously doing more and more on the configuration and vulnerability side space. So if a customer has an AWS S3 bucket that is opened it can be detected and can be remediated. So all of those proactive steps we are taking, in terms of enhancing our portfolio, but we have come a long way as a company, as a platform that we have evolved in the Marketplace. >> What's the hottest product? >> The hottest product? >> In Marketplace right now. >> Well, the fastest growing products include our digital experience products and we have new Cloud Protection. So we've got Posture and Workload Protection as well and those are the fastest growing. For AWS customers a strong affinity also for ZPA, which provides you zero trust access to your workloads on AWS. So those are all the most popular in Marketplace. >> Yeah. >> So I would like to add that we recently launched and this has been a few years, a couple of years. We launched a product called Zscaler Digital X, the ZDX. >> Mm-hmm. >> What that product does is, let's say you're making a Zoom call and your WiFi network is laggy or it's a Zoom server that's laggy. It kind of detects where is the problem and it further tells the IT department you need to fix either the server on which Zoom is running, or fix your home network. So that is the beauty of the product. So I think we are seeing massive growth with some of our new editions in the portfolio, which is a long time coming. >> Yeah and certainly a lot of growth opportunities for you guys, as you come in. Where do you see Zscaler's big growth coming from product-wise? What's the big push? Actually, this is great upside for you here. >> Yeah. >> On the go to market side. Where's the big growth for Zscaler right now? So I think we are focused as a company on zero trust architecture. We want to securely connect users to apps, apps to apps, workloads to workloads and machines to machines. We want to give customers an experience where they have direct access to the apps that's hidden from the outside world and they can securely connect to the apps in a very succinct fashion. The user experience is second to none. A lot of customers use us on the Microsoft Office 365 side, where they see a lag in connecting to Microsoft Office 365 directly. They use the IE service to securely connect. >> Yeah, latency kills. >> Microsoft Office 365. >> Latency kills, as we always say, you know and security, you got to look at the pattern, you want to see that data. >> Yeah, and emerging use cases, there is an immense amount of white space and upside for us as well in emerging use cases, like OT, 5G, IOT. >> Yeah. >> Federal government, DOD. >> Oh god, tactical edge government. >> Security at the edge, absolutely, yeah. >> Where's the big edge? What's the edge challenge right now, if you have to put your finger on the edge, because right now that's the hot area, we're watching that. It's going to be highly contested. It's not yet clear, I mean certainly hybrid is the operating model, cloud, distributing, computing, but edge has got unique things that you can't really point to on premises that's the same. It's highly dynamic, you need high bandwidth, low latency, compute at the edge. The data has to be processed right there. What's the big thing at the edge right now? >> Well, so that's probably an emerging answer. I mean, we're working with our customers, they're inventing and they're kind of finding the use cases for those edge, but one of the good things about Zscaler is that we are able to, we've got low latency at the edge. We're able to work as a computer at the edge. We work on Outpost, Snowball, Snowcone, the Snow devices. So we can be wherever our customers need us. Mobile devices, there are a lot of applications where we've got to be either on embedded devices, on tractors, providing security for those IOT devices. So we're pretty comfortable with where we are being the- >> So that's why you guys are financially doing so well, performance wise. I got to ask you though, because I think that brings up the great point. If this is why I like the Marketplace, if I'm a customer, the edge is highly dynamic. It's changing all the time. I don't want to wait to buy something. If I got my solution architects on a product, I need to know I'm going to have zero trust built in and I need to push the button on Zscaler. I don't want to wait. So how does the procurement side impact? What have you guys seen? Share your thoughts on how Marketplace is working from the procurement standpoint, because it seems to me to be fast. Is that right, or is it still slow on their side? On the buyer side, because this to me would be a benefit to developers, if we say, hey, the procurement can just go really fast. I don't want to go through a bunch of PO approvals or slow meetings. >> It can be, that manifests itself in several ways, John. It can be, for instance, somebody wants to do a POC and traditionally you could take any amount of time to get budget approval, take it through. What if you had a pre-approved cloud budget and that was spent primarily through AWS Marketplace, because it's consolidated data on your AWS invoice. The ability to purchase a POC on the Marketplace could be done literally within minutes of the decision being made to go forward with it. So that's kind of a front end, you know, early stage use case. We've got examples we didn't talk about on our recent earnings call of how we have helped customers bring in their procurement with large million dollar, multimillion dollar deals. Even when a resaler's been involved, one of our resaler partners. Being able to accelerate deals, because there's so much less legal work and traditional bureaucratic effort. >> Agility. >> That agility purchasing process has allowed our customers to pull into the quarter, or the end of month, or end of quarter for them, deals that would've otherwise not been able to be done. >> So this is a great example of where you can set policy and kind of create some guard rails around innovation and integration deals, knowing if it's something that the edge is happening, say okay, here's some budget. We approved it, or Amazon gives credits and partnership going on. Then I'd say, hey, well green light this, not to exceed a million dollars, or whatever number in their range and then let people have the freedom to execute. >> You're absolutely right, so from the purchasing side, it does give them that agility. It eliminates a lot of the processes that would push out a purchase in actual execution past when the business decision is made and quite frankly, to be honest, AWS has been very accommodative. They're a great partner. They've invested a lot in Marketplace, Marketplace programs, to help customers do the right thing and do it more quickly as well as vendors like us to help our customers make the decisions they need to. >> Rising tide, a rising tide floats all boats and you guys are a great example of an independent company. Highly successful on your own. >> Yep. >> Certainly the numbers are clear. Wall Street loves Zscaler and economics are great. >> Our customer CSAT numbers are off the scale as well. >> Customers are great and now you've got the Marketplace. This is again, a new normal. A new kind of ecosystem is developing where it's not like the old monolithic ecosystems. The value creation and extraction is happening differently now. It's kind of interesting. >> Yes and I feel we have a long way to go, but what I can tell you is that Zscaler is in this for the long run. We are seeing some of the competitors erupt in the space as well, but they have a long way to go. What we have built requires years worth of R&D and features and thousands of customer's use cases which kind of lead to something what Zscaler has come up with today. What we have is very unique and is going to continuously be an innovation in the market in the years to come. In terms of being more cloud-savvy or more cloud-focused or more cloud-native than what the market has seen so far in the form of next-gen firewalls. >> I know you guys have got a lot of AI work. We've had many conversations with Howie over there. Great stuff and really appreciate you guys participating in our super cloud event we had and we'll see more of that where we're talking about the next generation clouds, really enabling that new disruptive, open-spanning capabilities across multiple environments to run cloud-native modern applications at scale and secure. Appreciate your time to come on "theCUBE". >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks, I totally appreciate it. Zscaler, leading company here on "theCUBE" talking about their relationship with Marketplace as they continue to grow and succeed as technology goes to the next level in the cloud. Of course "theCUBE's" covering it here in Seattle. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (peaceful electronic music)

[Music] we're here with steve melanie the president and ceo of aviatrix steve john and i started this whole super cloud narrative as a way to describe that something different is happening specifically within the aws ecosystem but more broadly across the cloud landscape at re invent last year you and i spoke on the cube and you said one of your investors guy named nick sterile said to you at the show it's happening steve welcome to the cube what's happening what did nick mean by that yeah we were we were just getting ready to go on and i leaned over and he looked at me and he whispered in my ear and said it's happening he said it just like that and and you're right it was it was kind of funny and we talked about that and what he means is enterprises you know this is why i went to aviatrix three and a half years ago is the the the flip switch for enterprises and they said now we mean it we've been talking about cloud for 12 years or 15 years now we mean it we are digitally transforming we are the movement to cloud is going to make that happen and oh by the way of course it's multi-cloud because enterprises put workloads where they run best where they have the best security the best performance the best cost and the business is driving this transformation and they decide that i'm going to use that azure and another business unit decides i'm using google and another one says i'm using aws and so of course it's going to be multi-cloud and i think we're going to start seeing actual multi-cloud applications once that infrastructure and you know you call it the super cloud once that starts getting built developers are going to go wait a minute so i can pick this feature from google and and that service from azure and that service from aws easily without any hesitation once that happens they're going to start really developing today there aren't multi-cloud applications but but but the what's happening is the enterprise embracing public cloud they're using multiple clouds many of them call it four plus one right they're four different public clouds plus what they have on prem that to me is what's happening i am now re-architecting my enterprise infrastructure from applications all the way down to the network and i am embracing uh uh public clouds in that in that process so i mean you nailed us so many things in there i mean digitally transforming to me this is the digital transformation it's leveraging embracing the capex from the hyperscalers now you know people in the industry we're not trying to do what gartner does and create a new category per se but we do use super cloud as a metaphor so i don't expect necessarily vendors to use it or not but but i and i get that but when you talk about multi-cloud what specifically is new in other words what you touched on some of this stuff what constitutes a modern multi-cloud or what we would call a super cloud you know network architecture what are the salient attributes yeah i would say today so two years ago there was no such thing even as multiple clouds it was aws let's be clear everything was aws and for people to even back then two three years ago to even envision that there would be anything else other than aws people couldn't even envision now people kind of go yeah that was done we now see that we're going to use multiple clouds we're going to use azure we're going to use gcp and we're going to use this and we'll guess we're going to use oracle and even ollie cloud we're going to use five or four or five different public clouds what's but that would be i think of as multiple clouds but from an i.t perspective they need to be able to support all those clouds in these shared services and what they're going to do i actually think we're starting and you may have hit on something in the super cloud or i know you've talked about metacloud that that's got bad connotations for facebook i know everybody's like no please not another meta thing but there is that concept of this abstracted layer above you know writing we call it you know altitude you know aviatrix everything's you know riding above the clouds right that that that common abstracted layer this application infrastructure that runs the application that rides above all the different public clouds and i think once we do that you know dave what's going to happen is i think really what's going to happen is you're going to start seeing these these multi-cloud applications which to my knowledge really doesn't exist today i i think that might be the next phase and in order for that to happen you have to have all of the infrastructure be multi-cloud meaning not just networking and network security from from from aviation but you need snowflake you need hashtag you need datadog you need all the new horsemen of the new multi-cloud which isn't the old guys right this is all new people aviatrix dashie snowflake datadonk you name it that are going to be able to deliver all this multi-cloud cross-cloud wherever you want to talk about it such that application development and deployment can happen seamlessly and frictionlessly across multi-cloud once that happens the entire stack then you're going to start seeing and that to me starts enabling this what you guys call you know the super cloud the meta cloud the whatever cloud but that then rides above all the individual clouds that that's going to start getting a whole new realm of application development in my mind so we've got some work to do to basic do some basic blocking and tackling then the application developers can really build on top of that so so some of the skeptics on on this topic would ask how do you envision this changing networking versus it just being a bolt-on to existing fossilized network infrastructure in other words yeah how do we get from point a where we are today to point b you know so-called networking so we can actually build those uh super cloud applications yeah so you know what it is it's interesting because it goes back to my background at nasira and what we used to talk about then it isn't about managing complexity it's about creating simplicity it's very different and when you put the intelligence into the software right this is what computer science is all about we're turning networking into computer science when you create an abstraction layer we are not just an overlay day we dave we actually integrate in with the native services of the cloud we are not managing the complexity of these multi-clouds we are using it you know controlling the native constructs adding our own intelligence to this and then creating what is basically simplification for the people above it so we're simplifying things not just managing the complexity that's how you get the agility for cloud that's how you get to be able to do this because if all you are is a veneer on top of complexity you're just hiding complexity you're not creating simplicity and what happens is it actually probably gets more complex because if all you're doing is hiding the bad stuff you're not getting rid of it i love that i love that we're doing that at the networking and network security layer you're going to see snowflake and datadog and other people do it at their layers you know i reminds of a conversation i had with cause the one of the founders of pure storage who they're all about simplicity this idea of of creating simplicity versus like you said just creating you know a way to handle the complexity compare you know pure storage with the sort of old legacy emc storage devices and that's what you had you had you you had emc managing the complexity at pure storage disrupting by creating simplicity so what are the challenges of creating that simplicity and delivering that seamless experience that continuous experience across cloud is it engineering is it mindset is it culture is it technology what is it well i mean look at look you see the recession that we're we're hitting you see there is a significant problem that we have in the general it industry right now and it's called skills gap skills shortage it's two problems we don't have enough people and we don't have enough people that know cloud and the reason is everybody on the same tuesday three and a half years ago all said now i mean i'm moving the cloud we're a technology company we don't make sneakers anymore we don't make beer we're a technology company and we're going to digitally transform and we're going to move the cloud guess what three years ago there were probably seven people that understood cloud now everyone on the same tuesday morning all decides to try to hire those same seven people there's just not enough people around so you're going to need software and you're going to have to put the intelligence into the software because you're not going to be able to a hire those people and b even if you hire them you can't keep them as soon as they learn cloud guess what happens dave they're off they're on to the next job at the next highest bidder so how are you going to handle that you have to have software that intelligent software that is going to simplify things for you we have people managing massive multi-cloud network and network security people with two people on-prem they got hundreds right you it's not about taking that complex model that it had on-prem and jam it into the cloud you don't have the people to do it and you're not going to get the people to do it you know i want to ask you yeah so i want to ask you about the go to market challenges because we our industry gets a bad rap for for selling we're really good at selling and then but but actually delivering what we sell sometimes we fall down there so so i love tom sweet as cfo of of dell he talks about the the say do ratio uh how that's actually got to be low but you know but you know what i mean uh the math the fraction guy right so but do do what you say you're going to do are there specific go to market challenges related to this type of cross cloud selling where you can set you have to set the customer's expectations because what you're describing is not going to happen overnight it's a journey but how do you handle that go to market challenge in terms of setting those customer expectations and actually delivering what you say you can sell and selling enough to actually have a successful business um so i think everything's outside in so so i think the the what really is exciting to me about this cloud computing model that with the transformation that we're going through is it is business-led and it is led by the ceo and it is led by the business units they run the business it is all about agility is about enabling my developers and it's all about driving the business market share revenue all these kind of things you know the last transformation of mainframe to on to pc client server was led by technologists it wasn't led by the business and it was it was really hard to tie that to the business so then so this is great because we can look at the initiatives you can look at the the the initiatives of the ceo in your company and now as an i.t person you can tie to that and they're going to have two or three or four initiatives and you can actually map it to that so that's where we start is let's look at what the c your ceo cares about he cares about this he cares about that he cares about driving revenue he cares about agility of getting new applications out to the market sooner to get more revenue there's this and oh by the way transfer made transforming your infrastructure to the cloud is the number one thing so it's all about agility so guess what you need to be able to respond to that immediately because tomorrow the business is going to go to you and say great news dave we're moving to gcp wait what no one told me about that well we're telling you now and uh you need to be ready tomorrow and if you're sitting there and you're tied to the low-level constructs and all you know is aws well i don't have those people and even if i have even if i could hire them i'm not allowed to because i can't hire anybody how am i going to respond to the business and the needs of the business now all of a sudden i'm in the way as the infrastructure team of the ceo's goals because we decided we need to we need to get the ai capabilities of gcp and we're moving to gcp or i just did a big deal with gcp and uh miraculously they said i need to run on gcp right i did a big deal with google right guess what comes along with that oh you're moving to gcp great the business says we're moving to gcp and the i.t guys are sitting there going well no one told me well sorry so it's all about agility it's all about that and the and and complexity is the killer to agility this is all about business they're going to come to you and say we just acquired a company we need to integrate them oh but they got they use the same ip address range as we do there's overlapping ips and oh by the way they're in a different cloud how do i do that no one cares the business doesn't care they're like me they're very impatient get it done or we'll find someone who will yeah so you've got to get ahead of that and so when we in terms of when we talk to customers that's what we do this isn't just about defenses this is about making you get promoted making you do good for your company such that you can respond to that and maybe even enable the company to go do that like we're going to enable people to do true multi-cloud applications because the infrastructure has to come first right you you put the foundation in your big skyscraper like the crew behind me and the plumbing before you start building the floors right so infrastructure comes first then comes then comes the applications yeah so you know again some people call it super cloud like us multi-cloud 2.0 but the the real mega trend that i see steve and i'd love you to bottom line this and bring us home is you know andreessen's all companies are software companies it's like version 2.0 of that and the applications that are going to be built on that top this tie into the digital transformations it was goldman it's jpmc it's walmart it's capital one b of a oracle's acquisition of cerner is going to be really interesting to see these super clouds form within industries bringing their data their tooling and their specific software expertise built on top of that hyperscale infrastructure and infrastructure for companies like yours so bottom line is stephen steve what's the future of cloud how do you see it the future is n plus one so two years ago people had one plus one i had what i had on prem and then what i had in aws they today if you talk to an enterprise they'll have what they call four plus one right which is four public clouds plus what i have on prem it's going to n plus one right and what's going to happen is exactly what you said you're going to have industry clouds you're going to the the multi-cloud aspect of it is going to end it's not going to go from four to one some people think oh it's not going to be four it's going down to one or two bs it's going to end it's going to a lot as they start extending to the edge and they start integrating out to the to the branch offices it's not going to be about that branch offer so that edge iot or edge computing or data centers or campus connecting into the cloud it's going to be the other way around the cloud is going to extend to those areas and you're going to have ai clouds you know whether it's you know ultra beauty who's a customer of ours who's starting to roll out ar and vr out to their retail stores to show you know makeup and this and the other thing these are new applications transformations are always driven by new applications that don't exist this isn't about lift and shift of the existing applications the 10x tam in this market is going to becomes all the new things that's where the explosion is going to happen and you're going to see end level those those branch offices are going to look like clouds and they're going to need to be stitched together and treated like one infrastructure so it's going to go from four plus one to n plus one and that's what you're gonna want as an enterprise i'm gonna want n clouds so we're gonna see an explosion it's not going to be four it's going to be end now at the end underneath all of that will be leveraging and effectively commoditizing the existing csps yeah and but you're going to have an explosion of people commoditizing them and just like the goldmans and the industry clubs are going to do they're going to build their own eye as well right no way no way it's that's what's going to happen it's going to be a 10x on what we saw last decade with sas it's all going to happen around clouds and supercloud steve malini thanks so much for coming back in the cube and helping us sort of formulate this thinking i mean it really started with with with you and myself and john and nick and really trying to think this through and watching this unfold before our eyes so great to have you back thank you yeah it's fun thanks for having me are you welcome but keep it right there for more action from super cloud 22 be right back [Music] you

(bright music) >> "Supermetafragilisticexpialadotious." What's in a name? In an homage to the inimitable Charles Fitzgerald, we've chosen this title for today's session because of all the buzz surrounding "supercloud," a term that we introduced last year to signify a major architectural trend and shift that's occurring in the technology industry. Since that time, we've published numerous videos and articles on the topic, and on August 9th, kicked off "Supercloud22," an open industry event designed to advance the supercloud conversation, gathering input from more than 30 experienced technologists and business leaders in "The Cube" and broader technology community. We're talking about individuals like Benoit Dageville, Kit Colbert, Ali Ghodsi, Mohit Aron, David McJannet, and dozens of other experts. And today, we're pleased to welcome David Linthicum, who's a Chief Strategy Officer of Cloud Services at Deloitte Consulting. David is a technology visionary, a technical CTO. He's an author and a frequently sought after keynote speaker at high profile conferences like "VMware Explore" next week. David Linthicum, welcome back to "The Cube." Good to see you again. >> Oh, it's great to be here. Thanks for the invitation. Thanks for having me. >> Yeah, you're very welcome. Okay, so this topic of supercloud, what you call metacloud, has created a lot of interest. VMware calls it cross-cloud services, Snowflake calls it their data cloud, there's a lot of different names, but recently, you published a piece in "InfoWorld" where you said the following. "I really don't care what we call it, "and I really don't care if I put "my own buzzword into the mix. "However, this does not change the fact "that metacloud is perhaps the most important "architectural evolution occurring right now, "and we need to get this right out of the gate. "If we do that, who cares what it's named?" So very cool. And you also mentioned in a recent article that you don't like to put out new terms out in the wild without defining them. So what is a metacloud, or what we call supercloud? What's your definition? >> Yeah, and again, I don't care what people call it. The reality is it's the ability to have a layer of cross-cloud services. It sits above existing public cloud providers. So the idea here is that instead of building different security systems, different governance systems, different operational systems in each specific cloud provider, using whatever native features they provide, we're trying to do that in a cross-cloud way. So in other words, we're pushing out data integration, security, all these other things that we have to take care of as part of deploying a particular cloud provider. And in a multicloud scenario, we're building those in and between the clouds. And so we've been tracking this for about five years. We understood that multicloud is not necessarily about the particular public cloud providers, it's about things that you build in and between the clouds. >> Got it, okay. So I want to come back to that, to the definition, but I want to tie us to the so-called multicloud. You guys did a survey recently. We've said that multicloud was mostly a symptom of multi-vendor, Shadow Cloud, M&A, and only recently has become a strategic imperative. Now, Deloitte published a survey recently entitled "Closing the Cloud Strategy, Technology, Innovation Gap," and I'd like to explore that a little bit. And so in that survey, you showed data. What I liked about it is you went beyond what we all know, right? The old, "Our research shows that on average, "X number of clouds are used at an individual company." I mean, you had that too, but you really went deeper. You identified why companies are using multiple clouds, and you developed different categories of practitioners across 500 survey respondents. But the reasons were very clear for "why multicloud," as this becomes more strategic. Service choice scale, negotiating leverage, improved business resiliency, minimizing lock-in, interoperability of data, et cetera. So my question to you, David, is what's the problem supercloud or metacloud solves, and what's different from multicloud? >> That's a great question. The reality is that if we're... Well, supercloud or metacloud, whatever, is really something that exists above a multicloud, but I kind of view them as the same thing. It's an architectural pattern. We can name it anything. But the reality is that if we're moving to these multicloud environments, we're doing so to leverage best of breed things. In other words, best of breed technology to provide the innovators within the company to take the business to the next level, and we determine that in the survey. And so if we're looking at what a multicloud provides, it's the ability to provide different choices of different services or piece parts that allows us to build anything that we need to do. And so what we found in the survey and what we found in just practice in dealing with our clients is that ultimately, the value of cloud computing is going to be the innovation aspects. In other words, the ability to take the company to the next level from being more innovative and more disruptive in the marketplace that they're in. And the only way to do that, instead of basically leveraging the services of a particular walled garden of a single public cloud provider, is to cast a wider net and get out and leverage all kinds of services to make these happen. So if you think about that, that's basically how multicloud has evolved. In other words, it wasn't planned. They didn't say, "We're going to go do a multicloud." It was different developers and innovators in the company that went off and leveraged these cloud services, sometimes with the consent of IT leadership, sometimes not. And now we have these multitudes of different services that we're leveraging. And so many of these enterprises are going from 1000 to, say, 3000 services under management. That creates a complexity problem. We have a problem of heterogeneity, different platforms, different tools, different services, different AI technology, database technology, things like that. So the metacloud, or the supercloud, or whatever you want to call it, is the ability to deal with that complexity on the complexity's terms. And so instead of building all these various things that we have to do individually in each of the cloud providers, we're trying to do so within a cross-cloud service layer. We're trying to create this layer of technology, which removes us from dealing with the complexity of the underlying multicloud services and makes it manageable. Because right now, I think we're getting to a point of complexity we just can't operate it at the budgetary limits that we are right now. We can't keep the number of skills around, the number of operators around, to keep these things going. We're going to have to get creative in terms of how we manage these things, how we manage a multicloud. And that's where the supercloud, metacloud, whatever they want to call it, comes that. >> Yeah, and as John Furrier likes to say, in IT, we tend to solve complexity with more complexity, and that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about simplifying, and you talked about the abstraction layer, and then it sounds like I'm inferring more. There's value that's added on top of that. And then you also said the hyperscalers are in a walled garden. So I've been asked, why aren't the hyperscalers superclouds? And I've said, essentially, they want to put your data into their cloud and keep it there. Now, that doesn't mean they won't eventually get into that. We've seen examples a little bit, Outposts, Anthos, Azure Arc, but the hyperscalers really aren't building superclouds or metaclouds, at least today, are they? >> No, they're not. And I always have the predictions for every major cloud conference that this is the conference that the hyperscaler is going to figure out some sort of a multicloud across-cloud strategy. In other words, building services that are able to operate across clouds. That really has never happened. It has happened in dribs and drabs, and you just mentioned a few examples of that, but the ability to own the space, to understand that we're not going to be the center of the universe in how people are going to leverage it, is going to be multiple things, including legacy systems and other cloud providers, and even industry clouds that are emerging these days, and SaaS providers, and all these things. So we're going to assist you in dealing with complexity, and we're going to provide the core services of being there. That hasn't happened yet. And they may be worried about conflicting their market, and the messaging is a bit different, even actively pushing back on the concept of multicloud, but the reality is the market's going to take them there. So in other words, if enough of their customers are asking for this and asking that they take the lead in building these cross-cloud technologies, even if they're participating in the stack and not being the stack, it's too compelling of a market that it's not going to drag a lot of the existing public cloud providers there. >> Well, it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out, David, because I never say never when it comes to a company like AWS, and we've seen how fast they move. And at the same time, they don't want to be commoditized. There's the layer underneath all this infrastructure, and they got this ecosystem that's adding all this tremendous value. But I want to ask you, what are the essential elements of supercloud, coming back to the definition, if you will, and what's different about metacloud, as you call it, from plain old SaaS or PaaS? What are the key elements there? >> Well, the key elements would be holistic management of all of the IT infrastructure. So even though it's sitting above a multicloud, I view metacloud, supercloud as the ability to also manage your existing legacy systems, your existing security stack, your existing network operations, basically everything that exists under the purview of IT. If you think about it, we're moving our infrastructure into the clouds, and we're probably going to hit a saturation point of about 70%. And really, if the supercloud, metacloud, which is going to be expensive to build for most of the enterprises, it needs to support these things holistically. So it needs to have all the services, that is going to be shareable across the different providers, and also existing legacy systems, and also edge computing, and IoT, and all these very diverse systems that we're building there right now. So if complexity is a core challenge to operate these things at scale and the ability to secure these things at scale, we have to have commonality in terms of security architecture and technology, commonality in terms of our directory services, commonality in terms of network operations, commonality in term of cloud operations, commonality in terms of FinOps. All these things should exist in some holistic cross-cloud layer that sits above all this complexity. And you pointed out something very profound. In other words, that is going to mean that we're hiding a lot of the existing cloud providers in terms of their interfaces and dashboards and things like that that we're dealing with today, their APIs. But the reality is that if we're able to manage these things at scale, the public cloud providers are going to benefit greatly from that. They're going to sell more services because people are going to find they're able to leverage them easier. And so in other words, if we're removing the complexity wall, which many in the industry are calling it right now, then suddenly we're moving from, say, the 25 to 30% migrated in the cloud, which most enterprises are today, to 50, 60, 70%. And we're able to do this at scale, and we're doing it at scale because we're providing some architectural optimization through the supercloud, metacloud layer. >> Okay, thanks for that. David, I just want to tap your CTO brain for a minute. At "Supercloud22," we came up with these three deployment models. Kit Colbert put forth the idea that one model would be your control planes running in one cloud, let's say AWS, but it interacts with and can manage and deploy on other clouds, the Kubernetes Cluster Management System. The second one, Mohit Aron from Cohesity laid out, where you instantiate the stack on different clouds and different cloud regions, and then you create a layer, a common interface across those. And then Snowflake was the third deployment model where it's a single global instance, it's one instantiation, and basically building out their own cloud across these regions. Help us parse through that. Do those seem like reasonable deployment models to you? Do you have any thoughts on that? >> Yeah, I mean, that's a distributed computing trick we've been doing, which is, in essence, an agent of the supercloud that's carrying out some of the cloud native functions on that particular cloud, but is, in essence, a slave to the metacloud, or the supercloud, whatever, that's able to run across the various cloud providers. In other words, when it wants to access a service, it may not go directly to that service. It goes directly to the control plane, and that control plane is responsible... Very much like Kubernetes and Docker works, that control plane is responsible for reaching out and leveraging those native services. I think that that's thinking that's a step in the right direction. I think these things unto themselves, at least initially, are going to be a very complex array of technology. Even though we're trying to remove complexity, the supercloud unto itself, in terms of the ability to build this thing that's able to operate at scale across-cloud, is going to be a collection of many different technologies that are interfacing with the public cloud providers in different ways. And so we can start putting these meta architectures together, and I certainly have written and spoke about this for years, but initially, this is going to be something that may escape the detail or the holistic nature of these meta architectures that people are floating around right now. >> Yeah, so I want to stay on this, because anytime I get a CTO brain, I like to... I'm not an engineer, but I've been around a long time, so I know a lot of buzzwords and have absorbed a lot over the years, but so you take those, the second two models, the Mohit instantiate on each cloud and each cloud region versus the Snowflake approach. I asked Benoit Dageville, "Does that mean if I'm in "an AWS east region and I want to do a query on Azure West, "I can do that without moving data?" And he said, "Yes and no." And the answer was really, "No, we actually take a subset of that data," so there's the latency problem. From those deployment model standpoints, what are the trade-offs that you see in terms of instantiating the stack on each individual cloud versus that single instance? Is there a benefit of the single instance for governance and security and simplicity, but a trade-off on latency, or am I overthinking this? >> Yeah, you hit it on the nose. The reality is that the trade-off is going to be latency and performance. If we get wiggy with the distributed nature, like the distributed data example you just provided, we have to basically separate the queries and communicate with the databases on each instance, and then reassemble the result set that goes back to the people who are recording it. And so we can do caching systems and things like that. But the reality is, if it's distributed system, we're going to have latency and bandwidth issues that are going to be limiting us. And also security issues, because if we're removing lots of information over the open internet, or even private circuits, that those are going to be attack vectors that hackers can leverage. You have to keep that in mind. We're trying to reduce those attack vectors. So it would be, in many instances, and I think we have to think about this, that we're going to keep the data in the same physical region for just that. So in other words, it's going to provide the best performance and also the most simplistic access to dealing with security. And so we're not, in essence, thinking about where the data's going, how it's moving across things, things like that. So the challenge is going to be is when you're dealing with a supercloud or metacloud is, when do you make those decisions? And I think, in many instances, even though we're leveraging multiple databases across multiple regions and multiple public cloud providers, and that's the idea of it, we're still going to localize the data for performance reasons. I mean, I just wrote a blog in "InfoWorld" a couple of months ago and talked about, people who are trying to distribute data across different public cloud providers for different reasons, distribute an application development system, things like that, you can do it. With enough time and money, you can do anything. I think the challenge is going to be operating that thing, and also providing a viable business return based on the application. And so why it may look like a good science experiment, and it's cool unto itself as an architect, the reality is the more pragmatic approach is going to be a leavitt in a single region on a single cloud. >> Very interesting. The other reason I like to talk to companies like Deloitte and experienced people like you is 'cause I can get... You're agnostic, right? I mean, you're technology agnostic, vendor agnostic. So I want to come back with another question, which is, how do you deal with what I call the lowest common denominator problem? What I mean by that is if one cloud has, let's say, a superior service... Let's take an example of Nitro and Graviton. AWS seems to be ahead on that, but let's say some other cloud isn't quite quite there yet, and you're building a supercloud or a metacloud. How do you rationalize that? Does it have to be like a caravan in the army where you slow down so all the slowest trucks can keep up, or are the ways to adjudicate that that are advantageous to hide that deficiency? >> Yeah, and that's a great thing about leveraging a supercloud or a metacloud is we're putting that management in a single layer. So as far as a user or even a developer on those systems, they shouldn't worry about the performance that may come back, because we're dealing with the... You hit the nail on the head with that one. The slowest component is the one that dictates performance. And so we have to have some sort of a performance management layer. We're also making dynamic decisions to move data, to move processing, from one server to the other to try to minimize the amount of latency that's coming from a single component. So the great thing about that is we're putting that volatility into a single domain, and it's making architectural decisions in terms of where something will run and where it's getting its data from, things are stored, things like that, based on the performance feedback that's coming back from the various cloud services that are under management. And so if you're running across clouds, it becomes even more interesting, because ultimately, you're going to make some architectural choices on the fly in terms of where that stuff runs based on the active dynamic performance that that public cloud provider is providing. So in other words, we may find that it automatically shut down a database service, say MySQL, on one cloud instance, and moved it to a MySQL instance on another public cloud provider because there was some sort of a performance issue that it couldn't work around. And by the way, it does so dynamically. Away from you making that decision, it's making that decision on your behalf. Again, this is a matter of abstraction, removing complexity, and dealing with complexity through abstraction and automation, and this is... That would be an example of fixing something with automation, self-healing. >> When you meet with some of the public cloud providers and they talk about on-prem private cloud, the general narrative from the hyperscalers is, "Well, that's not a cloud." Should on-prem be inclusive of supercloud, metacloud? >> Absolutely, I mean, and they're selling private cloud instances with the edge cloud that they're selling. The reality is that we're going to have to keep a certain amount of our infrastructure, including private clouds, on premise. It's something that's shrinking as a market share, and it's going to be tougher and tougher to justify as the public cloud providers become better and better at what they do, but we certainly have edge clouds now, and hyperscalers have examples of that where they run a instance of their public cloud infrastructure on premise on physical hardware and software. And the reality is, too, we have data centers and we have systems that just won't go away for another 20 or 30 years. They're just too sticky. They're uneconomically viable to move into the cloud. That's the core thing. It's not that we can't do it. The fact of the matter is we shouldn't do it, because there's not going to be an economic... There's not going to be an economic incentive of making that happen. So if we're going to create this meta layer or this infrastructure which is going to run across clouds, and everybody agrees on, that's what the supercloud is, we have to include the on-premise systems, including private clouds, including legacy systems. And by the way, include the rising number of IoT systems that are out there, and edge-based systems out there. So we're managing it using the same infrastructure into cloud services. So they have metadata systems and they have specialized services, and service finance and retail and things like doing risk analytics. So it gets them further down that path, but not necessarily giving them a SaaS application where they're forced into all of the business processes. We're giving you piece parts. So we'll give you 1000 different parts that are related to the finance industry. You can assemble anything you need, but the thing is, it's not going to be like building it from scratch. We're going to give you risk analytics, we're giving you the financial analytics, all these things that you can leverage within your applications how you want to leverage them. We'll maintain them. So in other words, you don't have to maintain 'em just like a cloud service. And suddenly, we can build applications in a couple of weeks that used to take a couple of months, in some cases, a couple of years. So that seems to be a large take of it moving forward. So get it up in the supercloud. Those become just other services that are under managed... That are under management on the supercloud, the metacloud. So we're able to take those services, abstract them, assemble them, use them in different applications. And the ability to manage where those services are originated versus where they're consumed is going to be managed by the supercloud layer, which, you're dealing with the governance, the service governance, the security systems, the directory systems, identity access management, things like that. They're going to get you further along down the pike, and that comes back as real value. If I'm able to build something in two weeks that used to take me two months, and I'm able to give my creators in the organization the ability to move faster, that's a real advantage. And suddenly, we are going to be valued by our digital footprint, our ability to do things in a creative and innovative way. And so organizations are able to move that fast, leveraging cloud computing for what it should be leveraged, as a true force multiplier for the business. They're going to win the game. They're going to get the most value. They're going to be around in 20 years, the others won't. >> David Linthicum, always love talking. You have a dangerous combination of business and technology expertise. Let's tease. "VMware Explore" next week, you're giving a keynote, if they're going to be there. Which day are you? >> Tuesday. Tuesday, 11 o'clock. >> All right, that's a big day. Tuesday, 11 o'clock. And David, please do stop by "The Cube." We're in Moscone West. Love to get you on and continue this conversation. I got 100 more questions for you. Really appreciate your time. >> I always love talking to people at "The Cube." Thank you very much. >> All right, and thanks for watching our ongoing coverage of "Supercloud22" on "The Cube," your leader in enterprise tech and emerging tech coverage. (bright music)

>> Announcer: "theCUBE" presents "Kubecon and Cloudnativecon Europe, 2022" brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to Valencia, Spain and "Kubecon + Cloudnativecon Europe, 2022." I'm Keith Townsend, and we're continuing the conversations with amazing people doing amazing things. I think we've moved beyond a certain phase of the hype cycle when it comes to Kubernetes. And we're going to go a little bit in detail with that today, and on all the sessions, I have today with me, Taylor Dolezal. New head of CNCF Ecosystem. So, first off, what does that mean new head of? You're the head of CNCF Ecosystem? What is the CNCF Ecosystem? >> Yeah. Yeah. It's really the end user ecosystem. So, the CNCF is comprised of really three pillars. And there's the governing board, they oversee the budget and fun things, make sure everything's signed and proper. Then there's the Technical Oversight Committee, TOC. And they really help decide the technical direction of the organization through deliberation and talking about which projects get invited and accepted. Projects get donated, and the TOC votes on who's going to make it in, based on all this criteria. And then, lastly, is the end user ecosystem, that encompasses a whole bunch of different working groups, special interest groups. And that's been really interesting to kind of get a deeper sense into, as of late. So, there are groups like the developer experience group, and the user research group. And those have very specific focuses that kind of go across all industries. But what we've seen lately, is that there are really deep wants to create, whether it be financial services user group, and things like that, because end users are having trouble with going to all of the different meetings. If you're a company, a vendor member company that's selling authentication software, or something in networking, makes sense to have a SIG network, SIG off, and those kinds of things. But when it comes down to like Boeing that just joined, does that make sense for them to jump into all those meetings? Or does it make sense to have some other kind of thing that is representative of them, so that they can attend that one thing, it's specific to their industry? They can get that download and kind of come up to speed, or find the best practices as quickly as possible in a nice synthesized way. >> So, you're 10 weeks into this role. You're coming from a customer environment. So, talk to me a little bit about the customer side of it? When you're looking at something, it's odd to call CNCF massive. But it is, 7.1 million members, and the number of contributing projects, et cetera. Talk to me about the view from the outside versus the view now that you're inside? >> Yeah, so honestly, it's been fun to kind of... For me, it's really mirrored the open-source journey. I've gone to Kubecon before, gotten to enjoy all of the booths, and trying to understand what's going on, and then worked for HashiCorp before coming to the CNCF. And so, get that vendor member kind of experience working the booth itself. So, kind of getting deeper and deeper into the stack of the conference itself. And I keep saying, vendor member and end user members, the difference between those, is end users are not organizations that sell cloud native services. Those are the groups that are kind of more consuming, the Airbnbs, the Boeings, the Mercedes, these people that use these technologies and want to kind of give that feedback back to these projects. But yeah, very incredibly massive and just sprawling when it comes to working in all those contexts. >> So, I have so many questions around, like the differences between having you as an end user and in inter-operating with vendors and the CNCF itself. So, let's start from the end user lens. When you're an end user and you're out discovering open-source and cloud native products, what's that journey like? How do you go from saying, okay, I'm primarily focused on vendor solutions, to let me look at this cloud native stack? >> Yeah, so really with that, there's been, I think that a lot of people have started to work with me and ask for, "Can we have recommended architectures? Can we have blueprints for how to do these things?" When the CNCF doesn't want to take that position, we don't want to kind of be the king maker and be like, this is the only way forward. We want to be inclusive, we want to pull in these projects, and kind of give everyone the same boot strap and jump... I missing the word of it, just ability to kind of like springboard off of that. Create a nice base for everybody to get started with, and then, see what works out, learn from one another. I think that when it comes to Kubernetes, and Prometheus, and some other projects, being able to share best practices between those groups of what works best as well. So, within all of the separations of the CNCF, I think that's something I've found really fun, is kind of like seeing how the projects relate to those verticals and those groups as well. Is how you run a project, might actually have a really good play inside of an organization like, "I like that idea. Let's try that out with our team." >> So, like this idea of springboarding. You know, is when an entrepreneur says, "You know what? I'm going to quit my job and springboard off into doing something new." There's a lot of uncertainty, but for enterprise, that can be really scary. Like we're used to our big vendors, HashiCorp, VMware, Cisco kind of guiding us and telling us like, what's next? What is that experience like, springboarding off into something as massive as cloud native? >> So, I think it's really, it's a great question. So, I think that's why the CNCF works so well, is the fact that it's a safe place for all these companies to come together, even companies of competing products. you know, having that common vision of, we want to make production boring again, we don't want to have so much sprawl and have to take in so much knowledge at once. Can we kind of work together to create all these things to get rid of our adminis trivia or maintenance tasks? I think that when it comes to open-source in general, there's a fantastic book it's called "Working in Public," it's by Stripe Press. I recommend it all over the place. It's orange, so you'll recognize it. Yeah, it's easy to see. But it's really good 'cause it talks about the maintainer journey, and what things make it difficult. And so, I think that that's what the CNCF is really working hard to try to get rid of, is all this monotonous, all these monotonous things, filing issues, best practices. How do you adopt open-source within your organization? We have tips and tricks, and kind of playbooks in ways that you could accomplish that. So, that's what I find really useful for those kinds of situations. Then it becomes easier to adopt that within your organization. >> So, I asked Priyanka, CNCF executive director last night, a pretty tough question. And this is kind of in the meat of what you do. What happens when you? Let's pick on service mesh 'cause everyone likes to pick on service mesh. >> XXXX: Yeah. >> What happens when there's differences at that vendor level on the direction of a CIG or a project, or the ecosystem around service mesh? >> Yeah, so that's the fun part. Honestly, is 'cause people get to hash it out. And so, I think that's been the biggest thing for me finding out, was that there's more than one way to do thing. And so, I think it always comes down to use case. What are you trying to do? And then you get to solve after that. So, it really is, I know it depends, which is the worst answer. But I really do think that's the case, because if you have people that are using something within the automotive space, or in the financial services space, they're going to have completely different needs, wants, you know, some might need to run Coball or Fortran, others might not have to. So, even at that level, just down to what your tech stack looks like, audits, and those kinds of things, that can just really differ. So, I think it does come down to something more like that. >> So, the CNCF loosely has become kind of a standards body. And it's centered around the core project Kubernetes? >> Mm-hmm. >> So, what does it mean, when we're looking at larger segments such as service mesh or observability, et cetera, to be Kubernetes compliant? Where's the point, if any, that the CNCF steps in versus just letting everyone hash it out? Is it Kubernetes just need to be Kubernetes compliant and everything else is free for all? >> Honestly, in many cases, it's up to the communities themselves to decide that. So, the groups that are running OCI, the Open Container Interface, Open Storage Interface, all of those things that we've agreed on as ways to implement those technologies, I think that's where the CNCF, that's the line. That's where the CNCF gets up to. And then, it's like we help foster those communities and those conversations and asking, does this work for you? If not, let's talk about it, let's figure out why it might not. And then, really working closely with community to kind of help bring those things forward and create action items. >> So, it's all about putting the right people in the rooms and not necessarily playing referee, but to get people in the right room to have and facilitate the conversation? >> Absolutely. Absolutely. Like all of the booths behind us could have their own conferences, but we want to bring everybody together to have those conversations. And again, sprawling can be really wild at certain times, but it's good to have those cross understandings, or to hear from somebody that you're like, "Oh, my goodness, I didn't even think about that kind of context or use case." So, really inclusive conversation. >> So, organizations like Boeing, Adobe, Microsoft, from an end user perspective, it's sometimes difficult to get those organizations into these types of communities. How do you encourage them to participate in the conversation 'cause their voice is extremely important? >> Yeah, that I'd also say it really is the community. I really liked the Kubernetes documentary that was put out, working with some of the CNCF folks and core, and beginning Kubernetes contributors and maintainers. And it just kind of blew me away when they had said, you know, what we thought was success, was seeing Kubernetes in an Amazon Data Center. That's when we knew that this was going to take root. And you'd rarely hear that, is like, "When somebody that we typically compete with, its success is seeing it, seeing them use that." And so, I thought was really cool. >> You know, I like to use this technology for my community of skipping rope. You see the girls and boys jumping double Dutch rope. And you think, "I can do that. Like it's just jumping." But there's this hesitation to actually, how do you start? How do you get inside of it? The question is how do you become a member of the community? We've talked a lot about what happens when you're in the community. But how do you join the community? >> So, really, there's a whole bunch of ways that you can. Actually, the shirt that I'm wearing, I got from the 114 Release. So, this is just a fun example of that community. And just kind of how welcoming and inviting that they are. Really, I do think it's kind of like a job breaker. Almost you start at the outside, you start using these technologies, even more generally like, what is DevOps? What is production? How do I get to infrastructure, architecture, or software engineering? Once you start there, you start working your way in, you develop a stack, and then you start to see these tools, technologies, workflows. And then, after you've kind of gotten a good amount of time spent with it, you might really enjoy it like that, and then want to help contribute like, "I like this, but it would be great to have a function that did this. Or I want a feature that does that." At that point in time, you can either take a look at the source code on GitHub, or wherever it's hosted, and then start to kind of come up with that, some ideas to contribute back to that. And then, beyond that, you can actually say, "No, I kind of want to have these conversations with people." Join in those special interest groups, and those meetings to kind of talk about things. And then, after a while, you can kind of find yourself in a contributor role, and then a maintainer role. After that, if you really like the project, and want to kind of work with community on that front. So, I think you had asked before, like Microsoft, Adobe and these others. Really it's about steering the projects. It's these communities want these things, and then, these companies say, "Okay, this is great. Let's join in the conversation with the community." And together again, inclusivity, and bringing everybody to the table to have that discussion and push things forward. >> So, Taylor, closing message. What would you want people watching this show to get when they think about ecosystem and CNCF? >> So, ecosystem it's a big place, come on in. Yeah, (laughs) the water's just fine. I really want people to take away the fact that... I think really when it comes down to, it really is the community, it's you. We are the end user ecosystem. We're the people that build the tools, and we need help. No matter how big or small, when you come in and join the community, you don't have to rewrite the Kubernetes scheduler. You can help make documentation that much more easy to understand, and in doing so, helping thousands of people, If I'm going through the instructions or reading a paragraph, doesn't make sense, that has such a profound impact. And I think a lot of people miss that. It's like, even just changing punctuation can have such a giant difference. >> Yeah, I think people sometimes forget that community, especially community-run projects, they need product managers. They need people that will help with communications, people that will help with messaging, websites updating. Just reachability, anywhere from developing code to developing documentation, there's ways to jump in and help the community. From Valencia, Spain, I'm Keith Townsend, and you're watching "theCUBE," the leader in high tech coverage. (bright upbeat music)

>> Narrator: theCUBE presents KubeCon and Cloud NativeCon Europe, 2022 brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to Valencia, Spain. A coverage of KubeCon, Cloud NativeCon, Europe, 2022. I'm Keith Townsend. Your host of theCUBE, along with Paul Gillum, Senior Editor Enterprise Architecture for Silicon Angle, Enrico, Senior IT Analyst for GigaOm . This has been a full day, 7,500 attendees. I might have seen them run out of food, this is just unexpected. I mean, it escalated from what I understand, it went from capping it off at 4,000 gold, 5,000 gold in it off finally at 7,500 people. I'm super excited for... Today's been a great dead coverage. I'm super excited for tomorrow's coverage from theCUBE, but first off, we'll let the the new person on stage take the first question of the wrap up of the day of coverage, Enrico, what's different about this year versus other KubeCons or Cloud Native conversations. >> I think in general, it's the maturity. So we talk a lot about day two operations, observability, monitoring, going deeper and deeper in the security aspects of the application. So this means that for many enterprises, Kubernetes is becoming real critical. They want to get more control of it. And of course you have the discussion around FinOps, around cost control, because we are deploying Kubernetes everywhere. And if you don't have everything optimized, control, monitored, costs go to the roof and think about deploying the Public Cloud . If your application is not optimized, you're paying more. But also in that, on-premises if you are not optimized, you don't have any clear idea what is going to happen. So capacity planning become the nightmare, that we know from the past. So there is a lot of going on around these topics, really exciting actually, less infrastructure, more application. That is what Kubernetes is in here. >> Paul help me separate some of the signal from the noise. There is a lot going on a lot of overlap. What are some of the big themes of takeaways for day one that Enterprise Architects, Executives, need to take home and really chew on? >> Well, the Kubernetes was a turning point. Docker was introduced nine years ago, and for the first three or four years it was an interesting technology that was not very widely adopted. Kubernetes came along and gave developers a reason to use containers. What strikes me about this conference is that this is a developer event, ordinarily you go to conferences and it's geared toward IT Managers, towards CIOs, this is very much geared toward developers. When you have the hearts and minds of developers the rest of the industry is sort of pulled along with it. So this is ground zero for the hottest area of the entire computing industry right now, is in this area building Distributed services, Microservices based, Cloud Native applications. And it's the developers who are leading the way. I think that's a significant shift. I don't see the Managers here, the CIOs here. These are the people who are pulling this industry into the next generation. >> One of the interesting things that I've seen when we've always said, Kubernetes is for the developers, but we talk with an icon from MoneyGram, who's a end user, he's an enterprise architect, and he brought Kubernetes to his front end developers, and they rejected it. They said, what is this? I just want to develop code. So when we say Kubernetes is for developers or the developers are here, how do we reconcile that mismatch of experience? We have Enterprise Architect here. I hear constantly that the Kubernetes is for developers, but is it a certain kind of developer that Kubernetes is for? >> Well, yes and no. I mean, so the paradigm is changing. Okay. So, and maybe a few years back, it was tough to understand how make your application different. So microservices, everything was new for everybody, but actually, everything has changed to a point and now the developer understands, is neural. So, going through the application, APIs, automation, because the complexity of this application is huge, and you have, 724 kind of development sort of deployment. So you have to stay always on, et cetera, et cetera. And actually, to the point of developers bringing this new generation of decision makers in there. So they are actually decision, they are adopting technology. Maybe it's a sort of shadow IT at the very beginning. So they're adopting it, they're using it. And they're starting to use a lot of open source stuff. And then somebody upper in the stack, the Executive, says what are... They discover that the technology is already in place is a critical component, and then it's transformed in something enterprise, meaning paying enterprise services on top of it to be sure support contract and so on. So it's a real journey. And these guys are the real decision makers, or they are at the base of the decision making process, at least >> Cloud Native is something we're going to learn to take for granted. When you remember back, remember the Fail Whale in the early days of Twitter, when periodically the service would just crash from traffic, or Amazon went through the same thing. Facebook went through the same thing. We don't see that anymore because we are now learning to take Cloud Native for granted. We assume applications are going to be available. They're going to be performant. They're going to scale. They're going to handle anything we throw at them. That is Cloud Native at work. And I think we forget sometimes how refreshing it is to have an internet that really works for you. >> Yeah, I think we're much earlier in the journey. We had Microsoft on, the Xbox team talked about 22,000 pods running Linkerd some of the initial problems and pain points around those challenges. Much of my hallway track conversation has been centered around as we talk about the decision makers, the platform teams. And this is what I'm getting excited to talk about in tomorrow's coverage. Who's on the ground doing this stuff. Is it developers as we see or hear or told? Or is it what we're seeing from the Microsoft example, the MoneyGram example, where central IT is getting it. And not only are they getting it, they're enabling developers to simply write code, build it, and Kubernetes is invisible. It seems like that's become the Holy Grail to make Kubernetes invisible and Cloud Native invisible, and the experience is much closer to Cloud. >> So I think that, it's an interesting, I mean, I had a lot of conversation in the past year is that it's not that the original traditional IT operations are disappearing. So it's just that traditional IT operation are giving resources to these new developers. Okay, so it's a sort of walled garden, you don't see the wall, but it's a walled garden. So they are giving you resources and you use these resources like an internal Cloud. So a few years back, we were talking about private Cloud, the private Cloud as let's say the same identical paradigm of the Public Cloud is not possible, because there are no infinite resources or well, whatever we think are infinite resources. So what you're doing today is giving these developers enough resources to think that they are unlimited and they can do automatic operationing and do all these kind of things. So they don't think about infrastructure at all, but actually it's there. So IT operation are still there providing resources to let developers be more free and agile and everything. So we are still in a, I think an interesting time for all of it. >> Kubernetes and Cloud Native in general, I think are blurring the lines, traditional lines development and operations always were separate entities. Obviously with DevOps, those two are emerging. But now we're moving when you add in shift left testing, shift right testing, DevSecOps, you see the developers become much more involved in the infrastructure and they want to be involved in infrastructure because that's what makes their applications perform. So this is going to cause, I think IT organizations to have to do some rethinking about what those traditional lines are, maybe break down those walls and have these teams work much closer together. And that should be a good thing because the people who are developing applications should also have intimate knowledge of the infrastructure they're going to run on. >> So Paul, another recurring theme that we've heard here is the impact of funding on resources. What have your discussions been around founders and creators when it comes to sourcing talent and the impact of the markets on just their day to day? >> Well, the sourcing talent has been a huge issue for the last year, of course, really, ever since the pandemic started. Interestingly, one of our guests earlier today said that with the meltdown in the tech stock market, actually talent has become more available, because people who were tied to their companies because of their stock options are now seeing those options are underwater and suddenly they're not as loyal to the companies they joined. So that's certainly for the startups, there are many small startups here, they're seeing a bit of a windfall now from the tech stock bust. Nevertheless, skills are a long term problem. The US educational system is turning out about 10% of the skilled people that the industry needs every year. And no one I know, sees an end to that issue anytime soon. >> So Enrico, last question to you. Let's talk about what that means to the practitioner. There's a lot of opportunity out there. 200 plus sponsors I hear, I think is worth the projects is 200 plus, where are the big opportunities as a practitioner, as I'm thinking about the next thing that I'm going to learn to help me survive the next 10 or 15 years of my career? Where you think the focus should be? Should it be that low level Cloud builder? Or should it be at those levels of extraction that we're seeing and reading about? >> I think that it's a good question. The answer is not that easy. I mean, being a developer today, for sure, grants you a salary at the end of the month. I mean, there is high demand, but actually there are a lot of other technical figures in the data center, in the Cloud, that could really find easily a job today. So, developers is the first in my mind also because they are more, they can serve multiple roles. It means you can be a developer, but actually you can be also with the new roles that we have, especially now with the DevOps, you can be somebody that supports operation because you know automation, you know a few other things. So you can be a sysadmin of the next generation even if you are a developer, even if when you start as a developer. >> KubeCon 2022, is exciting. I don't care if you're a developer, practitioner, a investor, IT decision maker, CIO, CXO, there's so much to learn and absorb here and we're going to be covering it for the next two days. Me and Paul will be shoulder to shoulder, I'm not going to say you're going to get sick of this because it's just, it's all great information, we'll help sort all of this. From Valencia, Spain. I'm Keith Townsend, along with my host Enrico Signoretti, Paul Gillum, and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to theCUBE's presentation of Women in Tech, Global Event, celebrating International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California. We got two great guests. Cindy Polin, head of Solution Architects for Public Sector in Mexico for AWS. And Fernanda Spinardi, who's also the head of Solution Architects for Public Sector in Brazil, both with AWS. Thanks for coming, appreciate your time. >> Thanks for the invitation. >> Thank you, John. >> So we're celebrating International Women's Day this week, and this month, and pretty much every day, I think we're going to be doing a lot of good stuff. But today's a special day. And talking about people's careers, their roles, the gender gap, is a big theme this year. These are all the topics that are going on and being discussed. So, it's a been a lot of fun when learning a lot, I have to ask you guys with AWS, Cindy we'll start with you. How is AWS addressing the gender gap in its technical teams? Because solution architects, they're technical. And we need more women in there. How is AWS addressing the gender gap with its technical teams? >> Yes, for sure, thank you very much. Let me start with a quick note about what is the situation in Mexico. Let me go first into a report published by IMCO, and this is talking about this gender gaps in a STEM career. So let me tell you that three out of 10 professionals who choose careers related with the STEM, with the science technology, engineering and mathematics, are women. So, can you imagine this difference, It's really critical because for sure, we have few women. And in the moment that you try to reach people, to be part of the company, it's difficult. So it's important for AWS to be very very supportive in this initiative and also to be supporting diverse teams. So, that's why we are very supportive in bringing diverse talent in the company. >> There's a lot of focus on getting people early into the pipe lining. Is that some another big area? Did the study show anything there? >> Well, basically it's that we are studying to push harder, to bring more information to the ladies, to the women in general. And also to start developing the technical skills. Because it's really difficult and in the moment that you try to do this, it start like seeing these behaviors or stigmas about this is only for men, it's not for women. So we are trying to start breaking this point in general. >> Fernanda, we had a great chat about Latin America reinvent on theCUBE with your leader over there and, we were talking about the broader community and how you guys are partnering with external organizations and customers. How is Amazon Web Services, AWS, aiming to foster better balance and gender balance and technology partnerships in Latin America? >> Sure, so while the situation in Brazil is not different from the situation that Cindy was mentioning in Mexico right? Our research shows that women only represent around 37% of the workforce where in the country we have over 51-52% of women as part of our population. While we can take this from a gap perspective, also, we can take it from an opportunity perspective. There is such a huge unexplored workforce that we can bring to be part of AWS in the technology world, right? So for us on AWS and Amazon, it's part part of our day one culture. So we are still learning, right? And we are still trying, experimenting to see how we can bring more women to the tech world. One of the things that we are investing in Brazil and in Latin America, are the early in career talent programs. This is something that we have the opportunity to work with the students. And in LATAM, it's a little bit different from the US. We have the opportunity to work with them for one year sometimes for two years in a role while they work they are still in the university and we prepare that talent really early in their career and bring them to be part of Amazon. So yeah, I'm super excited with those programs, I can, talk more about it, but this is one of the initiatives that we are betting that will maybe be a game changer for us in the technology. >> Yeah, those are very interesting stats, 37% of the workers in country where women represent over half of the population. So definitely a lot of work to be done. I got to ask both of you. Amazon has a leadership principle that says that they want to strive to be the world's, or earth's best employer earth being, Earth Day and all that sustainability as well. Diversity, inclusion and equity is a big part of that mission more. And also Amazon's also known for high performing work environment. So, so having the best diversity and inclusion you know, is a, is a, as some say and many are saying is a force multiplier in performance. How is that going in your areas? Can you talk about how the culture that you're in, the countries that you're in and the Amazonian leadership principles tie together? Can you share your thoughts and experiences? >> Sure. I can, I can get started maybe with that one. So, although we have a new leadership principle from my perspective, we have we have always had leadership principles that foster diversity and, and inclusion, right. Pick up, earn trust as an example like it says, listen carefully, right. And speak candidly, this is for me it's the baseline for any, any inclusion conversation. Right. And also you have things like have backbone, disagree and commit. Like you are empowering people to actually have an opinion and bring back that opinion and be heard. Right. So it was already there. I think the thing now is that we have a very specific leadership principle so that there is no, no room for interpretation. Right. It's right there saying that there is a mission a mission to, to be the best employer. Right. And, and I'm, I'm very excited about it. >> John: Cindy, share your thoughts too. I like that comment because you know, Amazon culture's known for, you know, debate then align. Okay. And now you got that cultural factor. Now it's in the leadership principle. What's your reaction? >> Yes. And, and let me add a comment on that about Fernanda's point is that this LP is giving us like the empower to give this environment to prepare, to to give this space to the team and also to be more creative. And also to be more diverse is really important for us to have this space with a lot of empathy, with the in the space to have a lot of fun. And it's important to keep all the time in mind that are we doing the right thing for our employees? Are we are empowering them to be the best of, of the world? So, that is something that is critical for us and, and well that is something that we are right now working on it. >> Okay. So first of all I'm very impressed by both of you. You're inspiring. And I can also tell you that being a solution architect is not an easy job. But it's also in high demand. A lot of people want to, they need solution architects. It's one of the most coveted positions in the industry right now. So how do we get more women in that role? What ideas do you guys have besides being great role models, yourselves? How do we get more solution architects? Because it's super valuable and everyone wants to hire them. >> Fernanda, did you want to start? >> It's you guys. >> You touched a very important point, John. It's about having, having good examples. Like, I mean, it's about you seeing yourself in the role right? You, you believing that it's, it's possible. It's for everyone. If you have a spirit where you, you want to build things if you have this spirit of exploring new possibilities if you like to experiment, well, then you have all that we need in a solution architect, right? It's just then a matter of, you know, know learning technical, learning technology, technical stuff. But this is, this is about having fun on your journey as as a solution architect as well. >> And, and let me tell you something that we are also investing in trainings. Training is online for the for the women that they are, that has this interest that they want to learn more about the technology. They want to have a deeper knowledge about the technical stuff. So we are supporting these initiatives and that is something that they can do background and in their own pace. >> And this is an important role because they need the leadership as head of solution architects. It's a good thing. Is, is there any ways that you found that's a best practice for identifying or advice for people to know if they have what it takes or they have an affinity towards technology? Sometimes it's math. Because cloud is great levels it out. I mean, cloud is new, is more jobs open now that didn't exist years ago, couple years ago. So anyone can rise to the top. >> Yeah. I think that's the beauty of the cloud. There is so much space when we say technology I think this is such a, a broad word, right? It means so much, right. It can be someone that likes to develop code. It can be someone that likes to work with infrastructure. It can be someone that likes machine learning or databases or someone that is inspired about applications for the education world or to research genomes or cure cancer. So, yeah, I don't think that there is like any more like a specific profile. I think it's very open for everyone to explore what they love doing. And even from a technology perspective AWS is working to simplify access to the technology. If we take our services on machine learning. For instance, they are for people, for business people like you don't have to know much about algorithms, right. To use some of the AWS services. So I think we're experiencing the democratization of the technology, and with that more opportunity for people to join us. >> A lot of people are changing careers into cloud. So Cindy, I want to ask you guys also if you can share how the mentoring process works there. Is there mentoring? How does that work? Do you match people? Have you found a nice formula for providing some mentoring and some pathways as people come in? >> Yes, we have many ways but one is very important, is that we have user groups. That is a way that we have like a community with internal and external people, and we share advices, guidance, best practices for the people that is interested in this matter. So for one side as I already mentioned, we have training online that you can reach. We have a lot of free courses. Maybe you can start jumping into artificial intelligence. IUT whatever you want to, to, to want that given them. But in the other hand, we have this option to have this kind of support. We have AWS Girl Chile user groups. We have AWS women, Colombian user groups girls in Argentina, we have many of them. We have four hundreds of user communities. So, that is the way that we can keep in touch. >> Any other programs? I mean, Amazon Web Service and Amazon has very strong representation of women. There's a lot of pockets of women groups in all over the world. How does it come together? Because you also have customers in the user groups. You have partners in the partner network. You have technologists learning. So you have this ecosystem of people. It's not just AWS. How are you guys extending that gap into those areas? >> Exactly. And those conversations are getting more and more constant with our customers, right? So we used to talk about technology, we used to talk about business problems, now we talk about diversity. We talk about improving representation and improving the sentiment of inclusion within our customers as well. And one of the things that I can bring, we have been working with a number of our customers in Brazil just to mention New Bank, one of our customers there in building programs. between AWS and the customer, where we train people, and we expose that people to the market, even if it's inside AWS, inside New Bank or any other partner in that ecosystem. So we are building talent not only for us, but for for the entire ecosystem to benefit from. >> Okay, so I have to ask you guys How did you guys get into the tech, Cindy? What was your way? Did it just jump at you? Did it grab you? Did you kind of discover it early? When did you kind of get into the tech? >> That's a good question. I was remembering this moment that when I was seven years old I just started like working with cars and also with that kind of companies, literally companies. And in that moment say, "I want to be part of this technology work." And after that in high school, I have the opportunity to touch a computer. In that moment I said, "This is the thing that I want to do in the rest of my life." >> Yeah. that's it right there. You got the diction, you taste it. Fernanda, what about you? What's your story? How did you get into it? What was the moment? Was there an exact moment or did it just surround you? >> Yeah, I think I was always curious about how things work. I was not thinking about a career in tech honestly. I was thinking about becoming a lawyer, but at some point in time just clicked, right? And I had actually to fight my way into the technical world literally because, I had this very important university close to my house, like maybe 15 minutes from my house. But at that point in time in Brazil, that particular institution was not accepting women. And believe me, it was not like a hundred years ago. Like it was.... (laughing) >> Yeah, you're young, it's just recently. >> Yeah, so I had to move out out of my hometown, back to the city, to Sao Paulo, which is our biggest city in Brazil to find a place for me on an university that would take women. So yeah, I had to fight my way into technology, but I am very proud of that I was able to. >> Yeah, you know what's great now is you have YouTube, you have all these resources, these videos are going to be going everywhere. We're going to put this out there. There's communities where people can learn and see people like themselves out in positions of leadership and technology. So more and more contents being out there. And I think hopefully no one will have to fight to get into tech. If they like it, they're in it. One of the leaders at AWS she said, "We're in a nerd native environment now, the young generation is natively technical." And, I believe that, I see that. I think that's going to be a really exciting trend and seeing leaders like yourselves out there is really wonderful, so thank you for spending the time with us here on theCUBE. Final question I'll ask you, what's next for you Cindy and Fernanda? What's next in your journey? >> Okay, I think the next for me is to keep pushing the women in Mexico to keep installing and also to start thinking into what is the next step in my career? Where should I go? So I think that is the point that I want to do. >> Cindy, what's next for you? >> I feel I'm just starting. (laughing) So much to do, so much to do. I mean, there is a big business for us to make happen in Brazil right now, and we are looking for talent. So, if the video's going to go on YouTube, I would like everybody there to know that yeah, we are looking for talents in Brazil with opportunities all over the world actually. And yeah, that's building, building and building. >> And there's some rig twitch channels by the way too on some developer programmings, tons of programming, it's all out there. Congratulations, and we're looking forward to following up with you both in the future to get an update and thank you for spending the time and sharing your your stories here on theCUBE I really appreciate, thank you. >> Thank you too. >> Thank you so much. >> Okay, theCUBE presentation of Women in Tech, Global Events celebrating International Women's Day. This is the beginning of more programming. We're going to see more episodes from theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's continuous coverage of "AWS re:Invent 2021". I'm Dave Nicholson, and here at theCUBE, we're running one of the most important largest events in tech industry history with two live sets right here, live in Las Vegas, along with our two studios. And I'm delighted here in our studio to welcome Scott Warren US AWS practice, vice president for Capgemini. Welcome. >> Thank you. >> Dave: How's the show been going for you so far? >> Very, very good so far. It's great to be back in person. >> So tell me about your role at Capgemini. What you focus on. You're responsible for the relationship with AWS? >> Absolutely. So managing the relationship with AWS and how we partner, and then probably more importantly, kind of how we go to market with the AWS offering for our customers. So kind of understanding what the customer demand is, how we can help accelerate and get them moving faster out to the cloud, and then building that up as well as kind of industry specific offers on how we can accelerate cloud adoption. >> So when you talk about acceleration often in an organization like yours, there is the tug of war between the spoke solution hearing and pre-packaged things that serve to be accelerators. How do you go about balancing those things and tell us about some of the accelerators that you've developed? >> Absolutely. I think it's always kind of going to be a hybrid between the bespoken out of the box solutions. The out of the box solutions are inevitably always going to take some sort of customization or something like that to make them applicable within a customer's environment. But we all know it's very time consuming and expensive to build something completely bespoke from the ground up. So the way we really address that is we've built something at Capgemini we called it the cloud boost library. It is an online get lab library of thousands of code templates, infrastructure as code snippets that solve deploying your infrastructure and provision your infrastructure on the cloud, microservice design for healthcare and financial services and manufacturing and automotive. >> So industry specific? >> Not just specific and cloud in general. And so we bring that to every cloud engagement we work on. It's our real motto around that is we should never be starting on zero, starting from ground zero and anything we push out to AWS and we can always borrow, steal, modify, and change part of that library specific to that customer demand and need, and really speed up the implementation and get them out to AWS faster. >> Can you kind of double click on that? Give us an example of an accelerator inaction. You don't have to necessarily, if you've got a customer name, fantastic, or you can keep it generic. >> Yeah, absolutely. So we work for a big financial services company that's doing kind of an online data dissemination system, so thousands of public API is to disseminate data out to their customers and partners and vendors and things like that. So we were able to use that library to kind of get the framework for every single one of those APIs. A template, a kind of base function for that, and then use that kind of repeatably across those thousands of API. So we never really started from zero and said, provided 70, 80% kind of efficiency gain on that project versus kind of building it from the ground up. >> So with a customer like that, how did the initial engagement start? Was this a preexisting Capgemini relationship? Was this AWS at the table strategizing bringing in Capgemini. How does that work with your relationships with customers? >> So this was an existing customer of ours that we'd been doing application management in their data center for years. And several years ago, they had a kind of a leadership change happened and a new CTO came in and he laid down the edict that they're now a cloud first organization. So of course all his direct reports and managers started asking, what does that really mean? And they came to us as a trusted partner. And so we started walking them through our framework and template of how we bring our customers from ground zero completely in the data center, completely to a cloud first organization. And at that same time, we also began engaging our counterparts at AWS because we want to make sure we're in lockstep with what they're doing at AWS and kind of one consistent message out to our customer and doing the things the way they want them to be done. We want to unlock the funding programs available from AWS to incentivize that customer, to move out to the cloud. And then really having that kind of three legged partnership with us, the customer and AWS, puts them on the right path for success and in faster adoption of the cloud. >> Capgemini didn't just roll out of college a couple of years ago. (laughs) >> Been around a while. Been around a while. >> So you have an interesting perspective because you just mentioned being involved in the management of a customer's environment and IT landscape that is outside the purview of cloud, at least at some stage of the game. How do you turn being a legacy provider of services into a superpower instead of a liability? >> Absolutely. Yeah. >> How do you do that? And the reason why I say that superpower is because you said cap earlier and I thought in America, but it's a serious question. Some would say, well, Capgemini legacy. No, no, no. What's your reply? >> Absolutely. So what we found is the most important thing about a move to the cloud is understanding the entire application portfolio and landscape and the best way to move into the cloud. Some applications that are very prime for lift and shift. We just want to get them out of the data center, into the cloud very quickly. Other ones that are very mission critical on customer facing very important for the future of an organization. Really need to be looked at with a more modern lens in the clouds. How do we modernize this, make it cost effective, and in a long-term asset, that's going to run in the cloud in a PaaS or SaaS based service offering rather than just IaaS. So all of the legacy work under the previous work we've done for our customers, we understand their application and in data center landscape better, they do in most scenarios. So having all of that data allows us to feed that into kind of some of our tooling around assessing applications and figuring out the best migration path or modernization path. So all of that legacy knowledge kind of puts us in the driver's seat for being the best partner to actually help them with that cloud modernization. >> So with your AWS responsibility as part of Capgemini, it's a bit like having a foot on the dock and a foot on the boat? >> Scott: Yep. >> In terms of an individual customer's requirements, obviously Capgemini can continue to manage what we would refer to as legacy infrastructure while helping to modernize and migrate to cloud. What about this sort of combination of the two that represents the future specifically, AWS is support of hybrid cloud technology. The idea of Outposts, is that something that you are involved with? >> Absolutely. We're seeing kind of Outpost adoption trend up recently, actually. So when we see in certain sectors where a lot of kind of work is being done on the edge, a great example is an agriculture company we work for that has field in soil and weather sensors all over the planet. So monitoring the moisture in the soil, the nitrogen levels, the wind air pressure and temperature and humidity. And oftentimes those fields are in very remote disconnected locations. So we're seeing things like Outpost and snowball edge and different services like that become more and more prevalent for those edge use cases where compute can actually be done on the field and decisions can be made by the farmers that are planters in the field like real time. And then when connectivity comes back around, they can actually beam that back to AWS if necessary. The other kind of scenario we see Outposts really being prevalent is in very sensitive data scenarios. So we have customers in federal government work or things like that. There's just some data due to regulatory compliance that cannot be on the public cloud node yet, yet being the key word there. So Outposts becomes really important in those scenarios where the vast majority of the data and the assets go out to AWS, but the very, very sensitive data due to regulatory reasons, we keep in the Outpost can still kind of harness the power of AWS on that. >> You know, that brings up another interesting subject, the difference between where technology actually exists today and where people exist culturally today in terms of their acceptance and adoption of technology. There are absolutely cases where data residency, data governance requires that it be onsite. >> Scott: Absolutely. >> Then again, there are a lot of cases where people are just concerned about not having their arms around the data. So the perception that it isn't as safe in the cloud, as it is in the customer's data center is often a misguided, >> Scott: Very much so. >> Perception. So that's obviously an inhibiting factor to cloud adoption in some way. What are some of the other things that you see that are headwinds? Because it's been talked about widely here 80% or more of IT spend is still what we would think of as on-premises. >> Scott: Data center. Yeah. >> Not cloud. Those lines are being blurred with things like Outpost. I contend that in five years, when we talk about cloud, that's going to be sort of an irrelevant term. >> Yeah. >> It's really like, well, because it doesn't matter where it is. It's all virtualized. >> Compute and storage somewhere. Yeah. >> The headwinds that you're seeing. And again, they can be irrational headwinds or they can be technical bottlenecks. >> Yeah. I think the biggest one is business understanding what the cloud is and them adopting it. I've had a couple meetings that were a new thing for me this week, where I met with the chief marketing officer for one of our customers. So we're meeting with CTO, CIO, VPs, directors in the IT space, but this marketing officer wanted to meet with us. And she was kind of very cloud knowledgeable. She understood IaaS, SaaS, PaaS and the costing models of cloud consumption and some of the services. In her organization is kind of already all in on AWS. And she had seen this happen, this transformation happened on the IT side. And she wanted to know how can I, as the head of my marketing department start to harness the power of the public cloud to drive business outcomes within my area. And that was a really interesting conversation for me and kind of got me thinking that I think the business is going to start understanding, and that the lines between IT and business are going to begin to get blurred a little bit with the power of AWS and other hyperscalers and all the capability that's available to our customers once they get moved out there. >> In today's keynote, Swami talked a lot about data and the data-driven companies, or rather companies that are not data-driven. >> Yep. >> Are going to be left behind. And I thought it was interesting in the survey. He mentioned 9% of companies reported not looking at data at all for their decision-making process. We need a list of those companies so we can short their stocks. (laughs) And we can help them out. (laughs) Or you can help out, or you can help them out. Exactly. I'll refer a half to you, and I'll short the rest. How's that feel? Is that a deal? So within your world of things you do with AWS, with Capgemini on behalf of the customers, what are some of the tip of the spear things that are the most exciting from a buzz perspective and what are sort of the next gen things that you're thinking of? It could be something you literally just heard about announced over the last couple of days. What does the future hold? >> Absolutely. We kind of look at that is what we classify our intelligent industry offering. And so it's really industry specific offers and services that are going to kind of change how specific industries do business. A really good example is we do a lot with the automotive industry. We started working with the OEMs that are kind of producing electric vehicles and autonomous driving vehicles. And we've actually built a framework that lives on top of AWS called connected mobility solutions. So connecting all of the driverless functions of a car back to the mothership or the cloud, the cloud instance. And I think things like that are really kind of tip of the spear where it's, again, out on the edge, not in a data center or in a cloud, but gathering all that data from connected devices in different areas and kind of how we're going to manage that and enable that and make it secure and safe and reliable and things like that. >> Yeah. Yeah. I have direct experience with some of that. I have a car that won't allow me to access all of its self-driving features. I bet I can guess because of the way I drive. (laughs) Yep. The cloud is not all wonderful. It's not all lollipops and rainbows. There is a bit of a downside to it if you're a crazy maniac like myself. So Capgemini, hasn't just been a standalone organization. You've absorbed and merged with all sorts of different organizations. I imagine you have organizations that are specifically focused on AWS in addition to other clouds. >> Scott: Absolutely. I can manage that culturally. >> That's a good question. So three years ago, me as the Capgemini group as a whole entered into a three-year partnership called Project Liberty with AWS. And it was a three-year plan we had targets and numbers on both sides, but it really kind of unified how we were going to do AWS and cloud work across the Capgemini organization, all working under one program towards one common goal, on developing accelerators and solutions and go to market offerings, kind of with one thing in mind to drive that AWS partnership and growth. So that's really been kind of the big driver for us within Capgemini over the past three years, is that what we call Project Liberty internally. And then just recently about a year and a half, maybe two years ago, we acquired one of the world's leading digital engineering firms called Altron. Big presence in Europe, Southeast Asia and North America. And they brought kind of a whole new flavor of how we do cloud when we're talking about digital twin in the cloud, on the factory floor and actually engineering of products and in driverless vehicles and electric vehicles and things like that. So bringing all training and being able to include them in our overall kind of cloud AWS message and bringing their book of offers in has really expanded our offering as well. >> How has talent recruitment and acquisition been for you guys? Are you faced with the same challenges that others are? Which is we need educated people. Give the pitch, so my kids hear it. So they understand. The graduate was plastics, right? That's the future? >> Yeah. >> Cloud services, without Capgemini, all the technology that AWS produces is essentially worthless. If you can't connect it to business value and outcome, and that's what you do. So how has that looked for you? >> Yeah, we hae the same talent challenges as everyone right now. So we're really taking the thought process of let's take people who aren't traditionally in the technology field and begin training them up on the cloud and the different technology areas. >> You do that at Capgemini? >> We do that at Capgemini, yeah. So we're running in conjunction with AWS big boot camps where we bring people in and- >> Who are this people? Not to interrupt, just a few seconds left. What's the profile of somewhere? >> Yeah. So a lot of- >> I want to hear the unconventional ones, not the computer science person who doesn't know cloud. Who are you bringing in on this one? >> New college hires who majored in the non-related IT field completely psychology, social sciences, whatever it may be. But who had the aptitude and then kind of the one to learn cloud in IT. So we bring them in. And then looking in our Capgemini Organization internally at our recruiting organization, our marketing organization, our partnership organization, and some of those people who are early on in their careers and may want to pivot to the technology side. We're starting to ramp them up as well. So it's been a very effective program for us. And I think something we're going to continue to invest in further. >> That's a very satisfying part of what you do to be a part of. >> Absolutely. >> Well, Scott, I got to tell you it's been a great conversation. For the rest of us here at theCUBE our continuous coverage continues here at AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm Dave Nicholson signing off for a moment. But keep it right here theCUBE is your technology hybrid event leader. (upbeat music)