>> Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Covering WTG Transform 2019. Brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and we're here at WTG Transform 2019, across the Mass Pike from Fenway Park where we're hoping the rain's going to stop in time for the game tonight where we have 189 users here with Winslow Technology, digging in a lot of technology, networking with their peers, and I'm thrilled to have on another one of the ED users on the program. Plamen Dimitrov is director of Information Technology at Kiawah Island Golf Resorts coming to us from South Carolina. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, as I was actually telling you, I'm familiar with Kiawah, my father is retired down to John's Island right off of Charlestown, South Carolina. You have a beautiful golf course there, there've been professional events there, we actually have one of our Cubeos, does some PGA coverage, John Walls, so he and I have talked about Kiawah a few times, but for those of our audience that aren't as familiar, haven't been able to enjoy it, tell us a little bit about Kiawah. >> Kiawah is a beautiful island, over about 10 miles of oceanfront, side, where the Kiawah Golf Resort is spread out. We have different accommodations with a lot of different activities for all ages, starting with the Sanctuary Hotel, which is a Five Star by Forbes and a Five Diamond by AAA. Or you can choose any of our villas from one to eight bedroom villas. We have five beautiful golf courses, which one of them is ocean course, previously hosted Ryder Cup in 1991, and PGA in 2012, and we are also proud to be a host of the PGA 2021, very exciting. Apart of that, we are announced to be Tennis Resort #1 in the world by tennisresortonline.com. We have over 22 tennis course, different variations from car course to clay. On top of that, we have a lot of pools, swimming pools, water parks, a lot of recreation, kayaking. It can be a beautiful journey for any visitors. >> Yeah, so, Plamen I know some of the IT people listening to this are going to be like, "Boy, he's got a tough job there!" Sounds gorgeous, right on the ocean, so many things there, bring us a little bit inside the IT, your world, what that entails, and, boy, there's got to be some different challenges and opportunities that you face, versus the kind of traditional business IT. >> As every island, we have all of our friends, like salty water and all things like that. And besides that, I've mentioned that the company's spread out over 10 miles, we have a total of 23 locations, and all they share the same systems and applications. Our current challenges, from an IT standpoint, are things that not all of the vendors that can keep up with the current technology and the all new and moderns, so we have some, what we call, old school applications, they can't keep up, and then you have the new applications that can be hosted on the Cloud, for instance. In the same time, those applications need to somewhat work with each other and have some interfaces, so this is where we face the, these days a challenge, a little bit, and where our partnership with Winslow, were able to help us determine which is the best route for us. And we determined that having a data center on island, and they have another one off the island, is the best for us to go. They helped us go through the planning of what's the right set up to be used, and I think we're in the right direction. >> Okay, great, so you have two data centers and you're also using Cloud services, if I heard right? >> Correct. >> Okay. There's been a big discussion here, is like, all right, what is the Cloud's strategy and it is an ever changing world and there is no one right answer, so, when you look at yourselves, what is your Cloud strategy today and what makes you help determine where you'll be moving in the future? >> In one of the sessions, they mentioned it's all about checks and balance, and it's to be able to measure how to apply your cash in a way that it makes sense, and one day, maybe, for some applications makes sense to be on premise, another day makes sense to bring it on the Cloud. And I can give you an example, recently what we did was, we were looking into switching to Office 365, pretty much everybody knows about it, and there's a good study that, after you go over a certain threshold, it's much easier to, and much more cost effective, to have something on premise versus going to a Cloud version. Now, again, it depends on the size of the company, it depends on the... Your future projects and goals, for some people it may be different than us. But I think that the future more and more, things will be what's called colocating the Cloud, which is mainly by other providers, and we're going to have two called a key that you can get to those applications from anywhere. >> Plam, bring us inside a little bit that the data centers, you said you have two of them, what's your infrastructure stack look like today? >> We've been looking at the various solutions, hyper-converged, and hybrids, and with the help of Winslow, we determined that sticking to the 3-2-1 traditional solution is the way we go. We use their Compellent products, all flash erase, very flexible and very reliable, very nice speed it provides, performance-wise they're a great product. Then, after that story solution, you have two data switches and then a number of servers. We use, on top of that, the VMware as our hypervisor, along with their VDI environment called Horizon for some remote clients that they don't need much, but that's basically our setup. >> Great, and how long have you been using the Compellent solutions? >> The Compellent solutions, we've been using them for a year and a half, since I joined the company, but my relationship with Winslow goes far back, since 2013 where I used to work for another company here in Nantucket. And the very first person I worked with was John Cliffords from Winslow. Very great guy, and he introduced us to the Dell world. This is when we bought the first EqualLogic and afterwards, I went to Belmont, where we also bought (mumbles), and we just keep going along. >> All right, great, Plamen, last question I have for you, what brings you to an event like this, what were you hoping to get out of it, and how's it been going for you so far? >> Well, what brings me to an event like this, most of the time is on one side to see what Dell has to offer, and some people attend, they'll conference, but I think a place like this, where you have smaller scale conference, it's much more beneficial for me. A, from a learning experience and B, from creating connections, making connections with other users, which this is the best because sales rep can say, "Yeah, this is what you need." But then, from a user perspective, it's priceless to absorb experience. >> All right, well, Plamen Dimitrov, I really appreciate you sharing your journey, and everything that Kiawah Golf Resorts is doing, thank you so much. >> Thank you very much. >> All right, we'll be back with more coverage here from WTG Transform 2019, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching theCUBE. (funky electro music)

>>The Cube presents Ignite 22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >>Welcome back to Vegas, guys and girls, it's great to have you with us. The Cube Live. Si finishing our second day of coverage of Palo Alto Ignite. 22 from MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here with Dave Valante. Dave Cybersecurity is one of my favorite topics to talk about because it is so interesting. It is so dynamic. My other favorite thing is to hear the voice of our vendors' customers. And we could to >>Do that. I always love to have the customer on you get you get right to the heart of the matter. Yeah. Really understand. You know, what I like to do is sort of when I listen to the keynotes, try to see how well it aligns with what the customers are actually doing. Yeah. So let's >>Do it. We're gonna unpack that now. Michael Fagan joins us, the Chief Transformation Officer at Village Roadshow. Welcome Michael. It's great to have you >>And thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. >>So this is a really interesting entertainment company. I find the name interesting, but talk to us a little bit about Village Roadshow so the audience gets an understanding of all of the things that you guys do cuz theme parks is part of >>This. Yeah, so Village Road show's Australia's largest cinema exhibitor in conjunction with our partners at event. We also own and operate Australia's largest theme parks. We have Warner Brothers movie World, wet and Wild. SeaWorld Top Golf in Australia is, is operated by us plus more. We also do studio, we also own movie studios, so Aquaman, parts of the Caribbean. We're, we're filming our movie studios Elvis last year. And we also distribute and produce movies and TV shows. Quite diverse group. >>Yeah, you guys have won a lot of awards. I mean, I don't know, academy Awards, golden Globe, all that stuff, you know, and so it's good. Congratulations. Yeah. >>Thank you. >>Cool stuff. I wanna also, before we dig into the use case here, talk to us about the role of a chief transformation officer. How long have you been in that role? What does it encompass and what do you get to drive from a transformation perspective? Yeah, >>So the, the, the nature and pace of disruption is accelerating and on, on one side. And then on the other side, the running business as usual is becoming increasingly complex and, and more difficult to do. So running both simultaneously and at pace can put organizations at risk, both financially and and other ways. So in my role as Chief Transformation officer, I support the rest of the executive team by giving them additional capacity and also bring capability to the team that wasn't there before. So I do a lot of strategic and thought leadership. There's some executive coaching in there, a lot of financial modeling and analysis. And I believe that when a transformation role in particularly a chief transformation role is done correctly, it's a very hands-on role. So there's certain things where I, I dive right down and I'm actually hands in, hands-on leading teams or leading pieces of work. So I might be leading particular projects. I tried to drive profit revenue and profitability across the divisions and does any multi or cross-divisional opportunities or initiative, then I will, I will lead those. >>The transformation, you know, a while ago was cloud, right? Okay, hey, cloud and transformation officers, whether or not they had that title, we'll tell you, look, you gotta change the operating model. You can't just, you know, lift and shift in the cloud. That's, you know, that's pennies. We want, you know, big bucks. That's the operating. Now it's, I'm my question is, is did the pandemic just accelerate your transformation or, or was it, you know, deeper than that? >>Yeah, so what in my role have both digital and business transformation, some of it has been organizational. I think the pandemic has had a, a significant and long lasting effect on society, not just on, on business. So I think if you think about how work work used to be a, a place you went to and how it was done beforehand, before the, before COVID versus now where, you know, previously, you know, within the enterprise you had all of the users, you had all of the applications, you had all of the data, you had all of the people. And then since March, 2020, just overnight, that kind of inverted and, you know, you had people working from home and a person working from home as a branch office of one. So, so we ended up with another thousand branches literally overnight. A lot of the applications that we use are now SASS or cloud-based, whether that's timekeeping with Kronos or communica employee communication or work Jam. So they're not sitting within our data center, they're not sitting within, within our enterprise. It's all external. >>So from a security perspective, you obviously had to respond to that and we heard a lot about endpoint and cloud security and refactoring the network and identity. These guys aren't really an identity. They partner for that, but still a lot of change in focus that the CISO had to deal with. How, how did you guys respond to that? And, and you had a rush to do it. Yeah. And so as you sit back now, where do you go from here? >>Well we had, we had two major triggers for our, our network and security transformation. The first being COVID itself, and then the second beam, we had a, a major MPLS telco renewal that came up. So that gave you an opportunity to look at what we were doing and essentially our network was designed for a near, that no longer exists for when, for when p like I said, when people, when people were from home, all the applications were inside. So, and we had aging infrastructure, our firewalls were end of life. So initially we started off with an SD WAN at the SD WAN layer and an SD WAN implementation. But when we investigated and saw the security capabilities that are available now, we that to a full sassy WAN implementation. >>Why Palo Alto Networks? Because you, you had, you said you had an aging infrastructure designed for an era that doesn't exist anymore, but you also had a number of tools. We've been talking about a consolidation a lot the last couple days. Yeah. How did, what did you consolidate and why with Palo Alto? >>So we had a great partner in Australia, incidentally also called Cube. Cube Networks. Yeah. That we worked with great >>Names. Yeah, right. >>So we, so we, we worked for Cube. We ran a, a form of tender process. And Palo Alto with, you know, Prisma access and Global Global Protect was the only, the only solution that gave us everything that we needed in terms of network modernization, the agility that we required. So for example, in our theme part, we want to send out a hotdog cart or an ice cream cart, and that becomes, all of a sudden you got a new branch that I want to spin up this branch in 10 minutes and then I wanna spin it back down again. So from agility perspective, from a flexibility perspective, the security that, that we wanted, you know, from a zero trust perspective, and they were the only, certainly from a zero trust perspective, they're probably the only vendor that, that exists that, that actually provided the, the, all those capabilities. >>And did you consolidate tools or you were in the process of consolidating tools now? >>Yeah, so we actually, we actually consolidated down to, to, to a, to a single vendor. And in my previous role I had, I had implemented SD WAN before and you know, interoperability is a, is a major issue in the IT industry. I think there's, it's probably the only industry in the, the only industry I can think of certainly that where we, we ship products that aren't ready. They're not of all the features, they, they don't have all the features that they should have. They're their plans. They were releasing patches, releasing additional features every, every couple of months. So, you know, if you, if if Ford sold the card, I said, Hey, you're gonna give you backseats in a couple of months, they'd be uproar. But, but we do that all the time in, in it. So I had, when I previously implemented an Sdwan transformation, I had products from two tier one vendors that just didn't talk to one another. And so when I went and spoke to those vendors, they just went, well, it's not me. It's clearly, clearly those guys. So, so there's a lot to be said for having a, you know, a champion team rather than a team of champions. And Palo Alto have got that full stack fully integrated that was, you know, exactly meant what we were looking for. >>They've been talking a lot the last couple days about integration and it, and I've talked with some of their executives and some analysts as well, including Dave about that seems to be a differentiator for them because they really focus on that. Their m and a strategy is very, it seems to be very clear and there's purpose on that backend integration instead of leaving it to the customer, like Village Road show to do it. They also talked a lot about the consolidation. I'm just curious, Michael, in terms of like what you've heard at the show in the last couple of days. >>Yeah, I mean I've been hearing to same mess, but actually we've, we've lived in a >>You're living it. That's what I wanted to >>Know. So, so, you know, we had a choice of, you know, do you try and purchase so-called best of breed products and then put a lot of effort into integrating them and trying to get them to work, which is not really what we want to spend time doing. I don't, I don't wanna be famous for, you know, integration and, you know, great infrastructure. I want to be, I want Village to be famous for delivering great experiences to our customers. Memories that last a lifetime. And you know, when kids grow up in Australia, they, everybody remembers going to the theme parks. That's what, that's what I want our team to be doing and to be delivering those great experiences, not to be trying to plug together bits of software and it may or may not work and have vendors pointing at one another and then we are left carrying the cannon and holding the >>Baby. So what was the before and after, can you give us a sense as to how life changed, you know, pre that consolidation versus post? >>Yeah, so our, our, our infrastructure, say our infrastructure was designed for, you know, the, you know, old ways of working where we had you knowm routers that were, you know, not designed for cloud, for modern traffic, including cloud Destin traffic, an old MPLS network. We used to back haul all the traffic from, from our branches back to central location run where we've got, you know, firewall walls, we've got a dmz, we could run advanced inspection services on that. So if you had a branch that wanted to access a website that was housed next door, even if it was across the country, then it would, we would pull that all the way back to Melbourne. We would apply advanced inspection services to it, send it up to the cloud out back across the country. Traffic would come back, come down to us, back out to our branch. >>So you talk about crossing the country four times, even at the website is, is situated next door now with, with our sasi sdwan transformation just pops out to the cloud now straight away. And the, the difference in performance for our, for our team and for our customers, it, it's phenomenal. So you'll talk about saving minutes, you know, on a log on and, and seconds then and on, on an average transaction and second zone sound like a lot. But when you, it's every click up, they're saving a second and add up. You're talking about thousands of man hours every month that we've saved. >>If near Zuke were sitting right here and said, what could we do better? You know, what do you need from us that we're not delivering today that you want to, you want us to deliver that would change your life. Yeah, >>There's two things. One, one of which I think they're all, they're already doing, but I actually haven't experienced myself. It's around the autonomous digital experience management. So I've now got a thousand users who are sitting at home and they've got, when they've got a problem, I don't know, is it, is it my problem or is it their problem? So I know that p were working on a, an A solution that digital experience solution, which can actually tell, well actually know you're sitting in your kitchen and your routes in your front room, maybe you should move closer to the route. So there, there they, that's one thing. And the second thing is using AI to tell me things that I wouldn't be able to figure out with a human training. A lot of time sifting through data. So things like where I've potentially overcompensated and, you know, overdelivered on the network and security side or of potentially underdelivered on a security side. So having AI to, you know, assess all of those millions and probably billions of, you know, transactions and packets that are moving around our network and say, Hey, you could optimize it more if you, if you dial this down or dial this up. >>So you said earlier we, this industry has a habit of shipping products before, you know they're ready. So based on your experience, seems like, first of all, it sounds like you got a at least decent technical background as well. When do you expect to have that capability? Realistically? When can we expect that as an industry? >>I think I, I think, like I said, the the rate and nature of change is, is, I think it's accelerating. The halflife of degree is short. I think when I left university, what I, what I learned in first year was, was obsolete within five years, I'd say now it's probably obsolete of you. What'd you learn in first year? It's probably obsolete by the time you finish your degree. >>Six months. Yeah, >>It's true. So I think the, the, the rate of change and the, the partnership that I see Palo building with the likes of AWS and Google and that and how they're coming together to, to solve, to jointly solve these problems is I think we will see this within 12 months. >>Who, who are your clouds? You got multiple clouds >>Or We got multiple clouds. Mostly aws, but there are certain things that we run that run in run in Azure as well. We, we don't really have much in GCP or, or, or some of the other >>Azure for collaboration and teams, stuff like that. >>Ah, we, we run, we run SAP that's we hosted in, in Azure and our cinema ticketing system is, is was run in Azure. It's, it was only available in, in in Azure the time we're mo we are mostly an AWS >>Shop. And what do you do with aws? I mean, pretty much everything else is >>Much every, everything else, anything that's customer facing our websites, they give us great stability. Great, great availability, great performance, you know, we've had and, and, and, and a very variable as well. So, we'll, you know, our, our pattern of selling movie tickets is typically, you know, fairly flat except when, you know, there's a launch of a, of a new movie. So all of a sudden we might say you might sell, you know, at 9:00 AM when, you know, spider-Man went on sale last year, I think we sold 100 times the amount of tickets in the forest, 10 minutes. So our website didn't just scale look beautifully, just took in all of that extra traffic scale up. We're at only any intervention and then scale back down >>Taylor Swift needs that she does need that. So yeah. And so is your vision to have Palo Alto networks security infrastructure have be a common sort of layer across those clouds and maybe even some on-prem? Is it, are you, are you working toward that? Yeah, >>We, yeah, we, yeah, we, we'd love to have, you know, our end, our end customers don't really care about the infrastructure that we run. They won't be >>Able to unless it breaks. >>Unless it breaks. Yeah. They wanna be able to go to see a movie. Do you wanna be able to get on a rollercoaster? They wanna be able to go, you know, play around around a top golf. So having that convergence and that seamless integration of working across cloud network security now for most of our team, they, they don't know and they don't need to know. In fact, I, I frankly don't want them to know and be, be thinking about networks and clouds. I kind of want them thinking about how do we sell more cinema tickets? How do we give a great experience to our guests? How do we give long lasting lifetime memories to, to the people who come visit our parks? >>That's what they want. They want that experience. Right. I'd love to get your final thoughts on, we, we had you give a great overview of the ch the role that you play as Chief transformation officer. You own digital transformation, you want business transformation. What advice would you give to either other treat chief transformation officers, CISOs, CSOs, CEOs about partnering, what's the right partner to really improve your security posture? >>I think there's, there's two things. One is if you haven't looked at this in the last two years and made some changes, you're outta date. Yeah. Because the world has changed. We've seen, I mean, I've heard somebody say it was two decades worth of, I actually think it's probably five 50 years worth of change in, in Australia in terms of working habits. So one, you need to do something. Yeah. Need to, you need to have a look at this. The second thing I think is to try and partner with someone that has similar values to your organization. So Village is a, it's a wonderful, innovative company. Very agile. So the, like the, the concept of gold class cinema, so, you know, big proceeds, recliners, waiter service, elevated foods concept that, that was invented by village in 1997. Thank you. And we had thanks finally came to the states so decade later, I mean we would've had the CEO of every major cinema chain in the world come to come to Melbourne and have a look at what Village is doing and go, yeah, we're gonna export that back around around the world. It's probably one of, one of Australia's unknown exports. Yeah. So it's, yeah, so, so partnering. So we've got a great innovation history and we'd like to think of ourselves as pretty agile. So working with partners who are, have a similar thought process and, and managed to an outcome and not to a contract Yeah. Is, is important for us. >>It's all about outcomes. And you've had some great outcomes, Michael, thank you for joining us on the program, walking us through Village Roadshow, the challenges that you had, how you tackled them, and, and next time I think I'm in a movie theater and I'm in reclining chair, I'm gonna think about you and village. So thank you. We appreciate your insights, your time. Thank you. Thanks Michael. For Michael Fagan and Dave Valante. I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching The Cube. Our live coverage of Palo Alto Networks. Ignite comes to an end. We thank you so much for watching. We appreciate you. You're watching the Cube, the leader in live enterprise and emerging emerging tech coverage next year. >>Yeah.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, It's theCUBE! Covering Fortinet Security Summit, brought to you by Fortinet. >> And welcome to the cube coverage here at the PGA champion-- Fortinet championship, where we're going to be here for Napa valley coverage of Fortinet's, the championships security summit, going on Fortinet, sponsoring the PGA, but a great guest Merritt Baer, who's the principal in the office of the CISO at Amazon web services. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Merritt: Thank you for having me. It's good to be here. >> So Fortinet, uh, big brand now, sponsoring the PGA. Pretty impressive that they're getting out there with the golf. It's very enterprise focused, a lot of action. A lot of customers here. >> Merritt: It seems like it, for sure. >> Bold move. Amazon, Amazon web services has become the gold standard in terms of cloud computing, seeing DevOps people refactoring. You've seen the rise of companies like Snowflake building on Amazon. People are moving not only to the cloud, but they're refactoring their business and security is top of mind for everyone. And obviously cybersecurity threats that Fortinet helps cover, you guys are partnering with them, is huge. What is your state of the union for cyber? What's the current situation with the threat landscape? Obviously there's no perimeter in the cloud. More end points are coming on board. The Edge is here. 5G, wavelength with outpost, a lot happening. >> That was a long question, but I'll, I'll try. So I think, you know, as always business in innovation is the driver. And security needs to be woven into that. And so I think increasingly we're seeing security not be a no shop, but be an enabler. And especially in cloud, when we're talking about the way that you do DevOps with security, I know folks don't like the term DevSecOps, but you know, to be able to do agile methodology and be able to do the short sprints that are really agile and, and innovative where you can-- So instead of nine months or whatever, nine week timelines, we're talking about short sprints that allow you to elastically scale up and down and be able to innovate really creatively. And to do that, you need to weave in your security because there's no like, okay, you pass go, you collect $200. Security is not an after the fact. So I think as part of that, of course the perimeter is dead, long live the perimeter, right? It does matter. And we can talk about that a little bit. You know, the term zero trust is really hot right now. We can dig into that if that's of interest. But I think part of this is just the business is kind of growing up. And as you alluded to we're at the start of what I think is an S curve that is just at the beginning. >> You know, I was really looking forward to Reinforced this year. It was got canceled last year, but the first inaugural event was in Boston. I remember covering that. This year it was virtual, but the keynote Steven gave was interesting, security hubs at the center of it. And I want to ask you, because I need you to share your view on how security's changed with the cloud, because there's now new things that are there to take advantage of if you're a business or an enterprise, yeah on premises, there's a standard operating procedure. You have the perimeter, et cetera. That's not there anymore, but with the cloud, there's a new, there's new ways to protect and security hub is one. What are some of the new things that cloud enables for security? >> Well, so just to clarify, like perimeters exist logically just like they do physically. So, you know, a VPC for example, would be a logical perimeter and that is very relevant, or a VPN. Now we're talking about a lot of remote work during COVID, for example. But one of the things that I think folks are really interested with Security Hub is just having that broad visibility and one of the beauties of cloud is that, you get this tactile sense of your estate and you can reason about it. So for example, when you're looking at identity and access management, you can look at something like access analyzer that will under the hood be running on a tool that our, our group came up with that is like reasoning about the permissions, because you're talking about software layers, you're talking about computer layer reasoning about security. And so another example is in inspector. We have a tool that will tell you without sending a single packet over the network, what your network reach ability is. There's just like this ability to do infrastructure as code that then allows you to do security as code. And then that allows for ephemeral and immutable infrastructures so that you could, for example, get back to a known good state. That being said, you know, you kill a, your web server gets popped and you kill it and you spin up a new one. You haven't solved your problem, right? You need to have some kind of awareness of networking and how principals work. But at the same time, there's a lot of beauties about cloud that you inherit from a security perspective to be able to work in those top layers. And that's of course the premise of cloud. >> Yeah, infrastructure as code, you mentioned that, it's awesome. And the program ability of it with, with server-less functions, you're starting to see new ways now to spin up resources. How is that changing the paradigm and creating opportunities for better security? Is it, is it more microservices? Is it, is, are there new things that people can do differently now that they didn't have a year ago or two years ago? Because you're starting to see things like server-less functions are very popular. >> So yes, and yes, I think that it is augmenting the way that we're doing business, but it's especially augmenting the way we do security in terms of automation. So server-less, under the hood, whether it's CloudWatch events or config rules, they are all a Lambda function. So that's the same thing that powers your Alexa at home. These are server-less functions and they're really simple. You can program them, you can find them on GitHub, but they are-- one way to really scale your enterprise is to have a lot of automation in place so that you put those decisions in ahead of time. So your gray area of human decision making is scaled down. So you've got, you know, what you know to be allowable, what you know to be not allowable. And then you increasingly kind of whittled down that center into things that really are novel, truly novel or high stakes or both. But the focus on automation is a little bit of a trope for us. We at Amazon like to talk about mechanisms, good intentions are not enough. If it's not someone's job, it's a hope and hope is not a plan, you know, but creating the actual, you know, computerized version of making it be done iteratively. And I think that is the key to scaling a security chain because as we all know, things can't be manual for long, or you won't be able to grow. >> I love the AWS reference. Mechanisms, one way doors, raising the bar. These are all kind of internal Amazon, but I got to ask you about the Edge. Okay. There's a lot of action going on with 5G and wavelength. Okay, and what's interesting is if the Edge becomes so much more robust, how do you guys see that security from a security posture standpoint? What should people be thinking about? Because certainly it's just a distributed Edge point. What's the security posture, How should we be thinking about Edge? >> You know, Edge is a kind of catch all, right, we're talking about Internet of Things. We're talking about points of contact. And a lot of times I think we focus so much on the confidentiality and integrity, but the availability is hugely important when we're talking about security. So one of the things that excites me is that we have so many points of contact and so many availability points at the Edge that actually, so for example, in DynamoDB, the more times you put a call on it, the more available it is because it's fresher, you've already been refreshing it, there are so many elements of this, and our core compute platform, EC2, all runs on Nitro, which is our, our custom hardware. And it's really fascinating, the availability benefits there. Like the best patching is a patching you don't have to do. And there are so many elements that are just so core to that Greengrass, you know, which is running on FreeRTOS, which has an open source software, for example, is, you know, one element of zero trust in play. And there are so many ways that we can talk about this in different incarnations. And of course that speaks to like the breadth and depth of the industries that use cloud. We're talking about automotive, we're talking about manufacturing and agriculture, and there are so many interesting use cases for the ways that we will use IOT. >> Yeah. It's interesting, you mentioned Nitro. we also got Annapurna acquisition years ago. You got latency at the Edge. You can handle low latency, high volume compute with the data. That's pretty powerful. It's a paradigm shift. That's a new dynamic. It's pretty compelling, these new architectures, most people are scratching their heads going, "okay, how do I do this, like what do I do?" >> No, you're right. So it is a security inheritance that we are extremely calculated about our hardware supply chain. And we build our own custom hardware. We build our own custom Silicon. Like, this is not a question. And you're right in that one of the things, one of the north stars that we have is that the security properties of our engineering infrastructure are built in. So there just is no button for it to be insecure. You know, like that is deliberate. And there are elements of the ways that nature works from it running, you know, with zero downtime, being able to be patched running. There are so many elements of it that are inherently security benefits that folks inherit as a product. >> Right. Well, we're here at the security summit. What are you excited for today? What's the conversations you're having here at the Fortinet security summit. >> Well, it's awesome to just meet folks and connect outside. It's beautiful outside today. I'm going to be giving a talk on securing the cloud journey and kind of that growth and moving to infrastructure as code and security as code. I'm excited about the opportunity to learn a little bit more about how folks are managing their hybrid environments, because of course, you know, I think sometimes folks perceive AWS as being like this city on a hill where we get it all right. We struggle with the same things. We empathize with the same security work. And we work on that, you know, as a principal in the office of the CISO, I spend a lot of my time on how we do security and then a lot of my time talking to customers and that empathy back and forth is really crucial. >> Yeah. And you've got to be on the bleeding edge and have the empathy. I can't help but notice your AWS crypto shirt. Tell me about the crypto, what's going on there. NFT's coming out, is there a S3 bucket at NFT now, I mean. (both laughing) >> Cryptography never goes out of style. >> I know, I'm just, I couldn't help-- We'll go back to the pyramids on that one. Yeah, no, this is not a, an advertisement for cryptocurrency. It is, I'm a fangirl of the AWS crypto team. And as a result of wearing their shirts, occasionally they send me more shirts. And I can't argue with that. >> Well, love, love, love the crypto. I'm big fan of crypto, I think crypto is awesome. Defi is amazing. New applications are going to come out. We think it's going to be pretty compelling, again, let's get today right. (laughing) >> Well, I don't think it's about like, so cryptocurrency is just like one small iteration of what we're really talking about, which is the idea that math resolves, and the idea that you can have value in your resolution that the math should resolve. And I think that is a fundamental principle and end-to-end encryption, I believe is a universal human right. >> Merritt, thank you for coming on the cube. Great, great to have you on. Thanks for sharing that awesome insight. Thanks for coming on. >> Merritt: Thank you. >> Appreciate it. Okay. CUBE coverage here in Napa valley, our remote set for Fortinet's security cybersecurity summit here as part of their PGA golf Pro-Am tournament happening here in Napa valley. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.

>>From around the globe. It's the cube covering Fortinet security summit brought to you by Fortinet. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone. To the cubes, coverage of Fortinets championship golf tournament, we're here for the cybersecurity summit. David got a great guest, Ruby cutoff CEO, and co-founder of Tufin great to have you on. Thank you for coming on the cube. We were chatting before. Came on. Camera, big talk. You just gave it. Thanks mom. Thanks >>For having me >>Not a bad place here. Golf tournament, golf and cybersecurity, kind of go together. You know, keep the ball in the middle of the fairway. You know, don't let it get out of bounds, you know, >>And it's a beautiful place. So, uh, very happy to be here and be a premier sponsor of the event. >>Congratulations and a good, good to have you on let's get into the cybersecurity. We were talking before we came on camera around how transformation is really hard. We went to the cloud is really hard refactoring. You're just really hard, but security is really, really hard. That's true. So how do you look at how security is perceived in companies? Is there dynamics that are being amplified by the rapid moved movement to the cloud? You seeing apps being developed really fast changes fast. What's the, what's the barometer of the industry right now? Sure, >>Sure. It's interesting. And this hasn't really changed in the past, but we've seen like exacerbated getting worse and worse. I think a lot of companies security is actually seen as a blocker and frankly security is probably the most hated department in the organization because a lot of times, first of all, the security says no, but also they just take their time. So if you think about organizations, enterprises, they run on top of their enterprise applications. They have applications that their own in-house developers are writing, and those developers are changing their apps all the time. They're driving change in it as well. So you end up having dozens of change requests from developers want to open connectivity. You want to go from point a to point B on the network. They open a ticket. It reaches the network security team that ticket might take several days until it's implemented in production. So the level of service that security provides the application teams today is really not very high. So you can really understand why security is not, um, looked upon favorably by the rest of the organization. >>And some organizations. My perception is, is that, you know, the hardcore security teams that have been around for awhile, they've got standards and they're hardcore, a new app comes in, it's gotta be approved. Something's gotta get done. And it's slower, right? It slows people down the perception. It could be slow. How is it changing? Yes, >>So it changing because when you're moving to the cloud and a lot of organizations are adopting the cloud in many ways, private cloud, public cloud hybrid cloud, you know, they're working in cloud native environments and those environments, you know, the developers are, they own the keys to the kingdom, right? They're managing AWS Azure, Google cloud to managing get hub. You know, they got the place to themselves. So they're pushing changes in their apps without asking it for permission. So they're suddenly exposed to this is how fast it can really be. And while anything that they do in the on-prem or sort of traditional applications is still moving very slowly unless they're using an automated approach to policy. So one of the things that I spoke about today is the need for organizations to adopt a policy centric approach. So they need to define a policy of who can talk to whom and what conduct to what across the entire organizational network, whether it's firewalls routers, which is cloud platforms. >>And then once you have that policy, you can start automated based on the policy. So the concept is somebody opens a ticket, a developer wants to make a change. They want a ticket in service. Now remedy that ticket reaches, uh, some system that's going to check for compliance against the policy. If you're able to immediately tell if that change is compliant or not, then you're able to make that split-second decision, which might take an analyst a couple of days, and then you can design the perfect minimal change to implement on the network. That is really agile, right? That's what developers want to see. And a lot of security departments are really struggling with that today. >>Why, why are they? That seems like a no brainer because policy-based innovation has been around in the network layer for many, many years decades. Right? We'll see, makes things go better, faster. Why would they be against it? Where were they? >>Yeah. So they're not really against it. I think it's just the sheer complexity and size of today's networks is nothing compared to where it was 10 years ago. So you have tens to hundreds of firewalls in large enterprises, thousands of routers and switches, load balancers, private cloud SDN, like NSX and ACI public cloud Kubernetes. It's just a plethora of networking. So we're thinking of it as proliferation of networking is getting worse and worse, especially with IOT and now moving to the cloud. So it is just so complex that if you don't have specialized tools, there's absolutely no way they'll, you'll be able to. >>So your talk must so gone over well, because I do a lot of interviews and I hear developers talking about shift left, right? Which is, you know, basically vernacular for do security in the dev CIC D pipelining. So while you're there rather than having to go fix the bugs later, this seems to be a hot trend. People like it, they want it, they want to check it off, get it done, move on this policy-based automation, help them here. >>It does in some ways, I mean, so you need a policy for the cloud as well, but there's a different challenge that I see altogether in the cloud. And one of the challenges that we're saying is that there's actually a political divide. You have network security folks who are managing, you know, firewalls routers, switches, and maybe the hub to the cloud. And then inside the spokes inside the cloud itself, you have a different team, cloud operators, cloud security folks. And those two teams don't really talk to each other. Some companies have set up centers of excellence, where they're trying to bring all the experts together. But most companies, network security, folks who want to understand what's happening inside the cloud are sort of given the Heisman. They're not invited to meetings. Um, and there's lack of which I think is tragic because it's not going to go over well. So there's huge challenges in security in the cloud. And unless these two departments are going to talk to each other and work together, we're not going to get anywhere near the level of security that we need. >>The cloud team, the cloud guys, if you will, you know, quote guys or gals and the security guys and gals, they're not getting along. What's the, what's the, is it historical? Just legacy structures? Is it more of my department? I own the keys to the kingdom. So go through me kind of the vibe, or is it more of just evolution of the, developer's going to say, I'm going to go around you like shadow it, um, created the cloud. Is there like a shadow security, but trend around this? >>Yeah, there is. And I think it stems from what we covered in the beginning, which is, you know, app developers are now used to and trained to fear security. Every change they want on the on-prem network takes a week, right? They're moving to the cloud. Suddenly they're able to roam freely, do things quickly. If network security folks come by and say, oh, we want to take a look at those changes. What they're hearing, the music is all we're going to slow you down. And the last thing cloud guys want to hear is that we're going to slow you down. So they have they're fearfully. You know, they're, they're rightly afraid of what's going to happen. If they enable a very cumbersome and slow process, we got to work differently. Right? So there's new paradigms with dev DevSecOps where security is built into the CIC pipeline, where it doesn't slow down app developers, but enables compliance and visibility into the cloud environments at the same time. Great stuff. >>Great insight. I want to ask you your, one of your things in your top that I found interesting. And I like to have you explain it in more detail is you think security can be an enabler for digital transformation. Digital transformation can kick the wrong yeah. With transforming. Okay. Everyone knows that, but security, how does security become that enabler? >>So, I mean, today security is a, um, as a blocker to digital transformation. I think anybody that claims, Hey, we're on a path to digital transformation. We're automated, we're digitally transformed. And yet you asked the right people and you find out every change takes a week on the network. You're not digitally transformed, right? So if you adopt a, a framework where you're able to make changes in a compliant secure matter and make changes in minutes, instead of days, suddenly you'll be able to provide a level of service to app developers like they're getting in the cloud, that's digital transformation. So I see the network change process as pretty much the last piece of it that has not been digitally transformed yet. >>And this is where a lot of opportunity is. Exactly. All right. So talk about what you guys are doing to solve that problem, because you know, this is a big discussion. Obviously security is on everyone's mind. They're reactive to proactive that buying every tool they can platforms are coming out. You're starting to see a control plane. You're starting to see things like collective intelligence networks forming, uh, what's the solution to all this, >>Right? So what we've developed is a security policy layer that sits on top of all the infrastructure. So we've got, uh, four products in the two for an orchestration suite where we can connect to all the major firewalls, router, switches, cloud platforms, private cloud SDN. So we see the configuration in all those different platforms. We know what's happening on the ground. We build a typology model. That is one of the industry's best apology models that enables us to query and say, okay, from point a to point B, which firewalls, router switches and cloud platforms will you traverse. And then we integrate it with ticketing system, like a remedy or service now, so that the user experiences a developer opens a ticket for a change that ticket gets into Tufin. We check it against the policy that was defined by the security managers, the security manager defined a policy of who can talk to whom and what conducted what across the physical network and the cloud. >>So we can tell within a split second, is this compliant or not? If it's not compliant, we don't waste an engineer's time. We kick it back to the original user. But if it is compliant, we use that typology model to perform network change design. So we design the perfect minimal change to implement an every firewall router switch cloud platform. And then the last mile is we provision that change automatically. So we're able to make a change in minutes, instead of days would dramatically better security and accuracy. So the ROI on Tufin is not just security, but agility balanced with security at the same time. So you like the rules of the road, >>But the roads are changing all the time. That's how do you keep track of what's going on? You must have to have some sort of visualization technology when you lay out the topology and things start to be compliant, and then you might see opportunity to do innovative buckets. Hey, you know, I love this policy, but I'm, I'm going to work on my policy because sure. Got to up your game on policy and continue to iterate. Is that how do they, how do your customers Daniel? >>So listen, we we're, uh, we're not a tiny company anymore. We've grown. We went public in April of 2019 race and capital. We have over 500 employees, we sold over 2000 customers worldwide. So, um, you know, when customers ask us for advice, we come in and help them with consulting or professional services in terms of deployment. And the other piece is we gotta keep up all the time with what's happening with Fortnite. For example, as, as one of our strategic partners, every time fortnight makes the change we're on the beta program. So we know about a code change. We're able to test them the lab we know about their latest features. We got to keep up with all that. So that takes a lot of engineering efforts. We've hired a lot of engineers and we're hiring more. Uh, so it takes a lot of investment to do this at scale. And we're able to deliver that for our customers. >>I want the relationship with 400. I see you're here at the golf tournament. You're part of the pavilion. You're part of the tournament by the way. Congratulations. Great, great, great event. Thank you. What's the relationship with food and air from a product and a customer technology standpoint, >>We're working closely with Fortnite, where they're a strategic partner of ours. We're integrated into their Fordham manager, APIs. We're a fabric ready solution for them. So obviously working closely. Some of our biggest customers are fortnight's biggest customers will get the opportunity to sponsor this event, which is great tons of customers here and very interesting conversations. So we're very happy with that relationship. >>This is good. Yeah. So that ask you, what have you learned? I think you got great business success. Looking back now to where we are today, the speed of the market, what's your big takeaway in terms of how security changed and it continues to be challenging and these opportunities, what was the big takeaway for you? >>Well, I guess if you were like spanning my career, uh, the big takeaway is, uh, first of all, and just in startup world, patients think things come to those away, but also, um, you know, just, you got to have the basics, right? What we do is foundational. And there were times when people didn't believe in what we do or thought, you know, this is minor. This is not important as people move to the cloud, this won't matter. Oh, it matters. It matters not just in on-prem and it matters in the cloud as well. You gotta have a baseline of a policy and you gotta base everything around that. Um, and so w we've sort of had that mantra from day one and we were right. And we're, we're very happy to be where we are today. Yeah. >>And, you know, as a founder, a co-founder of the company, you know, most of the most successful companies I observed is usually misunderstood for a long time. That's true. Jesse's favorite quote on the cube. He's now the CEO of Amazon said we were misunderstood for a long time. I'm surprised it took people this long to figure out what we were doing. And, and that was good. A good thing. So, you know, just having that north star vision, staying true to the problem when there were probably opportunities that you are like, oh, we, you know, pressure or sure. Yeah. I mean, you stayed the course. What was the, what was the key thing? Grit focused. Yes. >>Looking to startup life. It's sorta like being in sales. We, we got told no, a thousand times before we got told yes. Or maybe a hundred times. So, uh, you gotta, you gotta be, um, you got to persevere. You gotta be really confident in what you're doing and, uh, just stay the course. And we felt pretty strongly about what we're building, that the technology was right. That the need of the market was right. And we just stuck to our guns. >>So focus on the future. What's the next five, five years look like, what's your focus? What's the strategic imperative for you guys. What's your, what's your, what do you mean working on? >>So there's several things that on the business side, we're transitioning to a subscription-based model and we're moving into SAS. One of our products is now a SAS based product. So that's very important to us. We also are now undergoing a shift. So we have a new version called Tufin Aurora Tufin Aurora is a transformation. It's our next generation product. Uh, we're rearchitected the entire, uh, underlying infrastructure to be based on microservices so we could be cloud ready. So that's a major focus in terms of engineering, uh, and in terms of customers, you know, we're, we're selling to larger and larger enterprises. And, uh, we think that this policy topic is critical, not just in the on-prem, but in the cloud. So in the next three years, as people move more and more to the cloud, we believe that what we do will be, become even more relevant as organization will straddle on-premise networks and the cloud. So >>Safe to say that you believe that policy based architecture is the key to automation. >>Absolutely. You can't automate what you don't know, and you can't people, like I mentioned this in my talk, people say, oh, I can do this. I can cook up an Ansible script and automate, all right, you'll push a change, but what is the logic? Why did you make that decision? Is it based on something you've got to have a core foundation? And that foundation is the policy >>Really great insight. Great to have you on the cube. You've got great success and working knowledge and you're in the right place. And you're skating to where the puck is and will be, as they say, congratulations on your success. Thank >>You very much. Thanks for having >>Me. Okay. Keep coming here. The Fortinet championship summit day, cybersecurity summit, 40 minutes golf tournament here in Napa valley. I'm John Firmicute. Thanks for watching.

>>from around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of AWS Public sector online brought to you by Amazon Web services. >>Hi, I'm stupid man. And this is the Cube's coverage of AWS Public Sectors Summit Online. We've done this show for many years. Of course, this 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. Very good partner of Aws is from Salesforce is Casey Coleman. She is the senior vice president of Global Government Solutions, together with sales work. Casey, thanks so much for joining us. >>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, you know, 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 how to break that down into actionable steps and really transformed what they're doing to serve their constituents and citizens better. >>Excellent. So it of course said that the public sector show a lot about the leverage of govcloud and the other services. All the compliance that goes into that ahead of this event you had Ah, new update at Salesforce in partnership with AWS. Talk to us about it's the government cloud plus s o. You know what's entailed there? Uh, and, uh, tell us how AWS and Salesforce work together to launch this solution. >>Yeah, thanks Do. We are so excited to announce the launch of govcloud Plus, which is sales force is a customer 3 60 crm platform that runs on Amazon Web services in the govcloud in their govcloud environment. And we've just received a provisional 80 0 provisional authority to operate from the FEDRAMP program office at the high security level. So we are announcing govcloud Plus is fed ramp. I'm ready to go generally available and ready for customers. >>Excellent. Maybe bring us inside. You know what's different about how government agencies leverage sales force most companies out there, You know, Salesforce is a critical piece off how they manage, you know, number one, they're salesforce 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 case management, its benefits delivery. It's communications and outreach. It's all the same kind of function that are necessary for commercial organizations to drive. And so that's what we do. We translate that into government ready terms so that they can serve child welfare, health information delivery record, former information, all kinds of services for the constituents of the public sector. And they might call them customers. They might call them citizens, residents constituent. But it's those they >>Yeah, well, what one of the things about Salesforce is, as you said, it's not just, you know, a sales tool. There's so much you've got a very broad and deep ecosystem. Their asses Well, as you know, people that know how to use it, they get underneath the covers. You know, when I think of not only a sales force. You know, the first company that I probably thought of and heard about that it was SAS. But if you talk about the AP economy, if you talk about how things integrate, Salesforce does a lot for developers. So I know one of the other pieces you had. There's everybody knows Dream Force. Maybe not as many people know, that trailhead DX show that that that Salesforce has had for developers. So bring us a little bit inside. What would 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 announced a lot of exciting new developments, including salesforce anywhere, which is really bringing an immersive voice, video and chat environment to collaborate in the developer environment and into 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. In a pace of change in the commercial world, all of the shop and bank and live on our mobile devices. And governments are being faced with the same expectations from the public to do any time anywhere personalized delivery as the code rapid development environments that force offers give public sector I t team the ability to quickly and respond to changing conditions like the code 19 pandemic and roll out applications that are not only fast to develop into boy but they also benefit from being in the govcloud environment. And so the compliance is party built in and that's another key challenges. Often it rises. The public sector is not almost building new applications and making sure they're secure with Salesforce all built in >>Yeah, sounds sounds a lot of sis similarity to what we hear in the private sector, of course, that the balance between what it is doing and how we enable developers, of course security, you mentioned super important anything specifically from the government sector that you'd say, Well, that might be different from what we see in the general enterprise world. >>You know, the but 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 had the best in class commercial tools to make sure they are providing world class security for for their their constituents in their mission. And that's one reason we're so excited to be partnering with AWS on Golf Club was because Amazon AWS has already deployed the Fed Ramp I version of their infrastructures of service. And so, by riding on top of that, we inherit all of those existing controls at our own Fed ramp controls. And our customers benefit from the best in class security from two of the most trusted name in public Cloud >>Great. You know, absolutely. Govcloud has been a real boon for the entire industry. When it talks about how government agencies they're leveraging cloud, you talked about sitting on top of ah govcloud the government cloud plus, you know, leverages some of the certifications and like, can you bring us inside a little bit? How long did this effort take? to get anything specific in the integrations were, you know, functionality that that you might be able to highlight about this joint effort. >>Yeah, we've been working on for some time now because it's it's essential to really think from the ground up. And this is not just re platform ing 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 technical tech, integration is the strategic partnership, and you're going to see a lot more now that's coming from both of us about the integration capabilities we're bringing together and a lot of the work we're going to be doing to continue to bring innovation to our joint customers. >>Excellent. You made reference to the pandemic. Uh, what are you hearing from your customers? How does this new offering impact them and support them both? Today is they're reacting to what happens as well as you know, going forward as we progress. >>Yes. Do you know the coveted 19 pandemic really exposed fault line in government programs that weren't scale to meet this demand. We saw website crashing when people were going to them and just overwhelming them with questions about the health situation. We saw benefits programs that only works where people could come in and sign up in a fly in person and obviously with government offices shut down, that wasn't an option. And a lot of government workers were sent home to tell a work without much notice, and their infrastructure just couldn't support it. And so just in general, there are a lot of breakdown along the way. But the good news is that a lot of public sector organizations and programs making that pivot quickly. For example, we worked with one state agency that experienced a 400% spikes in demand for applications for unemployment benefits. It makes sense people are out of work. They need unemployment benefit. But they just couldn't respond to that kind of surging demand. So we worked with them along with AWS and in less than a week stood up a virtual contact center with chatbots so that could meet the demand and provide those vital services to their residents at a time of real needs. So there's a lot to the 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, transformation. And I think it's really going to make a fundamental shift in how we re imagined government in the future. >>Yeah. Okay, so you're absolutely right that this pandemic has shown a real spotlight on where you know what works and what doesn't, Um, and I think about not only government, but you know, a lot of how finances were often times you have your plans in place, you have your budgets in place. You have, you know, funding cycles. So you know what? What our sales force and Amazon doing to help those you talk about. They have to ramp things up a weight where 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, you know, short term in and long term? Are you seeing some? Some change in how people think about their planning and how they could be ready for what change happens out there. >>Yeah, you know, one of the big findings from this whole experience, not just in the public sector but across every industry has been that digital transformation may in the past has been viewed as a nice to have. It is now really the only way to connect and serve both customers and employees, and so digital First, digital transformation is rapidly becoming an urgent imperative because this situation is is not going away overnight. And even when we get back to some state of normal, it's going to be different. It's a digital first and being able to move quickly to roll out 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. Okay, so I'll let you have the final word. What people want. What you want people to have is their take away of salesforce is participation in the AWS public sector online event. >>We are just so excited to be here with AWS to jointly come to our customers with govcloud plus the fed ramp. I authorized environment for the best in class theory, M 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 to. It's not only a technology integration, it's also a strategic partnership. And we think our customers 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. >>Thank you. >>Alright. Be sure to stay tuned. Lots more coverage of the Cube at AWS Public Sector Summit online. I'm Stew Minimum. And thank you for watching the Cube. >>Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum World 2019. Brought to you by VM Wear and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone. Live Cube Live coverage here in San Francisco, California in the Mosconi North lobby for V Emerald 2019 tapes our 10th year covering with some great guest, three days of wall to wall coverage that an amazing signorina Rob Salmon is the president CEO of Cohee City. Dave Solo, presidency of the Special Olympics Northern California. Thanks for coming on. Thanks to spend the time. Thanks for doing. Set the table. Why we hear what we're talking about. What's the purpose here? I know I wouldn't want to set it up more >> absolutely. I've been involved with Special Olympics for several years now. When former company Netapp Matt Thompson over Adobe called me and said, We got this high tech challenge. Dr. We've never sold it out. We want it. We want to get more companies involved when you help out, and the answer was absolutely and that led to David asking me to be on the board. So I've been involved with David, the team for an awful long time. KOHI City When I joined the company, some of the folks there knew of my involvement is that we'd like to start participating as well, which has led to what we're doing here. Of'em World >> David Talk about Special Olympics Quick mission for sure about the folks that might not given update for sure. >> John Yes, so Special Olympics enriches the lives of children, adults with intellectual disabilities. And so, in our footprint in Northern California, with serve over 23,000 athletes ages eight above and it's it's it's interesting. There's a lot of misconceptions people will say to me That's a great event that you do every four years And they referring the World Games, especially its world games, where athletes from all over the world get a common compete. But locally, through the state programs, hundreds of competitions happen a each and every year. And in Northern California we have, or 400 competitions per year in 14 different sports provides a wonderful ray of opportunities for athletes to demonstrate what what they can do when given the opportunity >> to do so. Talk about the community of aspect of it because I think What's interesting is what's on TV and what's in the mainstream press. It's more reach people that can be known for that. But it's deeper than as you point out. But >> talk about the >> community aspect. Got volunteers, people, individuals involved. Yeah, but the makeup of the network? No, it's an incredible network. >> I think we've really brought in an expanded our reach over the last 10 years. It used to be well known primarily for sports programming. So now we have inclusive education and health programs. We're able to bring together people with and without intellectual disabilities through those mediums. So if I'd resource is to schools an education and they run special Olympics programming during the school day. So educators wanna have us because we're improving school clamp campuses, reducing bowling, enhancing social emotional learning. And so the work that we're doing is so so critical with that community, then the area health. We have inclusive health. So now we got health and medical crypt, uh, professionals that are now providing health screenings for athletes. So some of the younger volunteers that we get that they're wanting to make a career in the medical field they're exposed to our population, right? And so they learn more about their specific health needs. So it's really about changing people's attitudes. And so this community of supporters volunteers, health professionals, education, Really. Our goal is to change people's attitudes fundamentally worldwide about people with intellectual disabilities and really kind of produce inclusive mindsets. We call it really promote understanding. >> If I may. I I really think what David and his team does and folks of sports Special Olympics around the world, they're dying. Changing attitudes are changing lives, lives of the athletes, lives of the people that work with the athletes, lives of the families. If you go to these events and there's something special, there are a lot of fun. And when you get involved and you see it, it definitely touches your heart and you realize we could be doing so much more. We could be doing so much more. >> I'm struck by you. Clearly, there's a passion thread here, and your background is really interesting to me because you're an accomplished student athlete, played football on and then you started a career in nonprofit right away, and now Rob, he was somebody would have hired right. It was like the perfect student athlete. You know, magna cum laude. I want this guy on my team. My hard driving says that How did you get into this? And described the background of that >> know for sure, sewn with nonprofit work. I kind of kind of started out. I was working for Boys and Girls Clubs of America, raising money to go to grad school, to be a history professor of all things. And so I got involved with the Boys and Girls Club with special Olympics. When the opportunity came, what was what was unique about it? It's really about how sports changes people's lives. Growing up, my father left me when I was 10 years old, and so was my coaches. They were the ones that really wasn't for them. I don't know that I would be here today, so they really took an active role in my life. So I've been very passion. I believe sports is a catalyst for social change, changed my life and provide an opportunity for me to be successful. And so that's what I want to help get back to our after. And it's also so. It's interesting is it's also proves that takes a village, you know, in these experiences changes lives. I think this is the big story, and it points to that. The sports is one element of other things. Health care. So you start getting connected in this is where the magic happens. This is the key. Yeah, some of the stories that wherever just phenomenal. I think society focuses on what our athletes can't do and dwells on the disability. We don't do that. So what? We're passionate about showcasing what they can do and having our volunteer, you know, certified train coaches work with our athletes to really help them get to the next level so they could be successful not only on the field, but off the field. So I mean, I got to get involved. Talk about the virtual. You're in Northern California. That's your territory, your area. But people, how they get involved, they wanna be share some no points of touch. Yeah, for sure. So a couple key points to touch would be number one. We have over 20,000 volunteers in our footprints, so we have a tremendous need for volunteers both globally and here locally, with Special Olympics, Northern California number two is from a donor standpoint. So everything that we do for athletes is completely free. And we're able to do that because the support of our community partners, our corporate partners like, Oh, he city, you know, individual supporters foundations were able to do that because of themselves. You know, either someone could go to the global website Special Olympics dot order come to W w dot s, O N C dot or for Northern California. We're always looking for volunteers, donor's community supporters, and we're also looking for board members, particularly from the tech sector. Senior executives in the tech sector. Justin, you stay channel lies for the people involved that also includes the people who volunteered. I'm sure people that want to make a difference whether you're thinking of senior approach, rather urine or your employees who want to give back so tell about the lives changing impact there because this is a corporate angle here that's not doesn't it's not for profit thing. It's a four good thing. >> Oh, this is for a good thing, and the thing I did to that is, and we touched briefly on Boys and Girls Clubs of America. These are all great organizations. I know Patton is key note. This morning, touched on giving back. This is an opportunity. Well, we're all blessed. We should give back. But the whole notion of getting more involved in touching lives I'll start with my two boys. They went to summer games and U C Davis three or four years ago. Now both of her good runners and they had some other kids on the high school team go with them. They were incredibly impressed. They had a lot of fun. A little banter with the athletes. Newsome, Bath, please. Out there there, Let's talk your heart. The gun goes off for the start, and they're already you get the arms up, curing away, and there's others incredibly talented athletes as well. It's so it just opened your eyes of what is possible. You're the one thing I touch on Is self esteem matters for every one of us, whether you have a disability or not, whether you're young or my age, it matters for someone to tell you that you are good. You are really worthy. Your hard work is paying off. You see these athletes when they finish the race or accomplished something that couldn't be more proud going to these events it will want. You will want to get involved. That's what typically happens. >> It sounds like you do coverages gonna be making its way to these events. Actually, wait, are fully got this part in the NHL MLB, NFL Masters golf tournaments. We have to get a pro circuit going on here way. Wonderful. Yeah. Hey, this is a really great cause. Any final thoughts again, back for people who want to get involved in the North California group. What? What can you offer people? No, I think we offer people a tangible way, especially when we think of the tech sector. And we think of the, you know, the employees and the millennials and hands on way for people to come out to our regional competitions and actually engage with our athletes and volunteer and be hands on and actually see where your money goes. You know, see, see that it's something tangible and you're helping provide that venue for athletes to be successful. One of things I didn't mention that we're really proud of. So we have a way of athletes are college students. We have athletes that are full time employees. Married couples, >> Um, >> and then we have a published poet. But last couple months we have an athlete that passed the bar exam who is now going to be a practicing attorney on. So that's really shows that you know, one of the things that you guys are hitting on here, Rob, I know you guys do a lot with your company. You guys even donating one of your tech sessions for a survey that John Troyer's team did around. Check burnout. People get it and even my kids to go to the high school In a lot of high schools like this now, where people get stressed out of the weirdest things, >> This is the kind >> of thing that getting involved in these community events like this really could help everybody. She allowed a little bit, Really. Take a load off, work with people, see the connection, see the impact. It's a burnout tactic option. It's also a way to relieve some stress. Feel >> good about it. >> The employees of Cohee City, when they came to me and said they want to get more evolved, they didn't do it because of me, they did it because they're excited about working with Special Olympics and they're beaming. Means some of the athletes 11 9 with a bunch of athletes going the baseball game tonight, Hamilton tomorrow night, their families as well. We couldn't be more excited, But I agree with you. You look at all the stresses in our lives, and I think this notion of what you do, who you do with how you give back is really, really important. I think that gives back piece, I think more of us allowing employees to do that, helping our children and school understand truly important the value. Um, is this absolutely >> You guys are making a great point because we've both been involved in youth sports all our lives, and it's kind of become twisted where you've got kids needs and parents needs and the parents trying to meet him in the middle, and that's not the way it should be. Your initiatives, I mean, it underscores what it's really all about. Self esteem, having fun, supporting your teammates and the broader community. >> But they stay well and compete and win two that they're in there. See some of those players. I mean, they're >> hard. I've seen some hard core competition, no doubt. But how well do they start? So >> eight years always started eight. And we have an athlete that's 81 that participates in watching. >> So okay, so appropriate. But the reason I miss it because, you know, having studied this allowed it. It's like 12 years old is the crossover point where people start to get crazy. And if you start before then, in other words Oh, this kid is nine. But he's not that good. Who could tell what a nine year old Michael Jordan got cut from his freshman basketball team? So it just goes to show you. So I think that that again, the values that you guys air promoting our worthy thanks >> me feel better about what we're doing. A cohesive it really does. Thank you for doing this. Being able to put two things I'm really passionate about together. Ah, this is pretty special for me. And I think my it around our founder and the rest of the company. And in David and team, they just do a fantastic job. I just wanna make sure we keep building on it. >> Congratulations. Great to get the word out. Congratulations. All your hard work. Awesome Cube coverage live in San Francisco. We back with more after this short break.

(dramatic music) >> Hi I'm Peter Burris, and welcome to another CUBE Conversation from our wonderful Palo Alto studios in beautiful Palo Alto, California. Another great conversation today, this one's especially interesting to me, we've got Tiffani Bova who's the Global Growth and Innovation Evangelist of Salesforce. Just written a book, great book by the way, Growth IQ, I guess it's coming out later in August of 2018. But Tiffani, I want to talk a little bit about something that seems near and dear to your heart, the notion of customer engagement and how that gets turned into business strategy. So, let's start there. What is, in your two and half years at Saleforce, what have you learned about customer engagement and how actionable is it, really? >> Well, you know, Peter, it's a great question 'cause I'd say this, you know, I thought I knew the answer to that question when I stated two and a half years ago and I've had the wonderful pleasure of spending time with customers of ours around the world and now I have a different perspective on what that is. You know, Clayton Christensen wrote that new book, Competing Against Luck and it was all about, sort of, the job that you have to do, right? You're going to go from point A to point B, are you going to catch a taxi or you going to catch an Uber. And what makes the difference if the job is the same, regardless of what you're doing. In my mind, right, it's the experience or the engagement that that particular driver or brand has with the customer that is riding in the back of the car, satisfying the need for the job that needed to be done. And when I started to shift my thinking around it's really this experience layer and this engagement layer of how easy is it, how friction, you could apply it to all kinds of industries now, you know. Whether it's meal delivery, or buying a book or buy, you know, software from someone like Salesforce or consulting or watching this show. It used to be you had to go and watch it live or you'd have to watch it on television, now we have very different ways and means in which you can be engaged. So that has been super exciting to me to see it live and in person as brands are really focusing on this importance of the way in which they engage with, connect with and inspire customers to do things with them as their brand of choice. >> So, as I said, Tiffani, I like the book and there is three or points that really want to draw out. I want to start with the first one though. >> Okay. >> Let's go back to this notion of engagement. >> Yes. >> You make the observation in the book and I also have some, a background, thinking about customer engagement, customer experience but you make a great point in the book that your brand is the promise that you're make to the marketplace. Customer experience is the customer side of the engagement. >> Right. >> It seems as though if there's a significant miss-match between those two, that's the first indication you've got a problem. If your brand promise and what is being experienced are not aligned, that says something, have I got that right? >> Absolutely and what's fascinating about that is many brands feel like they're totally aligned and then in mass, you know, research from all kinds of people whether it's McKenzie or Bain or Gartner or Forester or anybody else, you're seeing this disconnection where the brand thinks it's great and the customer's going, it's not that great. The gap between those two things, unfortunately, even with all the advancements with technology, I feel like it's getting wider, right? Because their still sort of, brands are still sort pushing out what they think is interesting and engaging and customers are going, it's kind of not so much. And so, this really a way and I really dug into it in Growth IQ of how brands can figure out, how do I get closer to that by starting with the customer and working their way back in. I mean, it's a long discussed topic of outside in versus inside out, it's nothing new there but now we have this advancements of technology that actually allow us to know what that outside in is telling us at scale, without having to throw people at the problem. >> Yeah, through data collection and other types of things. >> Absolutely. >> But it all starts with that impedance miss-match. >> Yes. >> And as you said, if businesses don't accept that they have a problem they're not going to change. But that is a measurable, actionable thing. >> Right. >> So, if nothing else, if nobody reads anything else out of the book, just that simple idea that it's not MPV, it's not, you know, other types of measures, your Net Promoter Score or other types of measures but it's, basically, is there that disconnect. So the second thing is is that you've observed how it can be made actionable. Now, you've come up with 10, a recipe, or let's call them 10 ingredients of different ways of thinking about what you might be able to do from a growth standpoint. Now, rather than going through all of them, let's just say that they're there but the thing that's interesting is you've come up with a general framework for how you can imagine putting those things together. You call it context combination sequence, what does that mean? >> It, I think it's, I, when I decided to embark on this journey of writing this book I said, you know, what do I feel has been missing, or what did I notice as a pattern as I was having conversations since I was traveling around and talking to customers. And it wasn't the decision that they make of how they were going to grow that was interesting, it was actually the fact that it was rarely in isolation. It was never a single answer to a very complex problem, it was a combination of a number of things. So, if you're going to launch a new product, like that's going to be your growth strategy, well, are you going to launch it yourself? Are you going to do it with partners? Are you going to launch it direct to consumer online or you going to go into retail? You have to then combine the fact that you want to launch a new product with other things to help you grow. Or if you you're going to say I want to reduce turn, it's not just, well, I'm going to lower a price because that's going to be a reason for people to stay, it's, well wait a second, are the platforms easy to use? Can people open a ticket easily? It's always in combination. >> Do I have visibility into whom I churn? >> And to whom I churn, right? But the first place people fail to start, let's to back to your original question of this gap between what customers expect and what businesses are doing is the context in the market has significantly shifted over the last decade. You could say, well obvious technology advancements but I think far more disruptive than technology is actually the customers themselves demanding more from brands. I want you to be better to the environment. I want you to be better socially. I want you to give me more value for what I'm spending. I want it as a service not as a product. I want it in a monthly bill not a one-time bill. I want to pay usage. Whatever they're saying, the customer has changed the context of the market. And I think that's one of the big triggers in this, so you start with context, what's going on, next is what are you going to combine those efforts with. And then the third thing and equally import is sequence. The order in which you do things actually has implications to the likelihood of success of whatever it is you're doing. If you're going to launch into a new market with a new product, and you don't have the infrastructure for distribution or selling or service in place before you launch the product, probably the wrong order. >> Right. >> Right and so if you need to set up the partnerships and the distribution and support and sales and marketing, support within region or translate things to language or do the things that you need to do to marketing materials or websites before you get there because if you launch, the first impression is gone if it's not a good experience for the customer. >> Yeah, you only have one time to make a first impression. >> You only have one time and it doesn't need to be perfect, but you cannot be just completely off the mark because getting them to come back is more expensive than it would of been had you just taken a pause, gotten it right and launched at the appropriate time. >> And that notion of context is also especially important because you identify something you call timing which is related to sequence in the fact that you have to be very honest about what you can and cannot effect. There are some things you may want to sequencing, you may want to fall the sequence. >> Right. >> But if the market isn't going to respond favorably, tell us a little bit about timing and how context shapes and resets prioritization as it changes as well. >> Yeah so, if you think of somebody like a Netflix, if Netflix had started with streaming and not with DVD mail, you know, in the United States at least, not everybody had bandwidth, it was too expensive, it was in very specific neighborhoods and as bandwidth started to make its way into the households and the cost started to decline, then they could say, well, wait a second, is this the best way to do it or could we potentially stream it and start doing OTT types of services? But they had to wait for the technology as well as the customer to catch up with what was possible. So, had they not done mail and started with streaming, maybe they couldn't of held on long enough. And so, mail was a great way to do, I'm going to capture these customers, I'm going to penetrate this base, get them to order more movies and do more things with me. Now I'm going to introduce streaming. Now I have this base of customers which now may want to transition to a new kind of delivery or experience that they want to have with us. And you might be surprised that they still have hundreds of thousands of mail customer including my mom, she still gets DVDs in the mail. And it's a huge profit engine for them, actually allows them to reinvest in the business to expand the streaming services other places in the world which may never get mail service, right. But in the beachhead of it and just let the customers churn out, never getting rid of it, not marketing it but not getting rid of it. So, had those timings been offered different, they may not have been as successful. So, it really has implications to think about what is the customer looking for, what is the temperature socially, what can technology help me deliver? Putting those things together and going, knowing what I know, I don't need it to be perfect but I'm willing to test it and fail and iterate and keep going as long as I keep that context of the market in mind and then the customer, you know, as sort of my true north of making sure that I'm aligning those things again, like we were talking about. >> So let me see if I can summarize that, so you got to get the context, which is-- >> Yes. >> What's really in the marketplace, customer, regulatory, competitor, all those other thing we think about. >> All those things. >> You think about the combination of recipes or combination of responses and then how you're going to sequence them out. Then that sequencing decision then goes back and says and what do I need to redefine about my understanding of context. >> That's right, that's right. >> So I got that right? >> You've got that right and I would tell you that-- >> So your avoiding boiling the ocean. >> Yeah, and that's what always, sort of, when I was trying to figure out what did I want to say in this book. I did not want it to be a boil of the ocean. I picked 10 paths to growth, none of which I think will be a surprise to anybody. It's a modernization on what Ansoff had done around the Ansoff four, there's that. There are things that now we have at our disposal which we didn't have at our disposal in 1957 when Ansoff came out. >> Yeah. >> I mean, so, you have to obviously introduce new things. So like, just using something like socially conscious enterprise was not something we were talking about 10 years ago. >> Right. >> But it's being used as a growth path now. And so, I wanted to try to give 10 very distinct growth paths so that people didn't feel overwhelmed by the hundreds of choices they could make. So if I could get it to something that was digestible and then say now, how do I put those things together. So I made natural associations between paths so that people would say, oh, if I'm going to do product and customer diversification, I might need to do partnerships. If I have a churn problem, I may need to optimize sales. Those two things fit together, right? If I'm going to, customer experience is at the foundation of everything. >> Right. >> Right, and so I tried to tell the story that people could say, oh, we're already on this path, should be stay on this path? Is it the right path? Should we be moving? Am I doing everything I could be doing to make this path be more effective? And that's what I was hoping to get out this is that I don't want people to think this is something completely flip the chessboard over and start from scratch. >> Right. >> I want you to pivot ever so slowly and make adjustments in real time so that you're not having to do, this is kind of an evolutionary versus revolutionary kind of transformation. >> Yeah, the strategies that seem to work today, or feature three things and kind of comes from Cluetrain Manifesto, agile, the empirical, they're based on data, they're optimistic, they identify what really can be done and their irritative, they take smaller steps when they do that. >> Yes. >> So, let me return back to kind of the notion of engagement, just for a second. >> Sure. >> One of the reasons why this book has so much prescriptive power is because there is a dramatic shift globally in market power. It used to be the sellers had the market power and therefore the information at your disposal that you used to make a decision largely came from the sellers and now, you're able to move into communities where buyers can come together and identify themselves in each other and use that source of information to help you make decisions. Very, very significant and profound shift and that's in many respects what's driving experience. Historically though, we've talked about sales and marketing alignment. (Tiffani laughing) About how we got to get the right message out, we got to enable sales in the right way. But customers spend most of their time with a brand in the form of a product or service which suggests that he whole notion of customer service and sustaining alignment between expectations and actuality in the customer service function becomes especially important. Have I got that right? >> You nailed it, I mean, I would say also you know, and I'm actually a practitioner before I was at Gartner, so I actually ran a division of Gateway computers, I ran sales and marketing for them. Before that I worked in web hosting company, we were the largest web hoster in the United States, we were actually four times the size of Rackspace. I was the beta client for ALOQUA, I was the beta client for Constant Contact. I was socially selling in 2000. Our shared property is web.com, if you watch golf. And so I was super early, so I'm actually a sales, I sort of say I'm a recovering seller, I bleed sales blood. (Peter laughing) And so when I was running both sales and marketing, I could argue with myself. But when I was just selling, you know, I understand this, you know, marketing giving us leads, sales not doing something with it. Then when I had customer service, you know, those three things together, I think today, is where companies really miss an opportunity. That just getting new customers in the door and it's so much more expensive to recruit new customers and to pay to get them versus just mining the gold you've already got. So, that is something that I'd say over the last two and a half years now that I'm here and I see it at scale that I will have conversations with CMOs and heads of sales and then the head of customer service is not in the room or it's just marketing and sales. So the same way marketing enables sales, they need to enable customer service. >> And, very importantly, the information that is being generated out of customer service-- >> Absolutely. >> Need to enable sales and marketing. >> Absolutely-- >> And in products. >> So I would tell you that in my opinion, the disconnection between what customers expect and businesses are doing actually is a manifestation of the unintentional consequence of the disconnection of teams because of the disconnection of metrics. Sales is very much, like how much did you sell? I mean, I'm over simplifying but how much did you sell. Marketing, how many leads did you, good or bad, how many leads? Customer service, how quickly did you get someone off the phone and how many calls did, tickets did you close today? Those three things pull those three groups in very different directions. So, something like a Net Promoter Score or churn or lifetime values, something can thread those three groups together in a metric so that people know that they're all in this together even though they play different roles. And so, I think the fact that people try to own customer experience worries me because I think the whole company has to be very focused on... >> It's a CEO job. >> But then it's a cultural shift, right? >> Absolutely. >> It's about culture, it's about this customer wants to have me help their problem but I have to get off the phone in two minutes because that's my quota and so do I get off the phone in two minutes or do I help my customer? >> Okay, let me make one quick comment and I'm going to ask you one last question. >> Yeah. >> And the quick comment I'll make is very prominent CEO of a very, very large computing company once said to me, I asked this person, 'cause I thought that they had won large because of marketing. And I said, so, tell me about he role of marketing within your company. And this person said to me, oh, marketing is what I put between engineering and sales so they don't kill each other. (Tiffani laughing) And I think that needs, obviously that orientation needs to change. But the last thing I wanted to talk about is one of the patterns you noted is disruption or disruptive-- >> Yes. >> I don't remember exactly what you called it but it boiled down, it could mean a lot of things, but you specifically focused on and you've already mentioned it, social good. >> Yep. >> As part of a strategy, give us a, you know 30 second, 44 second, why is social good becoming a viable strategy or viable pattern, one of the combinations that's working today? >> Well, I'd say, Salesforce was founded on the 1-1-1 model, which was very much about sort of this doing well by doing good, or doing good by doing good. But I would say this that even if you've watched television commercials over the last year, especially since Super Bowl last year, you'll see brands actually making statements about how they do well for the environment, how they're giving back, how they're hiring veterans, how they're doing things for... You know, Starbucks just announced they're going to- >> How they're willing to fly immigrant children home if they need to. >> Yeah, Starbucks is not doing a Starbucks in DC that will be signing so for hearing impaired. So you see people really making pivots and actually using that as I'm trying to connect with my constituency and my customer base in a new and different way. I love the fact that social consciousness is now getting into Unilever and getting into, you know the 1-1-1 model spread across 3,000 companies now. Or the Tom's model, one for one, buy a shoe, a shoe gets donated. You see it happening with a lot of start ups now where they're trying to start the company that way. Now, if you have a company that didn't start that way, there's not reason why you can't start to find a place where you can inject it going forward. But I'm super excited about that. >> Tiffani Bova, Global Growth Innovation Evangelist Salesforce, talking about the book Growth IQ. Again, great book. >> Thank you. >> Very prescriptive and I mean, I generally hate business books, lot of case studies. Thanks very much for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me, peter, it's been a pleasure. >> Absolutely, so once again, thanks for participating in our CUBE Conversation and until the next one, we'll see you soon. (dramatic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back. We are live here in Las Vegas. We're in the Sands right now of day two of Dell Technologies World 2018. I'm John Walls along with Stu Miniman, and it's a pleasure now to welcome Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, who is the President and GM of Server and Infrastructure Systems at Dell EMC. Ashley, good afternoon to you. >> Thank you, great pronunciation of my last name. >> Well, thank you very much, I've worked-- >> Not an easy thing to do. >> I worked on that, how about that? Stu and I were just talking briefly with you. What a cool exhibit floor, right? >> It really is. >> There's just a lot of-- What have you seen out there that's kind of caught your eye so far? >> Well, we brought in a lot of customers this time to show their outcomes. So I'm a car guy, so you know I went straight for the McLaren. >> How 'about that McLaren out there, right? Yeah. >> My son would love the F1 setup with the gaming, virtual reality. Top Golf is a great VxRail customer. We have GoalControl. Try to beat the AI and see if you can score a goal. I mean, there's some very cool demos back there. >> And then overall, just I'm curious about your thoughts about the show then because that's a part of it. >> That's a part of it. >> A lot of client relations you're doing here, business relations. >> Sure. We're only about half way through, but so far very, very positive energy I get. I don't know if you caught or already talked to Michael after the keynote, but certainly. >> Stu did today. Certainly, Michael was on fire at the keynote, and I really, really enjoyed the discussion with Dr. Chip Plater about, and Jeffrey Wright about, how technology connects to helping people. A lot of times engineers, stuck in a lab, looking at R&D, trying to figure out a problem, lose sight of what they're doing. Great opportunity for the team to see that and kind of expand and understand where their technology is going, what it's doing for the world, what the impact is that they're having. >> So, Ashley, your team's been real busy leading up to this, seeing some of the new products in the announcement. Before we get into this though, your role expanded a little bit since the last time we talked about, talked to Tom Burns yesterday as there was the group formerly known as VCE that turned into CPSG, It was split into some pieces, and HCI is now under your domain. >> That's right. So in addition to our server businesses, which are kind of the mainstream PowerEdge business, our Extreme Scale business, our OEM business. We had a reorganization to really kind of unlock the potential that we have in a great product set, a product set before my organization was already number one. It's a position of strength. What we're trying to do is accelerate from that. So if you think about the HCI marketplace, I think you have to be in the server business to win in the HCI business. I don't envy anyone trying to do this from a position of weakness or trying to adopt other people's technology. Our supply chain, our reach, our global services and support, and then the underlying ability to invest in the server technology and beyond and differentiate, innovate on top of that is what it's going to take to win, and maybe not tomorrow, but in the future as HCI takes off. We wanted to really accelerate that by shortening the decision-making loop, making it one mission for the team, and so that came in. In addition, maybe a quick call-out to the storage and data protection platform engineering team who also came into my group to, again, really put our best hardware and platform of systems engineers together from servers and data protection storage and kind of create a powerhouse of R&D. >> Yeah, Ashley, it's actually, it's not surprising to us, From our research side at Wikibon, we actually called it server SAN because it was really taking the functionality and what customers wanted as a business outcome from the SAN and was pulling it closer to the server. But at its core, it's really about software. One of the things that has struck me in the last few years, comparing this to EMC worlds in the past and now Dell, is what I used to see at Dell World, which was Dell is a platform that lots of things live on. So there's lots of storage partners that live on side of Dell. There's HCI partners. Of course, you've got a broad portfolio all from the Dell families, and then OEMs and other partners that fit there. 'Cause you're a team, it makes sense that HCI comes in there because you've got that platform at the server, >> Right. >> and it grows from there. >> If you circle back to just the Dell Legacy world perhaps, much more platform oriented, infrastructure at our heart, bringing that value with prop to our customers. And I've said it before, I think if you give any segment or capability time, I think a standard kind of open infrastructure hardware platform wins. It may not be a server, but it's going to look something like a server going forward. And the specialization and the value move into the IP stack and into the software. So you better be a company that can do the scale of a standards-based platform. You better have the IP, the specialized stacks, as we do in our VM-ware stacks, in our IP stacks or in data protection, storage, networking. You can see where Michael's kind of putting those two together. It's not a tomorrow thing but five, 10 years from now. We've seen it in the carrier space. We've seen it in storage. Everywhere you go, the commoditization curve takes us to standards, infrastructure, and IP in the software. >> You made an interesting point there, saying it might not necessarily be a server. Give us kind of, if you could step back for a second, the state of compute. >> Sure. >> There's compute in the cloud, there's compute at the edge, there's (chuckles) compute all over the place. A few years ago, it was like, ah, it's all going white box and undifferentiated. And in the public cloud, I say, there's probably more skews and compute in the public cloud than if I went to Dell and picked that up there. Whether that's a good or bad thing, you could probably have some insight on. But give us your view on kind of the state of compute in the industry today. >> Sure. So if I think back 10 years when we started our business with the hyper-scale, building those infrastructures as a service, multi-tenant public clouds, there really wasn't any other choice. You either did it in a legacy mode with your IT, maybe slightly modernizing, but you're still probably siloed. You probably had storage admins and networking admins, compute admins, or you went cloud. And it was such a different experience. Since then, what customers have said consistently is, why am I having to make that choice? I either go to this rent version, which is very expensive as I scale up, or I own it or I have to own it and it's different. So multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, private cloud, however you want to instantiate it. And something like hyper converged infrastructure just didn't exist. They didn't have a choice. Now, with a pushing of a few buttons, you can scale up your infrastructure, perhaps on prem or in a hosted environment. That is fairly seamless with that, and now you have that portability. >> Yeah, and I'm sorry, Ashley. I wasn't trying to poke at the cloud piece. Compute at edge use cases is a little bit different than traditional-- >> Yep, absolutely. >> Servers, what's happening with the Blade market. Definitely need to, I know we need to talk about the new PowerEdges. But there's the MX we're going to cover, too, but was just kind of, if there are form factors of servers. >> You bring up a good point. It's maybe emerging, so there's probably a little bit more hype than there is reality behind it. But there are going to be billions of sensors, trillions of sensors or things that create data outside of data center environments. That's where all the data's going to be produced, and that's where decisions are going to be made. Today, the theory is, it has to go back somewhere, although I don't think any of us are getting in an autonomous car if it has to talk back to a data center and decide what to do. >> Right. >> So there's already examples of what I would call edge compute. But what if your data center has to live at a base of a cell tower at the end of a 30 mile dirt road where someone only visits 45 days apart, and they're not an IT individual? How do you extend that infrastructure, that management domain, that security domain? How do you bring it all the way out there? How do you ruggedize it? Well, you're probably going to start with a company that's been doing fresh air cooling with 13, 14 billion server hours now, operating in fresh air environments. We understand how to bring that environment the way we've been working on that remote management, lights out management style, our security. I'll give you another emerging trend that's going to come out of that. Just at the time where we're going to extend our environments out of the safety of the data center, we're also going to go back to a stateful compute. With persistent memory, nonvolatile memory, storage class memories, and security paradigms are already shifting. We're getting ahead of that with our customers of what if it wasn't just the hard drive you had to protect but almost everything in that edge device. So the form factors will change, the connectivity will change, but what we know is, you'll likely gather as much data as you can. You'll throw some of it away 'cause it won't be useful. Right now, there's a sensor telling this building that these lights are on. Until they go off, it's not useful data. But in a car, it's very useful data. Some of that data will go back, it'll get trained because humans won't be able to take in all this data. You'll need a machine. You can't write the algorithm ahead of time. You have to learn something. Back goes that IP into the edge, and then decisions will be made at that stage. >> Before we head off, we've talked about some new products. You've alluded a little bit. So you've had a launch this week. Just run through that, if you would, real quick. >> Ashley: Sure, sure, we had a few things. >> It's nice to have a new baby to talk about. >> Sure, it's pretty exciting. And it really does stem from what we just talked about. So if I start on the PowerEdge side, if you have a strategy that is to help your customers with that digital transformation from cloud to data center and core all the way to edge, you can start to see why we're launching certain products and why they have certain technologies in them and innovations. So starting with the 940 XA, extreme acceleration, might have to rename it if you watched the keynote. Jeff called it extreme performance. He is the boss, so I think it's XP now. (Stu and John laughing) No, we'll keep it at extreme acceleration for now. That really is about large datasets training very quickly in database environments. So you want host to GPGPU to be a one-to-one ratio. You want large datasets to be local, so you need massive storage, 32 drives for instance. And you need the capability to, again, make sure it brings the tenets of security, manageability, the ecosystem with it. So, very excited about that one. I think there's some use cases we're just not even ready for. We've already have the technology today to put eight FPGAs in that system, direct connect. And there's very few workloads or even talent in the customer set to be able to enable that, but you got to get there first with the technology to allow that innovation to happen. And we want to stoke that. Then on the R840, this really was about, once you get the data in, you're going to have to make decisions. You need, still, that processing power. Maybe you don't need 20,000 cores in the box like a 940 XA. Maybe you need a little bit less, but you do need a massive storage localized in VME direct connect. That's more direct connect that any server, I think, period in the industry. And it's really about streaming those analytics, making those realtime choices. So it really fits into the strategy that we're undertaking. >> All right, Ashley, last thing I wanted to cover. It's a bit of preview that you showed at the show. The PowerEdge MX. >> Yep. >> Modular infrastructure, no midplane, should be able to upgrade it a lot more. So are we beyond where Blade Servers have gone? Do you consider this to fit into, some call it composable infrastructure. How would you position this kind of-- >> Well, I don't have some positioning yet. It's just a sneak peek. But let me tell you how we thing about it. Is it a Blade Server or not? I'm not sure the question is something we've considered yet. It's a form factor that we think for the future is really necessary, which is, we want to get to a stage, and we're putting our research into a stage of a journey where we want to get to the point where you can utilize the resources that you bring into your environment, whether they be your environment or someone else's. Today, so much is stranded connected to a CPU, and it's just the architecture that we have today. Whether it's memory, source class memory, persistent memory, GPGPUs, heterogeneous compute FPGAs, ASICs, memory semantics, IO semantics, have to leave the box. Then we can get you things like pooled up resources that can be utilized unbound, put together, then composed, if you want to use your word, or really just aligned around a workload then retired and put back in. APIs and software, we're starting to build that out. It's starting to emerge from certain management orchestration layers we have today. But we're going to need that fabric. And so, as you know, we're showing actually here today a Gen-Z demo where we're starting to build that fabric that has the latency, almost a memory-like latencies from load to store and usage, all the way out to it has the memory semantics that go all the way through from CPU all the way out to memory so that, all sudden, the node no longer traps and stands the resources. How do you do that? You better have an architecture that treats everything in the box, not just the compute part, as a first class citizen for power, for thermals, for management. Second thing, if you have a midplane, you have a point of failure, but you also are not upgradeable to these fabrics that are coming and these capabilities that are on the horizon, some of which are not even in Silicon or in a lab just yet. So when you build infrastructure, let me call it infrastructure for a second, people want it as an investment. That's the part we've talked about. There's a lot more to come, so the team's excited to get it out there. I tried to hold them back a little bit, but we cheated a little bit a showed it. >> A little demo goes a long way. Ashley, thanks for being with us. Thanks for telling your story, we appreciate the time. Look forward to seeing you down the road. >> Appreciate it, thanks, guys. >> You bet. Back with more. We are live here in Las Vegas at Dell Technologies World 2018. (electronic musical flourish)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, (electronic music) it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM. >> We're back at IBM Think 2018. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and this is day two of our wall-to-wall coverage of IBM Think. We've been doing IBM shows for years. This is the big, consolidated show, 30 to 40 thousand people, too many people to count. Cameron Clayton is here. He is a GM of Watson Content and IoT Platform at IBM. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks very much for having me. >> So quite a show, right? Standing room only! >> A large, large show. >> Standing room only and also great announcements. >> So tell us about your announcements. >> Yeah, so we got to couple of things we're really, really excited about. The team's been working really hard on for the last few months. One is a way to train Watson to make Watson even smarter than it already is out of the box. And so, we've been building data kits by vertical industry. So for financial services, for travel and transportation, for the hospitality industry, for health care and for government, on how do you give Watson a high machine IQ right out of the gate as opposed to having to train it in your area of industry. And so, once again, we're really focused on making Watson the AI system for Enterprise, and this is another step on that journey to make Watson really, really smart. >> It's really prioritizing it in a way that's much easier to consume. >> Much easier to consume, and if you think about it, there's a lot of jargon in each industry, right? To be an expert in industry, you got to know a lot of jargon, understand the context of that. An AI system doesn't know that unless it's taught that. And so we are teaching Watson that. And then how to apply it successfully in each of those industries. So it's a pretty material leap forward in how we're training Watson. >> So it hits the content component >> Cameron: Hits the content. >> And then industries you're knocking down? Where are you starting? >> Yeah, so we're starting with financial services. We're launching in travel and transportation and in hospitality. So we're basically, this is a pretty fun one, I love food. But basically Watson went out and scanned the entire internet and collected all the recipes that it could find on the internet and trained itself on food. And so, you can ask it now questions about food, what restaurants, about really specific things. If you're a vegan you can find out what's available near you. If you're gluten intolerant, you can find out things on the menu like that. But then there's other things, like in the travel and transportation industry. Virtual agents for travel agents, they can ask questions of Watson, and it can ask very specific, very deep things, very much like a human would. And so you can say a simple thing like, "Where should I stay in New York?" And a human would respond, "Well, are you a member of any hotel rewards program?" Normal AI chatbot wouldn't. It would just say, "These are the lists of the 4,000 hotels in New York." Watson will actually ask human-like questions to give you the best answer possible. But all that requires training, and that's what were built in with these Watson content data kits, and we're really excited about 'em. >> So I'll come back to that. But so if I take that example of Watson Chef, there's this discussion on AI for the enterprise versus AI for consumers. >> Right. Are you crossing over? That was kind of a consumer-y application. >> Cameron: Yeah. >> Is that just an example? >> It's just an example. No, it's very much about AI for the enterprise, right? And so the four priority industries that we're focused on, first is financial services, sort of the sweet spot for IBM. The second is supporting our government clients to make sure that Watson is trained in the language and nuisances the of government. The third is Watson health, so the health care industry, both the regulation and the language itself. So everything from pharmacology, et cetera. And then the fourth is travel and transportation. So it's very much about making Watson the smartest AI system for enterprise. That's absolutely its focus. >> What's the IoT angle in your title? >> Yeah, so-- >> What's going on there? >> I run the IoT platform for IBM, and so The Weather Company, which is how I joined IBM, which I also run, really is one of the largest IoT platforms in the world, which was actually a big part of the acquisition case for acquiring The Weather Company. We're now bringing the ability to ingest 35 to 40 billion data requests every day with The Weather Company platform to the IoT platform. We've combined those things together. So we can ingest data and content at a scale unlike pretty much anyone else in the world, sort of second only to Google in terms of the scale of data and content we can ingest. And we use that data to help train Watson on one hand, and on the other hand, to support our clients in multiple industries around the world. >> Yeah, I remember when IBM did that acquisition, Bob Picciano told me, "Well, you got to understand. "This is an IoT play as much as it is a data science play." So how has that evolved, come together, with IBM's core? >> Yeah, so I think in a couple of ways. One is, it's taken the way the company was mostly a domestic US business. IBM, in the last couple of years, has globalized that business in a very material way. A great example is in aviation, where we have the top 30 US operators. Now we have hundreds of operators all around the world helping them make decisions every day. At its core, this IoT platform that started with the way the company is now much larger than that, has grown into a decision platform, right? We make recommendations for people to make decisions. Mostly that's with Watson and AI, but sometimes it's just with machine learning and more traditional methods. >> So you got some other stuff going on. >> We were talking off camera >> We do. >> about this real-time closed captioning. I was showing you our video clipper tool. You said, "Hey-- >> Yeah! >> "We have something very similar." We're going to maybe talk and see if we can't-- >> Yeah, that'll be great. >> collaborate. I can't wait to try that out. So talk more about what you're doing with real-time closed captioning. It's a mandate, >> That's right. >> for broadcasters and other folks like YouTube. >> That's right. . How are you helping them? >> Yeah, so, as you mention, closed captioning is a regulated space for broadcasters, both local and national. It's a cost center for them, right? They have to do it, and it takes time, people, effort, and energy. We're automating that and we're doing it in a real-time way, so in true real time. So as we're speaking, Watson is listening. It's recording and it's annotating everything that goes on in the video clip. And then it's also breaking it up into essentially a highlight reel, right? And so you can ask questions. Hey, show me the highlights of the US Open or the Masters Golf Tournament. And it'll automatically select the very best clips that came from that tournament based on sentiment analysis, tone of voice, trending key words that were showing in social media, and surface those clips up, typically to a human editor who will then process them. It basically automates a system that today requires human intervention to deliver and makes it completely seamless by being in real-time. >> So Watson will analyze social data, Twitter data, take the fire hose and say, "OK, based on the Olympics," or whatever it was, "this is what was hot." >> Cameron: That's right. >> Curling was off the charts hot. >> (laughs) Curling is always hot in Olympics. >> Hashtag curling. >> Right. >> OK, cool. >> That's right. >> And this is a product that's out on the market today? >> It's a product that's launching here at Think and is being tested by multiple clients right now and is a really great accuracy, quality scores, 95% plus accuracy. But most importantly, it's no human intervention. So no person has to do anything, and it meets all of the regulatory requirements. For digital content creators, which are the fastest growing part of the video ecosystem, people like yourself and others, are also using it to automatically meta tag all their clips. So not only does it do sentiment analysis of the clips and the content itself using the closed captioning, but it's also going out and measuring social media key words and hashtags that are trending and looking for those key words in the closed captioning and clipping that out and surfacing it to make it easier. >> And I consume that as a monthly service kind of thing? >> Exactly, exactly, yep. >> How 'about GDPR? That's hot topic these days. Can you help me with my GDPR problem? 'Cause the clocks ticking on my defines, kicking in. >> Clocks ticking on GDPR. If you haven't started on GDPR yet, you're in some trouble. >> You're way late. >> You're way late, but you better call IBM pretty quickly, and we'll parachute in and try and help. >> How can you help? >> So I think we can help in multiple ways. So one is, obviously, our services group with GBS. We're doing thousands of engagements trying to help people with GDPR. I think, secondly, is we've got a big effort with our consumer weather business to be ready for GDPR. We have 250 million users of our weather app around the world, and they'll have to be compliant here pretty quickly. And so, we've got that all set up, ready to go. And then, these data kits also learn the regulations, right? So you can ask questions of Watson about GDPR and your specific use cases as a customer, and we'll show you how to apply the regulations of GDPR to your business. >> So earlier on, you talked about these data kits. I mean, in my head I was thinking SDK. >> Cameron: Right. So how does that all work? >> Yeah, so you can, you basically on a SAS basis, you essentially rent these data kits, everything from a general knowledge kit to a industry specific kit for financial services, to a sub-industry like wealth management within financial services. And you basically can rent each of those pieces. Within the government category, we have a GDPR capability, along with other regulatory capabilities within the data kits. >> OK, so how does that work? I sort of train my internal system? >> It's super easy. You, basically, go to Bluemix, and you can just use it as a subscription out of Bluemix is the fastest, easiest way to do it. Secondly, you can talk to any of your IBM associates about how you use data kits with Watson. It's always used in conjunction with Watson services themselves, is how you basically deploy our products. >> Let's say I got data all over the place in my organization, it's siloed out, and I'm freaking out because I've got personal data on an individual here and one over her and one over here. What do I do? I point my corpus of data at Watson, and it helps me extract from itities, dedupe, surface? >> The first step in all of our engagements is to listen and understand exactly where all the data is, and everyone's on a journey, right? From on prem to hybrid to some public cloud and everything in between. >> Dave: And they don't know where it all is. >> And they don't know where it all is. And so, step one is for us to go in and listen. We have a rule in our group, two ears and one mouth, use them proportionally. And so we go in and we try to listen, find out, map out sort of a architecture of where our client's data is. And then understand what problem they're really trying to solve because, often times, there's lots of good ideas, but there's only a couple of problems that really matter to that client to solve. Right now, GDPR is certainly one of those problems. But whether it's revenue or efficiency, we can help, but we really need to understand what the problem set is first. And so we have an engineering team that goes in and does sort of architectural work and listens upfront. And then we go into a sort of solutioning mode to solve problems. >> One of the question's we often ask on theCUBE is, how far can we take machine intelligence? How far should we take machine intelligence? What are the things that machines can do that humans can't? How is that changing? How will they complement each other? How will they compete? You must think about that a lot in your role. You're augmenting, sometimes replacing a lot of human tasks. But what are your thoughts on those big picture questions? >> Yes, I think we've, as a company, work really, really hard to make sure that we are always augmenting people wherever possible. We fundamentally believe that every job is going to be changed by AI, but we believe that humans are really good at creativity, at curiosity, and at risk management. We don't really think about us being good at risk management, but from when we're born, just learning to walk is a risk management exercise, right? Look at any toddler wobbling, learning to walk, you sort of realize it's a risk management exercise. AI systems have to learn all these things. And so surfacing and recommending decisions is what we believe Watson and AI is best equipped to do, and then have a person actually make the final call. >> Great. All right, Cameron, hey, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. >> You're welcome. >> It was really a pleasure meeting you. >> Absolutely, likewise. >> And look forward to the follow up. >> Absolutely, we'll follow up. >> Excited to see that. All right, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching the show theCUBE live from IBM Think 2018. We'll be right back. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live, from San Francisco , it's The Cube. Covering Samsung Developer Conference 2017. Brought to you by Samsung. >> Okay we're back here live in San Francisco at Moscone West for exclusive coverage of Samsung Developer Conference on John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media and the host of the cube here. Our next guest is Mary Min, Vice President of Global Business Development at SE Works Inc. Former entrepreneur, gamer, still entrepreneurial in her new world, but has seen the evolution of gaming. Here to talk about Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and kind of the trajectory of life in the digital era. Welcome to The Cube. >> Okay thank you. >> So we were just talking before we came on about the evolution of your career. You had a start-up, you sold it. It was a game. You been gaming since the late 90s and looking forward. What is the evolution of gaming and how it relates to Augmented Reality? Because there's a debate that goes on in the industry. Oh, VR is the next big thing, but yet it failed. Tim Cook recently came out and said hey, you know, don't get your hopes up. There's still more head room to do. Not necessarily a bad thing. Because now Augmented Reality is winning. You're seeing it in industrial IOT. You're seeing Augmented Reality. So what's your thoughts about how people should think about the evolution of this new wave of innovation. >> I think that with any new technology that's really life-changing for society as a whole, nothing ever gets done on the first iteration or the first phase. Things will never really take off on the first round especially when you're going mass consumer. Because people need time for learned behavior. People are creatures of habit. They like to stick what's familiar. And in order for them to move from one leap to the next, you need baby steps. And those baby steps unfortunately will include pioneers in whatever field, whether it be AR, or VR, that need to blaze the trail for their successors to come and start building on top of that as well. I read something really interesting this morning coming here where if you have someone who's trying to dig a well, and you need to dig 10 feet, the first person fails because they only dug the first foot. Second person, third person, subsequently until the ninth person, that well is not dug. But that 10th person is who successfully has the water filling the well. That 10th person could not have dug that final last foot if the first nine didn't go before him. And I consider that's really the phase that VR and AR honor as well. We needed that first iteration of VR in order to have the new generation of engineers, entrepreneurs, product people, mindset people, to start thinking about how to shape the future of this ecosystem. And we needed that to have it's course in order for AR to build on top of those learnings. And hopefully as we subsequently start to build on those as well, we don't view this as failures necessarily, but as necessary advancements in order to get to the ultimate goal of integrating more technology into our lives to make it a better life. >> And the relationship between the hardware platforms, whether it's console, PC, handset, or headset, and software, is interesting. And I want to talk about that with you. But first I want to tell you a story. Tell about your entrepreneur story. You were at UC-Berkeley Cal here, University of California - Berkeley, my daughter is a junior there, but... Great school, doing a lot of cutting-edge stuff there at Berkeley, and certainly not a lack of protests either these days. But, tell us the story. You dropped out and started a company. Tell the story. >> So I was attending Berkeley, and I'm very grateful that I was able to go to Cal. Particularly because I grew up in southern California where around the time that I grew up, there really wasn't a lot of start-ups or entrepreneurial minded people. And I came up here and became really immersed in tech and that was my first foray into it. And during college, I was working at a gaming company to help support myself through school. And just really fell in love with it. And decided that was truly what I wanted to do. My parents supported my decision, and so with their help and approval, I started building games. And I've been building games since, again, the mid-to-late 90s until now. Ran a couple of companies. Founded a few of them. And the latest one that I founded was a few years ago called Second-Wave Games. We had sold it to a larger company called World Golf Tour. And here I am now building tools for game developers actually. >> And what an evolution. You go back, I mean, the Nokia phones. You know, then the iPhone hit the scene. The smart phones. So everything in-between has been a balance of being creative with software and art, if you will gaming as art. What has changed? I mean obviously things fail, because it's a content business. Content is games. So there's always that symbiotic relationship between hardware and software. Who pushes who? Is it the yin and the yang? Or is it the good and the bad? What's going on between the relationship these days? Because we certainly see it on the enterprise side. Software at the end is driving infrastructure. What's the relationship from the content, from the artistry standpoint, and the handset. >> From our point, content makers are not very interested in any platform or hardware that doesn't have the distribution. But the hardware manufacturers need the content in order to push the distribution of hardware. So it becomes a chicken and the egg problem. And it really depends on the approach that people will take. The content distributors do not own the platform. They don't own the distribution of the actual devices that will run things. So it really kind of falls on the hardware manufacturers to decide what path they will go down. We will see more aggressive things like Microsoft when they first launched the Xbox for example. They took a heavy loss on every unit that they sold. But they were focused primarily on distribution. And then, they hit on this magic, very very like, really really run-away hit called Halo. You like Halo, you have to play on Xbox. It's not available on the other consoles. >> And Call of Duty right after it. >> Call of Duty right after it. >> The list is endless. >> So that becomes a really excellent example of how content drives adaptation of hardware. Because if you are huge fans of this title, you have to go to this hardware. And there is no other argument about it. >> It's interesting, the evolution of the internet, early adopters you saw as the adult industry. It was a leading indicator of the trends in online advertising. That's a big joke in the industry. Now, you are seeing the leading indicators in terms of cutting-edge pioneer blade trailers is gaming. Virtual communities, virtual currencies, the gaming culture you can almost use as a precursor to what you're seeing on the crypto side with blockchain. You can see on the Augmented Reality. That's a gamification of life where now the content is the real world. So that's super exciting for someone who has been in the gaming era. And software developers got to be sitting there licking their chops saying, hey I want to get in on this. >> So at my current company, SEWORKS, when we started developing our solution, we actually tested it first and foremost with gaming. With gaming apps above everything else. And people were a little puzzled thinking why would you test gaming above finance or healthcare or IOT? And our answer is because gaming is the most complex thing anyone can possibly make. It contains pretty much every single piece of technology that you could ever know. There are communications layers, there have the most sophisticated graphics layers, they have intense AI layers, they have intense algorithms, anything calculated, and it is in itself an inherit small economical ecosystem as well. So it is a very complex mini-world that you are building inside of the constraints of one application which then has to be very sophisticated in technology in order to run on our current set of hardware and devices. So it's the most challenging thing that we could build for and that's why we chose it. And I see the same thing happening. Gaming is life and life is games. Outside of solving your very basic human needs of shelter, food, and sleep, clothing. What's the immediate next thing that you want to do? People want to be entertained in some format or another. And games are really just almost like a primal urge in an instant. >> Yeah, and you said you're seeing the intersection of E-commerce, entertainment, and web services or cloud. Which you can bundle in IOT, all intersecting. And that's really what the real world is. Analog digital coming together is the consumerization of physical and digital. Which Samsung is putting out there. And this is the perfect beginning wave coming. Do you agree? >> I think so. As I was sitting through the keynote today, and I'm just reflecting on the future where I can watch TV and there's this beautiful scene of a local in northern California. Then I say, I want to go! And I jump in my car and the destination is magically loaded on my GPS in my very smart car, and it just takes me there. I don't have think about it. And on the way, they've already made reservations, right? It seems like a very seamless integration of everything if it's ideally done, and part of me, I think the security paranoia in me, is also a little afraid that too much information is going to be not necessarily a good thing in a lot of senses, because what we see, and what I've seen in almost 20 years of tech, is every time we rush to new technology, new platforms, new distribution, methodologies, people rush in and make the same mistakes over and over again. So I am a little afraid that with this era, it's going to be exactly the same. Where we see explosion of growth, we see explosion of content, people coming in with a gold rush, and then a few years later when thing are established, we're going to start to see the security leaks, the data leaks, the breaches. >> It's kind of like you don't know that smoking is bad for you until they realized people die of lung cancer. It's like data is the same thing. You don't know how much privacy you have given up. I mean look at Equifax. There's going to be more of those. So I think permission-less, permission-based data security, huge issue governing. That's big. >> It is, particularly because your average consumer is not very privacy sensitive. If I want to use something, I want to use something and asking me for permissions is just a hurdle that if I'm motivated enough to actually use a service, or use an app, I'm just going to keep brushing aside without really thinking about it. And alarmingly, the number of apps that we look at, the number of permissions that they ask, is kind of scary. >> Mary, great to have you on the cube. Great conversation. Great thought leadership. I'll give you the final word. What are you guys doing at SEWORKS? What are you up to after the event? What are some of the things you're working on? Get the plug in for your company. >> Yeah, so, what SEWORKS does is, we do tools for developers to help you alleviate your security needs when you're developing for mobile apps or for IOT or for connected, anything actually. If you're building on Android or iOS, we have a solution for you. We're essentially like your armory so we outfit you with an incredible shield that protects your application when it ships to the public. Against hacking and reverse engineering. >> So security as a service? >> We're security as a service. Just think of us as your on-call hackers, how's that? >> Great, your white hat shield for the apps, for mobile, mobile development is hot obviously. New user experiences and expectations are here. There's a big wave coming in, we're seeing on machine learning. You're seeing with AI. And certainly Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. All powered by unlimited compute in the cloud. Mary Min, SEWORKS, The Cube, more live coverage here in San Francisco after the short break.