(gentle music) >> Hey! Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of WiDS 2023, the eighth Annual Women In Data Science Conference. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. We are at Stanford University, as you know we are every year, having some wonderful conversations with some very inspiring women and men in data science and technical roles. I'm very pleased to introduce Tracy Zhang, my co-host, who is in the Data Journalism program at Stanford. And Tracy and I are pleased to welcome our next guest, Rhonda Crate, Principal Data Scientist at Boeing. Great to have you on the program, Rhonda. >> Tracy: Welcome. >> Hey, thanks for having me. >> Were you always interested in data science or STEM from the time you were young? >> No, actually. I was always interested in archeology and anthropology. >> That's right, we were talking about that, anthropology. Interesting. >> We saw the anthropology background, not even a bachelor's degree, but also a master's degree in anthropology. >> So you were committed for a while. >> I was, I was. I actually started college as a fine arts major, but I always wanted to be an archeologist. So at the last minute, 11 credits in, left to switch to anthropology. And then when I did my master's, I focused a little bit more on quantitative research methods and then I got my Stat Degree. >> Interesting. Talk about some of the data science projects that you're working on. When I think of Boeing, I always think of aircraft. But you are doing a lot of really cool things in IT, data analytics. Talk about some of those intriguing data science projects that you're working on. >> Yeah. So when I first started at Boeing, I worked in information technology and data analytics. And Boeing, at the time, had cored up data science in there. And so we worked as a function across the enterprise working on anything from shared services to user experience in IT products, to airplane programs. So, it has a wide range. I worked on environment health and safety projects for a long time as well. So looking at ergonomics and how people actually put parts onto airplanes, along with things like scheduling and production line, part failures, software testing. Yeah, there's a wide spectrum of things. >> But I think that's so fantastic. We've been talking, Tracy, today about just what we often see at WiDS, which is this breadth of diversity in people's background. You talked about anthropology, archeology, you're doing data science. But also all of the different opportunities that you've had at Boeing. To see so many facets of that organization. I always think that breadth of thought diversity can be hugely impactful. >> Yeah. So I will say my anthropology degree has actually worked to my benefit. I'm a huge proponent of integrating liberal arts and sciences together. And it actually helps me. I'm in the Technical Fellowship program at Boeing, so we have different career paths. So you can go into management, you can be a regular employee, or you can go into the Fellowship program. So right now I'm an Associate Technical Fellow. And part of how I got into the Fellowship program was that diversity in my background, what made me different, what made me stand out on projects. Even applying a human aspect to things like ergonomics, as silly as that sounds, but how does a person actually interact in the space along with, here are the actual measurements coming off of whatever system it is that you're working on. So, I think there's a lot of opportunities, especially in safety as well, which is a big initiative for Boeing right now, as you can imagine. >> Tracy: Yeah, definitely. >> I can't go into too specifics. >> No, 'cause we were like, I think a theme for today that kind of we brought up in in all of our talk is how data is about people, how data is about how people understand the world and how these data can make impact on people's lives. So yeah, I think it's great that you brought this up, and I'm very happy that your anthropology background can tap into that and help in your day-to-day data work too. >> Yeah. And currently, right now, I actually switched over to Strategic Workforce Planning. So it's more how we understand our workforce, how we work towards retaining the talent, how do we get the right talent in our space, and making sure overall that we offer a culture and work environment that is great for our employees to come to. >> That culture is so important. You know, I was looking at some anitab.org stats from 2022 and you know, we always talk about the number of women in technical roles. For a long time it's been hovering around that 25% range. The data from anitab.org showed from '22, it's now 27.6%. So, a little increase. But one of the biggest challenges still, and Tracy and I and our other co-host, Hannah, have been talking about this, is attrition. Attrition more than doubled last year. What are some of the things that Boeing is doing on the retention side, because that is so important especially as, you know, there's this pipeline leakage of women leaving technical roles. Tell us about what Boeing's, how they're invested. >> Yeah, sure. We actually have a publicly available Global Diversity Report that anybody can go and look at and see our statistics for our organization. Right now, off the top of my head, I think we're hovering at about 24% in the US for women in our company. It has been a male majority company for many years. We've invested heavily in increasing the number of women in roles. One interesting thing about this year that came out is that even though with the great resignation and those types of things, the attrition level between men and women were actually pretty close to being equal, which is like the first time in our history. Usually it tends on more women leaving. >> Lisa: That's a good sign. >> Right. >> Yes, that's a good sign. >> And we've actually focused on hiring and bringing in more women and diversity in our company. >> Yeah, some of the stats too from anitab.org talked about the increase, and I have to scroll back and find my notes, the increase in 51% more women being hired in 2022 than 2021 for technical roles. So the data, pun intended, is showing us. I mean, the data is there to show the impact that having females in executive leadership positions make from a revenue perspective. >> Tracy: Definitely. >> Companies are more profitable when there's women at the head, or at least in senior leadership roles. But we're seeing some positive trends, especially in terms of representation of women technologists. One of the things though that I found interesting, and I'm curious to get your thoughts on this, Rhonda, is that the representation of women technologists is growing in all areas, except interns. >> Rhonda: Hmm. >> So I think, we've got to go downstream. You teach, I have to go back to my notes on you, did my due diligence, R programming classes through Boeings Ed Wells program, this is for WSU College of Arts and Sciences, talk about what you teach and how do you think that intern kind of glut could be solved? >> Yeah. So, they're actually two separate programs. So I teach a data analytics course at Washington State University as an Adjunct Professor. And then the Ed Wells program is a SPEEA, which is an Aerospace Union, focused on bringing up more technology and skills to the actual workforce itself. So it's kind of a couple different audiences. One is more seasoned employees, right? The other one is our undergraduates. I teach a Capstone class, so it's a great way to introduce students to what it's actually like to work on an industry project. We partner with Google and Microsoft and Boeing on those. The idea is also that maybe those companies have openings for the students when they're done. Since it's Senior Capstone, there's not a lot of opportunities for internships. But the opportunities to actually get hired increase a little bit. In regards to Boeing, we've actually invested a lot in hiring more women interns. I think the number was 40%, but you'd have to double check. >> Lisa: That's great, that's fantastic. >> Tracy: That's way above average, I think. >> That's a good point. Yeah, it is above average. >> Double check on that. That's all from my memory. >> Is this your first WiDS, or have you been before? >> I did virtually last year. >> Okay. One of the things that I love, I love covering this event every year. theCUBE's been covering it since it's inception in 2015. But it's just the inspiration, the vibe here at Stanford is so positive. WiDS is a movement. It's not an initiative, an organization. There are going to be, I think annually this year, there will be 200 different events. Obviously today we're live on International Women's Day. 60 plus countries, 100,000 plus people involved. So, this is such a positive environment for women and men, because we need everybody, underrepresented minorities, to be able to understand the implication that data has across our lives. If we think about stripping away titles in industries, everybody is a consumer, not everybody, most of mobile devices. And we have this expectation, I was in Barcelona last week at a Mobile World Congress, we have this expectation that we're going to be connected 24/7. I can get whatever I want wherever I am in the world, and that's all data driven. And the average person that isn't involved in data science wouldn't understand that. At the same time, they have expectations that depend on organizations like Boeing being data driven so that they can get that experience that they expect in their consumer lives in any aspect of their lives. And that's one of the things I find so interesting and inspiring about data science. What are some of the things that keep you motivated to continue pursuing this? >> Yeah I will say along those lines, I think it's great to invest in K-12 programs for Data Literacy. I know one of my mentors and directors of the Data Analytics program, Dr. Nairanjana Dasgupta, we're really familiar with each other. So, she runs a WSU program for K-12 Data Literacy. It's also something that we strive for at Boeing, and we have an internal Data Literacy program because, believe it or not, most people are in business. And there's a lot of disconnect between interpreting and understanding data. For me, what kind of drives me to continue data science is that connection between people and data and how we use it to improve our world, which is partly why I work at Boeing too 'cause I feel that they produce products that people need like satellites and airplanes, >> Absolutely. >> and everything. >> Well, it's tangible, it's relatable. We can understand it. Can you do me a quick favor and define data literacy for anyone that might not understand what that means? >> Yeah, so it's just being able to understand elements of data, whether that's a bar chart or even in a sentence, like how to read a statistic and interpret a statistic in a sentence, for example. >> Very cool. >> Yeah. And sounds like Boeing's doing a great job in these programs, and also trying to hire more women. So yeah, I wanted to ask, do you think there's something that Boeing needs to work on? Or where do you see yourself working on say the next five years? >> Yeah, I think as a company, we always think that there's always room for improvement. >> It never, never stops. >> Tracy: Definitely. (laughs) >> I know workforce strategy is an area that they're currently really heavily investing in, along with safety. How do we build safer products for people? How do we help inform the public about things like Covid transmission in airports? For example, we had the Confident Traveler Initiative which was a big push that we had, and we had to be able to inform people about data models around Covid, right? So yeah, I would say our future is more about an investment in our people and in our culture from my perspective >> That's so important. One of the hardest things to change especially for a legacy organization like Boeing, is culture. You know, when I talk with CEO's or CIO's or COO's about what's your company's vision, what's your strategy? Especially those companies that are on that digital journey that have no choice these days. Everybody expects to have a digital experience, whether you're transacting an an Uber ride, you're buying groceries, or you're traveling by air. That culture sounds like Boeing is really focused on that. And that's impressive because that's one of the hardest things to morph and mold, but it's so essential. You know, as we look around the room here at WiDS it's obviously mostly females, but we're talking about women, underrepresented minorities. We're talking about men as well who are mentors and sponsors to us. I'd love to get your advice to your younger self. What would you tell yourself in terms of where you are now to become a leader in the technology field? >> Yeah, I mean, it's kind of an interesting question because I always try to think, live with no regrets to an extent. >> Lisa: I like that. >> But, there's lots of failures along the way. (Tracy laughing) I don't know if I would tell myself anything different because honestly, if I did, I wouldn't be where I am. >> Lisa: Good for you. >> I started out in fine arts, and I didn't end up there. >> That's good. >> Such a good point, yeah. >> We've been talking about that and I find that a lot at events like WiDS, is women have these zigzaggy patterns. I studied biology, I have a master's in molecular biology, I'm in media and marketing. We talked about transportable skills. There's a case I made many years ago when I got into tech about, well in science you learn the art of interpreting esoteric data and creating a story from it. And that's a transportable skill. But I always say, you mentioned failure, I always say failure is not a bad F word. It allows us to kind of zig and zag and learn along the way. And I think that really fosters thought diversity. And in data science, that is one of the things we absolutely need to have is that diversity and thought. You know, we talk about AI models being biased, we need the data and we need the diverse brains to help ensure that the biases are identified, extracted, and removed. Speaking of AI, I've been geeking out with ChatGPT. So, I'm on it yesterday and I ask it, "What's hot in data science?" And I was like, is it going to get that? What's hot? And it did it, it came back with trends. I think if I ask anything, "What's hot?", I should be to Paris Hilton, but I didn't. And so I was geeking out. One of the things I learned recently that I thought was so super cool is the CTO of OpenAI is a woman, Mira Murati, which I didn't know until over the weekend. Because I always think if I had to name top females in tech, who would they be? And I always default to Sheryl Sandberg, Carly Fiorina, Susan Wojcicki running YouTube. Who are some of the people in your history, in your current, that are really inspiring to you? Men, women, indifferent. >> Sure. I think Boeing is one of the companies where you actually do see a lot of women in leadership roles. I think we're one of the top companies with a number of women executives, actually. Susan Doniz, who's our Chief Information Officer, I believe she's actually slotted to speak at a WiDS event come fall. >> Lisa: Cool. >> So that will be exciting. Susan's actually relatively newer to Boeing in some ways. A Boeing time skill is like three years is still kind of new. (laughs) But she's been around for a while and she's done a lot of inspiring things, I think, for women in the organization. She does a lot with Latino communities and things like that as well. For me personally, you know, when I started at Boeing Ahmad Yaghoobi was one of my mentors and my Technical Lead. He came from Iran during a lot of hard times in the 1980s. His brother actually wrote a memoir, (laughs) which is just a fun, interesting fact. >> Tracy: Oh my God! >> Lisa: Wow! >> And so, I kind of gravitate to people that I can learn from that's not in my sphere, that might make me uncomfortable. >> And you probably don't even think about how many people you're influencing along the way. >> No. >> We just keep going and learning from our mentors and probably lose sight of, "I wonder how many people actually admire me?" And I'm sure there are many that admire you, Rhonda, for what you've done, going from anthropology to archeology. You mentioned before we went live you were really interested in photography. Keep going and really gathering all that breadth 'cause it's only making you more inspiring to people like us. >> Exactly. >> We thank you so much for joining us on the program and sharing a little bit about you and what brought you to WiDS. Thank you so much, Rhonda. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Tracy: Thank you so much for being here. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> Alright. >> For our guests, and for Tracy Zhang, this is Lisa Martin live at Stanford University covering the eighth Annual Women In Data Science Conference. Stick around. Next guest will be here in just a second. (gentle music)

hi everybody welcome back to re invent 2022. this is thecube's exclusive coverage we're here at the satellite set it's up on the fifth floor of the Venetian Conference Center and this is part of the global startup program the AWS startup showcase series that we've been running all through last year and and into this year with AWS and featuring some of its its Global Partners Ed wallson series the CEO of chaos search many times Cube Alum and Kevin Miller there's also a cube Alum vice president GM of S3 at AWS guys good to see you again yeah great to see you Dave hi Kevin this is we call this our Super Bowl so this must be like your I don't know uh World Cup it's a pretty big event yeah it's the World Cup for sure yeah so a lot of S3 talk you know I mean that's what got us all started in 2006 so absolutely what's new in S3 yeah it's been a great show we've had a number of really interesting launches over the last few weeks and a few at the show as well so you know we've been really focused on helping customers that are running Mass scale data Lakes including you know whether it's structured or unstructured data we actually announced just a few just an hour ago I think it was a new capability to give customers cross-account access points for sharing data securely with other parts of the organization and that's something that we'd heard from customers is as they are growing and have more data sets and they're looking to to get more out of their data they are increasingly looking to enable multiple teams across their businesses to access those data sets securely and that's what we provide with cross-count access points we also launched yesterday our multi-region access point failover capabilities and so again this is where customers have data sets and they're using multiple regions for certain critical workloads they're now able to to use that to fail to control the failover between different regions in AWS and then one other launch I would just highlight is some improvements we made to storage lens which is our really a very novel and you need capability to help customers really understand what storage they have where who's accessing it when it's being accessed and we added a bunch of new metrics storage lens has been pretty exciting for a lot of customers in fact we looked at the data and saw that customers who have adopted storage lens typically within six months they saved more than six times what they had invested in turning storage lens on and certainly in this environment right now we have a lot of customers who are it's pretty top of mind they're looking for ways to optimize their their costs in the cloud and take some of those savings and be able to reinvest them in new innovation so pretty exciting with the storage lens launch I think what's interesting about S3 is that you know pre-cloud Object Store was this kind of a niche right and then of course you guys announced you know S3 in 2006 as I said and okay great you know cheap and deep storage simple get put now the conversations about how to enable value from from data absolutely analytics and it's just a whole new world and Ed you've talked many times I love the term yeah we built chaos search on the on the shoulders of giants right and so the under underlying that is S3 but the value that you can build on top of that has been key and I don't think we've talked about his shoulders and Giants but we've talked about how we literally you know we have a big Vision right so hard to kind of solve the challenge to analytics at scale we really focus on the you know the you know Big Data coming environment get analytics so we talk about the on the shoulders Giants obviously Isaac Newton's you know metaphor of I learned from everything before and we layer on top so really when you talk about all the things come from S3 like I just smile because like we picked it up naturally we went all in an S3 and this is where I think you're going Dave but everyone is so let's just cut the chase like so any of the data platforms you're using S3 is what you're building but we did it a little bit differently so at first people using a cold storage like you said and then they ETL it up into a different platforms for analytics of different sorts now people are using it closer they're doing caching layers and cashing out and they're that's where but that's where the attributes of a scale or reliability are what we did is we actually make S3 a database so literally we have no persistence outside that three and that kind of comes in so it's working really well with clients because most of the thing is we pick up all these attributes of scale reliability and it shows up in the clients environments and so when you launch all these new scalable things we just see it like our clients constantly comment like one of our biggest customers fintech in uh Europe they go to Black Friday again black Friday's not one days and they lose scale from what is it 58 terabytes a day and they're going up to 187 terabytes a day and we don't Flinch they say how do you do that well we built our platform on S3 as long as you can stream it to S3 so they're saying I can't overrun S3 and it's a natural play so it's it's really nice that but we take out those attributes but same thing that's why we're able to you know help clients get you know really you know Equifax is a good example maybe they're able to consolidate 12 their divisions on one platform we couldn't have done that without the scale and the performance of what you can get S3 but also they saved 90 I'm able to do that but that's really because the only persistence is S3 and what you guys are delivering but and then we really for focus on shoulders Giants we're doing on top of that innovating on top of your platforms and bringing that out so things like you know we have a unique data representation that makes it easy to ingest this data because it's kind of coming at you four v's of big data we allow you to do that make it performant on s3h so now you're doing hot analytics on S3 as if it's just a native database in memory but there's no memory SSC caching and then multi-model once you get it there don't move it leverage it in place so you know elasticsearch access you know Cabana grafana access or SQL access with your tools so we're seeing that constantly but we always talk about on the shoulders of giants but even this week I get comments from our customers like how did you do that and most of it is because we built on top of what you guys provided so it's really working out pretty well and you know we talk a lot about digital transformation of course we had the pleasure sitting down with Adam solipski prior John Furrier flew to Seattle sits down his annual one-on-one with the AWS CEO which is kind of cool yeah it was it's good it's like study for the test you know and uh and so but but one of the interesting things he said was you know we're one of our challenges going forward is is how do we go Beyond digital transformation into business transformation like okay well that's that's interesting I was talking to a customer today AWS customer and obviously others because they're 100 year old company and they're basically their business was they call them like the Uber for for servicing appliances when your Appliance breaks you got to get a person to serve it a service if it's out of warranty you know these guys do that so they got to basically have a you know a network of technicians yeah and they gotta deal with the customers no phone right so they had a completely you know that was a business transformation right they're becoming you know everybody says they're coming a software company but they're building it of course yeah right on the cloud so wonder if you guys could each talk about what's what you're seeing in terms of changing not only in the sort of I.T and the digital transformation but also the business transformation yeah I know I I 100 agree that I think business transformation is probably that one of the top themes I'm hearing from customers of all sizes right now even in this environment I think customers are looking for what can I do to drive top line or you know improve bottom line or just improve my customer experience and really you know sort of have that effect where I'm helping customers get more done and you know it is it is very tricky because to do that successfully the customers that are doing that successfully I think are really getting into the lines of businesses and figuring out you know it's probably a different skill set possibly a different culture different norms and practices and process and so it's it's a lot more than just a like you said a lot more than just the technology involved but when it you know we sort of liquidate it down into the data that's where absolutely we see that as a critical function for lines of businesses to become more comfortable first off knowing what data sets they have what data they they could access but possibly aren't today and then starting to tap into those data sources and then as as that progresses figuring out how to share and collaborate with data sets across a company to you know to correlate across those data sets and and drive more insights and then as all that's being done of course it's important to measure the results and be able to really see is this what what effect is this having and proving that effect and certainly I've seen plenty of customers be able to show you know this is a percentage increase in top or bottom line and uh so that pattern is playing out a lot and actually a lot of how we think about where we're going with S3 is related to how do we make it easier for customers to to do everything that I just described to have to understand what data they have to make it accessible and you know it's great to have such a great ecosystem of partners that are then building on top of that and innovating to help customers connect really directly with the businesses that they're running and driving those insights well and customers are hours today one of the things I loved that Adam said he said where Amazon is strategically very very patient but tactically we're really impatient and the customers out there like how are you going to help me increase Revenue how are you going to help me cut costs you know we were talking about how off off camera how you know software can actually help do that yeah it's deflationary I love the quote right so software's deflationary as costs come up how do you go drive it also free up the team and you nail it it's like okay everyone wants to save money but they're not putting off these projects in fact the digital transformation or the business it's actually moving forward but they're getting a little bit bigger but everyone's looking for creative ways to look at their architecture and it becomes larger larger we talked about a couple of those examples but like even like uh things like observability they want to give this tool set this data to all the developers all their sres same data to all the security team and then to do that they need to find a way an architect should do that scale and save money simultaneously so we see constantly people who are pairing us up with some of these larger firms like uh or like keep your data dog keep your Splunk use us to reduce the cost that one and one is actually cheaper than what you have but then they use it either to save money we're saving 50 to 80 hard dollars but more importantly to free up your team from the toil and then they they turn around and make that budget neutral and then allowed to get the same tools to more people across the org because they're sometimes constrained of getting the access to everyone explain that a little bit more let's say I got a Splunk or data dog I'm sifting through you know logs how exactly do you help so it's pretty simple I'll use dad dog example so let's say using data dog preservability so it's just your developers your sres managing environments all these platforms are really good at being a monitoring alerting type of tool what they're not necessarily great at is keeping the data for longer periods like the log data the bigger data that's where we're strong what you see is like a data dog let's say you're using it for a minister for to keep 30 days of logs which is not enough like let's say you're running environment you're finding that performance issue you kind of want to look to last quarter in last month in or maybe last Black Friday so 30 days is not enough but will charge you two eighty two dollars and eighty cents a gigabyte don't focus on just 280 and then if you just turn the knob and keep seven days but keep two years of data on us which is on S3 it goes down to 22 cents plus our list price of 80 cents goes to a dollar two compared to 280. so here's the thing what they're able to do is just turn a knob get more data we do an integration so you can go right from data dog or grafana directly into our platform so the user doesn't see it but they save money A lot of times they don't just save the money now they use that to go fund and get data dog to a lot more people make sense so it's a creativity they're looking at it and they're looking at tools we see the same thing with a grafana if you look at the whole grafana play which is hey you can't put it in one place but put Prometheus for metrics or traces we fit well with logs but they're using that to bring down their costs because a lot of this data just really bogs down these applications the alerting monitoring are good at small data they're not good at the big data which is what we're really good at and then the one and one is actually less than you paid for the one so it and it works pretty well so things are really unpredictable right now in the economy you know during the pandemic we've sort of lockdown and then the stock market went crazy we're like okay it's going to end it's going to end and then it looked like it was going to end and then it you know but last year it reinvented just just in that sweet spot before Omicron so we we tucked it in which which was awesome right it was a great great event we really really missed one physical reinvent you know which was very rare so that's cool but I've called it the slingshot economy it feels like you know you're driving down the highway and you got to hit the brakes and then all of a sudden you're going okay we're through it Oh no you're gonna hit the brakes again yeah so it's very very hard to predict and I was listening to jassy this morning he was talking about yeah consumers they're still spending but what they're doing is they're they're shopping for more features they might be you know buying a TV that's less expensive you know more value for the money so okay so hopefully the consumer spending will get us out of this but you don't really know you know and I don't yeah you know we don't seem to have the algorithms we've never been through something like this before so what are you guys seeing in terms of customer Behavior given that uncertainty well one thing I would highlight that I think particularly going back to what we were just talking about as far as business and digital transformation I think some customers are still appreciating the fact that where you know yesterday you may have had to to buy some Capital put out some capital and commit to something for a large upfront expenditure is that you know today the value of being able to experiment and scale up and then most importantly scale down and dynamically based on is the experiment working out am I seeing real value from it and doing that on a time scale of a day or a week or a few months that is so important right now because again it gets to I am looking for a ways to innovate and to drive Top Line growth but I I can't commit to a multi-year sort of uh set of costs to to do that so and I think plenty of customers are finding that even a few months of experimentation gives them some really valuable insight as far as is this going to be successful or not and so I think that again just of course with S3 and storage from day one we've been elastic pay for what you use if you're not using the storage you don't get charged for it and I think that particularly right now having the applications and the rest of the ecosystem around the storage and the data be able to scale up and scale down is is just ever more important and when people see that like typically they're looking to do more with it so if they find you usually find these little Department projects but they see a way to actually move faster and save money I think it is a mix of those two they're looking to expand it which can be a nightmare for sales Cycles because they take longer but people are looking well why don't you leverage this and go across division so we do see people trying to leverage it because they're still I don't think digital transformation is slowing down but a lot more to be honest a lot more approvals at this point for everything it is you know Adam and another great quote in his in his keynote he said if you want to save money the Cloud's a place to do it absolutely and I read an article recently and I was looking through and I said this is the first time you know AWS has ever seen a downturn because the cloud was too early back then I'm like you weren't paying attention in 2008 because that was the first major inflection point for cloud adoption where CFO said okay stop the capex we're going to Opex and you saw the cloud take off and then 2010 started this you know amazing cycle that we really haven't seen anything like it where they were doubling down in Investments and they were real hardcore investment it wasn't like 1998 99 was all just going out the door for no clear reason yeah so that Foundation is now in place and I think it makes a lot of sense and it could be here for for a while where people are saying Hey I want to optimize and I'm going to do that on the cloud yeah no I mean I've obviously I certainly agree with Adam's quote I think really that's been in aws's DNA from from day one right is that ability to scale costs with with the actual consumption and paying for what you use and I think that you know certainly moments like now are ones that can really motivate change in an organization in a way that might not have been as palatable when it just it didn't feel like it was as necessary yeah all right we got to go give you a last word uh I think it's been a great event I love all your announcements I think this is wonderful uh it's been a great show I love uh in fact how many people are here at reinvent north of 50 000. yeah I mean I feel like it was it's as big if not bigger than 2019. people have said ah 2019 was a record when you count out all the professors I don't know it feels it feels as big if not bigger so there's great energy yeah it's quite amazing and uh and we're thrilled to be part of it guys thanks for coming on thecube again really appreciate it face to face all right thank you for watching this is Dave vellante for the cube your leader in Enterprise and emerging Tech coverage we'll be right back foreign

(bright music) >> Hello cloud computing friends and welcome back to theCUBE, where we are live from Las Vegas, Nevada, here at AWS re:Invent all week. My name is Savannah Peterson, very excited to be joined by Paul Gillan today. How are you doing? >> I'm doing great, Savannah. It's my first re:Invent. >> I was just going to ask you >> So it's quite an experience. >> If you've ever been to re:Invent. >> It's dazzling much like the sequins on your top. It's dazzling. >> Yes. >> It's a jam packed affair. I came to the COMDEX Conference for many years in Las Vegas, which was huge event and this really rivals it in terms of these crowd sizes. But I think there's more intensity here. There's more excitement. People are just jazzed about being here to the extent that I never saw at other computer conferences. >> I thought I would agree with you. It's my first re:Invent as well. I'm glad we could share this experience together. And the vibe, the pulse, I think being back in person is really contagious as well. Ooh, maybe the wrong word to use, but in a great way. The energy is definitely radiating between people here. I'll watch my words a little bit better. >> And in person we have with us Samuel Nicholls, the director of public cloud at Global Product Marketing at Veeam Software. Sam, is it Sam or Samuel? >> Depends if I'm in trouble, Paul. >> Savannah: But it depends on who's saying it out loud. >> Yeah, yeah. It's typically, Samuel is usually reserved for my mother, so- >> Yeah. >> (laughs) Well, Sam, thanks for joining us. >> We'll stick with Sam on the show. >> Yeah. >> So Veeam been a red hot company for several years. Really made its, uh, its reputation in the VMware world. Now you've got this whole-sail shift to the cloud, not that VMware is not important still, but how is that affecting, you're shifting with it, how is that affecting your role as a product manager and the business overall? >> Yeah, it's a fantastic question. Obviously Veeam was pioneered in terms of being the purpose-built backup and recovery company for VMware. And as these workloads are being transitioned from the data center into the cloud or just net new workloads being created in the cloud, there is that equal need for backup and recovery there. So it's incredibly important that we were able to provide a purpose-built backup and recovery solution for workloads that live in AWS as well. >> Paul: And how different is it backing up an AWS workload compared to a VMware workload? >> I think it depends on what kind of service a user is, is, is utilizing, right? There's infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, software as a service. And given the differences in what is exposed to that customer that can make backup and recovery quite challenging. So I would say that the primary thing that we want to look at is utilizing native snapshots is our first line of defense when it comes to backup and recovery, irrespective of what workload that right might be whether it's a virtual machine, Amazon EC2, some sort of database on Amazon RDS, a file share, so on. >> Savannah: I bet you're seeing a lot across verticals and across the industry given the support that you're giving customers. What are you seeing in the market and in customer environments? What are some of those trends? >> So I think the major trends that we highlight in our data protection trend support, which is a new update is coming very shortly in the new year, is- >> Savannah: We have to check that out. >> Yeah, absolutely. The physical server is on a decline within the data center. Virtualized workloads, namely VMware is relatively static, kind of flat. The real hockey stick is with the cloud workloads. And as I mentioned before, that is partially because workloads are being transitioned from physical to virtual machines to being cloud hosted but also we're creating more applications and the cloud has become lead de facto standard for new workloads. So you hear about cloud first initiatives, digital transformation, the cloud is central to that. >> You mentioned snapshotting, which is a relatively new phenomenon, although it's taken a hold rapidly, how does snapshotting work in the cloud versus in on your on-prem environment? >> Samuel: It's not wildly different at all. I think the snapshots is again, a great first line of defense for helping users achieve very low recovery point objectives. So the frequency that they can protect their data as well as very low recovery time objectives, how quickly that I can recover the data. Because that's why we're backing up, right? We need the ability to recover. However, snapshots certainly have their limitations as well. They are not independent of the workload that is being protected. So if there were to be some sort of cybersecurity event like ransomware that is prolific throughout pretty much every business, every vertical. When that snapshot is not independent, if the production system becomes compromised that snapshot's likely to be compromised as well. And then going back to the recovery piece, not going to have something to recover from. >> And it's not a one and done with ransomware. >> No. >> It's, yeah. So how, so what is the role that backup plays? I mean a lot of people, I feel like security is such a hot topic here in the show and just in general, attacks are coming in unique form factors for everyone. I mean, I feel like backup is, no pun intended, the backbone of a system here. How does that affect what you're creating, I mean? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think, like you say the backup is core to any comprehensive security strategy, right? I think when we talk about security, everyone tends to focus on the preventative, the proactive piece, stopping the bad guys from getting in. However, there is that remediative aspect as well because like you say, ransomware is relentless, right? You, you as a good guy have to pretty much fend off each and every single attack that comes your way. And that can be an infinite number of attacks. We're all human beings, we're fallible, right? And sometimes we can't defend against everything. So having a secure backup strategy is part of that remediative recovery component for a cybersecurity strategy is critical. And that includes things like encryption, immutability, logical separation of data and so forth. >> Paul: We know that ransomware is a scourge on-premises, typically begins with the end users, end user workstation. How does ransomware work in the cloud? And do the cloud providers have adequate protections against ransomware? Or can they? >> Samuel: Yeah, it's a, it's a fantastic question as well. I think when we look at the cloud, one of the common misconceptions is as we transition workloads to the cloud, we are transitioning responsibility to that cloud provider. And again, it's a misconception, right? It is a shared responsibility between the cloud provider in this case, AWS and the user. So as we transition these workloads across varying different services, infrastructure, platform, software as a service, we're always, always transitioning varying degrees of responsibility. But we always own our data and it is our responsibility to protect and secure that data, for the actual infrastructure components, the hardware that is on the onus of the cloud provider, so I'd say that's the major difference. >> Is ransomware as big a threat in the cloud as it is on-prem? >> Absolutely. There's no difference between a ransomware attack on-premises or in the cloud. Irrespective of where you are choosing to run your workloads, you need to have that comprehensive cybersecurity strategy in order to defend against that and ultimately recover as well if there's a successful attempt. >> Yeah, it's, ooh, okay. Let's get us out at the dark shadows real quick (laughs) and bring us back to a little bit of the business use case here. A lot of people using AWS. What do you think are some of the considerations, they should have when they're thinking about this, thinking about growing their (indistinct)? >> Well, if we're going to stick down the dark shadows, the cybersecurity piece. >> We can be the darkness. >> You and me kind of dark shadows business. >> Yeah, yeah. >> We can go rainbows and unicorns, nice and happy if you like. I think there's a number of considerations they need to keep up. Security is, is, is number one. The next piece is around the recovery as well. I think folks, when they, when we talk about backup and recovery, the focus is always on the backup piece of it. But again, we need to focus on why we're doing the backup. It's the recovery, it's the recovery component. So making sure that we have a clean verifiable backup that we're able to restore data from. Can we do that in a, in efficient and timely manner? And I think the other major consideration is looking at the entirety of our environments as well. Very few companies are a hundred percent sole sourced on a single cloud provider. It is typically hybrid cloud. It's around 80% of organizations are hybrid, right? So they have their on-premises data and they also have workloads running in one or multiple clouds. And when it comes to backup and recovery of all of these different infrastructures and environments, the way that we approach it is very different. And that often leads to multiple different point products from multiple different vendors. The average company utilizes three different backup products, sometimes as many as seven and that can introduce a management nightmare that's very complex, very resource intensive, expensive. So looking at the entirety of the environment and looking to utilize a backup provider that can cover the entirety of that environment while centralizing everything under a single management console helps folks be a lot more efficient, a lot more cost effective and ultimately better when it comes to data protection. >> Amazon and all cloud providers really are increasingly making regions transparent. Just at this conference, Amazon introduced failover controls from multiple multi-region access points. So you can, you can failover from one access from one region to another. What kind of challenges does that present to you as a backup provider? >> I don't think it represents any challenges. When we look at the native durability of the cloud, we look at availability zones, we look at multi-region failover. That is, that durability is ultimately founded on, on replication. And I wouldn't say that replication and backup, you would use one or the other. I would say that they are complimentary. So for replication, that is going to help with the failover scenario, that durability component. But then backup again is that independent copy. Because if we look at replication, if let's say the source data were to be compromised by ransomware or there was accidental deletion or corruption, that's simply going to be copied over to the target destination as well. Having that backup as an independent copy, again compliments that strategy as well. >> Paul: You need it in either, in any scenario. >> Samuel: In any scenario. >> I think the average person would probably say that backup is not the most exciting technology aspect of this industry. But, but you guys certainly made, build a great business on it. What excites you about what's coming in backup? What are the new technologies, new advancements that perhaps we haven't seen and productized yet that you think are going to change the game? >> I think actually what we offer right now is the most exciting piece which is just choice flexibility. So Veeam again is synonymous with VMware backup but we cover a multitude of environments including AWS, containerized workloads, Kubernetes physical systems and the mobility pieces is critical because as organizations look to act on their digital transformation, cloud first initiatives, they need to be able to mobilize their workloads across different infrastructures, maybe from on-premises into the cloud, one cloud to another, maybe it's cloud back to on-premises, 'cause we do also see that. That flexibility of choice is what excites me about Veeam because it's ultimately giving the users best in class data protection tool sets without any prescriptive approach from us in terms of where you should be running your workloads. That is the choice that you use. >> Yeah, Veeam is definitely more than VMware. We actually had a chance to chat with you all like KubeCon and CloudNativeCon in Detroit. So we, we've seen the multitude of things that you touch. I want to bring it back to something and something kind of fun because you talked a lot about the community and being able to serve them. It's very clear, actually I shouldn't say this, I shouldn't say it's very clear, but to me it appears clear that community is a big priority for Veeam. I just want to call this out 'cause this was one of the cooler pieces of swag. You all gave out a hundred massage guns. Okay, very hot topic. Hot Christmas gift for 2022. I feel like Vanna White right now. And, but I thought that I was actually really compelled by this because we do a swag segment on theCUBE but it's not just about the objects or getting stuff. It's really about who's looking out for their community and how are they saying thanks. I mean, swag is a brand activation but it's also a thank you and I loved that you were giving out massage guns to the AWS Heroes and Community Builders. >> Yep. >> What role does community play in the culture and the product development at Veeam? >> So community has always been at the heart of Veeam. If you have a look at pretty much every single development across all of our versions, across all of our products it's always did by the community, right? We have a wonderful Veeam forum where we got 400,000 plus users actively providing feedback on the product what they would like to see. And that is ultimately what steers the direction of the product. Of course market trends and technology chain. >> A couple other factors, I'm sure. >> A couple of other factors, but community is huge for us. And the same goes for AWS. So, you know, talking with the AWS Heroes, the Community Builders helps Veeam reach further into that, into that community and the AWS user base and empower those folks with data protection tools and massage guns, when your feet are tired from, you know, being standing on them all day in Vegas. >> (laughs) Yeah, well, I mean, everybody, everybody's working hard and it's nice to say, it's nice to say, thank you. So I love, I love to hear that and it's, it's clear from the breadth of products that you're creating, the ways that you're supporting your customers that you already, they care a lot about community. We have a new challenge on theCUBE this year at AWS re:Invent. Think of it as an Instagram reel of your thought leadership, your hot take on the show, key themes as we look into 2023. What do you think is the most important story or trend or thing going on here at the show? >> I think it's just the continuation of cybersecurity and the importance of backup as a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy. You know, some folks might say that secure backup is your last line of defense. Again, ransomware is relentless. These folks are going to keep coming and even if they're successful, it's not a one and done thing. It's going to happen again and again and again. So, you know, we have a look around the show floor, the presentations there is a huge cybersecurity focus and really just what folks should be doing as their best practice to secure their AWS environments. >> That's awesome. Well, Paul, any final, any final thoughts or questions? >> I just quickly, you've mentioned data security, you mentioned data protection and backup sort of interchangeably but they're not really the same thing, are they? I mean, what businesses do you see Veeam as being here? >> I would say that we are a data protection company because of, yes, there is backup, but there's also the replication component. There's the continuous data protection component where we've got, you know, near-zero RTOs and then we again look at the cybersecurity components of that. What can we do to really protect that data? So I would say that the two are different. Backup is a subset of data protection. >> Sam, thank you so much for being here with us on theCUBE. It's been a super insightful conversation. Hopefully we'll get you back soon and more of the teams, there seem to be celebrities here with us on theCUBE. Paul Gillan, thank you so much for being here with me. >> Pleasure Savannah. >> And I'm glad we get to celebrate our first re:Invent and most importantly, thank you to the audience for tuning in. Without you, we don't get to hang out here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada, where we're live from the show floor at AWS re:Invent. My name is Savannah Peterson with Paul Gillan. We're theCUBE and we are the leading source for high-tech coverage. (bright music)

>> From the CUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from the Cube and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> A better than expected earnings report in late August got people excited about Snowflake again, but the negative sentiment in the market is weighed heavily on virtually all growth tech stocks and Snowflake is no exception. As we've stressed many times the company's management is on a long term mission to dramatically simplify the way organizations use data. Snowflake is tapping into a multi hundred billion dollar total available market and continues to grow at a rapid pace. In our view, Snowflake is embarking on its third major wave of innovation data apps, while its first and second waves are still bearing significant fruit. Now for short term traders focused on the next 90 or 180 days, that probably doesn't matter. But those taking a longer view are asking, "Should we still be optimistic about the future of this high flyer or is it just another over hyped tech play?" Hello and welcome to this week's Wiki Bond Cube Insights powered by ETR. Snowflake's Quarter just ended. And in this breaking analysis we take a look at the most recent survey data from ETR to see what clues and nuggets we can extract to predict the near term future in the long term outlook for Snowflake which is going to announce its earnings at the end of this month. Okay, so you know the story. If you've been investor in Snowflake this year, it's been painful. We said at IPO, "If you really want to own this stock on day one, just hold your nose and buy it." But like most IPOs we said there will be likely a better entry point in the future, and not surprisingly that's been the case. Snowflake IPOed a price of 120, which you couldn't touch on day one unless you got into a friends and family Delio. And if you did, you're still up 5% or so. So congratulations. But at one point last year you were up well over 200%. That's been the nature of this volatile stock, and I certainly can't help you with the timing of the market. But longer term Snowflake is targeting 10 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2028. A big number. Is it achievable? Is it big enough? Tell you what, let's come back to that. Now shorter term, our expert trader and breaking analysis contributor Chip Simonton said he got out of the stock a while ago after having taken a shot at what turned out to be a bear market rally. He pointed out that the stock had been bouncing around the 150 level for the last few months and broke that to the downside last Friday. So he'd expect 150 is where the stock is going to find resistance on the way back up, but there's no sign of support right now. He said maybe at 120, which was the July low and of course the IPO price that we just talked about. Now, perhaps earnings will be a catalyst, when Snowflake announces on November 30th, but until the mentality toward growth tech changes, nothing's likely to change dramatically according to Simonton. So now that we have that out of the way, let's take a look at the spending data for Snowflake in the ETR survey. Here's a chart that shows the time series breakdown of snowflake's net score going back to the October, 2021 survey. Now at that time, Snowflake's net score stood at a robust 77%. And remember, net score is a measure of spending velocity. It's a proprietary network, and ETR derives it from a quarterly survey of IT buyers and asks the respondents, "Are you adopting the platform new? Are you spending 6% or more? Is you're spending flat? Is you're spending down 6% or worse? Or are you leaving the platform decommissioning?" You subtract the percent of customers that are spending less or churning from those that are spending more and adopting or adopting and you get a net score. And that's expressed as a percentage of customers responding. In this chart we show Snowflake's in out of the total survey which ranges... The total survey ranges between 1,200 and 1,400 each quarter. And the very last column... Oh sorry, very last row, we show the number of Snowflake respondents that are coming in the survey from the Fortune 500 and the Global 2000. Those are two very important Snowflake constituencies. Now what this data tells us is that Snowflake exited 2021 with very strong momentum in a net score of 82%, which is off the charts and it was actually accelerating from the previous survey. Now by April that sentiment had flipped and Snowflake came down to earth with a 68% net score. Still highly elevated relative to its peers, but meaningfully down. Why was that? Because we saw a drop in new ads and an increase in flat spend. Then into the July and most recent October surveys, you saw a significant drop in the percentage of customers that were spending more. Now, notably, the percentage of customers who are contemplating adding the platform is actually staying pretty strong, but it is off a bit this past survey. And combined with a slight uptick in planned churn, net score is now down to 60%. That uptick from 0% and 1% and then 3%, it's still small, but that net score at 60% is still 20 percentage points higher than our highly elevated benchmark of 40% as you recall from listening to earlier breaking analysis. That 40% range is we consider a milestone. Anything above that is actually quite strong. But again, Snowflake is down and coming back to churn, while 3% churn is very low, in previous quarters we've seen Snowflake 0% or 1% decommissions. Now the last thing to note in this chart is the meaningful uptick in survey respondents that are citing, they're using the Snowflake platform. That's up to 212 in the survey. So look, it's hard to imagine that Snowflake doesn't feel the softening in the market like everyone else. Snowflake is guiding for around 60% growth in product revenue against the tough compare from a year ago with a 2% operating margin. So like every company, the reaction of the street is going to come down to how accurate or conservative the guide is from their CFO. Now, earlier this year, Snowflake acquired a company called Streamlit for around $800 million. Streamlit is an open source Python library and it makes it easier to build data apps with machine learning, obviously a huge trend. And like Snowflake, generally its focus is on simplifying the complex, in this case making data science easier to integrate into data apps that business people can use. So we were excited this summer in the July ETR survey to see that they added some nice data and pick on Streamlit, which we're showing here in comparison to Snowflake's core business on the left hand side. That's the data warehousing, the Streamlit pieces on the right hand side. And we show again net score over time from the previous survey for Snowflake's core database and data warehouse offering again on the left as compared to a Streamlit on the right. Snowflake's core product had 194 responses in the October, 22 survey, Streamlit had an end of 73, which is up from 52 in the July survey. So significant uptick of people responding that they're doing business in adopting Streamlit. That was pretty impressive to us. And it's hard to see, but the net scores stayed pretty constant for Streamlit at 51%. It was 52% I think in the previous quarter, well over that magic 40% mark. But when you blend it with Snowflake, it does sort of bring things down a little bit. Now there are two key points here. One is that the acquisition seems to have gained exposure right out of the gate as evidenced by the large number of responses. And two, the spending momentum. Again while it's lower than Snowflake overall, and when you blend it with Snowflake it does pull it down, it's very healthy and steady. Now let's do a little pure comparison with some of our favorite names in this space. This chart shows net score or spending velocity in the Y-axis, an overlap or presence, pervasiveness if you will, in the data set on the X-axis. That red dotted line again is that 40% highly elevated net score that we like to talk about. And that table inserted informs us as to how the companies are plotted, where the dots set up, the net score, the ins. And we're comparing a number of database players, although just a caution, Oracle includes all of Oracle including its apps. But we just put it in there for reference because it is the leader in database. Right off the bat, Snowflake jumps out with a net score of 64%. The 60% from the earlier chart, again included Streamlit. So you can see its core database, data warehouse business actually is higher than the total company average that we showed you before 'cause the Streamlit is blended in. So when you separate it out, Streamlit is right on top of data bricks. Isn't that ironic? Only Snowflake and Databricks in this selection of names are above the 40% level. You see Mongo and Couchbase, they know they're solid and Teradata cloud actually showing pretty well compared to some of the earlier survey results. Now let's isolate on the database data platform sector and see how that shapes up. And for this analysis, same XY dimensions, we've added the big giants, AWS and Microsoft and Google. And notice that those three plus Snowflake are just at or above the 40% line. Snowflake continues to lead by a significant margin in spending momentum and it keeps creeping to the right. That's that end that we talked about earlier. Now here's an interesting tidbit. Snowflake is often asked, and I've asked them myself many times, "How are you faring relative to AWS, Microsoft and Google, these big whales with Redshift and Synapse and Big Query?" And Snowflake has been telling folks that 80% of its business comes from AWS. And when Microsoft heard that, they said, "Whoa, wait a minute, Snowflake, let's partner up." 'Cause Microsoft is smart, and they understand that the market is enormous. And if they could do better with Snowflake, one, they may steal some business from AWS. And two, even if Snowflake is winning against some of the Microsoft database products, if it wins on Azure, Microsoft is going to sell more compute and more storage, more AI tools, more other stuff to these customers. Now AWS is really aggressive from a partnering standpoint with Snowflake. They're openly negotiating, not openly, but they're negotiating better prices. They're realizing that when it comes to data, the cheaper that you make the offering, the more people are going to consume. At scale economies and operating leverage are really powerful things at volume that kick in. Now Microsoft, they're coming along, they obviously get it, but Google is seemingly resistant to that type of go to market partnership. Rather than lean into Snowflake as a great partner Google's field force is kind of fighting fashion. Google itself at Cloud next heavily messaged what they call the open data cloud, which is a direct rip off of Snowflake. So what can we say about Google? They continue to be kind of behind the curve when it comes to go to market. Now just a brief aside on the competitive posture. I've seen Slootman, Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake in action with his prior companies and how he depositioned the competition. At Data Domain, he eviscerated a company called Avamar with their, what he called their expensive and slow post process architecture. I think he actually called it garbage, if I recall at one conference I heard him speak at. And that sort of destroyed BMC when he was at ServiceNow, kind of positioning them as the equivalent of the department of motor vehicles. And so it's interesting to hear how Snowflake openly talks about the data platforms of AWS, Microsoft, Google, and data bricks. I'll give you this sort of short bumper sticker. Redshift is just an on-prem database that AWS morphed to the cloud, which by the way is kind of true. They actually did a brilliant job of it, but it's basically a fact. Microsoft Excel, a collection of legacy databases, which also kind of morphed to run in the cloud. And even Big Query, which is considered cloud native by many if not most, is being positioned by Snowflake as originally an on-prem database to support Google's ad business, maybe. And data bricks is for those people smart enough to get it to Berkeley that love complexity. And now Snowflake doesn't, they don't mention Berkeley as far as I know. That's my addition. But you get the point. And the interesting thing about Databricks and Snowflake is a while ago in the cube I said that there was a new workload type emerging around data where you have AWS cloud, Snowflake obviously for the cloud database and Databricks data for the data science and EML, you bring those things together and there's this new workload emerging that's going to be very powerful in the future. And it's interesting to see now the aspirations of all three of these platforms are colliding. That's quite a dynamic, especially when you see both Snowflake and Databricks putting venture money and getting their hooks into the loyalties of the same companies like DBT labs and Calibra. Anyway, Snowflake's posture is that we are the pioneer in cloud native data warehouse, data sharing and now data apps. And our platform is designed for business people that want simplicity. The other guys, yes, they're formidable, but we Snowflake have an architectural lead and of course we run in multiple clouds. So it's pretty strong positioning or depositioning, you have to admit. Now I'm not sure I agree with the big query knockoffs completely. I think that's a bit of a stretch, but snowflake, as we see in the ETR survey data is winning. So in thinking about the longer term future, let's talk about what's different with Snowflake, where it's headed and what the opportunities are for the company. Snowflake put itself on the map by focusing on simplifying data analytics. What's interesting about that is the company's founders are as you probably know from Oracle. And rather than focusing on transactional data, which is Oracle's sweet spot, the stuff they worked on when they were at Oracle, the founder said, "We're going to go somewhere else. We're going to attack the data warehousing problem and the data analytics problem." And they completely re-imagined the database and how it could be applied to solve those challenges and reimagine what was possible if you had virtually unlimited compute and storage capacity. And of course Snowflake became famous for separating the compute from storage and being able to completely shut down compute so you didn't have to pay for it when you're not using it. And the ability to have multiple clusters hit the same data without making endless copies and a consumption/cloud pricing model. And then of course everyone on the planet realized, "Wow, that's a pretty good idea." Every venture capitalist in Silicon Valley has been funding companies to copy that move. And that today has pretty much become mainstream in table stakes. But I would argue that Snowflake not only had the lead, but when you look at how others are approaching this problem, it's not necessarily as clean and as elegant. Some of the startups, the early startups I think get it and maybe had an advantage of starting later, which can be a disadvantage too. But AWS is a good example of what I'm saying here. Is its version of separating compute from storage was an afterthought and it's good, it's... Given what they had it was actually quite clever and customers like it, but it's more of a, "Okay, we're going to tier to storage to lower cost, we're going to sort of dial down the compute not completely, we're not going to shut it off, we're going to minimize the compute required." It's really not true as separation is like for instance Snowflake has. But having said that, we're talking about competitors with lots of resources and cohort offerings. And so I don't want to make this necessarily all about the product, but all things being equal architecture matters, okay? So that's the cloud S-curve, the first one we're showing. Snowflake's still on that S-curve, and in and of itself it's got legs, but it's not what's going to power the company to 10 billion. The next S-curve we denote is the multi-cloud in the middle. And now while 80% of Snowflake's revenue is AWS, Microsoft is ramping up and Google, well, we'll see. But the interesting part of that curve is data sharing, and this idea of data clean rooms. I mean it really should be called the data sharing curve, but I have my reasons for calling it multi-cloud. And this is all about network effects and data gravity, and you're seeing this play out today, especially in industries like financial services and healthcare and government that are highly regulated verticals where folks are super paranoid about compliance. There not going to share data if they're going to get sued for it, if they're going to be in the front page of the Wall Street Journal for some kind of privacy breach. And what Snowflake has done is said, "Put all the data in our cloud." Now, of course now that triggers a lot of people because it's a walled garden, okay? It is. That's the trade off. It's not the Wild West, it's not Windows, it's Mac, it's more controlled. But the idea is that as different parts of the organization or even partners begin to share data that they need, it's got to be governed, it's got to be secure, it's got to be compliant, it's got to be trusted. So Snowflake introduced the idea of, they call these things stable edges. I think that's the term that they use. And they track a metric around stable edges. And so a stable edge, or think of it as a persistent edge is an ongoing relationship between two parties that last for some period of time, more than a month. It's not just a one shot deal, one a done type of, "Oh guys shared it for a day, done." It sent you an FTP, it's done. No, it's got to have trajectory over time. Four weeks or six weeks or some period of time that's meaningful. And that metric is growing. Now I think sort of a different metric that they track. I think around 20% of Snowflake customers are actively sharing data today and then they track the number of those edge relationships that exist. So that's something that's unique. Because again, most data sharing is all about making copies of data. That's great for storage companies, it's bad for auditors, and it's bad for compliance officers. And that trend is just starting out, that middle S-curve, it's going to kind of hit the base of that steep part of the S-curve and it's going to have legs through this decade we think. And then finally the third wave that we show here is what we call super cloud. That's why I called it multi-cloud before, so it could invoke super cloud. The idea that you've built a PAS layer that is purpose built for a specific objective, and in this case it's building data apps that are cloud native, shareable and governed. And is a long-term trend that's going to take some time to develop. I mean, application development platforms can take five to 10 years to mature and gain significant adoption, but this one's unique. This is a critical play for Snowflake. If it's going to compete with the big cloud players, it has to have an app development framework like Snowpark. It has to accommodate new data types like transactional data. That's why it announced this thing called UniStore last June, Snowflake a summit. And the pattern that's forming here is Snowflake is building layer upon layer with its architecture at the core. It's not currently anyway, it's not going out and saying, "All right, we're going to buy a company that's got to another billion dollars in revenue and that's how we're going to get to 10 billion." So it's not buying its way into new markets through revenue. It's actually buying smaller companies that can complement Snowflake and that it can turn into revenue for growth that fit in to the data cloud. Now as to the 10 billion by fiscal year 28, is that achievable? That's the question. Yeah, I think so. Would the momentum resources go to market product and management prowess that Snowflake has? Yes, it's definitely achievable. And one could argue to $10 billion is too conservative. Indeed, Snowflake CFO, Mike Scarpelli will fully admit his forecaster built on existing offerings. He's not including revenue as I understand it from all the new stuff that's in the pipeline because he doesn't know what it's going to look like. He doesn't know what the adoption is going to look like. He doesn't have data on that adoption, not just yet anyway. And now of course things can change quite dramatically. It's possible that is forecast for existing businesses don't materialize or competition picks them off or a company like Databricks actually is able in the longer term replicate the functionality of Snowflake with open source technologies, which would be a very competitive source of innovation. But in our view, there's plenty of room for growth, the market is enormous and the real key is, can and will Snowflake deliver on the promises of simplifying data? Of course we've heard this before from data warehouse, the data mars and data legs and master data management and ETLs and data movers and data copiers and Hadoop and a raft of technologies that have not lived up to expectations. And we've also, by the way, seen some tremendous successes in the software business with the likes of ServiceNow and Salesforce. So will Snowflake be the next great software name and hit that 10 billion magic mark? I think so. Let's reconnect in 2028 and see. Okay, we'll leave it there today. I want to thank Chip Simonton for his input to today's episode. Thanks to Alex Myerson who's on production and manages the podcast. Ken Schiffman as well. Kristin Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hove is our Editor in Chief over at Silicon Angle. He does some great editing for us. Check it out for all the news. Remember all these episodes are available as podcasts. Wherever you listen, just search Breaking Analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Or you can email me to get in touch David.vallante@siliconangle.com. DM me @dvellante or comment on our LinkedIn post. And please do check out etr.ai, they've got the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for the CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, thanks for listening and we'll see you next time on breaking analysis. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back everyone to The Cubes coverage here in Seattle, Washington. For AWS's Marketplace Seller Conference. It's the big news within the Amazon partner network, combining with marketplace, forming the Amazon partner organization. Part of a big reorg as they grow to the next level, NextGen cloud, mid-game on the chessboard. Cube's got it covered. I'm John Furry, your host at Cube. Great guests here from Data bricks. Both cube alumni's. Jack Anderson, GM and VP of the Databricks partnership team for AWS. You handle that relationship and Joel Minick vice president of product and partner marketing. You guys have the keys to the kingdom with Databricks and AWS. Thanks for joining. Good to see you again. >> Thanks for having us back. >> Yeah, John, great to be here. >> So I feel like we're at Reinvent 2013. Small event, no stage, but there's a real shift happening with procurement. Obviously it's a no brainer on the micro, you know, people should be buying online. Self-service, Cloud Scale. But Amazon's got billions being sold through their marketplace. They've reorganized their partner network. You can see kind of what's going on. They've kind of figured it out. Like let's put everything together and simplify and make it less of a website, marketplace. Merge our partner organizations, have more synergy and frictionless experiences so everyone can make more money and customer's are going to be happier. >> Yeah, that's right. >> I mean, you're running relationship. You're in the middle of it. >> Well, Amazon's mental model here is that they want the world's best ISVs to operate on AWS so that we can collaborate and co architect on behalf of customers. And that's exactly what the APO and marketplace allow us to do, is to work with Amazon on these really, you know, unique use cases. >> You know, I interviewed Ali many times over the years. I remember many years ago, maybe six, seven years ago, we were talking. He's like, "we're all in on AWS." Obviously now the success of Databricks, you've got multiple clouds, see that. Customers have choice. But I remember the strategy early on. It was like, we're going to be deep. So this is, speaks volumes to the relationship you have. Years. Jack, take us through the relationship that Databricks has with AWS from a partner perspective. Joel, and from a product perspective. Because it's not like you guys are Johnny come lately, new to the scene. >> Right. >> You've been there, almost president creation of this wave. What's the relationship and how does it relate to what's going on today? >> So most people may not know that Databricks was born on AWS. We actually did our first $100 million of revenue on Amazon. And today we're obviously available on multiple clouds. But we're very fond of our Amazon relationship. And when you look at what the APN allows us to do, you know, we're able to expand our reach and co-sell with Amazon, and marketplace broadens our reach. And so, we think of marketplace in three different aspects. We've got the marketplace private offer business, which we've been doing for a number of years. Matter of fact, we were driving well over a hundred percent year over year growth in private offers. And we have a nine figure business. So it's a very significant business. And when a customer uses a private offer, that private offer counts against their private pricing agreement with AWS. So they get pricing power against their private pricing. So it's really important it goes on their Amazon bill. In may we launched our pay as you go, on demand offering. And in five short months, we have well over a thousand subscribers. And what this does, is it really reduces the barriers to entry. It's low friction. So anybody in an enterprise or startup or public sector company can start to use Databricks on AWS, in a consumption based model, and have it go against their monthly bill. And so we see customers, you know, doing rapid experimentation, pilots, POCs. They're really learning the value of that first, use case. And then we see rapid use case expansion. And the third aspect is the consulting partner, private offer, CPPO. Super important in how we involve our partner ecosystem of our consulting partners and our resellers that are able to work with Databricks on behalf of customers. >> So you got the big contracts with the private offer. You got the product market fit, kind of people iterating with data, coming in with the buyers you get. And obviously the integration piece all fitting in there. >> Exactly. >> Okay, so those are the offers, that's current, what's in marketplace today. Is that the products... What are people buying? >> Yeah. >> I mean, I guess what's the... Joel, what are people buying in the marketplace? And what does it mean for them? >> So fundamentally what they're buying is the ability to take silos out of their organization. And that is the problem that Databricks is out there to solve. Which is, when you look across your data landscape today, you've got unstructured data, you've got structured data, you've got real time streaming data. And your teams are trying to use all of this data to solve really complicated problems. And as Databricks, as the Lakehouse Company, what we're helping customers do is, how do they get into the new world? How do they move to a place where they can use all of that data across all of their teams? And so we allow them to begin to find, through the marketplace, those rapid adoption use cases where they can get rid of these data warehousing, data lake silos they've had in the past. Get their unstructured and structured data onto one data platform, an open data platform, that is no longer adherent to any proprietary formats and standards and something they can, very much, very easily, integrate into the rest of their data environment. Apply one common data governance layer on top of that. So that from the time they ingest that data, to the time they use that data, to the time they share that data, inside and outside of their organization, they know exactly how it's flowing. They know where it came from. They know who's using it. They know who has access to it. They know how it's changing. And then with that common data platform, with that common governance solution, they'd being able to bring all of those use cases together. Across their real time streaming, their data engineering, their BI, their AI. All of their teams working on one set of data. And that lets them move really, really fast. And it also lets them solve challenges they just couldn't solve before. A good example of this, you know, one of the world's now largest data streaming platforms runs on Databricks with AWS. And if you think about what does it take to set that up? Well, they've got all this customer data that was historically inside of data warehouses. That they have to understand who their customers are. They have all this unstructured data, they've built their data science model, so they can do the right kinds of recommendation engines and forecasting around. And then they've got all this streaming data going back and forth between click stream data, from what the customers are doing with their platform and the recommendations they want to push back out. And if those teams were all working in individual silos, building these kinds of platforms would be extraordinarily slow and complex. But by building it on Databricks, they were able to release it in record time and have grown at a record pace to now be the number one platform. >> And this product, it's impacting product development. >> Absolutely. >> I mean, this is like the difference between lagging months of product development, to like days. >> Yes. >> Pretty much what you're getting at. >> Yes. >> So total agility. >> Mm-hmm. >> I got that. Okay, now, I'm a customer I want to buy in the marketplace, but you got direct Salesforce up there. So how do you guys look at this? Is there channel conflict? Are there comp programs? Because one of the things I heard today in on the stage from AWS's leadership, Chris, was up there speaking, and Mona was, "Hey, he's a CRO conference chief revenue officer" conversation. Which means someone's getting compensated. So, if I'm the sales rep at Databricks, what's my motion to the customer? Do I get paid? Does Amazon sell it? Take us through that. Is there channel conflict? Or, how do you handle it? >> Well, I'd add what Joel just talked about with, you know, with the solution, the value of the solution our entire offering is available on AWS marketplace. So it's not a subset, it's the entire Data Bricks offering. And- >> The flagship, all the, the top stuff. >> Everything, the flagship, the complete offering. So it's not segmented. It's not a sub segment. >> Okay. >> It's, you know, you can use all of our different offerings. Now when it comes to seller compensation, we view this two different ways, right? One is that AWS is also incented, right? Versus selling a native service to recommend Databricks for the right situation. Same thing with Databricks, our sales force wants to do the right thing for the customer. If the customer wants to use marketplace as their procurement vehicle. And that really helps customers because if you get Databricks and five other ISVs together, and let's say each ISV is spending, you're spending a million dollars. You have $5 million of spend. You put that spend through the flywheel with AWS marketplace, and then you can use that in your negotiations with AWS to get better pricing overall. So that's how we view it. >> So customers are driving. This sounds like. >> Correct. For sure. >> So they're looking at this as saying, Hey, I'm going to just get purchasing power with all my relationships. Because it's a solution architectural market, right? >> Yeah. It makes sense. Because if most customers will have a primary and secondary cloud provider. If they can consolidate, you know, multiple ISV spend through that same primary provider, you get pricing power. >> Okay, Joel, we're going to date ourselves. At least I will. So back in the old days, (group laughter) It used to be, do a Barney deal with someone, Hey, let's go to market together. You got to get paper, you do a biz dev deal. And then you got to say, okay, now let's coordinate our sales teams, a lot of moving parts. So what you're getting at here is that the alternative for Databricks, or any company is, to go find those partners and do deals, versus now Amazon is the center point for the customer. So you can still do those joint deals, but this seems to be flipping the script a little bit. >> Well, it is, but we still have vars and consulting partners that are doing implementation work. Very valuable work, advisory work, that can actually work with marketplace through the CPPO offering. So the marketplace allows multiple ways to procure your solution. >> So it doesn't change your business structure. It just makes it more efficient. >> That's correct. >> That's a great way to say it. >> Yeah, that's great. >> Okay. So, that's it. So that's just makes it more efficient. So you guys are actually incented to point customers to the marketplace. >> Yes. >> Absolutely. >> Economically. >> Economically, it's the right thing to do for the customer. It's the right thing to do for our relationship with Amazon. Especially when it comes back to co-selling, right? Because Amazon now is leaning in with ISVs and making recommendations for, you know, an ISV solution. And our teams are working backwards from those use cases, you know, to collaborate and land them. >> Yeah. I want to get that out there. Go ahead, Joel. >> So one of the other things I might add to that too, you know, and why this is advantageous for companies like Databricks to work through the marketplace. Is it makes it so much easier for customers to deploy a solution. It's very, literally, one click through the marketplace to get Databricks stood up inside of your environment. And so if you're looking at how do I help customers most rapidly adopt these solutions in the AWS cloud, the marketplace is a fantastic accelerator to that. >> You know, it's interesting. I want to bring this up and get your reaction to it because to me, I think this is the future of procurement. So from a procurement standpoint, I mean, again, dating myself, EDI back in the old days, you know, all that craziness. Now this is all the internet, basically through the console. I get the infrastructure side, you know, spin up and provision some servers, all been good. You guys have played well there in the marketplace. But now as we get into more of what I call the business apps, and they brought this up on stage. A little nuanced. Most enterprises aren't yet there of integrating tech, on the business apps, into the stack. This is where I think you guys are a use case of success where you guys have been successful with data integration. It's an integrators dilemma, not an innovator's dilemma. So like, I want to integrate. So now I have integration points with Databricks, but I want to put an app in there. I want to provision an application, but it has to be built. It's not, you don't buy it. You build, you got to build stuff. And this is the nuance. What's your reaction to that? Am I getting this right? Or am I off because, no one's going to be buying software like they used to. They buy software to integrate it. >> Yeah, no- >> Because everything's integrated. >> I think AWS has done a great job at creating a partner ecosystem, right? To give customers the right tools for the right jobs. And those might be with third parties. Databricks is doing the same thing with our partner connect program, right? We've got customer partners like Five Tran and DBT that, you know, augment and enhance our platform. And so you're looking at multi ISV architectures and all of that can be procured through the AWS marketplace. >> Yeah. It's almost like, you know, bundling and un bundling. I was talking about this with, with Dave Alante about Supercloud. Which is why wouldn't a customer want the best solution in their architecture? Period. In its class. If someone's got API security or an API gateway. Well, you know, I don't want to be forced to buy something because it's part of a suite. And that's where you see things get sub optimized. Where someone dominates a category and they have, oh, you got to buy my version of this. >> Joel and I were talking, we were actually saying, what's really important about Databricks, is that customers control the data, right? You want to comment on that? >> Yeah. I was going to say, you know, what you're pushing on there, we think is extraordinarily, you know, the way the market is going to go. Is that customers want a lot of control over how they build their data stack. And everyone's unique in what tools are the right ones for them. And so one of the, you know, philosophically, I think, really strong places, Databricks and AWS have lined up, is we both take an approach that you should be able to have maximum flexibility on the platform. And as we think about the Lakehouse, one thing we've always been extremely committed to, as a company, is building the data platform on an open foundation. And we do that primarily through Delta Lake and making sure that, to Jack's point, with Databricks, the data is always in your control. And then it's always stored in a completely open format. And that is one of the things that's allowed Databricks to have the breadth of integrations that it has with all the other data tools out there. Because you're not tied into any proprietary format, but instead are able to take advantage of all the innovation that's happening out there in the open source ecosystem. >> When you see other solutions out there that aren't as open as you guys, you guys are very open by the way, we love that too. We think that's a great strategy, but what am I foreclosing if I go with something else that's not as open? What's the customer's downside as you think about what's around the corner in the industry? Because if you believe it's going to be open, open source, which I think open source software is the software industry, and integration is a big deal. Because software's going to be plentiful. >> Sure. >> Let's face it. It's a good time to be in software business. But Cloud's booming. So what's the downside, from your Databricks perspective? You see a buyer clicking on Databricks versus that alternative. What's potentially should they be a nervous about, down the road, if they go with a more proprietary or locked in approach? >> Yeah. >> Well, I think the challenge with proprietary ecosystems is you become beholden to the ability of that provider to both build relationships and convince other vendors that they should invest in that format. But you're also, then, beholden to the pace at which that provider is able to innovate. >> Mm-hmm. >> And I think we've seen lots of times over history where, you know, a proprietary format may run ahead, for a while, on a lot of innovation. But as that market control begins to solidify, that desire to innovate begins to degrade. Whereas in the open formats- >> So extract rents versus innovation. (John laughs) >> Exactly. Yeah, exactly. >> I'll say it. >> But in the open world, you know, you have to continue to innovate. >> Yeah. >> And the open source world is always innovating. If you look at the last 10 to 15 years, I challenge you to find, you know, an example where the innovation in the data and AI world is not coming from open source. And so by investing in open ecosystems, that means you are always going to be at the forefront of what is the latest. >> You know, again, not to date myself again, but you look back at the eighties and nineties, the protocol stacked with proprietary. >> Yeah. >> You know, SNA and IBM, deck net was digital. You know the rest. And then TCPIP was part of the open systems interconnect. >> Mm-hmm. >> Revolutionary (indistinct) a big part of that, as well as my school did. And so like, you know, that was, but it didn't standardize the whole stack. It stopped at IP and TCP. >> Yeah. >> But that helped inter operate, that created a nice defacto. So this is a big part of this mid game. I call it the chessboard, you know, you got opening game and mid-game, then you get the end game. You're not there at the end game yet at Cloud. But Cloud- >> There's, always some form of lock in, right? Andy Jazzy will address it, you know, when making a decision. But if you're going to make a decision you want to reduce- You don't want to be limited, right? So I would advise a customer that there could be limitations with a proprietary architecture. And if you look at what every customer's trying to become right now, is an AI driven business, right? And so it has to do with, can you get that data out of silos? Can you organize it and secure it? And then can you work with data scientists to feed those models? >> Yeah. >> In a very consistent manner. And so the tools of tomorrow will, to Joel's point, will be open and we want interoperability with those tools. >> And choice is a matter too. And I would say that, you know, the argument for why I think Amazon is not as locked in as maybe some other clouds, is that they have to compete directly too. Redshift competes directly with a lot of other stuff. But they can't play the bundling game because the customers are getting savvy to the fact that if you try to bundle an inferior product with something else, it may not work great at all. And they're going to be, they're onto it. This is the- >> To Amazon's credit by having these solutions that may compete with native services in marketplace, they are providing customers with choice, low price- >> And access to the core value. Which is the hardware- >> Exactly. >> Which is their platform. Okay. So I want to get you guys thought on something else I see emerging. This is, again, kind of Cube rumination moment. So on stage, Chris unpacked a lot of stuff. I mean this marketplace, they're touching a lot of hot buttons here, you know, pricing, compensation, workflows, services behind the curtain. And one of those things he mentioned was, they talk about resellers or channel partners, depending upon what you talk about. We believe, Dave and I believe on the Cube, that the entire indirect sales channel of the industry is going to be disrupted radically. Because those players were selling hardware in the old days and software. That game is going to change. You mentioned you guys have a program, let me get your thoughts on this. We believe that once this gets set up, they can play in this game and bring their services in. Which means that the old reseller channels are going to be rewritten. They're going to be refactored with this new kinds of access. Because you've got scale, you've got money and you've got product. And you got customers coming into the marketplace. So if you're like a reseller that sold computers to data centers or software, you know, a value added reseller or VAB or business. >> You've got to evolve. >> You got to, you got to be here. >> Yes. >> Yeah. >> How are you guys working with those partners? Because you say you have a product in your marketplace there. How do I make money if I'm a reseller with Databricks, with Amazon? Take me through that use case. >> Well I'll let Joel comment, but I think it's pretty straightforward, right? Customers need expertise. They need knowhow. When we're seeing customers do mass migrations to the cloud or Hadoop specific migrations or data transformation implementations. They need expertise from consulting and SI partners. If those consulting and SI partners happen to resell the solution as well. Well, that's another aspect of their business. But I really think it is the expertise that the partners bring to help customers get outcomes. >> Joel, channel big opportunity for Amazon to reimagine this. >> For sure. Yeah. And I think, you know, to your comment about how do resellers take advantage of that, I think what Jack was pushing on is spot on. Which is, it's becoming more and more about the expertise you bring to the table. And not just transacting the software. But now actually helping customers make the right choices. And we're seeing, you know, both SIs begin to be able to resell solutions and finding a lot of opportunity in that. >> Yeah. And I think we're seeing traditional resellers begin to move into that SI model as well. And that's going to be the evolution that this goes. >> At the end of the day, it's about services, right? >> For sure. Yeah. >> I mean... >> You've got a great service. You're going to have high gross profits. >> Yeah >> Managed service provider business is alive and well, right? Because there are a number of customers that want that type of a service. >> I think that's going to be a really hot, hot button for you guys. I think being the way you guys are open, this channel, partner services model coming in, to the fold, really kind of makes for kind of that Supercloud like experience, where you guys now have an ecosystem. And that's my next question. You guys have an ecosystem going on, within Databricks. >> For sure. >> On top of this ecosystem. How does that work? This is kind of like, hasn't been written up in business school and case studies yet. This is new. What is this? >> I think, you know, what it comes down to is, you're seeing ecosystems begin to evolve around the data platforms. And that's going to be one of the big, kind of, new horizons for us as we think about what drives ecosystems. It's going to be around, well, what's the data platform that I'm using? And then all the tools that have to encircle that to get my business done. And so I think there's, you know, absolutely ecosystems inside of the AWS business on all of AWS's services, across data analytics and AI. And then to your point, you are seeing ecosystems now arise around Databricks in its Lakehouse platform as well. As customers are looking at well, if I'm standing these Lakehouses up and I'm beginning to invest in this, then I need a whole set of tools that help me get that done as well. >> I mean you think about ecosystem theory, we're living a whole nother dream. And I'm not kidding. It hasn't yet been written up and for business school case studies is that, we're now in a whole nother connective tissue, ecology thing happening. Where you have dependencies and value proposition. Economics, connectedness. So you have relationships in these ecosystems. >> And I think one of the great things about the relationships with these ecosystems, is that there's a high degree of overlap. >> Yeah. >> So you're seeing that, you know, the way that the cloud business is evolving, the ecosystem partners of Databricks, are the same ecosystem partners of AWS. And so as you build these platforms out into the cloud, you're able to really take advantage of best of breed, the broadest set of solutions out there for you. >> Joel, Jack, I love it because you know what it means? The best ecosystem will win, if you keep it open. >> Sure, sure. >> You can see everything. If you're going to do it in the dark, you know, you don't know the outcome. I mean, this is really kind of what we're talking about. >> And John, can I just add that when I was at Amazon, we had a theory that there's buyers and builders, right? There's very innovative companies that want to build things themselves. We're seeing now that that builders want to buy a platform. Right? >> Yeah. >> And so there's a platform decision being made and that ecosystem is going to evolve around the platform. >> Yeah, and I totally agree. And the word innovation gets kicked around. That's why, you know, when we had our Supercloud panel, it was called the innovators dilemma, with a slash through it, called the integrater's dilemma. Innovation is the digital transformation. So- >> Absolutely. >> Like that becomes cliche in a way, but it really becomes more of a, are you open? Are you integrating? If APIs are connective tissue, what's automation, what's the service messages look like? I mean, a whole nother set of, kind of thinking, goes on in these new ecosystems and these new products. >> And that thinking is, has been born in Delta Sharing, right? So the idea that you can have a multi-cloud implementation of Databricks, and actually share data between those two different clouds, that is the next layer on top of the native cloud solution. >> Well, Databricks has done a good job of building on top of the goodness of, and the CapEx gift from AWS. But you guys have done a great job taking that building differentiation into the product. You guys have great customer base, great growing ecosystem. And again, I think a shining example of what every enterprise is going to do. Build on top of something, operating model, get that operating model, driving revenue. >> Mm-hmm. >> Yeah. >> Whether, you're Goldman Sachs or capital one or XYZ corporation. >> S and P global, NASDAQ. >> Yeah. >> We've got, you know, the biggest verticals in the world are solving tough problems with Databricks. I think we'd be remiss because if Ali was here, he would really want to thank Amazon for all of the investments across all of the different functions. Whether it's the relationship we have with our engineering and service teams. Our marketing teams, you know, product development. And we're going to be at Reinvent. A big presence at Reinvent. We're looking forward to seeing you there, again. >> Yeah. We'll see you guys there. Yeah. Again, good ecosystem. I love the ecosystem evolutions happening. This NextGen Cloud is here. We're seeing this evolve, kind of new economics, new value propositions kind of scaling up. Producing more. So you guys are doing a great job. Thanks for coming on the Cube and taking the time. Joel, great to see you at the check. >> Thanks for having us, John. >> Okay. Cube coverage here. The world's changing as APN comes together with the marketplace for a new partner organization at Amazon web services. The Cube's got it covered. This should be a very big, growing ecosystem as this continues. Billions of being sold through the marketplace. And of course the buyers are happy as well. So we've got it all covered. I'm John Furry. your host of the cube. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Like a marathon runner pumped up on adrenaline, UiPath sprinted to the lead in what is surely going to be a long journey toward enabling the modern automated enterprise. Now, in doing so the company has established itself as a leader in enterprise automation while at the same time, it got out over its skis on critical execution items and it disappointed investors along the way. In our view, the company has plenty of upside potential, but will have to slog through its current challenges, including restructuring its go-to market, prioritizing investments, balancing growth with profitability and dealing with a very difficult macro environment. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis and ahead of Forward 5, UiPath's big customer event, we once again dig into RPA and automation leader, UiPath, to share our most current data and view of the company's prospects relative to the competition and the market overall. Now, since the pandemic, four sectors have consistently outperformed in the overall spending landscape in the ETR dataset, cloud, containers, machine learning/AI, and robotic process automation. For the first time in a long time ML and AI and RPA have dropped below the elevated 40% line shown in this ETR graph with the red dotted line. The data here plots the net score or spending momentum for each sector with we put in video conferencing, we added it in simply to provide height to the vertical access. Now, you see those squiggly lines, they show the pattern for ML/AI and RPA, and they demonstrate the downward trajectory over time with only the most current period dropping below the 40% net score mark. While this is not surprising, it underscores one component of the macro headwinds facing all companies generally and UiPath specifically, that is the discretionary nature of certain technology investments. This has been a topic of conversation on theCUBE since the spring spanning data players like Mongo and Snowflake, the cloud, security, and other sectors. The point is ML/AI and RPA appear to be more discretionary than certain sectors, including cloud. Containers most likely benefit from the fact that much of the activity is spending on internal resources, staff like developers as much of the action in containers is free and open source. Now, security is not shown on this graphic, but as we've reported extensively in the last week at CrowdStrike's Falcon conference, security is somewhat less discretionary than other sectors. Now, as it relates to the big four that we've been highlighting since the pandemic hit, we're starting to see priorities shift from strategic investments like AI and automation to more tactical areas to keep the lights on. UiPath has not been immune to this downward pressure, but the company is still able to show some impressive metrics. Here's a snapshot chart from its investor deck. For the first time UiPath's ARR has surpassed $1 billion. The company now has more than 10,000 customers with a large number generating more than $100,000 in ARR. While not shown in this data, UiPath reported this month in its second quarter close that it had $191 million plus ARR customers, which is up 13% sequentially from its Q1. As well, the company's NRR is over 130%, which is very solid and underscores the low churn that we've previously reported for the company. But with that increased ARR comes slower growth. Here's some data we compiled that shows the dramatic growth in ARR, the blue bars, compared with the rapid deceleration and growth. That's the orange line on the right hand access there. For the first time UiPath's ARR growth dipped below 50% last quarter. Now, we've projected 34% and 25% respectively for the company's Q3 in Q4, which is slightly higher than the upper range of UiPath's CFO, Ashim Gupta's guidance from the last earnings call. That still puts UiPath exiting its fiscal year at a 25% ARR growth rate. While it's not unexpected that a company reaching $1 billion in ARR, that milestone, will begin to show lower, slower growth, net new ARR is well off its fiscal year '22 levels. The other perhaps more concerning factor is the company, despite strong 80% gross margins, remains unprofitable and free cash flow negative. New CEO, Rob Enslin, has emphasized the focus on profitability, and we'd like to see a consistent and more disciplined Rule of 40 or Rule of 45 to 50 type of performance going forward. As a result of this decelerating growth and lowered guidance stemming from significant macro challenges including currency fluctuations and weaker demand, especially in Europe and EP and inconsistent performance, the stock, as shown here, has been on a steady decline. What all growth stocks are facing, you know, challenges relative to inflation, rising interest rates, and looming recession, but as seen here, UiPath has significantly underperformed relative to the tech-heavy NASDAQ. UiPath has admitted to execution challenges, and it has brought in an expanded management team to facilitate its sales transition and desire to become a more strategic platform play versus a tactical point product. Now, adding to this challenge of foreign exchange issues, as we've previously reported unlike most high flying tech companies from Silicon Valley, UiPath has a much larger proportion of its business coming from locations outside of the United States, around 50% of its revenue, in fact. Because it prices in local currencies, when you convert back to appreciated dollars, there are less of them, and that weighs down on revenue. Now, we asked Breaking Analysis contributor, Chip Simonton, for his take on this stock, and he told us, "From a technical standpoint, there's really not much you can say, it just looks like a falling knife. It's trading at an all time low but that doesn't mean it can't go lower. New management with a good product is always a positive with a stock like this, but this is just a bad environment for UiPath and all growth stocks really, and," he added, "95% of money managers have never operated in this type of environment before. So that creates more uncertainty. There will be a bottom, but picking it in this high-inflation, high-interest rate world hasn't worked too well lately. There's really no floor to these stocks that don't have earnings, until you start to trade to cash levels." Well, okay, let's see, UiPath has $1.6 billion in cash in the balance sheet and no debt, so we're a long ways off from that target, the cash value with its current $7 billion valuation. You have to go back to April 2019 to UiPaths Series D to find a $7 billion valuation. So Simonton says, "The stock still could go lower." The valuation range for this stock has been quite remarkable from around $50 billion last May to $7 billion today. That's quite a swing. And the spending data from ETR sort of supports this story. This graphic here shows the net score or spending momentum granularity for UiPath. The lime green is new additions to the platform. The forest green is spending 6% or more. The gray is flat spending. The pink is spending down 6% or worse. And the bright red is churn. Subtract the red from the green and you get net score, which is that blue line. The yellow line is pervasiveness within the data set. Now, that yellow line is skewed somewhat because of Microsoft citations. There's a belief from some that competition from Microsoft is the reason for UiPath's troubles, but Microsoft is really delivering RPA for individuals and isn't an enterprise automation platform at least not today, but it's Microsoft, so you can't discount their presence in the market. And it probably is having some impact, but we think there are many other factors weighing on UiPath. Now, this is data through the July survey but taking a glimpse at the early October returns they're trending with the arrows, meaning less green more gray and red, which is going to lower UiPath's overall net score, which is consistent with the macro headwinds and the business performance that it's been seeing. Now, nonetheless, UiPath continues to get high marks from its customers, and relative to it's peers it maintains a leadership position. So this chart from ETR, shows net score or spending velocity in the vertical access, an overlap or presence in the dataset on the horizontal access. Microsoft continues to have a big presence, and as we mentioned, somewhat skews the data. UiPath has maintained its lead relative to automation anywhere on the horizontal access, and remains ahead of the legacy pack of business process and other RPA vendors. Solonis has popped up in the ETR data set recently as a process mining player and has a pretty high net score. It's a critical space UiPath has entered, via its acquisition of ProcessGold back in October 2019. Now, you can also see what we did is we added in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for robotic process automation. We didn't blow it up here but we circled the position of UiPath. You can see it's leading in both the vertical and the horizontal access, ahead of automation anywhere as well as Microsoft and others. Now, we're still not seeing the likes of SAP, Service Now, and Salesforce showing up in the ETR data, but these enterprise software vendors are in a reasonable position to capitalize on automation opportunities within their installed basis. This is why it's so important that UiPath transitions to an enterprise-wide horizontal play that can cut across multiple ERP, CRM, HCM, and service management platforms. While the big software companies can add automation to their respective stovepipes, and they're doing that, UiPath's opportunity is to bring automation to enable enterprises to build on top of and across these SaaS platforms that most companies are running. Now, on the chart, you see the red arrows slanting down. That signifies the expected trend from the upcoming October ETR survey, which is currently in the field and will run through early next month. Suffice it to say that there is downward spending pressure across the board, and we would expect most of these names, including UiPath, to dip below the 40% dotted line. Now, as it relates to the conversation about platform versus product, let's dig into that a bit more. Here's a graphic from UiPath's investor deck that underscores the move from product to platform. UiPath has expanded its platform from its initial on-prem point product to focus on automating tasks for individuals and back offices to a cloud-first platform approach. The company has added in technology from a number of acquisitions and added organically to those. These include, the previously mentioned, ProcessGold for process discovery, process documentation from the acquisition of StepShot, API automation via the acquisition of Cloud Elements, to its more recent acquisition of Re:infer, a natural language processing specialist. Now, we expect the platform to be a big focus of discussion at Forward 5 next week in Las Vegas. So let's close in on our expectations for the three-day event next week at the Venetian. UiPath's user conference has grown over the years and the Venetian should be by far be the biggest and most heavily attended in the company's history. We expect UiPath to really emphasize the role of automation, specifically in the context of digital transformation, and how UiPath has evolved, again, from point product to platform to support digital transformation. Expect to focus on platform maturity. When UiPath announced its platform intentions back in 2019, which was the last physical face-to-face customer event prior to COVID, it essentially was laying out a statement of direction. And over the past three years, it has matured the platform and taken it from vision to reality. You know, I said the last event, actually, the last event was 2021. Of course, theCUBE was there at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. But prior to that, 2019 is when they laid out that platform vision. Now, in a conjunction with this evolution, the company has evolved its partnerships, pairing up with the likes of Snowflake and the data cloud, CrowdStrike, to provide better security, and, of course, the big Global System Integrators, to help implement enterprise automation. And this is where we expect to hear a lot from customers. I've heard, there'll be over 100 speaking at the show about the outcomes and how they're digitally transforming. Now, I mentioned earlier that we haven't seen the big ERP and enterprise software companies show up yet in the ETR data, but believe me they're out there and they're selling automation and RPA and they're competing. So expect UiPath to position themselves and deposition those companies. Position UiPath as a layer above these bespoke platforms shown here on number four. With process discovery and task discovery, building automation across enterprise apps, and operationalizing process workflows as a horizontal play. And I'm sure there'll be some new graphics on this platform that we can share after the event that will emphasize this positioning. And finally, as we showed earlier in the platform discussion, we expect to hear a lot about the new platform capabilities and use cases, and not just RPA, but process mining, testing, testing automation, which is a new vector of growth for UiPath, document processing. And also, we expect UiPath to address its low code development capabilities to expand the number of people in the organization that can create automation capabilities and automations. Those domain experts is what we're talking about here that deeply understand the business but aren't software engineers. Enabling them is going to be really important, and we expect to hear more about that. And we expect this conference to set the tone for a new chapter in UiPath's history. The company's second in-person gathering, but the first one was last October. So really this is going to be sort of a build upon that, and many in-person events. For the first time this year, UiPath was one of the first to bring back its physical event, but we expect it to be bigger than what was at the Bellagio, and a lot of people were concerned about traveling. Although UiPath got a lot of customers there, but I think they're going to really up the game in terms of attendance this year. And really, that comparison is unfair because UiPath, again, it was sort of the middle of COVID last year. But anyway, we expect this new operations and go-to-market oriented focus from co-CEO, Rob Enslin, and new sales management, we're going to be, you know, hearing from them. And the so-called adult supervision has really been lacking at UiPath, historically. Daniel Dines will no doubt continue to have a big presence at the event and at the company. He's not a figurehead by any means. He's got a deep understanding of the product and the market and we'll be interviewing both Daniel and Rob Enslin on theCUBE to find out how they see the future. So tune in next week, or if you're in Las Vegas, definitely stop by theCUBE. If you're not go to thecube.net, you'll be able to watch all of our coverage. Okay, we're going to leave it there today. I want to thank Chip Simonton again for his input to today's episode. Thanks to Alex Morrison who's on production and manages our podcasts. Ken Schiffman, as well, from our Boston office, our Boston studio. Kristen Martin, and Cheryl Knight, they helped get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor in chief over at SiliconANGLE that does some great editing. Thanks all. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis Podcasts. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com, and you could email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @dvellante. If you got anything interesting, I'll respond. If not, please keep trying, or comment on my LinkedIn post and please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time on Breaking Analysis. (gentle techno music)

foreign okay we're back at Falcon 2022 crowdstrike's big user conference first time in a couple of years obviously because of kova this is thecube's coverage Dave vellante and Dave Nicholson wall-to-wall coverage two days in a row Michael Rogers the series the newly minted vice president of global alliances at crowdstrike Michael first of all congratulations on the new appointment and welcome to the cube thank you very much it's an honor to be here so dial back just a bit like think about your first hundred days in this new role what was it like who'd you talk to what'd you learn wow well the first hundred days were filled with uh excitement uh I would say 18 plus hours a day getting to know the team across the globe a wonderful team across all of the partner types that we cover and um just digging in and spending time with people and understanding uh what the partner needs were and and and and it was just a it was a blur but a blast I agree with any common patterns that you heard that you could sort of coalesce around yeah I mean I think that uh really what a common thing that we hear at crowdstrike whether it's internal is extra external is getting to the market as fast as possible there's so much opportunity and every time we open a door the resource investment we need we continue to invest in resources and that was an area that we identified and quickly pivoted and started making some of those new investments in a structure of the organization how we cover Partners uh how we optimize uh the different routes to Market with our partners and yeah just a just a it's been a wonderful experience and in my 25 years of cyber security uh actually 24 and a half as of Saturday uh I can tell you that I have never felt and had a better experience in terms of culture people and a greater mission for our customers and our partners you'll Max funny a lot of times Dave we talk about this is we you know we learned a lot from Amazon AWS with the cloud you know taking something you did internally pointing it externally to Pizza teams there's shared responsibility model we talk about that and and one of the things is blockers you know Amazon uses that term blocker so were there any blockers that you identified that you're you're sort of working with the partner ecosystem to knock down to accelerate that go to market well I mean if I think about what we had put in place prior and I had the benefit of being vice president of America's prior to the appointment um and had the pleasure of succeeding my dear friend and Mentor Matthew Pauley um a lot of that groundwork was put in place and we work collectively as a leadership team to knock down a lot of those blockers and I think it really as I came into the opportunity and we made new Investments going into the fiscal year it's really getting to Market as fast as possible it's a massive Target addressable market and identifying the right routes and how to how to harness that power of we to drive the most value to the marketplace yeah what is it what does that look like in terms of alliances alliances can take a lot of shape we've we've talked to uh service providers today as an example um our Global Systems integrators in that group also what what is what does the range look like yeah I mean alliances at crowdstrike and it's a great question because a lot of times people think alliances and they only think of Technology alliances and for us it spans really any and all routes to Market it could be your traditional solution providers which might be regionally focused it could be nationally focused larger solution providers or Lars as you noted service providers and telcos global system integrators mssps iot Partners OEM Partners um and store crouchstrike store Partners so you look across that broad spectrum and we cover it all so the mssps we heard a lot about that on the recent earnings call we've heard this is a consistent theme we've interviewed a couple here today what's driving that I mean is it the fact that csos are just you know drowning for talent um and why crowdstrike why is there such an affinity between mssps and crowdstrike yeah a great question we um and you noted that uh succinctly that csos today are faced with the number one challenge is lack of resources and cyber security the last that I heard was you know in the hundreds of thousands like 350 000 and that's an old stat so I would venture to Guess that the open positions in cyber security are north of a half a million uh as we sit here today and um service providers and mssps are focused on providing service to those customers that are understaffed and have that Personnel need and they are harnessing the crowdstrike platform to bring a cloud native best of breed solution to their customers to augment and enhance the services that they bring to those customers so partner survey what tell us about the I love surveys I love data you know this what was the Genesis of the survey who took it give us the breakdown yeah that's a great question no uh nothing is more important than the feedback that we get from our partners so every single year we do a partner survey it reaches all partner types in the uh in the ecosystem and we use the net promoter score model and so we look at ourselves in terms of how we how we uh rate against other SAS solution providers and then we look at how we did last year and in the next year and so I'm happy to say that we increased our net promoter score by 16 percent year over year but my philosophy is there's always room for improvement so the feedback from our partners on the positive side they love the Falcon platform they love the crowdstrike technology they love the people that they work with at crowdstrike and they like our enablement programs the areas that they like us to see more investment in is the partner program uh better and enhanced enablement making it easier to work with crowdstrike and more opportunities to offer services enhance services to their customers dramatic differences between the types of Partners and and if so you know why do you think those were I mean like you mentioned you know iot Partners that's kind of a new area you know so maybe maybe there was less awareness there were there any sort of differences that you noticed by type of partner I would say that you know the areas or the part the partners that identified areas for improvement were the partners that that uh either were new to crowdstrike or they're areas that we're just investing in uh as as we expand as a company and a demand from the market is you know pull this thing into these new routes to Market um not not one in particular I mean iot is something that we're looking to really blow up in the next uh 12 to 18 months um but no no Common Thread uh consistent feedback across the partner base speaking of iot he brought it up before it's is it in a you see it as an adjacency to i-team it seems like it and OT used to never talk to each other and now they're increasingly doing so but they're still it still seems like different worlds what have you found and learned in that iot partner space yeah I mean I think the key and we the way we look at the journey is it starts with um Discovery discovering the assets that are in the OT environment um it then uh transitions to uh detection and response and really prevention and once you can solve that and you build that trust through certifications in the industry um you know it really is a game changer anytime you have Global in your job title first word that comes to mind for me anyway is sovereignty issues is that something that you deal with in this space uh in terms of partners that you're working with uh focusing on Partners in certain regions so that they can comply with any governance or sovereignty yeah that's that's a great question Dave I mean we have a fantastic and deep bench on our compliance team and there are certain uh you know parameters and processes that have been put in place to make sure that we have a solid understanding in all markets in terms of sovereignty and and uh where we're able to play and how that were you North America before or Americas uh Americas America so you're familiar with the sovereignty issue yeah a little already Latin America is certainly uh exposed me plenty of plenty of that yes 100 so you mentioned uh uh Tam before I think it was total available Market you had a different word for the t uh total addressable Mark still addressable Market okay fine so I'm hearing Global that's a tam expansion opportunity iot is definitely you know the OT piece and then just working better um you know better Groove swing with the partners for higher velocity when you think about the total available total addressable market and and accelerating penetration and growing your Tam I've seen the the charts in your investor presentation and you know starts out small and then grows to you know I think it could be 100 billion I do a lot of Tam analysis but just my back a napkin had you guys approaching 100 billion anyway how do you think about the Tam and what role do Partners play in terms of uh increasing your team yeah that's a great question I mean if you think about it today uh George announced on the day after our 11th anniversary as a company uh 20 000 customers and and if you look at that addressable Market just in the SMB space it's north of 50 million companies that are running on Legacy on-prem Solutions and it really provides us an opportunity to provide those customers with uh Next Generation uh threat protection and and detection and and response partners are the route to get there there is no doubt that we cannot cover 50 50 million companies requires a span of of uh of of of a number of service providers and mssps to get to that market and that's where we're making our bets what what's an SMB that is a candidate for crowdstrike like employee size or how do you look at that like what's the sort of minimum range yeah the way we segment out the SMB space it's 250 seats or endpoints and below 250 endpoints yes right and so it's going to be fairly significant so math changes with xdr with the X and xdr being extended the greater number of endpoints means that a customer today when you talk about total addressable Market that market can expand even without expanding the number of net new customers is that a fair yeah Fair assessment yep yeah you got that way in that way but but map that to like company size can you roughly what's the what's the smallest s that would do business with crowdstrike yeah I mean we have uh companies as small as five employees that will leverage crowd strike yeah 100 and they've got hundreds of endpoints oh no I'm sorry five uh five endpoints is oh okay so it's kind of 250 endpoints as well like the app that's the sweets that's it's that's kind of the Top Line we look at and then we focus oh okay when we Define SMB it's below so five to 250 endpoints right yes and so roughly so you're talking to companies with less than 100 employees right yeah yeah so I mean this is what I was talking about before I say I look around the the ecosystem myself it kind of reminds me of service now in 2013 but servicenow never had a SMB play right and and you know very kind of proprietary closed platform not that you don't have a lot of propriety in your platform you do but you they were never going to get down Market there and their Tam is not as big in my view but I mean your team is when you start bringing an iot it's it's mind-boggling it's endless how large it could be yeah all right so what's your vision for the Elevate program partner program well I I look at uh a couple things that we've we've have in place today one is um one is we've we've established for the first time ever at crowdstrike the Alliance program management office apmo and that team is focused on building out our next Generation partner program and that's you know processes it's you know uh it's it's ring fencing but it's most important importantly identifying capabilities for partners to expand to reduce friction and uh grow their business together with crowdstrike we also look at uh what we call program Harmony and that's taking all of the partner types or the majority of the partner types and starting to look at it with the customer in the middle and so multiple partners can play a role on the journey to bringing a customer on board initially to supporting that customer going forward and they can all participate and be rewarded for their contribution to that opportunity so it's really a key area for us going forward Hub and spoke model with the center of the that model is the customer you're saying that's good okay so you're not like necessarily fighting each other for for a sort of ownership of that model but uh cool Michael Rogers thanks so much for coming on thecube it was great to have you my pleasure thank you for having me you're welcome all right keep it right there Dave Nicholson and Dave vellante we'll be right back to Falcon 22 from the Aria in Las Vegas you're watching thecube foreign [Music]

(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome, everyone, to this Cube conversation. It's part of our season two, episode four of the ongoing AWS Startup Showcase Series. Today's theme, "Cybersecurity: Detect and Protect Against Threats." I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got one of our alumni back with us. Rakesh Narasimhan joins me, President and CEO of Anitian. Rakesh, it's great to have you back on the program. >> Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here. >> So some congratulations are in order. I see that Anitian was recently awarded nine global InfoSec awards at RSA conference just this year including couple great titles here hot company and security company of the year. Talk to the audience who knows Anitian what is it doing to enable and empower the digital transformation for enterprises that are, I mean, we've been talking about the acceleration of digital transformation. How is Anitian an enabler of that? >> Thank you again for the opportunity. I think the big change that we brought to the table in Anitian is really what is typically a very manual, complex time consuming and quite expensive process. We've just brought software innovations to it and really that's customers who are trying to do compliance or security in the cloud which just provide a platform that basically accelerates a customer's application migration to cloud. And so that ability is the software innovation that we were able to bring to the space and that just wasn't there before. And so we're just happy that we took the opportunity to innovate there and just bring it to the customers. >> So let's now talk to and address those AWS customers. When you're talking to prospects, existing AWS customers what do you say are the differentiators that makes Anitian so unique when in AWS. >> That's a great question. I think the biggest innovation, the biggest thing that we bring to the table is really an acceleration and timeline and completion of their application. So if you're a customer and you're trying to get into a new market for compliance, for example or you're trying to basically get a new application up and running in a secure environment in either one of those cases, we have a product offering a platform offering that enables you to quickly get up and running and get to production. And that's been the reason why we've enjoyed enormous success in the marketplace in the AWS customer base. >> One of the areas where I see that an Anitian has been very successful is in helping cloud software vendors get FedRAMP compliance and be able to access what is a huge federal market. How are you able to do that? >> Yeah, I think the big thing that we focused on was you have a complete class of SaaS vendors out there who provide enormous innovation that they bring to the marketplace but the government market in general has not been able to participate in it because it again, like I said, it's very complex. It takes time and it's very expensive. And so we focused on that opportunity to really make it easier for all these cloud service providers to be able to bring their innovations to the government market, for example, with FedRAMP and so we help with the automation and the acceleration with our platform offering on top of cloud providers like AWS, and that enables the SaaS provider to offer that opportunity that hitherto is not available to now make it available in the government marketplace. And that's a huge buyer, if you will their budgets are huge. They're still buying even on a downturn in the market even as commercial vendors, who look at that, that market everybody's nervous about it. But if you look at the government market they have budget, they're buying and that needs to be provided to the install base. And so we help make that happen. >> How does that make you unique from a competitive perspective to be able to accelerate veteran for AWS customers in particular? >> I think the biggest issue has always been three things, right? It's complex, it's time consuming but most importantly, how quickly can a company make their software innovations available to a large market has always been sort of the challenge especially in the federal market. So we basically pre-engineering a platform taking care of all the requirements of the standard in compliance and security and then essentially help the customer bring that innovation on top of the AWS environment and making that available to the customers and record time. That's the reason why we're able to enjoy the success. Historically, the space has been very very focused on a lot of consulting folks really providing consulting on an hourly basis. We thought of actually bringing a software oriented approach just like people buy email, they buy service and then all the innovations that come along with it for the subscription that you pay. It's a very similar concept we brought to this space prior to this, either people did it themselves or they hired a lot of consulting folks to tell them what to do. And that could take a long time and then not just time and expense but every single time they made a change they would still, again, have to go redo all that work. We just brought a platform approach which is well understood by now in the industry you pay a subscription, you buy a platform and all the innovations come along for them. So that's huge productivity, time to market but most importantly it enables them to achieve their revenue goals because they're trying to get to market and service the customer, right? So we help them accomplish that in record time. >> So you are really impacting your customer's bottom line. You've been very successful in helping AWS public sector customers to accelerate FedRAMP. As you talked about FedRAMP compliance how are you now switching gears to focus on the AWS commercial customers and even enterprise DevOps teams to be able to accelerate cloud application security? >> Yeah, I think, again we started from a place of humility, if you will. You know, there's a lot of vendors a lot of folks make a lot of claims. We wanted to make sure that we first we're very good at doing something. And that's something was really go after the federal market and the success we achieved in that marketplace had a few insights for ourselves which was people really struggle in all kinds of environments, not just public sector. And what we found is that commercial customers are also trying to go to cloud. They're also dealing with the issues of security in securing their environments. And it's really the DevOps and DevSecOps folks on whom this burden falls. And they have to answer to so many different constituencies in an enterprise company. And so we time and time again while we did the work in FedRAMP we learned that, you know it's not just about compliance. It's also about securing on a base of standards. So how could we provide the same pre-engineered environment for DevOps and DevSecops teams to be able to run that environment for their applications that became an 'aha' for us because we were running into it all the time in the public sector side. So we went and talked to a few customers and said, 'Hey, how about we do the same thing on the commercial side for you?' And I wish I could take credit for this but it's actually not true. It's actually customers who came to us and said, 'Hey you did this really well for us in public sector side. Could you provide the same thing for us in the commercial side?' where it's not about all the documentation and all the audits and things that happen on the compliance side of the house. I just want you to provide an environment so that our DevOps teams could just operate in that environment and Devs can work on it. Can you do that? And we'll pay you. And that was born really our idea of secure cloud enterprise. Our primary offering historically has been secure cloud compliance with a compliance business if you will, where people could go into market and have a completely new market to go after. Whereas in the enterprise side we brought those innovations, those learnings and brought it to a commercial market. And so that's the new product, if you will, that we're launching to service that customer base, if you will. >> So if I'm an AWS customer when do I know it's time to contact Anitian and say, 'Guys we need help and we think you're the right ones to help us accelerate.' >> Yeah, I think it's re really straightforward if you are a customer commercial SaaS vendor, if you will, that runs an AWS and you want to go after a new market then you come to us and we can help you quickly get to all the compliance standards so that you can go sell in the government marketplace. That's an offering we already have, or you are a a brand new company and B2B company and you're developing an application and you want a pre-engineered environment that passes all the security standards so that you don't have to worry about it. You have a subscription to AWS and you have a subscription to us. And then that basically provides you a secure environment in which you can start developing your applications and start developing, deploying them much like your DevOps cycle would work. So we provide that basis already for you. So if you're a customer on the B2B side and you're going to cloud to get your applications to the marketplace on AWS, we're a great solution for you to actually have that engineered platform in place already. So those are the two areas where you can contact us and we can help you out. >> And talk to me about when you are in customer conversations especially as we've had such challenging times the last couple of years, how have those customer conversations changed and evolved? Are you seeing an acceleration up the C-suite stack? Is this a key priority for the CEO and his or her team? >> Yeah, I think it's a phenomenal point. I think security's always been top of mind for folks, not just the C-suite, but in boardrooms as well. But you know, the key thing we found is that even in a down market, sometimes in the environment that is playing out in the macro environment. I think the thing that has not changed is people are still trying to figure out how to make their dollar go further. And how do I get a better return on investment? So if you look at our compliance business that growth is all about that market is growing. There's still opportunity, and people are still having budgets and spending. So commercial companies are still trying to figure out how can I extend my market reach into new markets? So that's an area that the C-suite is really interested in. Funny enough, you would think in the cyber world it's a CSOs who are the ones who actually are looking for solutions from us that certainly an audience but CEOs and CROs are the folks who really clamor for our solution because it is their ability to enter a new market and go after a new budget that can grow their business and have an ROI pretty quickly. That's the ability for them to make that decision. So it's very pertinent to their buying behavior that we have aligned ourselves to very simply put by engaging us. They get to go after a new market to establish a new line of revenue they didn't have before. So that's always interesting to any C-suite member as you can imagine. And that's the compliance side. >> Absolutely establishing new revenue streams is huge and that's a big competitive differentiator. We've seen a lot of customers that weren't able in any industry to do that during the challenging pandemic times. And that is a game changer for organizations across industries. >> Exactly, exactly. And wishing that play out, not just on that side, but even on the commercial side where people are also trying to figure out how do I basically make sure it's pre-done so that it's one less thing for me to have to worry about so that I can be more productive. I can get to market pretty quickly which means I can, again, deliver to my customers quickly which means revenue for them as well. So we are the security business, but really if you notice we're solving a business problem for our customers and we're aligned to their ROI so that it's relatively easier for them to make a decision. They certainly get security in compliance but the bigger benefit for them is to grow their business itself. So we are trying to accelerate that momentum for them. >> That's critical, and I'm sure your customers really appreciate the impact that you're having on their growth, their ability to deliver to what I can only presume is their demanding customers. As one of the things I know that's been in short supply the last couple of years, is patience and tolerance. Is there Rakesh a customer story that you think really articulates the value of what Anitian is delivering? Maybe a favorite customer story that you mentioned when you're giving talks? >> Sure, sure. We really have a very customer base across the landscape. If you think about our compliance business, Smartsheet is a great example who partnered early. They were not even in the cloud before. And then that's a great example with AWS where the three of us work together to offer Smartsheet the collaboration software public SaaS company, if you will, who really established themselves and differentiated themselves in the marketplace by offering that on AWS. And we helped them accomplish their FedRAMP itself not just for once, but you know they've been great customers of ours multiple renewals over the years and every single year that the business that they get on the federal sizes increased because of the work that they did first with us. And so, you know, we've look for more opportunities with them, certainly on that part. And increasingly we start thinking about where else can we help them grow? Because typically most customers have a thing to solve on a compliance standard, but it turns out that the compliance journey is, you know some companies are trying to do Socto to be able to even sell. Then you want to do electronic commerce. You might have to do PCI or you want to sell under the federal government. You'll have to do FedRAMP and FedRAMP has moderate, high but depending on the customers you have, including DOD and once you get to DOD, they'll ask for IL4 and IL5. So these are different compliance regimes. If you will think of them as a journey and we want to be the company that provides a seamless progression for customers as they're on that journey so that we can actually deliver something of value. We're not interested in nickel and diamond customers and charging them by the hour, we're a platform player. We want to make sure that they use it to basically get their ROI and growth happening. And we just take care of the hard part of making sure that they're in compliance, right? And similarly, we're bringing the same idea like Smartsheet. I told you about to a commercial marketplace of customers who can do the same thing for commercial apps in the cloud. And so that gives us a very clean way for customers to really become not just productive, but satisfy their customers quickly and hence grow their business. And we celebrate that collaboration and all of that happens because of AWS and our ability to focus on those customers >> Sounds like a great partnership and definite synergy there on I know, and, you know as well, how customer obsessed in their own words AWS. Speaking of customers one more question for you in terms of being on that journey that compliance journey, which isn't a destination, right? It's probably a zigzaggy path. Do you work with customers that both haven't started the process to FedRAMP plans or those that maybe have with a competitor are running into roadblocks? Are those both routes to market for you? >> Yeah, we interestingly enough historically we used to see a lot of folks who have tried to do it themselves and found it hard or for a variety of reasons they just gave up. And so they would come to us. We have also examples of customers who have tried to go down the consulting path and has not worked and come to us so that it's sort of a broken project. We start from there, but a majority of our business is people who've gotten a contract from one of the agencies. Then they're like, 'oh now what!' We need to get this done before September. And so what's the quickest way to get there. And generally that's where we can help you because we are the best, fastest way to get there. And so we get that mix of customers people who have already tried hasn't worked out people who have tried with other folks hasn't worked out, but a majority of the folks are people who don't even know, you know how to go about doing it, but they know they have to do it in order for them to keep the customer that they've won one of the agencies, if you will. So that has given us a very healthy perspective on how to help customers of different kinds in that journey. The other thing is, you know, we've grown tremendously in the last couple of years. And the other thing we learned is every customer is different. And we tried to bring a very common approach to addressing this problem. Even though customers come in all shapes and forms we have startup companies in, you know early forms of maturity. And we have like really iconic, you know unicorn companies who we've helped go through FedRAMP. So the gamut is large, but you know we're learning a lot by doing this. And I think that's the key thing for me. I want our company to be one that is growing with innovation, but at the same time keeping flexibility in our approach so that we are not just learning new things, we're delivering on the harder problems our customers are facing. Cause I think that's where software innovation can really play a big differentiating role. And that's the reason why I always enjoyed being at Anitian and growing the business and keeping the company really, fast moving and innovative. >> Speaking of being fast moving and innovative here we are coming up on the fourth quarter of calendar year 22, what's next for Anitian? What are some of the exciting things that have you pumped up? Have you mojo going for what's next for the rest of the year? >> Yeah, I think a big portion of my enthusiasm for the company and the road ahead is I think it's rare if you look at the industry, oftentimes you see companies that start out with a single solution and then are able to grow from there. One of the best advantages Anitian has is this platform centric approach to do compliance on the journey I talked about. So if you think about that journey every customer that is going to cloud has this challenge that, they either have to comply do a bunch of standards, one or many. And then how do I do that in a platform approach in a common way so that I don't have to worry about it. I play a subscription and I am just protected by that. And I actually get the marketplace. So that's a tremendous journey we are on. We've only done a few of them and we have a whole new set of compliance standards coming on our platform. So that's one way, look forward to that. The other one I'm really looking forward to is the commercial customers. There's a huge opportunity for people to really know that they're sitting on top of a very secure environment in AWS. And how do I quickly propel myself into the marketplace so that I can be differentiated. I can get to market quickly but I can also make sure my innovations are getting to the marketplace as a customer, right? So I think I'm really excited about the things we are bringing to market just not just this year, but next year early next year on the compliance side, as well as the commercial side, that'll actually differentiate us and make it a lasting part of a customer's journey. And that's, I think the best thing you can hope for building a lasting company where your innovations are powering the productivity of your customers in a meaningful manner. And I always feel proud of the team. You mentioned the awards, but honestly more than anything else, we've put together a great team. And the team does a tremendous job with a very good ecosystem of partners. And our humility is it's not just us it's the ecosystem together. And the partnership with Amazon that helps us be the company we are able to be. We live in really story times and we're lucky to be part of this opportunity if you will. >> Yeah better together. That ecosystem is incredibly powerful. Thank you so much Rakesh for talking about what's going on at Anition, how you're helping customers, accelerate FedRAMP compliance, what you're doing in the commercial space and how you're helping your customers really improve their bottom line. We thank you so much for partnering with the Cube for season two, episode four of the AWS startup showcase. >> My pleasure. Thank you very much. >> And we want to thank you for watching but keep it right here for more action on the Cube which as you know, is your leader in tech coverage. I'm Lisa Martin. See you next time. (lively music)

(bright music) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Snowflake Summit 22, live from Caesar's Forum in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin here with about 7,000 plus folks, and this next Cube segment, two words, girl power. Please welcome one of our alumni back to the program, Colleen Kapase, SVP, Worldwide Partners and Alliances at Snowflake and Poornima Ramaswamy, EVP of Global Partnerships and Chief of Staff to the CEO. Ladies, welcome to the program! >> Thank you, very happy to be here, amazing event! >> Isn't it? It's so great to see this many people. Yesterday, the keynote, we got in barely, standing room only. I know there was at least one overflow room, maybe two. People are chomping at the bit to hear what Snowflake and its ecosystem has been up to the last three years, since 2019. >> It's been phenomenal! Since the last time we met together, as humans coming together, and then seeing the step function growth three years later, I don't think, we didn't grow gradually. We just jumped three years ahead, and people have just been hungry for the information and the sharing and the joint education, so it's been a phenomenal show. >> It has been, Poornima, talk to us about the Qlik partnership with Snowflake. What's it all about? What's your joint vision, your joint strategy? Give us all that good stuff. >> Sure, so speaking of three years, this relationship has been in existence for the last three years. We were at the last Snowflake Conference in 2019, and I liked what Frank said, even though we were not in-person in life the innovation has continued and our relationship has strengthened over the last three years as well. So it's interesting that everything that Frank and everything that was mentioned at the keynote yesterday is completely in alignment with Qlik's vision and strategy as well. We are focused on making data available for quick decision making, in a timely manner, for in the moment business decisions as such. The world has gone topsy-turvy in the last two years, so you want to know things that are changing as they happen and not one day late, one month late or one quarter late, because then the world's already passed you, that business moment has passed you. That's been our focus. We've got a dual product strategy and portfolio. We collaborate really strongly with Snowflake on both of those to make the most amount of data, made available on the Snowflake platform in the shortest amount of time, so that it's fresh, and it's timely for business decision makers to get access to it, to make decisions as they are dealing with supply chain challenges and people challenges and so on and can make those moments count as such. >> They have to, one of the things that we've learned in the pandemic is access to real-time data is no longer a, oh, that's great, nice to have. It's table stakes for businesses in every industry. Consumer expectations have risen to a level we've probably never seen, and let's face it, they're not going to go down. Nobody's going to want less data, slower. (laughs) Colleen, talk about the Qlik partnership from your Snowflake's perspective. >> Yeah, it's been fabulous, and we started on the BI side and keep evolving it, frankly with more technology, more solutions, making that real-time access, not just the the BI side of having the business intelligence and seeing the data but moving beyond that to the governance side, and that's such a huge piece of the relationship as well, and the trustworthy that executives have with the data, who's seeing it and how are we leveraging it, and we keep expanding that too and having some fun too. I know you guys have been making some acquisitions. >> Talk to us about what's going on at Qlik and some news today as well, acquisitions news, what's the deal? >> Yeah, so like I mentioned, we have a dual product strategy, a Qlik data integration platform and a Qlik analytics platform. And we are strengthening, making sure that we align with Snowflake's vision of all workloads, SaaS only and governed. So the announcement today was we do provide real-time data using our Qlik data integration platform into Snowflake, but that real-time data has to make its way into the hands of the business decision makers as well. So we launched what we call as direct query into Snowflake, so as and when data gets into the Snowflake platform, now customers for specific use cases can choose to access that data as it comes in by accessing it directly on Snowflake. And there are other use cases where the data's already been prepared and so on, and they'll continue using the Qlik analytics platform, but this direct query access will make a world of difference in terms of that active intelligence, in-the-moment decision making. The second announcement that we did was the SaaS first and going all into SaaS, so we are doing our data movement investments in our SaaS platform, and one of our first investments is on the Snowflake platform, going direct into Snowflake, and our data ingestion now, our data replication real-time is going to be available natively into the Snowflake platform through our SaaS data transformation investment that we've made. So those are the two big announcements, and governance has been the cornerstone for our platform end-to-end, right from the beginning, and that strength continues, and that's, again, completely in alignment with the vision that Snowflake has as well. >> I couldn't agree more, that native integration, we used to think about bringing the data to the work, and now it's bring the work to the data, because that's the secure environment, the governed environment, and that's what we're seeing with our product roadmaps together and where we're going, and it gives customers just peace of mind. When you're bringing the work to the data, it's more secure, it's more governed, and that real-time access, it's speed, because boy, so many executives have to make real-time decisions quickly. The world is moving faster than it ever has before, and I've never had an executive say, "Oh yeah, I'll just wait and get the data later." That's not a conversation they have. I need it, and I need it now, and I need it at my fingertips, and I need more of my entire organization to have access to that data, what I feel secure and safe to share with them. And so, having Qlik make that possible is just fantastic. >> The security piece is absolutely critical. We've seen such changes to the threat landscape in the last couple of years. It's no longer now a, if we get hit by a cyber attack, it's a matter of when. And the volume of data just keeps proliferating, proliferating, proliferating, which obviously is not going to slow down either. So having the governance factor, the ability to share data securely, leveraging powerful analytics across to customers and partners and ecosystem, it sounds like to me a pretty big differentiator of what Snowflake is delivering to its customers and the ecosystem. >> It is, and I would say one of the things that has held folks back from moving to the cloud before, was governance. Is this just going to be a free for all, Lisa? I'm not feeling secure with that. And so, having the ability to extend our ecosystem and work on that governance together gives executives peace of mind, that they can easily determine who's going to have access to what, which makes a transition to the cloud faster. And that's what we're looking for, because to have our customers experience the benefits of cloud and the moving up and moving down from a data perspective and really getting access to the data cloud, that's where the nirvana is, and so you guys are helping make that possible and provide that peace of mind, so it's amazing. >> You talk about peace of mind, and it's one of those things we think, oh, it's a marketing term or it's a soft term. It's actually not, it's completely measurable, and it's something that I talk to a lot of C-suite, and the statement of "I sleep better at night," is real. There's gravity with it, knowing that they can trust where the data is. The access is governed. It just keeps getting more and more critical every day. >> Colleen: Well, it's a newsworthy event, frankly- >> Absolutely, nobody wants don't to be a headline. >> If things don't go right, that's people's jobs on the line that's reputations, and that's careers, so that is so important, and I think with a lot of our customers that's our conversations directly of how can you ensure that this is going to be a secure experience? And it's Snowflake and some of our superpowers, and frankly, some of our partners superpowers too, together it's better. >> I can bring this home with a customer example, a couple of customer examples. So Urban Outfitters, I think they're a well-known brand. They've got about 650 stores, to your point on governed autonomy is what I call it. But then it's not just about helping with decision making at the top. You want to be able to make decision making at all levels, so we speak about data democratization. It's about not just strategic decisions that you make for a two-year timeframe or a five-year timeframe. It's about decisions that you want to make today in the first half of the day versus the second half of the day. So Urban Outfitters is a common customer, and during the pandemic they had to change their in-stores into distribution centers. They had to look at their supply chain landscape, because there were supply chain bottlenecks that are still happening today. So, with the power of both Qlik data integration and Qlik analytics, but then the combined power of Qlik and Snowflake, the customer actually was able to make insights available to their in-store managers, to their distribution centers, and from a time perspective, what used to take them days, or, in fact, sometimes even weeks, they're now able to get data in 15 minutes refresh time for their operational decision makers, their distribution centers and their order taking systems, so they're able to make decisions on which brands are moving, not moving. Do they need to change the product position in their stores? Do they need to change their suppliers today? Because, for what's going to be in their inventory one month later, because they are foreseeing, they're able to predict the supply chain bottlenecks that are coming in. They're able to do all of that today because that power of a governed autonomous environment that we've built but real-time data making fresh data available through Snowflake and easy-to-use dashboards and visualization through the analytics platform that we've got. And another customer ABB, 37 different SAP source systems being refreshed every two minutes, worldwide for B2B transactions to be able to make all of those decisions. >> And what you're talking about there, especially with their Urban Outfitters example, I think that's one that everybody as a consumer of clothing and apparel, what you just described, what Qlik and Snowflake enabled there, that could have very well saved that organization. We saw a lot of retailers that were not able to make that pivot. >> Poornima: Yep, no, and it did. >> You are exactly right. I think the differentiation on a lot of our core customers together of combing through, not just surviving but thriving through the pandemic, access to data and supply chain management, and it's these types of solutions that are game changing, and that's why Snowflake's not being sold just to the IT department, it's the business decision makers where they have to make decisions, and one of the things that surprised us the most was we had the star schema COVID data up on our data marketplace and the access to that, that we had our customers to determine supply chain management. What's open? What are the rules per state, per region? Where should we put supply? Where should we not? It was phenomenal. So when you have tools like what Qlik offers together with that data coming through the community, I think that's where a lot of executives experience the power of the data cloud, and that's what we want to see. And we're helping real businesses. We say we want to drive outcomes. Supply chain management was a massive outcome that we helped over the last two years. >> And that was critical, obviously we're still in that from a macro economic perspective. It's still a challenge for a lot of folks, but it was life and death. It was, initially, how do we survive this? And to your point, Colleen, now we've got this foundation, now we can thrive, and we can leave the competition who wasn't able to move this fast in the dust behind us. >> A foreseen function for change, really, and then that change wasn't just different, it was better. >> Yeah, it is better, and it now sets the foundation for the next stage of innovation, which is auto ML and AI ML. You're looking back, you're saying, "Okay this is all the data, "so these are the decisions I had to make in the moment." But then now they can start looking at what are the midterm and the long term strategic decisions I have to make, because I can now predict what are the interconnectedness or the second secondary level and the tertiary level impact for worldwide events. There's a pandemic. We are passed the pandemic. There's flood somewhere. There's fire somewhere. China shuts down every so often. You need new suppliers. How do you get out of your way in terms of making daily decisions, but start planning ahead? I think auto ML, AI ML, and data's going to be the foundation for that and real-time data at that. So what Snowflake's doing in terms of the investment in that space, and Qlik has acquired companies in the auto ML space and driving more automation, that time-to-business value and time-to-predictive insights is going to become very key. >> Absolutely key and also really a lifeline for organizations to be able to do that. >> And I have to say, it's a source of pride for us to see our partners growing and thriving in this environment too. Like some of these acquisitions they're making, Lisa, in the machine learning space, it's awesome. This is where customers want to go. They've got all this fabulous data. They now know how to access it real time. How do I use queries to make me smarter? How do I use this machine learning to look at a vast amount of data in a very real time fashion and make business decisions from? That's the future, that's where we're going. So to see you guys expand from BI, to governance, to machine learning, we're really, Lisa, watching companies in our ecosystem grow as we grow, and that's the piece I take a lot of personal pride in, and it's the fun part of the job, frankly. >> Yeah, as you should take part in that, and that's something too, that's been thematic the last... We were recovering this show yesterday and today that the growth and the substance of the Snowflake ecosystem. You see it, you feel it, and you hear it. >> Yeah, well in Frank Slootman's book, "Amp It Up," there's actually a section that he talks about, because I think he has some amazing lifelong advice on his journey of growth, and he tells us that, "Hey you can attach your company, "your personal career energy to an elevator going up "and a company and a high growth story "or a flat or declining." And it's harder in a flat and declining space, and Snowflake we certainly see as an elevator skyrocketing up and these organizations surrounding us with their technologies and capabilities to have joint outcomes, they're doing fantastic too. I've heard this story over and over again this week. I love seeing this story too with Qlik, and it's just amazing. >> I bet, Ladies, thank you so much for joining me, talking about the Snowflake-Qlik partnership, the better together power, and also, you're just scratching the surface. The future, the momentum, you can feel it. >> Yeah, I love it. >> We appreciate your insights and your time and good luck! >> Thank you, thank you. >> And let's let the girl bosses go! (laughs) >> Exactly! (laughs) For my girl boss guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Snowflake Summit 22, live from Caesar's Forum in Las Vegas. I'll be right back with my next guest. (bright music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. Everyone welcome back to the cubes coverage of a Davis reinvent 2020. It's a virtual conference this year. This is the Cube virtual. I'm John for your host. We're not in person this year. We're doing it remote because of the pandemic, but it's gonna be wall to wall coverage for three weeks. We've got you covered. And we got a great interview signature interview here with Two Cube alumni's Matt Garment, vice president of sales and marketing at AWS, formerly head of the C two and, of course, Sanjay Poon in CEO of VM Ware. Both distinguished guests and alumni of the Cube. Good to see you, Sanjay. Matt. Thanks for coming on. Uh, let's just jump into it. How are you guys doing? >>Great. Exciting. Excited for reinvent and, uh, excited for the conversation. So thanks for having us on. >>Yeah, I'm great to be here. We are allowed to be 6 ft away from each other, so I came in, but super excited about the partnership. Matt and I have been friends for several years on. You were so excited about another reinvent, the different circumstances doing all virtual. But it's a fantastic partnership. >>You know, I look forward to reinvent one of my most favorite times of the year, and it's also kind of stressful because it's backs up against Thanksgiving. And but, you know, you get through it, you have your turkey and you do the Friday and you guys probably Kino, perhaps, and all things going on and then you go to Vegas is a few celebration. We're not doing it this year. Three weeks eso There's gonna be a lot of big content in the first week, and we're gonna roll that out. We're gonna cover it, But it's gonna be a different celebrations so mad. I know you're in front center on this, Uh, just real quick. What are what do you expect people to be doing on the system? What's your expectations and how is this all going to play out? >>Yeah, you know, it's gonna be different, but I think we have Justus much exciting news as ever. And, you know, it's gonna be over a three week period. I think it actually gives people an opportunity to Seymour things. I think a lot of times we heard from, uh, from customers before was they love the excitement of being in Vegas, and we're not gonna be able to exactly replicate that, but But we have a lot of exciting things planned, and it'll enables customers to get two more sessions Seymour of the content and really see more of the exciting things that are coming out of AWS. And there's a lot s over the three weeks I encourage folks toe to dive in and really learn things is a This is the opportunity for customers to learn about the cloud and and some really cool things coming out. We're excited. >>Well, congratulations on all the business performs. I know that there's been a tailwind with the pandemic as people wanna go faster and smarter with cloud and on premise and Sanjay, you guys have a great results as well. Before I get into some of my point. Of course, I have a lot of I know we don't a lot of time, but I want to get a nup date on the relationship we covered in three years ago when, uh, Andy Jassy and team came down to San Francisco with Pat Gelsinger, Raghu, Sanjay. All this went down. There were skeptics. Relationship has proven to be quite strong and successful for both parties because you guys take a minute so you will start with you and talk about the relationship update. Where you guys at, What's the status? The relationship people want to know. >>Yeah, I think John, the relationship is going really well. Uh, it's rooted in first off, a clear understanding that there's value for customers. Um, this is the best of the public cloud in the private cloud in a hybrid cloud journey. And then, secondly, a deep engineering effort. This wasn't a Barney announcement. We both decided Matt in his previous role, was running a lot of the engineering efforts. Uh, we were really keen to make this a deep engineering effort, and often when we have our connected Cube ers, we're doing one little later this afternoon. I often can't tell when a Amazon personal speaking when a VM ware person speaking we're so connected both the engineering and then the go to market efforts. And I think after the two or three years that the the solution has had to just state and now we have many, many customers started to get real value. The go to market side of the operations really starting take off. So we're very excited about it. It is the preferred and the best offering. We think in the market, Um, and for Vienna, where customers. We message it as the best place for Vienna workload that's running on V sphere to move into Amazon. >>Matt, what's your take on the relationship update from your >>standpoint, I agree with Sanjay. I think it's been it's been fantastic. I think like you said, some folks were skeptical when we first announced it. But But, you know, we knew that there was something there and I think as we've gotten even deeper into this partnership, Onda figured out how we can continue Thio integrate more deeply both with on Prem and into the cloud. Our customers have really guided us and I think that's that's enabled us to further strengthen that partnership, and customers continue to get more excited when they see how easy it is to move and operate their VM where in their V sphere workloads inside of a W S on how it integrates well with the AWS environment, Um on they can still use all of the same functions and capabilities that they they built their business on the inside of the sphere. We're seeing bigger and bigger customers really just embrace us, and the partnerships only grown stronger. I think you know, Sanjay and I, we do joint sales calls together. I think that the business has really, really grown. It's been it's been a fantastic partnership. >>I was talking about that yesterday with being where in eight of us teams members as well. I want to get your thoughts on this cultural fit. Sanjay mentioned e think the engineering cultures air there. The also the corporate culture, both customer focused. Remember Andy Jassy told me, Hey, we're customer focused like you're making big. You make big, big statements Public Cloud and now he goes toe hybrid. He's very reactive to the customers and this is a cultural thing for me, was an VM where what are the customers saying to you now? What are you working backwards from this year? Because there's a lot to work backwards from. You got the pandemic. You got clear trends around at modernization automation under the covers, if you will. And you got VM Ware successful software running on their cloud on AWS. You got other customers. Matt, what's the big trends right now that are highlighted in your in your world? >>Yeah, it's a good question. And I think you know, it really does highlight the strength of this this hybrid model, I think, you know, pre pandemic. We had huge numbers of customers, obviously kind of looking at the cloud, but some of the largest enterprises in the world, in the more traditional enterprises, they really weren't doing a lot, you know, they were tipping their toes in, and some of the forward leaning enterprises were being really aggressive about getting into the cloud. But, you know, many people were just, you know, kind of hesitant or kind of telling, saying, Yes, we'll go learn about the cloud. I think as soon as the pandemic hit, we're really starting to see some of those more traditional enterprises realize it's a business imperative for them. Toe have ah, big cloud strategy and to move there quickly, and I I think our partnership with VM Ware and the VMC offering really is allowing many of these large enterprises to do that. And we see we see big traditional enterprise is really accelerating that move into the cloud. It gives them the business agility they need that allows them to operate their environment in uncertain world that allows them to operate remotely on DSO. We're seeing all of those trends, and I think I think we're going to continue to see the acceleration of our joint business. >>Sanjay, your thoughts. Virtualization has hit ah, whole nother level. It's not like server virtualization like it's cultural, it's societal. What's your take? >>Yeah, I think you know, virtualization is that fabric that connects the private cloud to the public cloud. It's the basis for a lot of the public cloud infrastructure. So when we listen to customers, I think the first kind of misconception we had to help them with was that it had to be choice between one or the other and being able to take Vienna Cloud, which was basically compute storage networking management and put that into the bare metal capabilities of AWS, an engineer deep into the stack and all the services that Matt and the engineering team were able to provide to us now allows that sort of application that sitting on premise to move like a house on wheels into a W s. And that's a beautiful experience we've even shown in in conferences, like a virtual reality moving of a workload, throwing a workload into a W s and a W s catches it. It's a good metaphor in a good way to think of those things that VM were like like the most playing the customers like like the emotional moves nicely. But then the other a misconception we had thio kind of illustrate to our customers was that you could once you were there, uh, let's take that metaphor. The house and wheels renovate the house with all the I think there's probably $200 services that Amazon AWS has. Um, all of a I data services be I I o t. Whatever. You have all the things that Andy and Matt kind of talk about in any of the reinvents. You get to participate and build on those services so it has. It's not like you take this there, and then it's sort of a dead end. You get to modernize your app after you migrated. So this migrate and modernize motion is something that we really start to reinforce with our customers, and it doesn't matter which one you do. First, you may modernize first and then migrate or migrate first and modernize. And in the modernized parts we've also made some significant investments and containers and Tan Xue. We could talk about that at this time and optimizing that for both the private cloud world and the public cloud world like Amazon. >>You know, Matt, this is something that we're talking about a lot this week. These few weeks with reinvent going on this everything is a service trend has a lot of things under it, like automation. Higher level services. One of the critics would say, Three years ago, when this announcement relationship between VM Ware enables came out was, Oh, Amazon's is going to steal all of their customers and VM we're screwed. Turns out that's not the case. You guys are both winning and rising. Tide floats all boats because VM Ware has an operator kind of market. People are operating their business with VM ware and they're adding higher level services with Cloud native, So it Xan overall win, so that was proven false. So clearly the new trend You guys are gaining a large enterprises that wanna go faster, have that existing operator kind of legacy stuff or pre conditions of the enterprise like VM ware. So how do you guide the technology teams and how do you look at this? Because this is where customers are like saying, Hey, I cannot operate my business house on wheels, modernize it in real time, come out a covert with the growth strategy and go faster your interview on all that. >>So I think you're exactly right. I think we see a lot of customers who see I don't want to necessarily lose what I have. I want to add on top of that, And so whether that's adding machine learning and kind of figuring out how they can take their data from various different data silos and put them into a large data lake and gets the machine learning insights on top of that, whether they want to do analytics, um, whether they want to d i o T. Whether they want to modernize two containers, I think there's there's a whole bunch of ways in which customers are looking at that. But you're absolutely right. It's not a I'm gonna go from a to B. It's I'm gonna take a and add B to it and, um, we see that's that's over and over again. I think what we've seen from customers doing it and, um and they're really taking advantage of that, right? And I think customers see all the announcements that we're making a reinvent over the next three weeks, and they wanna be able to take advantage of those things right? It's it's they want to be able to add that onto their production environment. They want to take a lot of the benefits they've gotten from their VM Ware environment, but also add some of these innovations from AWS. And I think that Z that really is what we focus on is what our engineering teams focus on. You know, we have joint engineering efforts to figure out how we can bridge that gap, right, so that they BMR environments can very easily reach into their A W s environment and take advantage of all the new services and offerings that we have there. So, um, that's that's exactly what our joint teams really pushed together. >>Sanjay, I wanna get your thoughts on this and we talk. Two years ago, we had a conversation with Cuba. I ask you since this is a great move for VM Ware because it simplifies the messaging and clears up the whole cloud strategy. And you had said something that I'm gonna bring this back today. You said it's not just simplifying the messaging to customers about what we're gonna do in the cloud. It's going to simplify their life is gonna make things easier. Have them set up for better bitterness. Goodness down the road. Can you take him in to explain what that what that goodness was? What came out of the simplicity of the messaging, the simplicity of solution? Where are we now? How does that all kind of Italian together? Can you take him in to explain that? >>Yeah, I think when the history books are written, John, um, this partnership will be one of the most seminal partnerships because from VM Ware's perspective, maybe a little from Amazon Let Matt talk about if you feel the same way. This is a headwind turning into a tailwind. I think that's sort of narrative that VM ware in Amazon were competing each others that maybe was the early story. In the early days of A W s Progress and VM, we're trying to build our own public cloud and then divesting that, uh, Mats, a Stanford grad. I'm a Harvard grad. So one day there'll be a case study. I think in both schools about how this partnership we have a strong partnership with deadlines, sometimes joke. That's a little bit of an arranged marriage we don't have. We didn't have much saying that because AMC Bardhyl so that's an important partnership. But this one we have to work hard to create. And I tell our customers, Del on AWS are top partners. And as you think about what we've been able to do here, the simplicity to the customer for you, as you describe this, is being able to really lower cost of ownership in any process, in terms of how they're building and migrating APs to be the best optimization of hardware, software and services. And the more you could make that better, simpler, cheaper through software and through the movement to the cloud. Um, I think customers benefit, and then you know, Of course, the innovation machine of both companies. Uh, Amazon's really building. I mean, every time I go to read and I'm just amazed at the Yeah, I think it's a near 200 services that they're building in all of these rich layers. All of those developers, services and, I don't know, two million customers. The whatever number of people that have it reinvent this year get to participate on top of all the applications and the virtualization infrastructure we built over the 20 years of our history. Uh eh. So I hope, you know, as we continue do this, this is all now, but customers success large and small customers being able to. And I'm very gratified to three years since we announced this that we're getting very good customer traction. And for us, that's gonna be a key focus to the reinvent, uh, presence we >>have at their show. It really just goes to show you when you built, when you invest in relationships up and down the spectrum from engineering Ah, product and executive. It kind of does pay off. Congratulations to you guys on that matter. I want to get your thoughts on where this kind of going because you're talking about the messaging from VM ware in the execution that comes behind it is the best, you know, Private public cloud hybrid cloud success. There's momentum there. What are the customers saying to you when you look at customer proof points? Um, what do you point to? Because you're now in charge of sales and marketing, you have to take now the installed base of Amazon Web services, which is you got the Debs and startups and, you know, cloud scale to large enterprises. Now you got the postcode growth. Go fast, cloud scale. You've got a huge customer base. You've got a target. These guys, you gotta bring this solution. What are they saying about the VM ware AWS success? Can you share some? Some >>days I'd be happy to, I think I mean, look, this this is what gets, uh, us excited. I know Sanjay gets just as excited about this. It's and it's really it's resonating across our customer base. You know, there's folks like S and P Global who's a large enterprise, right? They had, uh, they had a hardware procurement cycle. They were looking at them on front of implementation and they looked at a WSMV I'm wearing. They said, Look, we want to migrate. All of our applications want to migrate. Everything we have into the cloud, I think it was 150 critical financial applications that they seamlessly migrated with zero downtime Now all running on BMC in the cloud. Um, you look at governments, right? We have thing folks like the Scottish government on many government customers. We have folks that are like Penny Mac and regulated industries. Um, that really took critical parts of their application. Andi seamlessly migrated them to to A W S and BMC, and they looked at us. And when we talk to these customers, we really say, like, where is the best place for us to run these v sphere workloads? And, um and the great thing is we have a consistent message. We we know that it's the right that that aws nbn where's the best place to run those VCR workloads in the cloud? And so as we see enterprises as we see regulated industries as we see governments really looking to modernize and take advantage of the cloud, we're seeing them move whole swaths of their applications. And this is not just small parts. These are the critical really mission critical applications that they know that they need to get out flexibility on, and they want to get that agility. And so, um, you know, there's been a broad swath of customers like that that have really moved large large pieces of their application in date of us. So it's been fun to see. >>And John, if I might add to that what we've also sought to do is pick some of those great customers like the ones that Matt talked about and put them on stage. Uh, VM world. In previous, we had Freddie Mac and we had, you know, I h s market and these are good examples in the few that Matt talked about. So I'm super excited. I expect there'll be many more reinvent we did. Some also be in world. So we're getting these big customers to talk about this because then you get the 10 phenomenon. Everyone wants to come to this, tend to be able to participate in that momentum. The other thing I'm super excited about it started off as a US phenomenon. Just the U s customers, but I'm starting to see riel interest from European and a p J customers. Asia Pacific customers in countries Australia, Japan, U. K, France, Germany. So this becomes a global phenomenon where customers understand that this doesn't have to be just the U. S centric customers that are participating. And then that was, for me a very key objective because the early customers always gonna start in the Geo where, um, you know, there's the most resonance with the public cloud. But now we're starting to see this really take off in many parts of the world. >>Yeah, that's a great point at something we can talk about another conversation. Maybe we will bring you guys into some of our live check ins throughout the three weeks we're doing here. Reinvent. But this global regional approach Matt has been hugely successful. Um, we're on Amazon. We have Q breaches because by default, we're on top of Amazon. You're seeing companies build on top of Amazon. Look a snowflake. The largest I po in the history of Wall Street behind VM Ware. They run Amazon, right? And I will probably have other clouds to down the road. But the point is you guys are enabling this. >>Yeah, global. And it's it is one of the things that we hear from customers that they that they love about running in the cloud is that, you know, think about if you had Teoh, you know you mentioned snowflake. Imagine if your snowflake and you have to go build data centers everywhere. If you had to go roll out toe to Europe and then you have to build data centers in Germany and then you have to build data centers and the U. K. And then you had to go build data centers in Australia like that would be an enormous cost and complexity, and they probably wouldn't do it frankly, at their early stage, Um, you know, now they just they spin up another stack and their ableto serve their customers anywhere around the world. And we're seeing that from our VM or customers where, you know, they actually are spinning up brand new vmc clusters, uh, where they weren't able to do it before, where they either had toe operate from a single stack. Um, now they're able to say, you know what? I'd love to have Ah, vm or stack in Australia, and they're able to get that up and running quickly. And so I do think that this is actually enabling new business it z, enabling customers to think about. How do they put their computer environment close to where their end users are or where they need that computer environment to be sometime just close to end users? Sometimes it's for data residency requirements, but it really kind of enables customers to do that. Where think about in a cove in world, if you have to go launch a data center in a new country, you probably just I mean, maybe it wouldn't even be possible to do that way are today. And now it's just FBI calls. So >>I mean, your point about going slows in an option. The imperative we have, you know, even expression here inside silicon and on the Cube team. Is there a problem? Yes. Is it important? Yes. What are the consequences if you don't solve the problem? Can you quantify those consequences? And then you gotta look at solutions and look at the timing. So you got timing. You got cost. You got the consequences of not doing it. And speed all those things. No. No one's gonna roll out of data center in six months if they if they tried so again, Cloud. And I'm trying to come into play here. You gotta operate something. It's a hand in the glove, its's. I'm seeing the cream rise to the top with covert. You're seeing real examples of riel scale riel value problems that you solve that important that have consequences that can be quantified. I mean, it's simple. Is that >>you know, John, I was gonna say, in addition to this via McLeod on aws were also pretty, you know, prominent AWS customer for some of our services. So some of the services that we've seen accelerate through Covic Are these distributed workforce security capabilities? Eso we resume internally, that obviously runs on AWS. But then surrounding that with workspace one and carbon like to secure the laptop that goes home. Those services of us running A W. S two. So this is one of those places where we're grateful that we could run those cloud services because we're also just like Snowflake and Zoom and others. Many of the services that we build that our SAS type services run on Amazon, and that reinforces the partnership for us. Almost like a SAS customer. >>Well, gentlemen, really appreciate your insight. As always, a great conversation. We could go for another hour. You guys with leaders of your organizations, you're at the front lines as managing through the pandemic will have you guys come into our check ins throughout the three weeks now here during reinvent from or commentary. But I'd like to end this segment by sharing. In your opinion, what is the most important thing that the audience should pay attention to this year at Reinvent? I know there's a lot of things going on. It's three weeks, not four days. It's so it's longer, but still there's a lot of announcements, man, on your side vm where you got the moment and you got your announcements. What should customers pay attention to this reinvent Virtual 2020. >>So, do you wanna go first? >>No, man, it's your show. You go first. E >>I would encourage folks toe Really think about and plan the three weeks out. This this is the opportunity to really dive in and learn. Right? Reinvent is as as many of you know, this This is just a different type of conference. It's not American Conference. This is a learning conference, and and even virtually that doesn't change. And so I encourage. Look across the broad swath of things that we're doing. Learn about machine learning and what we're doing in that space. Learn about the new compute capabilities or container capabilities. Learn about you know what, what is most relevant to your business if you're looking about. Hey, I have an on premise data center, and I'm looking about how I extend into the cloud. There's a lot of new capabilities around BMC and AWS that makes sense, but there's also a lot of cool announcements around just other services. Um, that could be interesting. We have a ton of customers. They're giving talks. And learning from other customers is often the best way to really understand how you can get the most value out of the cloud. And so I encourage folks toe really kind of block that time. I think it's easy when your remote to get distracted by, you know, watching Netflix or answering emails or things like that. But this is this is a great opportunity to block that schedule. Find the time that you have to really spend time and dive into the sessions because we have a ton of great content on a lot of really cool launches coming up. >>Yeah, I'm just very quickly. I would like one of things I love about Amazon's culture and were similar. VM Ware is that sort of growth mindset. Learn it all and I'm looking forward myself personally to going to reinvent university. This is three weeks of learning, uh, listening to many of those those things. I learned a ton and I've tried to have my own sort of mindset of have being a learn it all as opposed to know it. Also these air incredible sessions and I would also reinforce what Matt said which is going find pure customers of yours that are in your same vertical. We're seeing enormous success in the key verticals Vienna plays in which itself called financial services public sector healthcare manufacturing, CPG retail. I mean, whatever it is so and many of those customers will be, uh, you know, doing virtual talks or we have case studies of use cases because often these sort of birds of a feather allow you to then plan your migration of modernization journey in a similar >>fashion, Matt Sanjay, always great to get the leaders of the two biggest companies in our world A, W s and VM where to share their perspectives. Uh, this year is gonna be different. I'm looking forward to, you know, really kinda stepping up and leaning into the virtual because, you know, we're gonna do three weeks of cube coverage. We have, like, special coverage days, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday for each of the three weeks that we're in. And we're gonna try to make this fun as possible. Keep everyone engaged on tryto navigate, help people navigate through the virtual world. So looking forward to having you guys back on and and sharing. Thanks for coming. I appreciate it. Thank you very much. Okay, this is the cubes. Virtual coverage of virtual reinvent 2020. I'm John for your host. Stay with us. Silicon angle dot com. The cube will be checking in with our live coverage in and out of the sessions and stay with us for more wall to wall coverage. Thanks for watching. Yeah,

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Online. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector's Summit Online. We've done this show for many years, of course, this time it's online rather than in person in the District of Washington, D.C. Happy to welcome to the program first time guest, a very good partner of AWS's, from Salesforce, it's Casey Coleman. She is the Senior Vice President of Global Government Solutions, once again, with Salesforce. Casey, thanks so much for joining us. >> Stu, thank you, glad to be here. >> All right, so first of all maybe, if you could, give us a little bit of level set, your role at Salesforce and obviously a long partnership with Amazon. Tell us a little bit about that. >> Yes, my role at Salesforce is to work with our customers in the public sector, globally, and really help them map out their digital transformation. You know, it's an ongoing journey and we help them understand how to break that down into actionable steps and really transform what they're doing to server their constituents and citizens better. >> Excellent, so of course, at the Public Sector Show a lot about leverage of GovCloud and the other services, all of the compliance that goes into that. Ahead of this event, you had a new update at Salesforce in partnership with AWS. Talk to us about it's the Government Cloud Plus. So what's entailed there? And tell us how AWS and Salesforce work together to launch this solution. >> Yeah, thanks Stu. We are so excited to announce the launch of GovCloud Plus which is Salesforce's Customer 360 CRM platform that runs on Amazon Web Services in the GovCloud in their GovCloud environment and we've just received a provisional APO provisional authority to operate from the FedRAMP Program office at the high security level. So we are announcing GovCloud Plus is FedRamp High, ready to go, generally available and ready for customers. >> Excellent, maybe bring us inside. What's different about how government agencies leverage Salesforce. For most companies out there, Salesforce is a critical piece of how they manage not only their sales force but marketing and lots of other pieces, anything specific that we should understand about the public sector. >> Yeah, it's a great question because even our name, Salesforce, sounds like a commercial kind of thing to do. Governments don't think of themselves as selling, but if you break down to a level of detail about what governments actually do, it is the same kind of functions. It's case management, it's benefits delivery, it's communications and outreach, it's all the same kind of functions that are necessary for commercial organizations to thrive. And so that's what we do, we translate that into government-ready terms so that they can serve child welfare, health information delivery, patient records, farmer information, all kinds of services for constituents of the public sector. And they might call them customers, they might call them citizens, residents, constituents, but it's those they serve. >> Yeah, well one of the things about Salesforce is, as you said, it's not just a sales tool, there's so much. You've got a very broad and deep ecosystem there as well as people that know how to use it. They get underneath the covers. When I think of not only is Salesforce the first company that I probably thought of and heard about that it was SaaS, but if you talk about the API economy, if you talk about how things integrate, Salesforce does a lot for developers. So I know one of the other pieces you had that everybody knows Dreamforce, maybe not as many people know the TrailheaDX Show that Salesforce just had for developers, so bring us a little bit inside what Salesforce is doing for developers and of course, the government angle along those lines, too. >> Yeah, there's a lot going on in the developer world. We were glad to be able to host a virtual version of our Trailhead Developer Conference and announce a lot of exciting, new developments, including Salesforce Anywhere which his really bringing an immersive voice, video, and chat environment to collaborate in the developer environment and in the delivery environment. And you bring that into the public sector and the benefits are amazing because one of the key challenges with government is keeping up with the pace of the public expectations at a pace of change in the commercial world. All of us shop and bank, and live on our mobile devices, and governments are being faced with the same expectations from the public to do anytime, anywhere, personalized service delivery. It's the (audio distortion) rapid development environment that Salesforce offers gives the public sector IT teams the ability to quickly respond to changing conditions like the COVID-19 pandemic, and rollout applications that are not only fast to develop and deploy, but they also benefit from being in the GovCloud environment, and so the compliance is already built in. And that's another key challenge that often arises, the public sector (audio distortion) is not only fielding new applications but making sure they're secure, and so with Salesforce, it's all built in. >> Yeah, it sounds a lot of system similarity to what we hear in the private sector. Of course, the balance between what IT is doing and how we enable developers. Of course, security, you mentioned, is super important. Anything, specifically, from the government sector that you'd say might be different from what we see in the general enterprise world? >> You know, the security is top of mind for the public sector, always, because they're dealing with the most sensitive data. They're dealing with the public trust. And trust is really the currency of government. They're not dealing in profit and market share, but they are dealing in a public trust and protecting information like financial data, health data, personal data, and so it's essential that the government has the best in class commercial tools to make sure they are providing world class security for their constituents and their mission. And that's one reason we're so excited to be partnering with AWS on GovCloud Plus because Amazon AWS has already deployed the FedRAMP High version of their infrastructures and service, and so by riding on top of that, we inherit all of those existing controls, add our own FedRAMP High controls, and our customers benefit from the best in class security from two of the most trusted names in the Public Cloud. >> Great, you know, absolutely, GovCloud has been a real boon for the entire industry when it talks about how government agencies are leveraging Cloud. You talked about sitting on top of GovCloud, the Government Cloud Plus leverages some of the certifications and the like. Can you bring us inside a little bit? How long did this effort take to get? Anything specific in the integrations or functionality that you might be able to highlight about this joint effort? >> Yeah we've been working on it for some time now, because it's essential to really think from the ground, up. And this is really not just re-platforming our Cloud solutions on AWS, it is rethinking the whole architecture so that we really are organically taking advantage of infrastructure services that AWS provides. So it is a really deep integration. And it's not only a tech integration, it's a strategic partnership too, and you're going to see a lot more announcements coming from both of us about the integration, the capabilities we're bringing together. And a lot of the work we're going to be doing continue to bring innovation to our joint customers. >> Excellent. You made reference to the pandemic. What are you hearing from your customers? How does this new offering impact them and support them both, today, as they're reacting to what happens as well as going forward, as we progress? >> Yeah, Stu, you know, the COVID-19 pandemic really exposed a fault line in government programs that weren't scaled to meet this demand. We saw Websites crashing when people were going to them, and just overwhelming them with questions about the health situation. We saw benefits programs that only worked when people could come in and sign up and apply in person, and obviously, with government offices shut down, that wasn't an option. And a lot of government workers were sent home to tele-work without much notice, and their infrastructure just couldn't support it. And so just in general, there was a lot of breakdowns along the way. But the good news is that a lot of public sector organizations and programs are making that pivot quickly. For example, we worked with one state agency that experienced a 400% spike in demand for applications for unemployment benefits. It makes sense. People are out of work, they need unemployment benefits, but they just couldn't respond to that kind of surge in demand. So we worked with them along with AWS and in less than a week, stood up a virtual contact center with chatbot so they could meet the demand and provide those vital services for their residents at a time of real need. So there's a lot to be optimistic about in the middle of this crisis; there is a lot of transformation happening. This kind of forcing function is producing a lot of innovation and transformation and I think it's really going to make a fundamental shift in how we reimagine government in the future. >> Yeah, Casey, you're absolutely right. This pandemic has shown a real spotlight on what works and what doesn't. And I think about not only government, but a lot of how finances work. Oftentimes, you have your plans in place, you have your budgets in place, you have funding cycles, so what are Salesforce and Amazon doing to help those customers? You talk about they have to ramp things up. Oh wait, were they financially ready for this? Some companies, "Oh wait, I have to temporarily "dial things down that's not in my 12-month "or 36-month plan." So are there things that you're doing to help customers short-term and long-term? Are you seeing some change in how people think about their planning and how they can be ready for what change happens out there? >> Yeah, one of the big findings from this while experience, not just in the public sector, but across every industry, has been that digital transformation may, in the past, have been viewed as a nice-to-have. It is now really the only way to connect and serve both the customers and employees, and so digital first, digital transformation is rapidly becoming an urgent imperative because this situation is not going away overnight. And even when we get back to some state of normal, it's going to be different. And so digital first and being able to move quickly to rollout services rapidly, to be able to start small and then scale rapidly, these are things that benefit any organization, whether it's government or commercial. >> Excellent, well Casey, I'll let you have the final word what you want people to have as their takeaway of Salesforce's participation in the AWS Private Sector Online Event. >> We are just so excited to be here with AWS to jointly come to our customers with GovCloud Plus, the FedRAMP High authorized environment for the best in class CRM, and customer and employee services. Our partnership with AWS is one that we're excited about. You're going to see a lot more announcements coming soon. It's not only a technology integration, it's also a strategic partnership, and we think our customers are, jointly, just going to be really excited about the development. So thank you for the time and glad to be here. >> All right, well thank you so much, Casey. Congratulations on the Government Cloud Plus launch and absolutely look forward to hearing more about it in the future. >> Thank you, Stu. >> All right, be sure to stay tuned. Lots more coverage of theCUBE at AWS Public Sector Summit Online. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (soft electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco. It's theCUBE, covering RSA Conference 2020, San Francisco. Brought to you by, SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back everyone. CUBE coverage here in Moscone in San Francisco for RSA, 2020. I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE. We've got a great guest here talking about cybersecurity and the impact with AI and the role of data. It's always great to have Derek Manky on Chief Security Insights Global Threat Alliances with FortiGuard Lab, part of Fortinet, FortiGuard Labs is great. Great organization. Thanks for coming on. >> It's a pleasure always to be here-- >> So you guys do a great threat report that we always cover. So it covers all the bases and it really kind of illustrates state of the art of viruses, the protection, threats, et cetera. But you're part of FortiGuard Labs. >> Yeah, that's right. >> Part of Fortinet, which is a security company, public. What is FortiGuard Labs? What do you guys do, what's your mission? >> So FortiGuard Labs has existed since day one. You can think of us as the intelligence that's baked into the product, It's one thing to have a world-class product, but you need a world-class intelligence team backing that up. We're the ones fighting those fires against cybercrime on the backend, 24/7, 365 on a per second basis. We're processing threat intelligence. We've got over 10 million attacks or processing just per minute, over a hundred billion events, in any given day that we have to sift through. We have to find out what's relevant. We have to find gaps that we might be missing detection and protection. We got to push that out to a customer base of 450,000 customers through FortiGuard services and 5 million firewalls, 5 million plus firewalls we have now. So it's vitally important. You need intelligence to be able to detect and then protect and also to respond. Know the enemy, build a security solution around that and then also be able to act quickly about it if you are under active attack. So we're doing everything from creating security controls and protections. So up to, real time updates for customers, but we're also doing playbooks. So finding out who these attackers are, why are they coming up to you. For a CSO, why does that matter? So this is all part of FortiGuard Labs. >> How many people roughly involved ? Take us a little inside the curtain here. What's going on? Personnel size, scope. >> So we're over 235. So for a network security vendor, this was the largest global SOC, that exists. Again, this is behind the curtain like you said. These are the people that are, fighting those fires every day. But it's a large team and we have experts to cover the entire attack surface. So we're looking at not just a viruses, but we're looking at as zero-day weapons, exploits and attacks, everything from cyber crime to, cyber warfare, operational technology, all these sorts of things. And of course, to do that, we need to really heavily rely on good people, but also automation and artificial intelligence and machine learning. >> You guys are walking on a tight rope there. I can only imagine how complex and stressful it is, just imagining the velocity alone. But one of the trends that's coming up here, this year at RSA and is kind of been talking about in the industry is the who? Who is the attacker because, the shifts could shift and change. You got nation states are sitting out there, they're not going to have their hands dirty on this stuff. You've got a lot of dark web activity. You've got a lot of actors out there that go by different patterns. But you guys have an aperture and visibility into a lot of this stuff. >> Absolutely. >> So, you can almost say, that's that guy. That's the actor. That's a really big part. Talk about why that's important. >> This is critically important because in the past, let's say the first generation of, threat intelligence was very flat. It was to watch. So it was just talking about here's a bad IP, here's a bad URL, here's a bad file block hit. But nowadays, obviously the attackers are very clever. These are large organizations that are run a lot of people involved. There's real world damages happening and we're talking about, you look at OT attacks that are happening now. There's, in some cases, 30, $40 million from targeted ransom attacks that are happening. These people, A, have to be brought to justice. So we need to understand the who, but we also need to be able to predict what their next move is. This is very similar to, this is what you see online or CSI. The police trynna investigate and connect the dots like, plotting the strings and the yarn on the map. This is the same thing we're doing, but on a way more advanced level. And it's very important to be able to understand who these groups are, what tools they use, what are the weapons, cyber weapons, if you will, and what's their next move potentially going to be. So there's a lot of different reasons that's important. >> Derek, I was riffing with another guest earlier today about this notion of, government protection. You've got a military troops drop on our shores and my neighborhood, the Russians drop in my neighborhood. Guess what, the police will probably come in, and, or the army should take care of it. But if I got to run a business, I got to build my own militia. There's no support out there. The government's not going to support me. I'm hacked. Damage is done. You guys are in a way providing that critical lifeline that guard or shield, if you will, for customers. And they're going to want more of it. So I've got to ask you the hard question, which is, how are you guys going to constantly be on the front edge of all this? Because at the end of the day, you're in the protection business. Threats are coming at the speed of milliseconds and nanoseconds, in memory. You need memory, you need database. You've got to have real time. It's a tsunami of attack. You guys are the front lines of this. You're the heat shield. >> Yes, absolutely. >> How do you take it to the next level? >> Yeah, so collaboration, integration, having a broad integrated platform, that's our bread and butter. This is what we do. End-to-end security. The attack surface is growing. So we have to be able to, A, be able to cover all aspects of that attack surface and again, have intelligence. So we're doing sharing through partners. We have our core intelligence network. Like I said, we're relying heavily on machine learning models. We're able to find that needle in the haystack. Like, as I said earlier, we're getting over a hundred billion potential threat events a day. We have to dissect that. We have to break it down. We have to say, is this affecting endpoint? Is this effect affecting operational technology? What vertical, how do we process it? How do we verify that this is a real threat? And then most importantly, get that out in time and speed to our customers. So I started with automation years ago, but now really the way that we're doing this is through broad platform coverage. But also machine learning models for and-- >> I want to dig into machine learning because, I love that needle in the haystack analogy, because, if you take that to the next step, you got to stack a needles now. So you find the needle in the haystack. Now you got a bunch of needles, where do you find that? You need AI, you got to have some help. But you still got the human component. So talk about how you guys are advising customers on how you're using machine learning and get that AI up and running for customers and for yourselves. >> So we're technology people. I always look at this as the stack. The stack model, the bottom of the stack, you have automation. You have layer one, layer two. That's like the basic things for, feeds, threat feeds, how we can push out, automate, integrate that. Then you have the human. So the layer seven. This is where our human experts are coming in to actually advise our customers. We're creating a threat signals with FortiGuard Labs as an example. These are bulletins that's a quick two to three page read that a CSO can pick up and say, here's what FortiGuard Labs has discovered this week. Is this relevant to my network? Do I have these protections in place. There's also that automated, and so, I refer to this as a centaur model. It's half human half machine and, the machines are driving a lot of that, the day to day mundane tasks, if you will, but also finding, collecting the needles of needles. But then ultimately we have our humans that are processing that, analyzing it, creating the higher level strategic advice. We recently, we've launched a FortiAI, product as well. This has a concept of a virtual-- >> Hold on, back up a second. What's it called? >> FortiAI. >> So it's AI components. Is it a hardware box or-- >> This is a on-premise appliance built off of five plus years of learning that we've done in the cloud to be able to identify threats and malware, understand what that malware does to a detailed level. And, where we've seen this before, where is it potentially going? How do we protect against it? Something that typically you would need, four to five headcount in your security operations center to do, we're using this as an assist to us. So that's why it's a virtual analyst. It's really a bot, if you will, something that can actually-- >> So it's an enabling opportunity for the customers. So is this virtual assistant built into the box. What does that do, virtual analyst. >> So the virtual analyst is able to, sit on premises. So it's localized learning, collect threats to understand the nature of those threats, to be able to look at the needles of the needles, if you will, make sense of that and then automatically generate reports based off of that. So it's really an assist tool that a network admin or a security analyst was able to pick up and virtually save hours and hours of time of resources. >> So, if you look at the history of like our technology industry from a personalization standpoint, AI and data, whether you're a media business, personalization is ultimately the result of good data AI. So personalization for an analyst, would be how not to screw up their job. (laughs) One level. The other one is to be proactive on being more offensive. And then third collaboration with others. So, you starting to see that kind of picture form. What's your reaction to that? >> I think it's great. There's stepping stones that we have to go through. The collaboration is not always easy. I'm very familiar with this. I mean I was, with the Cyber Threat Alliance since day one, I head up and work with our Global Threat Alliances. There's always good intentions, there's problems that can be created and obviously you have things like PII now and data privacy and all these little hurdles they have to come over. But when it works right together, this is the way to do it. It's the same thing with, you talked about the data naturally when he started building up IT stacks, you have silos of data, but ultimately those silos need to be connected from different departments. They need to integrate a collaborate. It's the same thing that we're seeing from the security front now as well. >> You guys have proven the model of FortiGuard that the more you can see, the more visibility you can see and more access to the data in real time or anytime scale, the better the opportunity. So I got to take that to the next level. What you guys are doing, congratulations. But now the customer. How do I team up with, if I'm a customer with other customers because the bad guys are teaming up. So the teaming up is now a real dynamic that companies are deploying. How are you guys looking at that? How is FortiGuard helping that? Is it through services? Is it through the products like virtual assistant? Virtual FortiAI? >> So you can think of this. I always make it an analogy to the human immune system. Artificial neural networks are built off of neural nets. If I have a problem and an infection, say on one hand, the rest of the body should be aware of that. That's collaboration from node to node. Blood cells to blood cells, if you will. It's the same thing with employees. If a network admin sees a potential problem, they should be able to go and talk to the security admin, who can go in, log into an appliance and create a proper response to that. This is what we're doing in the security fabric to empower the customer. So the customer doesn't have to always do this and have the humans actively doing those cycles. I mean, this is the integration. The orchestration is the big piece of what we're doing. So security orchestration between devices, that's taking that gap out from the human to human, walking over with a piece of paper to another or whatever it is. That's one of the key points that we're doing within the actual security fabric. >> So that's why silos is problematic. Because you can't get that impact. >> And it also creates a lag time. We have a need for speed nowadays. Threats are moving incredibly fast. I think we've talked about this on previous episodes with swarm technology, offensive automation, the weaponization of artificial intelligence. So it becomes critically important to have that quick response and silos, really create barriers of course, and make it slower to respond. >> Okay Derek, so I got to ask you, it's kind of like, I don't want to say it sounds like sports, but it's, what's the state of the art in the attack vectors coming in. What are you guys seeing as some of the best of breed tax that people should really be paying attention to? They may, may not have fortified down. What are SOCs looking at and what are security pros focused on right now in terms of the state of the art. >> So the things that keep people up at night. We follow this in our Threat Landscape Report. Obviously we just released our key four one with FortiGuard Labs. We're still seeing the same culprits. This is the same story we talked about a lot of times. Things like, it used to be a EternalBlue and now BlueKeep, these vulnerabilities that are nothing new but still pose big problems. We're still seeing that exposed on a lot of networks. Targeted ransom attacks, as I was saying earlier. We've seen the shift or evolution from ransomware from day to day, like, pay us three or $400, we'll give you access to your data back to going after targeted accounts, high revenue business streams. So, low volume, high risk. That's the trend that we're starting to see as well. And this is what I talk about for trying to find that needle in the haystack. This is again, why it's important to have eyes on that. >> Well you guys are really advanced and you guys doing great work, so congratulations. I got to ask you to kind of like, the spectrum of IT. You've got a lot of people in the high end, financial services, healthcare, they're regulated, they got all kinds of challenges. But as IT and the enterprise starts to get woke to the fact that everyone's vulnerable. I've heard people say, well, I'm good. I got a small little to manage, I'm only a hundred million dollar business. All I do is manufacturing. I don't really have any IP. So what are they going to steal? So that's kind of a naive approach. The answer is, what? Your operations and ransomware, there's a zillion ways to get taken down. How do you respond to that. >> Yeah, absolutely. Going after the crown jewels, what hurts? So it might not be a patent or intellectual property. Again, the things that matter to these businesses, how they operate day to day. The obvious examples, what we just talked about with revenue streams and then there's other indirect problems too. Obviously, if that infrastructure of a legitimate organization is taken over and it's used as a botnet and an orchestrated denial-of-service attack to take down other organizations, that's going to have huge implications. >> And they won't even know it. >> Right, in terms of brand damage, has legal implications as well that happened. This is going even down to the basics with consumers, thinking that, they're not under attack, but at the end of the day, what matters to them is their identity. Identity theft. But this is on another level when it comes to things to-- >> There's all kinds of things to deal with. There's, so much more advanced on the attacker side. All right, so I got to ask you a final question. I'm a business. You're a pro. You guys are doing great work. What do I do, what's my strategy? How would you advise me? How do I get my act together? I'm working the mall every day. I'm trying my best. I'm peddling as fast as I can. I'm overloaded. What do I do? How do I go the next step? >> So look for security solutions that are the assist model like I said. There's never ever going to be a universal silver bullet to security. We all know this. But there are a lot of things that can help up to that 90%, 95% secure. So depending on the nature of the threats, having a first detection first, that's always the most important. See what's on your network. This is things where SIM technology, sandboxing technology has really come into play. Once you have those detections, how can you actually take action? So look for a integration. Really have a look at your security solutions to see if you have the integration piece. Orchestration and integration is next after detection. Finally from there having a proper channel, are there services you looked at for managed incident response as an example. Education and cyber hygiene are always key. These are free things that I push on everybody. I mean we release weekly threat intelligence briefs. We're doing our quarterly Threat Landscape Reports. We have something called threat signals. So it's FortiGuard response to breaking industry events. I think that's key-- >> Hygiene seems to come up over and over as the, that's the foundational bedrock of security. >> And then, as I said, ultimately, where we're heading with this is the AI solution model. And so that's something, again that I think-- >> One final question since it's just popped into my head. I wanted, and that last one. But I wanted to bring it up since you kind of were, we're getting at it. I know you guys are very sensitive to this one topic cause you live it every day. But the notion of time and time elapsed is a huge concern because you got to know, it's not if it's when. So the factor of time is a huge variable in all kinds of impact. Positive and negative. How do you talk about time and the notion of time elapsing. >> That's great question. So there's many ways to stage that. I'll try to simplify it. So number one, if we're talking about breaches, time is money. So the dwell time. The longer that a threat sits on a network and it's not cleaned up, the more damage is going to be done. And we think of the ransom attacks, denial-of-service, revenue streams being down. So that's the incident response problem. So time is very important to detect and respond. So that's one aspect of that. The other aspect of time is with machine learning as well. This is something that people don't always think about. They think that, artificial intelligence solutions can be popped up overnight and within a couple of weeks they're going to be accurate. It's not the case. Machines learn like humans too. It takes time to do that. It takes processing power. Anybody can get that nowadays, data, most people can get that. But time is critical to that. It's a fascinating conversation. There's many different avenues of time that we can talk about. Time to detect is also really important as well, again. >> Let's do it, let's do a whole segment on that, in our studio, I'll follow up on that. I think it's a huge topic, I hear about all the time. And since it's a little bit elusive, but it kind of focuses your energy on, wait, what's going on here? I'm not reacting. (laughs) Time's a huge issue. >> I refer to it as a latency. I mean, latency is a key issue in cybersecurity, just like it is in the stock exchange. >> I mean, one of the things I've been talking about with folks here, just kind of in fun conversation is, don't be playing defense all the time. If you have a good time latency, you going to actually be a little bit offensive. Why not take a little bit more offense. Why play defense the whole time. So again, you're starting to see this kind of mentality not being, just an IT, we've got to cover, okay, respond, no, hold on the ballgame. >> That comes back to the sports analogy again. >> Got to have a good offense. They must cross offense. Derek, thanks so much. Quick plug for you, FortiGuard, share with the folks what you guys are up to, what's new, what's the plug. >> So FortiGuard Labs, so we're continuing to expand. Obviously we're focused on, as I said, adding all of the customer protection first and foremost. But beyond that, we're doing great things in industry. So we're working actively with law enforcement, with Interpol, Cyber Threat Alliance, with The World Economic Forum and the Center for Cyber Security. There's a lot more of these collaboration, key stakeholders. You talked about the human to human before. We're really setting the pioneering of setting that world stage. I think that is, so, it's really exciting to me. It's a lot of good industry initiatives. I think it's impactful. We're going to see an impact. The whole goal is we're trying to slow the offense down, the offense being the cyber criminals. So there's more coming on that end. You're going to see a lot great, follow our blogs at fortinet.com and all-- >> Great stuff. >> great reports. >> I'm a huge believer in that the government can't protect us digitally. There's going to be protection, heat shields out there. You guys are doing a good job. It's only going to be more important than ever before. So, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for coming I really appreciate. >> Never a dull day as we say. >> All right, it's theCUBE's coverage here in San Francisco for RSA 2020. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering RSA Conference 2020 San Francisco. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's coverage from RSA Conference on Moscone South. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. You know, cybersecurity is changing, and the next technology is right around the corner, and it's got to be invented somewhere, and of course Accenture Labs is part of it. Our next guest is Lisa O'Connor, Global Security R&D Lead for Accenture Labs. Lisa's working on some of those hard problems all around the world. Thank you for joining me today. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you for having me. >> So, we always get the good scoop from Accenture, because you have a lot of smart people in that company. You know, they know their stuff. I know you got a huge analytics team. I've talked to Jean-Luc Chatelain before, and I know you got a massive amount of, deep bench of talent. But as you have to go do the applied R&D, and maybe some of the crazy ideas, you got to start thinking about where the puck is going to be. >> Absolutely. >> You got to understand that. Well, it's pretty clear to us that Cloud is certainly there. Palo Alto Networks had a disappointing earnings yesterday, because their on-premises business is shifting to the Cloud. You're seeing hybrid operating model and multicloud for the enterprise, but now you got global challenges. >> We absolutely do. >> Huge, so what are you guys working on that's coming? Tell us. >> So we're working on lots of exciting things, and Cloud is one of them. But, some of the things I'm so passionate about in labs, and I have the best job at Accenture. Don't tell anyone. (laughs) I do. So, we are working on, like Jean-Luc is working on applied intelligence, we are working on robust AI. So, when we think about AI in the future, how do we feel that, and know that it's okay? How do we put it out there and know it's safe in production, we've done the right training, we've made our model resilient to what's out there? One of the things we see happening, and I love AI, love it. It has great potential, and we get great insights out of it, but a lot of times we stop, we get the insights, and we say, "Okay, it's in the box, we got a couple hits there, "we're good, it's good." No, maybe not. And so really, it's learning and creating the actually applied attacks on AI, and then figuring out what the right defenses are. And, depending on what type of machine learning you're using, those defenses change. And so, we're having a great time in our lab in Washington D.C., working on basically defending AI and building those techniques, so that what we put out as Accenture is robust. >> You know, it's interesting, AI, you watch some of the hardcore, you know, social justice warriors out there going after Amazon, Google, you know, because they're doing some pretty progressive things. Oh, facial recognition, you got AI, you got Alexa. You know, a lot of people are like, "Oh, I'm scared." But, at the end of the day, they also have some challenges like network security, so you have all this AI up and down the stack. And, one thing I like about what's being talked about in the industry is the shared responsibility model. So, I got to ask you, as AI becomes exciting, but also, balancing, frightening to people, how do you get that shared responsibility model, so we get it right, do the experimentation, without people freaking out? (laughs) So, it's kind of like this weird mode we're in now, where I want to do more AI, because I think it benefits society, but everyone's freaking out. >> Yeah, so, in our tech vision that we just launched, The Tech Vision 2020, there's a lot of talk about value and values, which is really important when we think about AI because we can get great value out of it, but there's a values piece of it and it's how we're using it, how we're getting those insights. Because, the one thing, we have this circle, and it's between customer experience, because the companies that do customer experience well are going to excel, they're going to keep their clients, they're going to do amazing things, they're going to become sticky. But, to do that well, you have to be a good custodian of their data and their information, and curated experiences that they want, and not the creepy ones, not the ones they don't want. And so, we really look at that trust is necessary in that ecosystem, in building that, and keeping that with clients. So, that's something that came out of our technology vision. And, in fact, we're going to be talking at the Executive Women's Forum, this is tomorrow, and we're going to be having a panel on AI, and defending it, which will be very interesting. >> Make sure your people film that conference. We'd like to get a view of it on YouTube after. We love those conferences, really insightful. But, I want to get back to what you were talking about, the fun side. >> Yeah. >> You got a lot of new things on, your guys are kicking the tires on, scratching the surface on. You have two operating labs, one in Washington D.C., and one in Israel. What city in Israel? Is it in Tel Aviv or-- >> Herzliya. >> Okay, did not know. >> Yeah, the tech district, just north of Tel Aviv. It's the hotspot. >> So, Silicon Valley, D.C., and Israel, hotbeds of technology now. >> Yes. >> What's coming out of those labs, what's hot? >> Oh, there's so much exciting stuff coming out of our lab in Herzliya. One of the things that we have, and it's something that's been long and coming, it's been brewing for a while, but it's really looking at creating a model of the enterprise security posture. And, when I say a model of it, I'm talking about a cyber digital twin. Because, so much we can't do in our production networks, we don't have the capabilities. We can look around the room, but we don't have the capabilities on the SOCs team side, to ingest all this stuff. We need a playground where we can ask the what-ifs, where we can run high performance analytics, and we do that through a temporal knowledge graph. And, that's a hard thing to achieve, and it's a hard thing to do analytics at scale. So, that's one of the big projects that we're doing out of our Israel lab. >> Are you saying digital twins is a framework for that? >> Yeah. >> Does it really work well with that? >> So the knowledge graph, we can create digital twins around many things, because a digital twin is a model of processes, people, technologies, the statefulness of things, and configurations, whatever you want to pull in there. So, when we start thinking about, what would we take in to create the perfect enterprise security posture? What would give us all the insights? And, then we can ask the questions about, okay, how would an adversary do lateral movement through this? I can't fix everything that's a 10, but I could fix the right ones to reduce the risk impactfully. And, those are the kind of what-ifs that you can do. >> That's real sci-fi stuff, that's right around the corner. >> Yeah, it is. >> That simulation environment. >> It is. >> What-ifs. Oh my god, the company just got hacked, we're out of business. That's your simulation. You could get to, that's the goal, right? >> It absolutely is, to ask those good business questions about the data, and then to report on the risk of it. And, the other thing, as we move to 5G, this problem's getting bigger and bigger, and we're now bringing in very disparate kinds of compute platforms, computing-at-the-edge. And, what does that do to our nice little network model that we had, that our traditional systems are used to defending against? >> I mean, just the segmentation of the network, and the edge opens up so much more aperture-- >> Yes, it does (laughs). >> to the digital twin, or a knowledge graph. You brought up knowledge graph, I want to get your thoughts on this. I was just having dinner last night with an amazing woman out of New York. She's a Ph.D. in computer science. So, we're talking about graphs, and I love riffing on graph databases. But, the topic came up about databases in general, because with the cloud, it's horizontally scalable, you've got all kinds of simulation, a lot of elasticity going on, there's a lot of software being written on this. You got time series database, you got relational database, you got unstructured, and you got graphs. You got to make them all work together. This is kind of the unique challenge. And, with security, leveraging the right database, and the right construct is a super important thing. How do you guys look at that in the labs? Because, is it something that you guys think about, or is it going to be invisible someday? >> Oh, we think about it a lot. In fact, we've had a number of research projects over the last five years now, actually six years, where we've really pivoted hard in cyber security to graph databases. And, the reason for that is, the many-to-many relationships, and what we can do in terms of navigating, asking the questions, pulling on a thread, because in cyber hunting, that's what we're doing. In many of these use cases that we're trying to defend an enterprise, we're following the next new path based on the newest information of now what the challenge is, or what the current configuration is. So, that's really important. So, graph databases enable that so well. Now, there's still the architecture challenge of, okay, when I ask a query, what am I doing? Am I disrupting the whole apple cart? Do I have to process everything over, or is there a way to do that elegantly, where I can ask my query, and because of how I've structured it in storage, I can do it much better, and I can do it much more efficiently. And that, I think, is where the opportunities are. >> I got to tell you, I'm getting exited now on this whole database discussion, because you think about the logic around what you just said. A graph database with that kind of complexity, when you factor in contextually different things happening at any given time, the database needs to be parsed and managed differently. >> Yes. >> That's a huge challenge. >> It is a great research challenge, which is why we're doing it. >> What is that, how far along are we going to be able to have this dynamic, self-evolving, self-governing, self-healing data modeling? Is that coming soon, or... >> Yeah, I hope so. We wrote about it a couple of years ago. >> You did? >> The self-healing enterprise, aspirational. But I think, I mean, we try to get to real time, right? And, we try to get to real time, and again, refactoring. As we talk about what an adversary is going to do, or lateral movement through a business process, we're talking about a lot of computational horsepower to recalculate all that, process it again, update it, and then again present that back. So the number of things we're asking, how we're asking it becomes also very important to the structure. >> Just, it goes zooming up a little bit, high level, what we're really talking about here is value >> of the data. >> Absolutely. >> And, when you get into the valuation of the nodes, and the arcs, and all that graphs, and other databases, you got to know what to pay attention to. It's kind of like going into the hospital and hearing all these alarms going off. At some point you don't know what's, until they hear a flat line, or whatever. >> Right. That's a bad one. >> I mean, well that's obvious. But, now sometimes there's so many alerts, there's so many alarms. How do you understand at any given time what to pay attention to, because obviously when someone's having a problem you want to pay attention to it. If it's a security alert, that's prioritized. >> And the devil is in the analytics, right? What's the question we're asking, and the analytics that give us that prioritization? And that's non-trivial, because there are a lot of other folks that are doing prioritization in a different manner. To do it at scale, and to do it, not just one hop out, but I want to go all the way to the crown jewels, I want that whole path navigated, and I want to know where to cut along that path. That's a hard thing to do. And so, we've actually developed, and we've submitted patents for them, but we've developed new analytics that'll support that. >> Awesome. Well Lisa, I want to ask you kind of a, I'll give you a plug here, just going to get it out, because I think it's important. Skills gap's a big thing, so I want to give you a minute to explain, or share what you're looking for in your hiring. Who are you looking for? What kind of, the make-up of individual, obviously? Maybe, do you use straight, more academic paper kind of people, or practitioners? I mean, when you look to hire, what are some of the priorities that you look for, and who would thrive in an Accenture Lab's environment? >> Oh, my goodness. >> Take a minute to share what you're looking for. >> Yeah, so we love people that think out of the box, and those kinds of people come from very different backgrounds. And so, part of that is, some of them we look for Ph.D.'s, that have wonderful applied skills, and applied is a key word there. White papers are great, I need to be able to prove something, I need to be able to demo something that has value. So, having the applied skills to a business challenge is really important. So, that sort of ground, understanding the business, very important too. But, our talent comes from many different areas. I mean, I kind of joke, my lab looks like the UN, it's wonderful. I have people from across the globe that are in our cyber security lab. I have, in our Washington D.C. lab, we're 50% women, which is also exciting, because we want different experiences, and we shoot for cognitive diversity, right? So, we're looking for people that think differently about solving problems, and are not encumbered by what they've seen in the past, because we're trying to be tip of spear. And, I'm sure you know that from Paul Daugherty. >> Yeah. >> We are trying to be three to five years over the horizon. >> You guys got a good narrative. I always love talking to Accenture, they have a good vision. So, I got to ask you, the next logical question is, obviously, in the news, you see everyone talking about breaches, and ya know, it's not a breach if the door's open, you just walk in. They're really walking in, nothing was really breached, you're just giving it to them. >> Yeah. It's a passive invitation. >> (laughs) Hey come on in. Human error is a big part of it, but then, breach is obviously targeted, phishing, and all that good stuff. But, as those stories get told, there's a whole nother set of stories that aren't being told that are super important. So, I'd love to get your thoughts on, what are the most important stories that we should be talking about that aren't being talked about? >> Yeah, so I have two that are front-of-mind for me. One theme we come back to, and it's not sexy, it's hygiene. It is IT hygiene, and so many of the large companies, and even medium, small companies, we have legacy technology, and keeping that adds complexity, it adds to the whole breadth and depth of what we have to manage and defend. Keeping that attack surface simple and small, cloud-enabled, all those good things, is a real asset and it makes it much easier to defend. So, that's kind of the first non-sexy one, hygiene. The other one I'll say that I think is a challenge that we are not dealing with yet, quantum computing, right? And so, we're on the way to getting our post quantum cryptography in place, but there's another dimension to it, and it's our histories. So, all of the things that have passed on the wire, all the communications with the key exchanges, all that brilliant stuff, is sitting somewhere. Once we get to that point where this becomes very routine, and it's coming fast, we predicted eight years, two years ago. >> So, all that exhaust is somewhere, pent up. >> It's somewhere that, we have to think about how much data we're keeping as custodians, how we're managing it, and then we have to think about the exposure from our past, and say, "Okay, what does that mean that, that was out there?" "Is it aged enough that it doesn't have value?" And, I think there's a real triage that needs to be done, and certainly data management. >> I think, you know, the hygiene brings up a good point. It reminds me of the story Andy Jassy was telling about the mainframe customer that they couldn't find who had the password. They had to find their person, who was retired 10 years earlier to get the password. You don't forget things, but also, there's a human component in all this. Humans and machines are working together. >> Absolutely. >> And. that's a huge part of it. It's not just machines dominating it all, there's going to be a human component, there's a societal impact that we're seeing with information. And, whether that's out in the open, or behind closed doors, there's all kinds of things looming. >> There are, and I think one of the things in the companies that we're seeing who are embracing innovation well, are doing a lot of retraining. Because, the things that people are excellent at, AI is not good at, and the things that AI is good at, are not at all what people are good at. So, the good news is there is a beautiful teaming there, if we retool the skills, or if we re-envision those roles, so that people can get into those roles, and I think that's really important, because I'd rather see AI do all the heavy lifting well, and be trustworthy, and robust and all those great things, and the people be doing the much smarter things that require a human. >> Does the process serve the purpose? Does the purpose serve the process? Same kind of question, right? >> Exactly. >> AI, you can't have great AI that does nothing. >> That's right. >> (laughs) So, it has to be relevant. >> It absolutely does. >> Relevance is kind of a big thing. >> And we own that context, right? Humans own that context. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thanks for coming in, and sharing the insight. Really appreciate it. Final question, it's always tough to pick your favorite child, but what is your most coolest thing you're working on right now? >> I'll tell you, the cyber digital twin stuff is so cool. >> The what? >> The cyber digital twin stuff is so cool. When you see the power of what that picture, and the analytics can do, we'll show ya. >> Do you have a demo of that now? >> We absolutely do. >> You do. Is it online, or is it more in person you got to see it? >> More in person. >> Okay. >> Folks can reach out, yeah. >> We'll have to get the exclusive on that. >> We do. >> I love those simulations. I think it's very beneficial. >> It is. >> A lot of learning. I mean, who doesn't want practice? >> Well, and a picture, you know that is worth a million dollars. It's just incredible to look at it, and it clicks. It clicks of all the potential things you could ask or do. And, that's the exciting part now, as we show this with customers' and we co-innovate with customers', they're coming up with a laundry list of questions. >> And, this is the beautiful thing about cloud, is that new capabilities are emerging every day, and you could use the good ones. Lisa O'Connor is here. Thank you very much for sharing your insights. Global Security R&D Lead for Accenture Labs. TheCUBE coverage, getting all the signal here on the show floor, extracting that from all the noise. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>live from San Francisco. It's the queue covering our essay conference 2020 San Francisco Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media >>Hey, welcome back here. Ready? Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're in our 2020 the biggest security conference in the country, if not the world. I guess there's got to be 50,000 people. We'll get the official word tomorrow. It's our sixth year here and we're excited to be back. I'm not sure why. It's 2020. We're supposed to know everything at this point in time with the benefit on inside. We got two people that do. You know a lot. We're excited to have him. My left is Chris Bets is the SVP and chief security officer for Centurylink. Chris, Great to see you. And to his left is Chris Smith, VP Global security Services for Centurylink. Welcome. >>Thank you for having me. >>Absolutely. You guys just flew into town >>just for the conference's great To be here is always a really exciting space with just a ton of new technology coming out. >>So let's just jump into it. What I think is the most interesting and challenging part of this particular show we go to a lot of shows you 100 shows a year. I don't know that there's one that's got kind of the breadth and depth of vendors from the really, really big the really, really small that you have here. And, you know, with the expansion of Moscone, either even packing more women underneath Howard Street, what advice do you give to people who are coming here for the first time? Especially on more than the buyer side as to how do you navigate this place >>when I when I come here and see So I'm always looking at what the new technologies are. But honestly, having a new technology is not good enough. Attackers are coming up with new attacks all the time. The big trick for me is understanding how they integrate into my other solutions. So I'm not so I'm not just focused on the technology. I'm focused on how they all fit together. And so the vendors that have solutions that fit together that really makes a difference in my book. So I'm looking for for products that are designed to work with each other, not just separate >>from a practice standpoint. The theme of IRA say this year is the human element, and for us, if you look at this floor, it's overwhelming. And if you're a CSO of an average enterprise, it's hard to figure out what you need to buy and how to build a practice with all of the emerging tools. So for us core to our practice, I think any mature, 30 security practices having a pro services capability and consulting capability that can be solved this all together, that helps you understand what to buy, what things to piece together and how to make it all work >>right. And it's funny, the human element that is the kind of the global theme. And what's funny is for all the technology it sounds like. Still, the easiest way in is through the person, whether it's a phishing attack or there's a myriad of ways that people are getting him to the human. So that's kind of a special challenge or trying to use technology to help people do a better job. At the end of the day, sometimes you're squishy ISS or easier access point is not a piece of technology, but it's actually a person. It's >>often because We asked people to do the wrong things. We're having them. Focus on security steps. Use email. Security is an easy to grasp example way all go through training every year to teach folks how to make sure that they avoid clicking on the wrong emails for us more often than a year. So the downside of that is arresting people to take a step away from their job and try to figure out how to protect themselves. And is this a bad emails that are really focusing on the job? So that's why it's so important to me to make sure that we've got solutions that help make the human better and frankly, even worse in security. We don't have the staff that we need. And so how do we help Make sure that the right tools are there, that they work together. They automate because asking everybody to take those steps, it's just it's a recipe for disaster because people are going to make mistakes >>right? Let's go a little deeper into the email thing. A friend of mines and commercial real estate, and he was describing an email that he got from his banker describing a wire transfer from one of his suppliers that he has a regular, ongoing making relationship with. You know, it's not the bad pronunciation and bad grammar and kind of the things that used to jump out is an obvious. But he said it was super good to the point where thankfully, you know, it was just this time. But, you know, he called the banker like, did you just send me this thing? So you know where this as the sophistication of the bad guys goes up specifically targeting people, how do you try to keep up with how do you give them the tools to know Woe versus being efficient? I'm trying to get my job done. >>Yeah, for me, it starts with technology. That takes a look. We've only got so many security practitioners in the company. Actually. Defend your email example. We've got to defend every user from those kinds of problems. And so how do I find technology solutions that help take the load off security practitioners so they can focus on the niche examples that really, really well crafted emails and help take that load off user? Because users just not gonna be able to handle that right? It's not fair to ask them. And like you said, it was just poorly time that helped attack. So how do we help? Make sure that we're taking that technology load off, identify the threats in advance and protect them. And so I think one of the biggest things that Chris and I talk a lot about is how to our solutions help make it easier for people to secure themselves instead of just providing only technology technology advantage, >>our strategy for the portfolio and it sort of tied to the complexity. CN This floor is simplicity. So from our perspective, our goal is a network service provider is to deliver threat free traffic to our customers even before it gets to the human being. And we've got an announcement that we launched just a week ago in advance of the show called Rapid Threat Defense. And the idea is to take our mature threat Intel practice that Chris has a team of folks focused on that. We branded black Lotus labs and Way built a machine learning practice that takes all the bad things that we see out in the network and protects customers before it gets to their people. >>So that's an interesting take. You have the benefit of seeing a lot of network traffic from a lot of customers and not just the stuff that's coming into my building. So you get a much more aggregated approach, so tell us a little bit more about that. And what is the Black Lotus Labs doing? And I'm also curious from an industry point of view, you know, it's just a collaboration with the industry cause you guys are doing a lot of traffic. There's other big network providers carrying a lot of traffic. How well do you kind of work together when you identify some nasty new things that you're doing the horizon? And where do you draw the line between better together versus still independent environment? >>When we're talking about making the Internet safer, it's not really to me a lot about competitive environment. It's really about better together. That's one of things I love about the security community. I'm sure you see it every year when you're here. You're talking security practitioners how across every industry security folks work together to accomplish something that's meaningful. So as the largest world's largest global I P we get to see a ton of traffic, and it's really, really interesting we'll be able to put together, you know, at any given point in time. We're watching many tens of thousands of probable malware networks. We're protecting our customers from that. But we're also able to ourselves take down nearly 65 now where networks every month just knock them off the Internet. So identify the command and control, and we take it off the Internet. We work with our partners. We go talk to hosting providers, maybe competitors of ours. And we say, Hey, here's a bad, bad actors bad server that's being used to control now where? Going shut it down. And so the result of that is not only protecting our customers, but more importantly, protecting tens of thousands of customers every month. By removing now where networks that were attacking, that really makes a difference. To me, that's the biggest impact we bring. And so it really is a better together. It's a collaboration story and, of course, for said, we get the benefit of that information as we're developing it as we're building it, we can protect our customers right away while we're building the confidence necessary to take something as dramatic and action as shutting down on our network. Right. Unilaterally, >>Citrix. I was gonna ask you kind of the impact of I o t. Right in this in this crazy expansion of the tax services, when you hear about all the time with my favorite example, somebody told the story of attacking a casino through the connected thermometer in the fish tank in the lobby, which may or may not be true, is still a great story. Great story. But I'm curious, you know, looking at the network, feeding versus the devices connecting that's really in an interesting way to attack this proliferation of attack services. You're getting it before it necessarily gets to all these new points of presence doing it based on the source. For >>us, that's the only way to make it scalable. It is true that automation blocking it before it gets to the azure to a device. It is what will create simplicity and value for our customers. >>Right on the other piece of the automation. Of course, that we hear about all the time is there just aren't enough security professionals, period. So if you don't have the automation. You don't have the machine learning, as you said, to filter low hanging fruit and the focus your resource. If they need to be, you're not going to do it. The bad news is the bad guys, similar tools. So as you look at kind of the increase in speed of automation, the increase in automated connectivity between these devices making decisions amongst each other, how do you see that kind of evolving? But you're kind of role and making sure you stay a step ahead of the bad guys. For >>me, it's not about just automation. It's about allowing smart people to put their brains against hard problems, hard impactful problems and so on. So simply automating is not enough. It's making sure that automation is reducing the the load on people so that they're able to focus on those hard, unique problems really solve all those solutions and, yes, Attackers, Attackers build automation as well. And so if we're not building faster and better than we're falling behind, so like every other part of this race, it's about getting better, faster and why it's so important that technology work together because we're constantly throwing out more tools and if they don't work better together, even if we got incremental automation, these place way still miss overall because it's end to end that we need to defend ourselves and our customers >>layered on what he said. For the foreseeable future, you're gonna need smart security people that help protect your practice. Our goal in automation is take the road tasks out of out of the gate. They live so they can focus on the things that provide the most value protecting their enterprise. >>Right when you're looking, you talked about making sure things work together, for you talked about making sure things work together. How do you decide what's kind of on the top of the top of the stack, where everybody wants to own the single pane of glass? Everybody wants to be the control plane. Everybody wants to be that thing that's on your computer all the time, which is how you work your day to day. How do you kind of dictate what are the top level tools while still going out? And, he said, exploring some of these really cutting edge things out around the fringe, which don't necessarily have a full stack solution that you're going to rely on but might have some cool kind of point solutions if you will, or point products to help you plug some new and emerging holes. Yeah, >>yeah. So for us, yeah, we take security capabilities and we build them into the other things that we sell. So it's not a bolt on. So when you buy things from us, whether whether it's bandwidth or whether its SD wan and security comes baked in, so it's not something you have to worry about integrating later. It's an ingredient of the things that we sell in all of the automation that we build is built into our practice, So it's simple for our customers to understand, like, simple and then layered. On top of that, we've got a couple different ways that we bring pro services and consulting to our practice. So we've got a smart group of folks that could lean into staff, augment and sit on site, do just about anything to help customers build a practice from day zero to something more mature. But now we're toying with taking those folks in building them into products and services that we sell for 10 or 20 hours a month as an ingredient. So you get that consulting wrapper on top of the portfolio that we sell as a service provider. >>Get your take on kind of budgets and how people should think about their budgets. And when I think of security, I can't help but think of like insurance because you can't spend all your money on security. But you want to spend the right amount on security. But at the end of the day, you can't be 100% secure, right? So it's kind of kind of working the margins game, and you have to make trade offs in marketing, wants their money and product development, wants their money and sales, wants their money. So what people are trying to assess kind of the risk in their investment trade offs. What are some of the things they should be thinking about to determine what is the proper investment on security? Because it can't just be, you know, locker being 100% it's not realistic, and then all the money they help people frame that. >>Usually when companies come to us in, Centurylink plays in every different segment, all the way down to, you know, five people company all the way to the biggest multinationals on the planet. So that question is, in the budget is a little bit different, depending on the type of customer, the maturity and the lens are looking at it. So, typically, way have a group of folks that we call security account managers those our consultants and we bring them in either in a dedicated or a shared way. Help companies that's us, wear their practices today in what tool sets for use again things that they need to purchase and integrate to get to where they need to be >>really kind of a needs analysis based on gaps as much as anything else. >>That's part of the reason why we try to build prisons earlier, so many of the technologies into our solution so that so that you buy, you know, SD wan from us, and you get a security story is part of it is that that allows you to use the customer to save money and really have one seamless solution that provides that secure experience. We've been building firewalls and doing network based security for going on two decades now, in different places. So at this point, that is a good place that way, understand? Well, we can apply automation against it. We can dump, tail it into existing services and then allow focused on other areas of security. So it helps. From a financial standpoint, it also helps customers understand from where they put their talent. Because, as you talked about, it's all about talents even more so than money. Yes, we need to watch our budgets. But if you buy these tools, how do you know about the talent to deploy them? And easier You could make it to do that simpler. I think the better off right >>typical way had the most success selling security practices when somebody is either under attacker compromised right, then the budget opens right up, and it's not a problem anymore. So we thought about how to solve that commercially, and I'll just use Vitas is an example. We have a big D dos global DDOS practice that's designed to protect customers that have applications out on the Internet that are business critical, and if they go down, whether it's an e commerce or a trading site losing millions of dollars a day, and some companies have the money to buy that up front and just have it as a service. And some companies don't purchase it from us until they're under attack. And the legacy telco way of deploying that service was an order and a quote. You know, some days later, we turned it up. So we've invested with Christine the whole orchestration layer to turn it up in minutes and that months so you can go to our portal. You can enter a few simple commercial terms and turn it on when you need it. >>That's interesting. I was gonna ask you kind of how has cloud kind of changed the whole go to market and the way people think about it. And even then you hear people have stuff that's secure in the cloud, but they mis configured a switch left something open. But you're saying, too it enables you to deploy in a very, very different matter based on you know, kind of business conditions and not have that old, you know, get a requisite get a p o requisition order, install config. Take on another kind of crazy stuff. Okay, so before I let you go, last question. What are your kind of priorities for this show for Centurylink when it's top of mind, Obviously, you have the report and the Black Lotus. What do you guys really prioritizing for this next week? Here for Cisco. >>We're here to help customers. We have a number of customers, a lot of learning about our solutions, and that's always my priority. And I mentioned earlier we just put out a press release for rapid threat defense. So we're here to talk about that, and I think the industry and what we're doing this little bit differently. >>I get to work with Chris Motions Week with customers, which is kind of fun. The other part that I'm really excited about, things we spent a bunch of time with partners and potential partners. We're always looking at how we bring more, better together. So one of the things that we're both focused on is making sure that we're able to provide more solutions. So the trick is finding the right partners who are ready to do a P I level integration. The other things that Chris was talking about that really make this a seamless and experience, and I think we've got a set of them that are really, really interested in that. And so those conversations this week will be exceptionally well, I think that's gonna help build better technology for our customers even six months. >>Alright, great. Well, thanks for kicking off your week with the Cube and have a terrific week. Alright. He's Chris. He's Chris. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. Where? The RSA Conference in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching. See you next time. >>Yeah, yeah.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Splunk.conf19, brought to you by Splunk. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here inside for Splunk.conf, their 10th-year conference. We've been here seven years. I'm John Furrier, the host. Our next guest is Sherrie Caltagirone, founder and executive director of the Global Emancipation Network, a cutting-edge company and organization connecting different groups together to fight that battle combating human trafficking with the power of data analytics. We're in a digital world. Sherrie, thanks for coming in. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> So love your mission. This is really close to my heart in terms of what you're doing because with digital technologies, there's a unification theme here at Splunk, unifying data sets, you hear on the keynotes. You guys got a shout-out on the keynote, congratulations. >> Sherrie: We did, thank you. >> So unifying data can help fight cybersecurity, fight the bad guys, but also there's other areas where unification comes in. This is what you're doing. Take a minute to explain the Global Emancipation Network. >> Yeah, thank you. So what we do is we are a data analytics and intelligence nonprofit, dedicated to countering all forms of human trafficking, whether it's labor trafficking, sex trafficking, or any of the sub types, men, women, and children all over the world. So when you think about that, what that really means is that we interact with thousands of stakeholders across law enforcement, governments, nonprofits, academia, and then private sector as well. And all of those essentially act as data silos for human trafficking data. And when you think about that as trafficking as a data problem or you tackle it as a data problem, what that really means is that you have to have a technology and data-led solution in order to solve the problem. So that's really our mission here is to bring together all of those stakeholders, give them easy access to tools that can help improve their counter posture. >> And where are you guys based and how big is the organization? What's the status? Give a quick plug for where you guys are at and what the current focus is. >> Yeah, perfect, so I am based in San Luis Obispo, California. We have just started a brand new trafficking investigations hub out at Cal Poly there. They're a fantastic organization whose motto is learn by doing, and so we are taking the trafficking problem and the tangential other issues, so like we mentioned, cyber crime, wildlife trafficking, drugs trafficking, all of this sort of has a criminal convergence around it and applying technology, and particularly Splunk, to that. >> Yeah, and I just want to make a note 'cause I think it's important to mention. Cal Poly's doing some cutting-edge work. Alison Robinson, Bill Britton, who runs the program over there, they got a great organization. They're doing a lot of data-oriented from media analysis, data, big focus there. Cal Poly quite a big organization. >> They are, and they're doing some wonderful things. AWS just started an innovation hub called the DX Hub there that we are a part of, really trying to tackle these really meaty problems here that are very data-centric and technology-centric. And Cal Poly's the best place to do that. >> Great, let's get into some of the details. One of the things around the news, obviously seeing Mark Zuckerberg doing the tour, Capitol Hill, DC, Georgetown, free speech, data. Facebook has been kind of blamed for breaking democracy. At the same time, it's a platform. They don't consider themselves as an editorial outlet. My personal opinion, they are, but they hide behind that platform. So bad things have happened, good things can happen. So you're seeing technology kind of being pigeonholed as bad. Tech for bad, there's also a tech for good. Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of VMware, publicly said technology's neutral. We humans can shape it. So you guys are looking at it from shaping it for good. How are you doing it? What are some of the things that are going on technically from a business standpoint that is shaping and unifying the data? >> Yeah, I mean, it's absolutely certain that technology has facilitated human trafficking and other ills throughout the world. It's a way that people bring their product, in this case, sadly, human beings, to the market to reach buyers, right? And technology absolutely facilitates that. But, as you mentioned, we can use that against them. So actually here at Conf we are bringing together for a first time the partnership that we did with Splunk for Good, Accenture, and Global Emancipation Network to help automatically classify and score risky businesses, content, ads, and individuals there to help not only with mitigating risk and liability for the private sector, whether it's social media giants or if it's transportation, hospitality, you name it, but also help ease the burden of content moderators. And that's the other side of it. So when you live in this space day in and day out, you really exact a mental toll here. It's really damaging to the individual who sits and reads this material and views photos over and over again. So using technology is a way to automate some of those investigations, and the identification of that content could be helpful in a variety of ways. >> In a way, it's a whole other adversary formula to try to identify. One of the things that Splunk, as we've been here at Splunk Conference, they've been about data from day one. A lot of data and then grew from there, and they have this platform. It's a data problem, and so one of the things that we're seeing here is diverse data, getting at more data makes AI smarter, makes things smarter. But that's hard. Diverse data might be in different data sets or silos, different groups. Sharing data's important, so getting that diverse data, how difficult is it for you guys? Because the bad guys can hide. They're hiding in from Craigslist to social platforms. You name it, they're everywhere. How do you get the data? What's the cutting-edge ingestion? Where are the shadows? Where are the blind spots? How do you guys look at that? Because it's only getting bigger. >> Absolutely, so we do it through a variety of different ways. We absolutely see gathering and aggregating and machining data the most central thing to what we do at Global Emancipation Network. So we have a coalition, really, of organizations that we host their scrapers and crawlers on and we run it through our ingestion pipeline. And we are partnered with Microsoft and AWS to store that data, but everything goes through Splunk as well. So what is that data, really? It's data on the open web, it's on the deep web. We have partners as well who look at the dark web, too, so Recorded Future, who's here at Conf, DeepL as well. So there's lots of different things on that. Now, honestly, the data that's available on the internet is easy for us to get to. It's easy enough to create a scraper and crawler, to even create an authenticated scraper behind a paywall, right? The harder thing is those privately held data sets that are in all of those silos that are in a million different data formats with all kinds of different fields and whatnot. So that is where it's a little bit more of a manual lift. We're always looking at new technologies to machine PDFs and that sort of thing as well. >> One of the things that I love about this business we're on, the wave we're on, we're in a digital media business, is that we're in pursuit of the truth. Trust, truth is a big part of what we do. We talk to people, get the data. You guys are doing something really compelling. You're classifying evil. Okay, this is a topic of your talk track here. Classifying evil, combating human trafficking with the power of data analytics. This is actually super important. Could you share why, for people that aren't following inside the ropes of this problem, why is it such a big problem to classify evil? Why isn't it so easy to do? What's the big story? What should people know about this challenge? >> Yeah, well, human trafficking is actually the second-most profitable crime in the world. It's the fastest-growing crime. So our best estimates are that there's somewhere between 20 million and 45 million people currently enslaved around the world. That's a population the size of Spain. That's nothing that an individual, or even a small army of investigators can handle. And when you think about the content that each of those produce or the traffickers are producing in order to advertise the services of those, it's way beyond the ability of any one organization or even, like I said, an army of them, to manage. And so what we need to do then is to be able to find the signal in the noise here. And there is a lot of noise. Even if you're looking at sex trafficking, particularly, there's consensual sex work or there's other things that are a little bit more in that arena, but we want to find that that is actually engaging in human trafficking. The talk that you mentioned that we're doing is actually a fantastic use case. This is what we did with Splunk for Good and Accenture. We were actually looking at doing a deep dive into the illicit massage industry in the US, and there are likely over 10,000 illicit massage businesses in the US. And those businesses, massages and spas, that are actually just a front for being a brothel, essentially. And it generates $2 billion a year. We're talking about a major industry here, and in that is a very large component of human trafficking. There's a very clear pipeline between Korea, China, down to New York and then being placed there. So what we ended up needing to do then, and again, we were going across data silos here, looking at state-owned data, whether it was license applications, arrest filings, legal cases, that sort of thing, down into the textual advertisements, so doing NLP work with weighted lexicons and really assigning a risk score to individual massage businesses to massage therapist business owners and then, again, to that content. So looking, again, how can we create a classifier to identify evil? >> It's interesting, I think about when you're talking about this is a business. This is a business model, this business continuity. There's a supply chain. This is a bona fide, underground, or overt business process. >> Yeah, absolutely, and you're right on that too that it is actually overt because at this point, traffickers actually operate with impunity for the most part. So actually framing it that way, as a market economy, whether it's shadowy and a little bit more in the black market or completely out in the open, it really helps us frame our identification, how we can manage disruptions, who need to be the stakeholders at the table for us in order to have a wider impact rather than just whack-a-mole. >> I was just talking with Sonia, one of our producers, around inclusiveness and this is so obviously a human passion issue. Why don't we just solve it? I mean, why doesn't someone like the elite class or world organization, just Davos, and people just say they're staring at this problem. Why don't they just say, "Hey, this is evil. "Let's just get rid of it." What's the-- >> Well, we're working on it, John, but the good thing is, and you're absolutely right, that there are a number of organizations who are actually working on it. So not just us, there's some other amazing nonprofits. But the tech sector's actually starting to come to the table as well, whether it's Splunk, it's Microsoft, it's AWS, it's Intel, IBM, Accenture. People are really waking up to how damaging this actually is, the impact that it has on GDP, the way that we're particularly needing to protect vulnerable populations, LGBTQ youth, children in foster care, indigenous populations, refugees, conflict zones. So you're absolutely right. I think, given the right tools and technology, and the awareness that needs to happen on the global stage, we will be able to significantly shrink this problem. >> It's classic arbitrage. If I'm a bad guy, you take advantage of the systematic problems of what's in place, so the current situation. Sounds like siloed groups somewhat funded, not mega-funded. This group over here, disconnect between communications. So you guys are, from what I could tell, pulling everyone together to kind of create a control plane of data to share information to kind of get a more holistic view of everything. >> Yeah, that's exactly it. Trying to do it at scale, at that. So I mentioned that at first we were looking at the illicit massage sector. We're moving over to the social media to look again at the recruitment side and content. And the financial sector is really the common thread that runs through all of it. So being able to identify, taking it back to a general use case here from cyber security, just indicators as well, indicators of compromise, but in our case, these are just words and lexicons, dollar values, things like that, down to behavioral analytics and patterns of behavior, whether people are moving, operating as call centers, network-like behavior, things that are really indicative of trafficking. And making sure that all of those silos understand that, are sharing the data they can, that's not overly sensitive, and making sure that we work together. >> Sherrie, you mentioned AWS. Teresa Carlson, I know she's super passionate about this. She's a leader. Cal Poly, we mentioned that. Splunk, you mentioned, how is Splunk involved? Are they the core technology behind this? Are they powering the-- >> They are, yeah, Splunk was actually with us from day one. We sat at a meeting, actually, at Microsoft and we were really just white boarding. What does this look like? How can we bring Splunk to bear on this problem? And so Splunk for Good, we're part of their pledge, the $10 million pledge over 10 years, and it's been amazing. So after we ingest all of our data, no matter what the data source is, whatever it looks like, and we deal with the ugliest and most unstructured data ever, and Splunk is really the only tool that we looked at that was able to deal with that. So everything goes through Splunk. From there, we're doing a series of external API calls that can really help us enrich that data, add correlations, whether it's spatial data, network analysis, cryptocurrency analysis, public records look-ups, a variety of things. But Splunk is at the heart. >> So I got to ask you, honestly, as this new architecture comes into play for attacking this big problem that you guys are doing, as someone who's not involved in that area, I get wow, spooked out by that. I'm like, "Wow, this is really bad." How can people help? What can people do either in their daily lives, whether it's how they handle their data, observations, donations, involvement? How do people get involved? What do you guys see as some areas that could be collaborating with? What do you guys need? How do people get involved? >> Yeah, one that's big for me is I would love to be able to sit in an interview like this, or go about my daily life, and know that what I am wearing or the things that I'm interacting with, my phone, my computer, weren't built from the hands of slave labor. And at this point, I really can't. So one thing that everybody can do is demand of the people that they are purchasing from that they're doing so in a socially viable and responsible way. So looking at supply chain management as well, and auditing specifically for human trafficking. We have sort of the certified, fair-trade certified organic seals. We need something like that for human trafficking. And that's something that we, the people, can demand. >> I think you're on the right track with that. I see a big business model wave where consumer purchasing power can be shifted to people who make the investments in those areas. So I think it's a big opportunity. It's kind of a new e-commerce, data-driven, social-impact-oriented economy. >> Yep, and you can see more and more, investment firms are becoming more interested in making socially responsible investments. And we just heard Splunk announce their $100 million social innovation fund as well. And I'm sure that human trafficking is going to be part of that awareness. >> Well, I'll tell you one of the things that's inspirational to me personally is that you're starting to see power and money come into helping these causes. My friend, Scott Tierney, just started a venture capital firm called Valo Ventures in Palo Alto. And they're for-profit, social impact investors. So they see a business model shift where people are getting behind these new things. I think your work is awesome, thank you. >> Yeah, thank you so much, I appreciate it. >> Thanks for coming on. Congratulations on the shout-out on the keynote. Appreciate it. The Global Emancipation Network, check them out. They're in San Luis Obispo, California. Get involved. This is theCUBE with bringing you the signal from the noise here at .conf. I'm John Furrier, back with more after this short break. (upbeat music)