(gentle music) >> Hello everyone. Welcome to this CUBE conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We got a great remote guest coming in. Joseph Nelson, co-founder and CEO of RoboFlow hot startup in AI, computer vision. Really interesting topic in this wave of AI next gen hitting. Joseph, thanks for coming on this CUBE conversation. >> Thanks for having me. >> Yeah, I love the startup tsunami that's happening here in this wave. RoboFlow, you're in the middle of it. Exciting opportunities, you guys are in the cutting edge. I think computer vision's been talked about more as just as much as the large language models and these foundational models are merging. You're in the middle of it. What's it like right now as a startup and growing in this new wave hitting? >> It's kind of funny, it's, you know, I kind of describe it like sometimes you're in a garden of gnomes. It's like we feel like we've got this giant headstart with hundreds of thousands of people building with computer vision, training their own models, but that's a fraction of what it's going to be in six months, 12 months, 24 months. So, as you described it, a wave is a good way to think about it. And the wave is still building before it gets to its full size. So it's a ton of fun. >> Yeah, I think it's one of the most exciting areas in computer science. I wish I was in my twenties again, because I would be all over this. It's the intersection, there's so many disciplines, right? It's not just tech computer science, it's computer science, it's systems, it's software, it's data. There's so much aperture of things going on around your world. So, I mean, you got to be batting all the students away kind of trying to get hired in there, probably. I can only imagine you're hiring regiment. I'll ask that later, but first talk about what the company is that you're doing. How it's positioned, what's the market you're going after, and what's the origination story? How did you guys get here? How did you just say, hey, want to do this? What was the origination story? What do you do and how did you start the company? >> Yeah, yeah. I'll give you the what we do today and then I'll shift into the origin. RoboFlow builds tools for making the world programmable. Like anything that you see should be read write access if you think about it with a programmer's mind or legible. And computer vision is a technology that enables software to be added to these real world objects that we see. And so any sort of interface, any sort of object, any sort of scene, we can interact with it, we can make it more efficient, we can make it more entertaining by adding the ability for the tools that we use and the software that we write to understand those objects. And at RoboFlow, we've empowered a little over a hundred thousand developers, including those in half the Fortune 100 so far in that mission. Whether that's Walmart understanding the retail in their stores, Cardinal Health understanding the ways that they're helping their patients, or even electric vehicle manufacturers ensuring that they're making the right stuff at the right time. As you mentioned, it's early. Like I think maybe computer vision has touched one, maybe 2% of the whole economy and it'll be like everything in a very short period of time. And so we're focused on enabling that transformation. I think it's it, as far as I think about it, I've been fortunate to start companies before, start, sell these sorts of things. This is the last company I ever wanted to start and I think it will be, should we do it right, the world's largest in riding the wave of bringing together the disparate pieces of that technology. >> What was the motivating point of the formation? Was it, you know, you guys were hanging around? Was there some catalyst? What was the moment where it all kind of came together for you? >> You know what's funny is my co-founder, Brad and I, we were making computer vision apps for making board games more fun to play. So in 2017, Apple released AR kit, augmented reality kit for building augmented reality applications. And Brad and I are both sort of like hacker persona types. We feel like we don't really understand the technology until we build something with it and so we decided that we should make an app that if you point your phone at a Sudoku puzzle, it understands the state of the board and then it kind of magically fills in that experience with all the digits in real time, which totally ruins the game of Sudoku to be clear. But it also just creates this like aha moment of like, oh wow, like the ability for our pocket devices to understand and see the world as good or better than we can is possible. And so, you know, we actually did that as I mentioned in 2017, and the app went viral. It was, you know, top of some subreddits, top of Injure, Reddit, the hacker community as well as Product Hunt really liked it. So it actually won Product Hunt AR app of the year, which was the same year that the Tesla model three won the product of the year. So we joked that we share an award with Elon our shared (indistinct) But frankly, so that was 2017. RoboFlow wasn't incorporated as a business until 2019. And so, you know, when we made Magic Sudoku, I was running a different company at the time, Brad was running a different company at the time, and we kind of just put it out there and were excited by how many people liked it. And we assumed that other curious developers would see this inevitable future of, oh wow, you know. This is much more than just a pedestrian point your phone at a board game. This is everything can be seen and understood and rewritten in a different way. Things like, you know, maybe your fridge. Knowing what ingredients you have and suggesting recipes or auto ordering for you, or we were talking about some retail use cases of automated checkout. Like anything can be seen and observed and we presume that that would kick off a Cambrian explosion of applications. It didn't. So you fast forward to 2019, we said, well we might as well be the guys to start to tackle this sort of problem. And because of our success with board games before, we returned to making more board game solving applications. So we made one that solves Boggle, you know, the four by four word game, we made one that solves chess, you point your phone at a chess board and it understands the state of the board and then can make move recommendations. And each additional board game that we added, we realized that the tooling was really immature. The process of collecting images, knowing which images are actually going to be useful for improving model performance, training those models, deploying those models. And if we really wanted to make the world programmable, developers waiting for us to make an app for their thing of interest is a lot less efficient, less impactful than taking our tool chain and releasing that externally. And so, that's what RoboFlow became. RoboFlow became the internal tools that we used to make these game changing applications readily available. And as you know, when you give developers new tools, they create new billion dollar industries, let alone all sorts of fun hobbyist projects along the way. >> I love that story. Curious, inventive, little radical. Let's break the rules, see how we can push the envelope on the board games. That's how companies get started. It's a great story. I got to ask you, okay, what happens next? Now, okay, you realize this new tooling, but this is like how companies get built. Like they solve their own problem that they had 'cause they realized there's one, but then there has to be a market for it. So you actually guys knew that this was coming around the corner. So okay, you got your hacker mentality, you did that thing, you got the award and now you're like, okay, wow. Were you guys conscious of the wave coming? Was it one of those things where you said, look, if we do this, we solve our own problem, this will be big for everybody. Did you have that moment? Was that in 2019 or was that more of like, it kind of was obvious to you guys? >> Absolutely. I mean Brad puts this pretty effectively where he describes how we lived through the initial internet revolution, but we were kind of too young to really recognize and comprehend what was happening at the time. And then mobile happened and we were working on different companies that were not in the mobile space. And computer vision feels like the wave that we've caught. Like, this is a technology and capability that rewrites how we interact with the world, how everyone will interact with the world. And so we feel we've been kind of lucky this time, right place, right time of every enterprise will have the ability to improve their operations with computer vision. And so we've been very cognizant of the fact that computer vision is one of those groundbreaking technologies that every company will have as a part of their products and services and offerings, and we can provide the tooling to accelerate that future. >> Yeah, and the developer angle, by the way, I love that because I think, you know, as we've been saying in theCUBE all the time, developer's the new defacto standard bodies because what they adopt is pure, you know, meritocracy. And they pick the best. If it's sell service and it's good and it's got open source community around it, its all in. And they'll vote. They'll vote with their code and that is clear. Now I got to ask you, as you look at the market, we were just having this conversation on theCUBE in Barcelona at recent Mobile World Congress, now called MWC, around 5G versus wifi. And the debate was specifically computer vision, like facial recognition. We were talking about how the Cleveland Browns were using facial recognition for people coming into the stadium they were using it for ships in international ports. So the question was 5G versus wifi. My question is what infrastructure or what are the areas that need to be in place to make computer vision work? If you have developers building apps, apps got to run on stuff. So how do you sort that out in your mind? What's your reaction to that? >> A lot of the times when we see applications that need to run in real time and on video, they'll actually run at the edge without internet. And so a lot of our users will actually take their models and run it in a fully offline environment. Now to act on that information, you'll often need to have internet signal at some point 'cause you'll need to know how many people were in the stadium or what shipping crates are in my port at this point in time. You'll need to relay that information somewhere else, which will require connectivity. But actually using the model and creating the insights at the edge does not require internet. I mean we have users that deploy models on underwater submarines just as much as in outer space actually. And those are not very friendly environments to internet, let alone 5g. And so what you do is you use an edge device, like an Nvidia Jetson is common, mobile devices are common. Intel has some strong edge devices, the Movidius family of chips for example. And you use that compute that runs completely offline in real time to process those signals. Now again, what you do with those signals may require connectivity and that becomes a question of the problem you're solving of how soon you need to relay that information to another place. >> So, that's an architectural issue on the infrastructure. If you're a tactical edge war fighter for instance, you might want to have highly available and maybe high availability. I mean, these are words that mean something. You got storage, but it's not at the edge in real time. But you can trickle it back and pull it down. That's management. So that's more of a business by business decision or environment, right? >> That's right, that's right. Yeah. So I mean we can talk through some specifics. So for example, the RoboFlow actually powers the broadcaster that does the tennis ball tracking at Wimbledon. That runs completely at the edge in real time in, you know, technically to track the tennis ball and point the camera, you actually don't need internet. Now they do have internet of course to do the broadcasting and relay the signal and feeds and these sorts of things. And so that's a case where you have both edge deployment of running the model and high availability act on that model. We have other instances where customers will run their models on drones and the drone will go and do a flight and it'll say, you know, this many residential homes are in this given area, or this many cargo containers are in this given shipping yard. Or maybe we saw these environmental considerations of soil erosion along this riverbank. The model in that case can run on the drone during flight without internet, but then you only need internet once the drone lands and you're going to act on that information because for example, if you're doing like a study of soil erosion, you don't need to be real time. You just need to be able to process and make use of that information once the drone finishes its flight. >> Well I can imagine a zillion use cases. I heard of a use case interview at a company that does computer vision to help people see if anyone's jumping the fence on their company. Like, they know what a body looks like climbing a fence and they can spot it. Pretty easy use case compared to probably some of the other things, but this is the horizontal use cases, its so many use cases. So how do you guys talk to the marketplace when you say, hey, we have generative AI for commuter vision. You might know language models that's completely different animal because vision's like the world, right? So you got a lot more to do. What's the difference? How do you explain that to customers? What can I build and what's their reaction? >> Because we're such a developer centric company, developers are usually creative and show you the ways that they want to take advantage of new technologies. I mean, we've had people use things for identifying conveyor belt debris, doing gas leak detection, measuring the size of fish, airplane maintenance. We even had someone that like a hobby use case where they did like a specific sushi identifier. I dunno if you know this, but there's a specific type of whitefish that if you grew up in the western hemisphere and you eat it in the eastern hemisphere, you get very sick. And so there was someone that made an app that tells you if you happen to have that fish in the sushi that you're eating. But security camera analysis, transportation flows, plant disease detection, really, you know, smarter cities. We have people that are doing curb management identifying, and a lot of these use cases, the fantastic thing about building tools for developers is they're a creative bunch and they have these ideas that if you and I sat down for 15 minutes and said, let's guess every way computer vision can be used, we would need weeks to list all the example use cases. >> We'd miss everything. >> And we'd miss. And so having the community show us the ways that they're using computer vision is impactful. Now that said, there are of course commercial industries that have discovered the value and been able to be out of the gate. And that's where we have the Fortune 100 customers, like we do. Like the retail customers in the Walmart sector, healthcare providers like Medtronic, or vehicle manufacturers like Rivian who all have very difficult either supply chain, quality assurance, in stock, out of stock, anti-theft protection considerations that require successfully making sense of the real world. >> Let me ask you a question. This is maybe a little bit in the weeds, but it's more developer focused. What are some of the developer profiles that you're seeing right now in terms of low-hanging fruit applications? And can you talk about the academic impact? Because I imagine if I was in school right now, I'd be all over it. Are you seeing Master's thesis' being worked on with some of your stuff? Is the uptake in both areas of younger pre-graduates? And then inside the workforce, What are some of the devs like? Can you share just either what their makeup is, what they work on, give a little insight into the devs you're working with. >> Leading developers that want to be on state-of-the-art technology build with RoboFlow because they know they can use the best in class open source. They know that they can get the most out of their data. They know that they can deploy extremely quickly. That's true among students as you mentioned, just as much as as industries. So we welcome students and I mean, we have research grants that will regularly support for people to publish. I mean we actually have a channel inside our internal slack where every day, more student publications that cite building with RoboFlow pop up. And so, that helps inspire some of the use cases. Now what's interesting is that the use case is relatively, you know, useful or applicable for the business or the student. In other words, if a student does a thesis on how to do, we'll say like shingle damage detection from satellite imagery and they're just doing that as a master's thesis, in fact most insurance businesses would be interested in that sort of application. So, that's kind of how we see uptick and adoption both among researchers who want to be on the cutting edge and publish, both with RoboFlow and making use of open source tools in tandem with the tool that we provide, just as much as industry. And you know, I'm a big believer in the philosophy that kind of like what the hackers are doing nights and weekends, the Fortune 500 are doing in a pretty short order period of time and we're experiencing that transition. Computer vision used to be, you know, kind of like a PhD, multi-year investment endeavor. And now with some of the tooling that we're working on in open source technologies and the compute that's available, these science fiction ideas are possible in an afternoon. And so you have this idea of maybe doing asset management or the aerial observation of your shingles or things like this. You have a few hundred images and you can de-risk whether that's possible for your business today. So there's pretty broad-based adoption among both researchers that want to be on the state of the art, as much as companies that want to reduce the time to value. >> You know, Joseph, you guys and your partner have got a great front row seat, ground floor, presented creation wave here. I'm seeing a pattern emerging from all my conversations on theCUBE with founders that are successful, like yourselves, that there's two kind of real things going on. You got the enterprises grabbing the products and retrofitting into their legacy and rebuilding their business. And then you have startups coming out of the woodwork. Young, seeing greenfield or pick a specific niche or focus and making that the signature lever to move the market. >> That's right. >> So can you share your thoughts on the startup scene, other founders out there and talk about that? And then I have a couple questions for like the enterprises, the old school, the existing legacy. Little slower, but the startups are moving fast. What are some of the things you're seeing as startups are emerging in this field? >> I think you make a great point that independent of RoboFlow, very successful, especially developer focused businesses, kind of have three customer types. You have the startups and maybe like series A, series B startups that you're building a product as fast as you can to keep up with them, and they're really moving just as fast as as you are and pulling the product out at you for things that they need. The second segment that you have might be, call it SMB but not enterprise, who are able to purchase and aren't, you know, as fast of moving, but are stable and getting value and able to get to production. And then the third type is enterprise, and that's where you have typically larger contract value sizes, slower moving in terms of adoption and feedback for your product. And I think what you see is that successful companies balance having those three customer personas because you have the small startups, small fast moving upstarts that are discerning buyers who know the market and elect to build on tooling that is best in class. And so you basically kind of pass the smell test of companies who are quite discerning in their purchases, plus are moving so quick they're pulling their product out of you. Concurrently, you have a product that's enterprise ready to service the scalability, availability, and trust of enterprise buyers. And that's ultimately where a lot of companies will see tremendous commercial success. I mean I remember seeing the Twilio IPO, Uber being like a full 20% of their revenue, right? And so there's this very common pattern where you have the ability to find some of those upstarts that you make bets on, like the next Ubers of the world, the smaller companies that continue to get developed with the product and then the enterprise whom allows you to really fund the commercial success of the business, and validate the size of the opportunity in market that's being creative. >> It's interesting, there's so many things happening there. It's like, in a way it's a new category, but it's not a new category. It becomes a new category because of the capabilities, right? So, it's really interesting, 'cause that's what you're talking about is a category, creating. >> I think developer tools. So people often talk about B to B and B to C businesses. I think developer tools are in some ways a third way. I mean ultimately they're B to B, you're selling to other businesses and that's where your revenue's coming from. However, you look kind of like a B to C company in the ways that you measure product adoption and kind of go to market. In other words, you know, we're often tracking the leading indicators of commercial success in the form of usage, adoption, retention. Really consumer app, traditionally based metrics of how to know you're building the right stuff, and that's what product led growth companies do. And then you ultimately have commercial traction in a B to B way. And I think that that actually kind of looks like a third thing, right? Like you can do these sort of funny zany marketing examples that you might see historically from consumer businesses, but yet you ultimately make your money from the enterprise who has these de-risked high value problems you can solve for them. And I selfishly think that that's the best of both worlds because I don't have to be like Evan Spiegel, guessing the next consumer trend or maybe creating the next consumer trend and catching lightning in a bottle over and over again on the consumer side. But I still get to have fun in our marketing and make sort of fun, like we're launching the world's largest game of rock paper scissors being played with computer vision, right? Like that's sort of like a fun thing you can do, but then you can concurrently have the commercial validation and customers telling you the things that they need to be built for them next to solve commercial pain points for them. So I really do think that you're right by calling this a new category and it really is the best of both worlds. >> It's a great call out, it's a great call out. In fact, I always juggle with the VC. I'm like, it's so easy. Your job is so easy to pick the winners. What are you talking about its so easy? I go, just watch what the developers jump on. And it's not about who started, it could be someone in the dorm room to the boardroom person. You don't know because that B to C, the C, it's B to D you know? You know it's developer 'cause that's a human right? That's a consumer of the tool which influences the business that never was there before. So I think this direct business model evolution, whether it's media going direct or going direct to the developers rather than going to a gatekeeper, this is the reality. >> That's right. >> Well I got to ask you while we got some time left to describe, I want to get into this topic of multi-modality, okay? And can you describe what that means in computer vision? And what's the state of the growth of that portion of this piece? >> Multi modality refers to using multiple traditionally siloed problem types, meaning text, image, video, audio. So you could treat an audio problem as only processing audio signal. That is not multimodal, but you could use the audio signal at the same time as a video feed. Now you're talking about multi modality. In computer vision, multi modality is predominantly happening with images and text. And one of the biggest releases in this space is actually two years old now, was clip, contrastive language image pre-training, which took 400 million image text pairs and basically instead of previously when you do classification, you basically map every single image to a single class, right? Like here's a bunch of images of chairs, here's a bunch of images of dogs. What clip did is used, you can think about it like, the class for an image being the Instagram caption for the image. So it's not one single thing. And by training on understanding the corpora, you basically see which words, which concepts are associated with which pixels. And this opens up the aperture for the types of problems and generalizability of models. So what does this mean? This means that you can get to value more quickly from an existing trained model, or at least validate that what you want to tackle with a computer vision, you can get there more quickly. It also opens up the, I mean. Clip has been the bedrock of some of the generative image techniques that have come to bear, just as much as some of the LLMs. And increasingly we're going to see more and more of multi modality being a theme simply because at its core, you're including more context into what you're trying to understand about the world. I mean, in its most basic sense, you could ask yourself, if I have an image, can I know more about that image with just the pixels? Or if I have the image and the sound of when that image was captured or it had someone describe what they see in that image when the image was captured, which one's going to be able to get you more signal? And so multi modality helps expand the ability for us to understand signal processing. >> Awesome. And can you just real quick, define clip for the folks that don't know what that means? >> Yeah. Clip is a model architecture, it's an acronym for contrastive language image pre-training and like, you know, model architectures that have come before it captures the almost like, models are kind of like brands. So I guess it's a brand of a model where you've done these 400 million image text pairs to match up which visual concepts are associated with which text concepts. And there have been new releases of clip, just at bigger sizes of bigger encoding's, of longer strings of texture, or larger image windows. But it's been a really exciting advancement that OpenAI released in January, 2021. >> All right, well great stuff. We got a couple minutes left. Just I want to get into more of a company-specific question around culture. All startups have, you know, some sort of cultural vibe. You know, Intel has Moore's law doubles every whatever, six months. What's your culture like at RoboFlow? I mean, if you had to describe that culture, obviously love the hacking story, you and your partner with the games going number one on Product Hunt next to Elon and Tesla and then hey, we should start a company two years later. That's kind of like a curious, inventing, building, hard charging, but laid back. That's my take. How would you describe the culture? >> I think that you're right. The culture that we have is one of shipping, making things. So every week each team shares what they did for our customers on a weekly basis. And we have such a strong emphasis on being better week over week that those sorts of things compound. So one big emphasis in our culture is getting things done, shipping, doing things for our customers. The second is we're an incredibly transparent place to work. For example, how we think about giving decisions, where we're progressing against our goals, what problems are biggest and most important for the company is all open information for those that are inside the company to know and progress against. The third thing that I'd use to describe our culture is one that thrives with autonomy. So RoboFlow has a number of individuals who have founded companies before, some of which have sold their businesses for a hundred million plus upon exit. And the way that we've been able to attract talent like that is because the problems that we're tackling are so immense, yet individuals are able to charge at it with the way that they think is best. And this is what pairs well with transparency. If you have a strong sense of what the company's goals are, how we're progressing against it, and you have this ownership mentality of what can I do to change or drive progress against that given outcome, then you create a really healthy pairing of, okay cool, here's where the company's progressing. Here's where things are going really well, here's the places that we most need to improve and work on. And if you're inside that company as someone who has a preponderance to be a self-starter and even a history of building entire functions or companies yourself, then you're going to be a place where you can really thrive. You have the inputs of the things where we need to work on to progress the company's goals. And you have the background of someone that is just necessarily a fast moving and ambitious type of individual. So I think the best way to describe it is a transparent place with autonomy and an emphasis on getting things done. >> Getting shit done as they say. Getting stuff done. Great stuff. Hey, final question. Put a plug out there for the company. What are you going to hire? What's your pipeline look like for people? What jobs are open? I'm sure you got hiring all around. Give a quick plug for the company what you're looking for. >> I appreciate you asking. Basically you're either building the product or helping customers be successful with the product. So in the building product category, we have platform engineering roles, machine learning engineering roles, and we're solving some of the hardest and most impactful problems of bringing such a groundbreaking technology to the masses. And so it's a great place to be where you can kind of be your own user as an engineer. And then if you're enabling people to be successful with the products, I mean you're working in a place where there's already such a strong community around it and you can help shape, foster, cultivate, activate, and drive commercial success in that community. So those are roles that tend themselves to being those that build the product for developer advocacy, those that are account executives that are enabling our customers to realize commercial success, and even hybrid roles like we call it field engineering, where you are a technical resource to drive success within customer accounts. And so all this is listed on roboflow.com/careers. And one thing that I actually kind of want to mention John that's kind of novel about the thing that's working at RoboFlow. So there's been a lot of discussion around remote companies and there's been a lot of discussion around in-person companies and do you need to be in the office? And one thing that we've kind of recognized is you can actually chart a third way. You can create a third way which we call satellite, which basically means people can work from where they most like to work and there's clusters of people, regular onsite's. And at RoboFlow everyone gets, for example, $2,500 a year that they can use to spend on visiting coworkers. And so what's sort of organically happened is team numbers have started to pull together these resources and rent out like, lavish Airbnbs for like a week and then everyone kind of like descends in and works together for a week and makes and creates things. And we call this lighthouses because you know, a lighthouse kind of brings ships into harbor and we have an emphasis on shipping. >> Yeah, quality people that are creative and doers and builders. You give 'em some cash and let the self-governing begin, you know? And like, creativity goes through the roof. It's a great story. I think that sums up the culture right there, Joseph. Thanks for sharing that and thanks for this great conversation. I really appreciate it and it's very inspiring. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks for having me, John. >> Joseph Nelson, co-founder and CEO of RoboFlow. Hot company, great culture in the right place in a hot area, computer vision. This is going to explode in value. The edge is exploding. More use cases, more development, and developers are driving the change. Check out RoboFlow. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Cube's day one coverage of HPE discover 22 live from the Venetian in Las Vegas. I got a power panel here, Lisa Martin, with Dave Valante, John furrier, Holger Mueller also joins us. We are gonna wrap this, like you've never seen a rap before guys. Lot of momentum today, lot, lot of excitement, about 8,000 or so customers, partners, HPE leaders here. Holger. Let's go ahead and start with you. What are some of the things that you heard felt saw observed today on day one? >>Yeah, it's great to be back in person. Right? 8,000 people events are rare. Uh, I'm not sure. Have you been to more than 8,000? <laugh> yeah, yeah. Okay. This year, this year. I mean, historically, yes, but, um, >>Snowflake was 10. Yeah. >>So, oh, wow. Okay. So 8,000 was my, >>Cisco was, they said 15, >>But is my, my 8,000, my record, I let us down with 7,000 kind of like, but it's in the Florida swarm. It's not nicely. Like, and there's >>Usually what SFI, there's usually >>20, 20, 30, 40, 50. I remember 50 in the nineties. Right. That was a different time. But yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Interesting what people do and it depends how much time there is to come. Right. And know that it happens. Right. But yeah, no, I think it's interesting. We, we had a good two analyst track today. Um, interesting. Like HPE is kind of like back not being your grandfather's HPE to a certain point. One of the key stats. I know Dave always for the stats, right. Is what I found really interesting that over two third of GreenLake revenue is software and services. Now a love to know how much of that services, how much of that software. But I mean, I, I, I, provocate some, one to ones, the HP executives saying, Hey, you're a hardware company. Right. And they didn't even come back. Right. But Antonio said, no, two thirds is, uh, software and services. Right. That's interesting. They passed the one exabyte, uh, being managed, uh, as a, as a hallmark. Right. I was surprised only 120,000 users if I had to remember the number. Right, right. So that doesn't seem a terrible high amount of number of users. Right. So, but that's, that's, that's promising. >>So what software is in there, cuz it's gotta be mostly services. >>Right? Well it's the 70 plus cloud services, right. That everybody's talking about where the added eight of them shockingly back up and recovery, I thought that was done at launch. Right. >>Still who >>Keep recycling storage and you back. But now it's real. Yeah. >>But the company who knows the enterprise, right. HPE, what I've been doing before with no backup and recovery GreenLake. So that was kind of like, okay, we really want to do this now and nearly, and then say like, oh, by the way, we've been doing this all the time. Yeah. >>Oh, what's your take on the installed base of HP. We had that conversation, the, uh, kickoff or on who's their target, what's the target audience environment look like. It certainly is changing. Right? If it's software and services, GreenLake is resonating. Yeah. Um, ecosystems responding. What's their customers cuz managed services are up too Kubernetes, all the managed services what's what's it like what's their it transformation base look like >>Much of it is of course install base, right? The trusted 20, 30 plus year old HP customer. Who's keeping doing stuff of HP. Right. And call it GreenLake. They've been for so many name changes. It doesn't really matter. And it's kind of like nice that you get the consume pain only what you consume. Right. I get the cloud broad to me then the general markets, of course, people who still need to run stuff on premises. Right. And there's three reasons of doing this performance, right. Because we know the speed of light is relative. If you're in the Southern hemisphere and even your email servers in Northern hemisphere, it takes a moment for your email to arrive. It's a very different user experience. Um, local legislation for data, residency privacy. And then, I mean Charles Phillips who we all know, right. Former president of uh, info nicely always said, Hey, if the CIOs over 50, I don't have to sell qu. Right. So there is not invented. I'm not gonna do cloud here. And now I've kind of like clouded with something like HP GreenLake. That's the customers. And then of course procurement is a big friend, right? Yeah. Because when you do hardware refresh, right. You have to have two or three competitors who are the two or three competitors left. Right. There's Dell. Yeah. And then maybe Lenovo. Right? So, so like a >>Little bit channels, the strength, the procurement physicians of strength, of course install base question. Do you think they have a Microsoft opportunity where, what 365 was Microsoft had office before 365, but they brought in the cloud and then everything changed. Does HP have that same opportunity with kind of the GreenLake, you know, model with their existing stuff. >>It has a GreenLake opportunity, but there's not much software left. It's a very different situation like Microsoft. Right? So, uh, which green, which HP could bring along to say, now run it with us better in the cloud because they've been selling much of it. Most of it, of their software portfolio, which they bought as an HP in the past. Right. So I don't see that happening so much, but GreenLake as a platform itself course interesting because enterprise need a modern container based platform. >>I want, I want to double click on this a little bit because the way I see it is HP is going to its installed base. I think you guys are right on say, this is how we're doing business now. Yeah. You know, come on along. But my sense is, some customers don't want to do the consumption model. There are actually some customers that say, Hey, of course I got, I don't have a cash port problem. I wanna pay for it up front and leave me alone. >>I've been doing this since 50 years. Nice. As I changed it, now <laugh> two know >>Money's wants to do it. And I don't wanna rent because rental's more expensive and blah, blah, blah. So do you see that in the customer base that, that some are pushing back? >>Of course, look, I have a German accent, right? So I go there regularly and uh, the Germans are like worried about doing anything in the cloud. And if you go to a board in Germany and say, Hey, we can pay our usual hardware, refresh, CapEx as usual, or should we bug consumption? And they might know what we are running. <laugh> so not whole, no offense against the Germans out. The German parts are there, but many of them will say, Hey, so this is change with COVID. Right. Which is super interesting. Right? So the, the traditional boards non-technical have been hearing about this cloud variable cost OPEX to CapEx and all of a sudden there's so much CapEx, right. Office buildings, which are not being used truck fleets. So there's a whole new sensitivity by traditional non-technical boards towards CapEx, which now the light bulb went on and say, oh, that's the cloud thing about also. So we have to find a way to get our cost structure, to ramp up and ramp down as our business might be ramping up through COVID through now inflation fears, recession, fears, and so on. >>So, okay. HP's, HP's made the statement that anything you can do in the cloud you can do in GreenLake. Yes. And I've said you can't run on snowflake. You can't run Mongo Atlas, you can't run data bricks, but that's okay. That's fine. Let's be, I think they're talking about, there's >>A short list of things. I think they're talking about the, their >>Stuff, their, >>The operating experience. So we've got single sign on through a URL, right. Uh, you've got, you know, some level of consistency in terms of policy. It's unclear exactly what that is. You've got storage backup. Dr. What, some other services, seven other services. If you had to sort of take your best guess as to where HP is now and peg it toward where Amazon was in which year? >>20 14, 20 14. >>Yeah. Where they had their first conference or the second we invent here with 3000 people and they were thinking, Hey, we're big. Yeah. >>Yeah. And I think GreenLake is the building blocks. So they quite that's the >>Building. Right? I mean similar. >>Okay. Well, I mean they had E C, Q and S3 and SQS, right. That was the core. And then the rest of those services were, I mean, base stock was one of that first came in behind and >>In fairness, the industry has advanced since then, Kubernetes is further along. And so HPE can take advantage of that. But in terms of just the basic platform, I, I would agree. I think it's >>Well, I mean, I think, I mean the software, question's a big one. I wanna bring up because the question is, is that software is getting the world. Hardware is really software scales, everything, data, the edge story. I love their story. I think HP story is wonderful Aruba, you know, hybrid cloud, good story, edge edge. But if you look under the covers, it's weak, right? It's like, it's not software. They don't have enough software juice, but the ecosystem opportunity to me is where you plug and play. So HP knows that game. But if you look historically over the past 25 years, HP now HPE, they understand plug and play interoperability. So the question is, can they thread the needle >>Right. >>Between filling the gaps on the software? Yeah. With partners, >>Can they get the partners? Right. And which have been long, long time. Right. For a long time, HP has been the number one platform under ICP, right? Same thing. You get certified for running this. Right. I know from my own history, uh, I joined Oracle last century and the big thing was, let's get your eBusiness suite certified on HP. Right? Like as if somebody would buy H Oracle work for them, right. This 20 years ago, server >>The original exit data was HP. Oracle. >>Exactly. Exactly. So there's this thinking that's there. But I think the key thing is we know that all modern forget about the hardware form in the platforms, right? All modern software has to move to containers and snowflake runs in containers. You mentioned that, right? Yeah. If customers force snowflake and HPE to the table, right, there will be a way to make it work. Right. And which will help HPE to be the partner open part will bring the software. >>I, I think it's, I think that's an opportunity because that changes the game and agility and speed. If HP plays their differentiation, right. Which we asked on their opening segment, what's their differentiation. They got size scale channel, >>What to the enterprise. And then the big benefit is this workload portability thing. Right? You understand what is run in the public cloud? I need to run it local. For whatever reason, performance, local residency of data. I can move that. There that's the big benefit to the ISVs, the sales vendors as well. >>But they have to have a stronger data platform story in my that's right. Opinion. I mean, you can run Oracle and HPE, but there's no reason they shouldn't be able to do a deal with, with snowflake. I mean, we saw it with Dell. Yep. We saw it with, with, with pure and I, if our HPE I'd be saying, Hey, because the way the snowflake deal worked, you probably know this is your reading data into the cloud. The compute actually occurs in the cloud viral HB going snowflake saying we can separate compute and storage. Right. And we have GreenLake. We have on demand. Why don't we run the compute on-prem and make it a full class, first class citizen, right. For all of our customers data. And that would be really innovative. And I think Mongo would be another, they've got OnPrem. >>And the question is, how many, how many snowflake customers are telling snowflake? Can I run you on premise? And how much defo open years will they hear from that? Right? This is >>Why would they deal Dell? That >>Deal though, with that, they did a deal. >>I think they did that deal because the customer came to them and said, you don't exactly that deal. We're gonna spend the >>Snowflake >>Customers think crazy things happen, right? Even, even put an Oracle database in a Microsoft Azure data center, right. Would off who, what as >>Possible snowflake, >>Oracle. So on, Aw, the >>Snow, the snowflakes in the world have to make a decision. Dave on, is it all snowflake all the time? Because what the reality is, and I think, again, this comes back down to the, the track that HP could go up or down is gonna be about software. Open source is now the software industry. There's no such thing as proprietary software, in my opinion, relatively speaking, cloud scale and integrated, integrated integration software is proprietary. The workflows are proprietary. So if they can get that right with the partners, I would focus on that. I think they can tap open source, look at Amazon with open source. They sucked it up and they integrated it in. No, no. So integration is the deal, not >>Software first, but Snowflake's made the call. You were there, Lisa. They basically saying it's we have, you have to be in snowflake in order to get the governance and the scalability, all that other wonderful stuff. Oh, but we we'll do Apache iceberg. We'll we'll open it up. We'll do Python. Yeah. >>But you can't do it data clean room unless you are in snowflake. Exactly. Snowflake on snowflake. >>Exactly. >>But got it. Isn't that? What you heard from AWS all the time till they came out outposts, right? I mean, snowflake is a market leader for what they're doing. Right. So that they want to change their platform. I mean, kudos to them. They don't need to change the platform. They will be the last to change their platform to a ne to anything on premises. Right. But I think the trend already shows that it's going that way. >>Well, if you look at outpost is an signal, Dave, the success of outpost launched what four years ago, they announced it. >>What >>EKS is beating, what outpost is doing. Outpost is there. There's not a lot of buzz and talk to the insiders and the open source community, uh, EKS and containers. To your point mm-hmm <affirmative> is moving faster on, I won't say commodity hardware, but like could be white box or HP, Dell, whatever it's gonna be that scale differentiation and the edge story is, is a good one. And I think with what we're seeing in the market now it's the industrial edge. The back office was gen one cloud back office data center. Now it's hybrid. The focus will be industrial edge machine learning and AI, and they have it here. And there's some, some early conversations with, uh, I heard it from, uh, this morning, you guys interviewed, uh, uh, John Schultz, right? With the world economic 4k birth Butterfield. She was amazing. And then you had Justin bring up a Hoar, bring up quantum. Yes. That is a differentiator. >>HP. >>Yes. Yeah. You, they have the computing shops. They had the R and D can they bring it to the table >>As, as HPC, right. To what they Schultz for of uh, the frontier system. Right. So very impressed. >>So the ecosystem is the key for them is because that's how they're gonna fill the gaps. They can't, they can't only, >>They could, they could high HPC edge piece. I wouldn't count 'em out of that game yet. If you co-locate a box, I'll use the word box, particularly at a telco tower. That's a data center. Yep. Right. If done properly. Yep. So, you know, what outpost was supposed to do actually is a hybrid opportunity. Aruba >>Gives them a unique, >>But the key thing is right. It's a yin and yang, right? It's the ecosystem it's partners to bring those software workload. Absolutely. Right. But HPE has to keep the platform attractive enough. Right. And the key thing there is that you have this workload capability thing that you can bring things, which you've built yourself. I mean, look at the telcos right. Network function, visualization, thousands of man, years into these projects. Right. So if I can't bring it to your edge box, no, I'm not trying to get to your Xbox. Right. >>Hold I gotta ask you since in the Dave too, since you guys both here and Lisa, you know, I said on the opening, they have serious customers and those customers have serious problems, cyber security, ransomware. So yeah. I teach transformation now. Industrial transformation machine learning, check, check, check. Oh, sounds good. But at the end of the day, their customers have some serious problems. Right? Cyber, this is, this is high stakes poker. Yeah. What do you think HP's position for in the security? You mentioned containers, you got all this stuff, you got open source, supply chain, you have to left supply chain issues. What is their position with security? Cuz that's the big one. >>I, I think they have to have a mature attitude that customers expect from HPE. Right? I don't have to educate HP on security. So they have to have the partner offerings again. We're back at the ecosystem to have what probably you have. So bring your own security apart from what they have to have out of the box to do business with them. This is why the shocker this morning was back up in recovery coming. <laugh> it's kind like important for that. Right? Well >>That's, that's, that's more ransomware and the >>More skeleton skeletons in the closet there, which customers should check of course. But I think the expectations HP understands that and brings it along either from partner or natively. >>I, I think it's, I think it's services. I think point next is the point of integration for their security. That's why two thirds is software and services. A lot of that is services, right? You know, you need security, we'll help you get there. We people trust HP >>Here, but we have nothing against point next or any professional service. They're all hardworking. But if I will have to rely on humans for my cyber security strategy on a daily level, I'm getting gray hair and I little gray hair >>Red. Okay. I that's, >>But >>I think, but I do think that's the camera strategy. I mean, I'm sure there's a lot of that stuff that's beginning to be designed in, but I, my guess is a lot of it is services. >>Well, you got the Aruba. Part of the booth was packed. Aruba's there. You mentioned that earlier. Is that good enough? Because the word zero trust is kicked around a lot. On one hand, on the other hand, other conversations, it's all about trust. So supply chain and software is trusting trust, trust and verified. So you got this whole mentality of perimeter gone mentality. It's zero trust. And if you've got software trust, interesting thoughts there, how do you reconcile zero trust? And then I need trust. What's what's you? What are you seeing older on that? Because I ask people all the time, they're like, uh, I'm zero trust or is it trust? >>Yeah. The middle ground. Right? Trusted. The meantime people are man manipulating what's happening in your runtime containers. Right? So, uh, drift control is a new password there that you check what's in your runtime containers, which supposedly impenetrable, but people finding ways to hack them. So we'll see this cat and mouse game going on all the time. Yeah. Yeah. There's always gonna be the need for being in a secure, good environment from that perspective. Absolutely. But the key is edge has to be more than Aruba, right? If yeah. HV goes away and says, oh yeah, we can manage your edge with our Aruba devices. That's not enough. It's the virtual probability. And you said the important thing before it's about the data, right? Because the dirty secret of containers is yeah, I move the code, but what enterprise code works without data, right? You can't say as enterprise, okay, we're done for the day check tomorrow. We didn't persist your data, auditor customer. We don't have your data anymore. So filling a way to transport the data. And there just one last thought, right? They have a super interesting asset. They want break lands for the venerable map R right. Which wrote their own storage drivers and gives you the chance to potentially do something in that area, which I'm personally excited about. But we'll see what happens. >>I mean, I think the holy grail is can I, can I put my data into a cloud who's ever, you know, call it a super cloud and can I, is it secure? Is it governed? Can I share it and be confident that it's discoverable and that the, the person I give it to has the right to use it. Yeah. And, and it's the correct data. There's not like a zillion copies running. That's the holy grail. And I, I think the answer today is no, you can, you can do that maybe inside of AWS or maybe inside of Azure, look maybe certainly inside of snowflake, can you do that inside a GreenLake? Well, you probably can inside a GreenLake, but then when you put it into the cloud, is it cross cloud? Is it really out to the edge? And that's where it starts to break down, but that's where the work is to be done. That's >>The one Exide is in there already. Right. So men being men. Yeah. >>But okay. But it it's in there. Yeah. Okay. What do you do with it? Can you share that data? What can you actually automate governance? Right? Uh, is that data discoverable? Are there multiple copies of that data? What's the, you know, master copy. Here's >>A question. You guys, here's a question for you guys analyst, what do you think the psychology is of the CIO or CSO when HP comes into town with GreenLake, uh, and they say, what's your relationship with the hyperscalers? Cause I'm a CIO. I got my environment. I might be CapEx centric or Hey, I'm open model. Open-minded to an operating model. Every one of these enterprises has a cloud relationship. Yeah. Yeah. What's the dynamic. What do you think the psychology is of the CIO when they're rationalizing their, their trajectory, their architecture, cloud, native scale integration with HPE GreenLake or >>HP service. I think she or he hears defensiveness from HPE. I think she hears HPE or he hears HPE coming in and saying, you don't need to go to the cloud. You know, you could keep it right here. I, I don't think that's the right posture. I think it should be. We are your cloud. And we can manage whether it's OnPrem hybrid in AWS, Azure, Google, across those clouds. And we have an edge story that should be the vision that they put forth. That's the super cloud vision, but I don't hear it >>From these guys. What do you think psycho, do you agree with that? >>I'm totally to make, sorry to be boring, but I totally agree with, uh, Dave on that. Right? So the, the, the multi-cloud capability from a trusted large company has worked for anybody up and down the stack. Right? You can look historically for, uh, past layers with cloud Foundry, right? It's history vulnerable. You can look for DevOps of Hashi coop. You can look for database with MongoDB right now. So if HPE provides that data access, right, with all the problems of data gravity and egres cost and the workability, they will be doing really, really well, but we need to hear it more, right. We didn't hear much software today in the keynote. Right. >>Do they have a competitive offering vis-a-vis or Azure? >>The question is, will it be an HPE offering or will, or the software platform, one of the offerings and you as customer can plug and play, right. Will software be a differentiator for HP, right. And will be close, proprietary to the point to again, be open enough for it, or will they get that R and D format that, or will they just say, okay, ES MES here on the side, your choice, and you can use OpenShift or whatever, we don't matter. That's >>The, that's the key question. That's the key question. Is it because it is a competitive strategy? Is it highly differentiated? Oracle is a highly differentiated strategy, right? Is Dell highly differentiated? Eh, Dell differentiates based on its breadth. What? >>Right. Well, let's try for the control plane too. Dell wants to be an, >>Their, their vision is differentiated. Okay. But their execution today is not >>High. All right. Let me throw, let me throw this out at you then. I'm I'm, I'm sorry. I'm I'm HPE. I wanna be the glue layer. Is that, does that fly? >>What >>Do you mean? The group glue layer? I'll I wanna be, you can do Amazon, but I wanna be the glue layer between the clouds and our GreenLake will. >>What's the, what's the incremental value that, that glue provides, >>Provides comfort and reliability and control for the single pane of glass for AWS >>And comes back to the data. In my opinion. Yeah. >>There, there there's glue levels on the data level. Yeah. And there's glue levels on API level. Right. And there's different vendors in the different spaces. Right. Um, I think HPE will want to play on the data side. We heard lots of data stuff. We >>Hear that, >>But we have to see it. Exactly. >>Yeah. But it's, it's lacking today. And so, Hey, you know, you guys know better than I APIs can be fragile and they can be, there's a lot of diversity in terms of the quality of APIs and the documentation, how they work, how mature they are, what, how, what kind of performance they can provide and recoverability. And so just saying, oh wow. We are living the API economy. You know, the it's gonna take time to brew, chime in here. Hi. >><laugh> oh, so guys, you've all been covering HPE for a long time. You know, when Antonio stood up on stage three years ago and said by 2022, and here we are, we're gonna be delivering everything as a service. He's saying we've, we've done it, but, and we're a new company. Do you guys agree with that? >>Definitely. >>I, yes. Yes. With the caveat, I think, yes. The COVID pandemic slowed them down a lot because, um, that gave a tailwind to the hyperscalers, um, because of the, the force of massive O under forecasting working at home. I mean, everyone I talked to was like, no one forecasted a hundred percent work at home, the, um, the CapEx investments. So I think that was an opportunity that they'd be much farther along if there's no COVID people >>Thought it wasn't impossible. Yeah. But so we had the old work from home thing right. Where people trying to get people fired at IBM and Yahoo. Right. So I would've this question covering the HR side and my other hat on. Right. And I would ask CHS let's assume, because I didn't know about COVID shame on me. Right. I said, big California, earthquake breaks. Right. Nobody gets hurt, but all the buildings have to be retrofitted and checked for seism logic down. So everybody's working from home, ask CHS, what kind of productivity gap hit would you get by forcing everybody working from home with the office unsafe? So one, one gentleman, I won't know him, his name, he said 20% and the other one's going ha you're smoking. It's 40 50%. We need to be in the office. We need to meet it first night. And now we went for this exercise. Luckily not with the California. Right. Well, through the price of COVID and we've seen what it can do to, to productivity well, >>The productivity, but also the impact. So like with all the, um, stories we've done over two years, the people that want came out ahead were the ones that had good cloud action. They were already in the cloud. So I, I think they're definitely in different company in the sense of they, I give 'em a pass. I think they're definitely a new company and I'm not gonna judge 'em on. I think they're doing great. But I think pandemic definitely slowed 'em down that about >>It. So I have a different take on this. I think. So we've go back a little history. I mean, you' said this, I steal your line. Meg Whitman took one for the Silicon valley team. Right. She came in. I don't think she ever was excited that I, that you said, you said that, and I think you wrote >>Up, get tape on that one. She >>Had to figure out how do I deal with this mess? I have EDS. I got PC. >>She never should have spun off the PC, but >>Okay. But >>Me, >>Yeah, you can, you certainly could listen. Maybe, maybe Gerstner never should have gone all in on services and IBM would dominate something other than mainframes. They had think pads even for a while, but, but, but so she had that mess to deal with. She dealt with it and however, they dealt with it, Antonio came in, he, he, and he said, all right, we're gonna focus the company. And we're gonna focus the mission on not the machine. Remember those yeah. Presentations, but you just make your eyes glaze over. We're going all in on Azure service >>And edge. He was all on. >>We're gonna build our own cloud. We acquired Aruba. He made some acquisitions in HPC to help differentiate. Yep. And they are definitely a much more focused company now. And unfortunately I wish Antonio would CEO in 2015, cuz that's really when this should have started. >>Yeah. And then, and if you remember back then, Dave, we were interviewing Docker with DevOps teams. They had composability, they were on hybrid really early. I think they might have even coined the term hybrid before VMware tri-state credit for it. But they were first on hybrid. They had DevOps, they had infrastructure risk code. >>HPE had an HP had an awesome cloud team. Yeah. But, and then, and then they tried to go public cloud. Yeah. You know, and then, you know, just made them, I mean, it was just a mess. The focus >>Is there. I give them huge props. And I think, I think the GreenLake to me is exciting here because it's much better than it was two years ago. When, when we talked to, when we started, it's >>Starting to get real. >>It's, it's a real thing. And I think the, the tell will be partners. If they make that right, can pull their different >>Ecosystem, >>Their scale and their customers and fill the software gas with partners mm-hmm <affirmative> and then create that integration opportunity. It's gonna be a home run if they don't do that, they're gonna miss the operating, >>But they have to have their own to your point. They have to have their own software innovation. >>They have to good infrastructure ways to build applications. I don't wanna build with somebody else. I don't wanna take a Microsoft stack on open source stack. I'm not sure if it's gonna work with HP. So they have to have an app dev answer. I absolutely agree with that. And the, the big thing for the partners is, which is a good thing, right? Yep. HPE will not move into applications. Right? You don't have to have the fear of where Microsoft is with their vocal large. Right. If AWS kind of like comes up with APIs and manufacturing, right. Google the same thing with their vertical push. Right. So HPE will not have the CapEx, but >>Application, >>As I SV making them, the partner, the bonus of being able to on premise is an attractive >>Part. That's a great point. >>Hold. So that's an inflection point for next 12 months to watch what we see absolutely running on GreenLake. >>Yeah. And I think one of the things that came out of the, the last couple events this past year, and I'll bring this up, we'll table it and we'll watch it. And it's early in this, I think this is like even, not even the first inning, the machine learning AI impact to the industrial piece. I think we're gonna see a, a brand new era of accelerated digital transformation on the industrial physical world, back office, cloud data center, accounting, all the stuff. That's applications, the app, the real world from space to like robotics. I think that HP edge opportunity is gonna be visible and different. >>So guys, Antonio Neri is on tomorrow. This is only day one. If you can imagine this power panel on day one, can you imagine tomorrow? What is your last question for each of you? What is your, what, what question would you want to ask him tomorrow? Hold start with you. >>How is HPE winning in the long run? Because we know their on premise market will shrink, right? And they can out execute Dell. They can out execute Lenovo. They can out Cisco and get a bigger share of the shrinking market. But that's the long term strategy, right? So why should I buy HPE stock now and have a good return put in the, in the safe and forget about it and have a great return 20 years from now? What's the really long term strategy might be unfair because they, they ran in survival mode to a certain point out of the mass post equipment situation. But what is really the long term strategy? Is it more on the hardware side? Is it gonna go on the HPE, the frontier side? It's gonna be a DNA question, which I would ask Antonio. >>John, >>I would ask him what relative to the macro conditions relative to their customer base, I'd say, cuz the customers are the scoreboard. Can they create a value proposition with their, I use the Microsoft 365 example how they kind of went to the cloud. So my question would be Antonio, what is your core value proposition to CIOs out there who want to transform and take a step function, increase for value with HPE? Tell me that story. I wanna hear. And I don't want to hear, oh, we got a portfolio and no, what value are you enabling your customers to do? >>What and what should that value be? >>I think it's gonna be what we were kind of riffing on, which is you have to provide either what their product market fit needs are, which is, are you solving a problem? Is it a pain point is a growth driver. Uh, and what's the, what's that tailwind. And it's obviously we know at cloud we know edge. The story is great, but what's the value proposition. But by going with HPE, you get X, Y, and Z. If they can explain that clearly with real, so qualitative and quantitative data it's home >>Run. He had a great line of the analyst summit today where somebody asking questions, I'm just listening to the customer. So be ready for this Steve jobs photo, listening to the customer. You can't build something great listening to the customer. You'll be good for the next quarter. The next exponential >>Say, what are the customers saying? <laugh> >>So I would make an observation. And my question would, so my observation would be cloud is growing collectively at 35%. It's, you know, it's approaching 200 billion with a big, big four. If you include Alibaba, IBM has actually said, Hey, we're gonna gr they've promised 6% growth. Uh, Cisco I think is at eight or 9% growth. Dow's growing in double digits. Antonio and HPE have promised three to 4% growth. So what do you have to do to actually accelerate growth? Because three to 4%, my view, not enough to answer Holger's question is why should I buy HPE stock? Well, >>If they have product, if they have customer and there's demand and traction to me, that's going to drive the growth numbers. And I think the weak side of the forecast means that they don't have that fit yet. >>Yeah. So what has to happen for them to get above five, 6% growth? >>That's what we're gonna analyze. I mean, I, I mean, I don't have an answer for that. I wish I had a better answer. I'd tell them <laugh> but I feel, it feels, it feels like, you know, HP has an opportunity to say here's the new HPE. Yeah. Okay. And this is what we stand for. And here's the one thing that we're going to do that consistently drives value for you, the customer. And that's gonna have to come into some, either architectural cloud shift or a data thing, or we are your store for blank. >>All of the above. >>I guess the other question is, would, would you know, he won't answer a rude question, would suspending things like dividends and stock buybacks and putting it into R and D. I would definitely, if you have confidence in the market and you know what to do, why wouldn't you just accelerate R and D and put the money there? IBM, since 2007, IBM spent is the last stat. And I'm looking go in 2007, IBM way, outspent, Google, and Amazon and R and D and, and CapEx two, by the way. Yep. Subsequent to that, they've spent, I believe it's the numbers close to 200 billion on stock buyback and dividends. They could have owned cloud. And so look at this business, the technology business by and large is driven by innovation. Yeah. And so how do you innovate if >>You have I'm buying, I'm buying HP because they're reliable high quality and they have the outcomes that I want. Oh, >>Buy their products and services. I'm not sure I'd buy the stock. Yeah. >>Yeah. But she has to answer ultimately, because a public company. Right. So >>Right. It's this job. Yeah. >>Never a dull moment with the three of you around <laugh> guys. Thank you so much for sharing your insights, your, an analysis from day one. I can't imagine what day two is gonna bring tomorrow. Debut and I are gonna be anchoring here. We've got a jam packed day, lots going on, hearing from the ecosystem from leadership. As we mentioned, Antonio is gonna be Tony >>Alma Russo. I'm dying. Dr. >>EDMA as well as on the CTO gonna be another action pack day. I'm excited for it, guys. Thanks so much for sharing your insights and for letting me join this power panel. >>Great. Great to be here. >>Power panel plus me. All right. For Holger, John and Dave, I'm Lisa, you're watching the cube our day one coverage of HPE discover wraps right now. Don't go anywhere, cuz we'll see you tomorrow for day two, live from Vegas, have a good night.

>>Mhm Yeah, this is Dave valentin. I'd like to welcome you back to the cubes coverage of couch base connect online with the theme of this event is modernized now and one of the big announcements is Capella which of course as you all undoubtedly know is the brightest star in the constellation Auriga, which is latin for charioteer, yep, you can find that in the constellation of that constellation of the night sky in late february, early March in the northern hemisphere. So with that little tidbit, I'd like to welcome in scott Anderson to the cube, who is the senior vice president of product management and business operations. That couch base scott welcome. Good to see you. >>Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. >>That's our pleasure. So you've launched couch based cappella if I understand correctly, it's built on couch based server seven which he launched just a few months ago in the middle of the summer. Can you give us an overview of Capella? >>Yeah, absolutely. So couch based Capellas are fully managed databases. Service for enterprise applications. One of the goals of launching Capella and our databases is service offering that we just announced today is about increasing the accessibility of couch base so it's about making it easy for a developer or an enterprise to get up and running in just a few clicks in a couple of minutes Um and about making it more affordable and accessible through the development phase through the test phase, the production phase. So really it's about ease of use having the right offerings aligned to the phase of development that customers in and eventually into the production of their enterprise application leveraging capella and couch based Server seven. >>So let me ask you, I I went pretty deep with ravi on the, on the technical side and I want to understand what makes Capella different from some of the competitive offerings. Is it the sort of the fundamentals that I learned from Ravi about how you guys have have have really done an awesome focus on on on sequel but been able to maintain acid compliance deal with distributed architectural challenges and then bringing that over to database as a service. Is that the fundamental, what are some of the other differentiators? >>Yeah, that that is the fundamental, we have an amazing platform that Roddy and our core engineering team built and we've talked about that and I think Robbie mentioned that the ease of sequel and applying that to a documented oriented database, then combining some of those capabilities with the ease of use, the ability that you can get up and running, signing up for our free trial couple minutes later you've got a database endpoint that is fully managed by couch base. And so we're doing the monitoring, we're doing alerting, we have calls to action based off what events are occurring within the database environment, ensuring it's always available as well as doing kind of the mundane tasks of backup and recovery, uh scaling the environment, upgrades and so forth. So it's really about ease of use, making it um leveraging are incredibly robust, broad platform um and then making that in different consumable model for our customers and developers and getting started really easily. The other thing that we have done is really leverage the best practices over the last 10 or 11 years of some of the largest enterprises in the world using couch based for the mission critical applications. So we've codified those best practices and that's how we keep that service, high performance, always on highly available. And that's one of the core value propositions that were able to bring with Capella. It's really about management capability, global visibility of your clusters coupled with what we believe is the best no sequel database in the marketplace today. >>What about what about cost, total cost of ownership as you scale a lot of times when you scale out, you get dis economies of scale, it's kind of like, you know, you get that negative curve, uh what are you seeing? >>Yeah, we've done a third party benchmark studies which have proven out how we are able to literally scale the environment uh and continue on that curve as you add notes, you're getting that incremental performance that you would expect. The other thing that we do that's really unique within couch bases are multidimensional scaling and this allows you to place our services, things like data index, query, full text search indexes and analytics, you can co locate those on single nodes within a cluster or you can have dedicated notes for each one of those services. The reason that is important is you get work line isolation for those specific services within our cluster. The other thing that you can do is you can match the compute infrastructure to the needs of each one of those services. So some services like query are much more core, compute intensive and that allows you to have a specific instance type that is optimized for that, reducing your costs, indexes where you want very fast performance, you may want to have a higher amount of memory relative to the number of course. So that ability to mix and match the infrastructure with an existing cluster allows us to lower overall costs. That coupled with their blazing fast performance with our in memory architecture allows people to get incredible performance at scale. Um, what we've proven out in the study that I mentioned earlier is we have that linear scalability and you're able to do more for less at the end of the day, you're getting more operations per second per dollar if you want to use that as a metric. >>Got it. Thank you for that. What do customers need to think about when they want to get started with Capela? How difficult is it for people to jump in? >>It is incredibly simple. It's as simple as going to couch base dot com clicking on start your free trial, You're going to that free trial, you provide a minimal set of information for us and it's literally a few clicks and you're going to have a database endpoint within three minutes and that's really been a foundation of, of what we've been focused on over the last 6-9 months is removing any friction we can in the process because our goal is to give a tremendous user experience and get people up and running as quickly as possible. So we're really, really proud of that. And then from a paid offering perspective, we have a number of offerings which are really aligned to the needs of each customer, some individuals who want a larger cluster and they want to be able to pay for that. We've optimized service levels around that in terms of level support and the features that we think are appropriate for a dev cycle, a test cycle and then into production and lastly we will be announcing a number of promotional starter pack bundles, really trying to couple the overall service that we have with Capella with some of our expertise, so helping new users get up and running in terms of things like index definitions, what's the best way to do document design and schema within within couch base. Our end goal is to match these services and bundles with the life cycle of application development. So in my development phase what's the offering for me as I move for production readiness, what services capabilities I need and then production and the ongoing if I expand my use. So we've been really focused on, how do we get people up up and running as quickly as possible and how do we get them to production as quickly as possible at the lowest total cost? >>That's nice. That's a nice accelerant for customers. Um, so as you heard upfront, I did a little research about the name Capella. How did you choose it and why? >>Well, one thing I learned early in my career is naming is not a strong suit of mine. I leave that to John or our chief marketing officer in the overall team. Um, we all have opinions, but I trust John and we went through, I think it was over 60 names, seven rounds of debate to come up with capella, but we want to name of strength. We like the alliteration couch, basic capella together. Um, one of the little facts may have tipped it over is I believe in latin, it means little goats. So we kind of played from the barriers. Always think to jerry rice goat, greatest of all time. So that was a nice play on that also. Um, but I leave it to them and really happy with the overall name, love the liberation, Love some of the hidden meanings within that. Um, and we're really, really excited about getting going. So you wouldn't want me to pick the name. Um, I get a vote. Um, but I would say my overall influence is a little bit lower than where john's is and matt cain, who I know you spoke with previously. >>I love it, jerry rice definitely is a little go because I'm from New England. So of course tom we think tom brady is the big goat. I >>know we've, I grew up in that joe Montana era, so maybe you can take that off line after this interview. We can have our own debate, but I guess super bowl trophies or the ultimate measure at the end of the day. >>Now I've got a little stat for you. So, so Capella is also one of the 88 modern constellations as adopted by the International Astronomical Union. I. E. Not one of the ancient constellations. Pretty clever. Right. >>Exactly. >>Scott is great to have you on the cube. Thanks so much. Really, >>thank you so much. >>All right. And thank you for watching. Thank you for watching. Our pleasure. Thank you much of the cubes coverage of couch based connect 2021. Keep it right there for more great content. Mm mhm

(upbeat music) >> This is Dave Vellante, and I'd like to welcome you back to The Cube's coverage of Couchbase ConnectONLINE, where the theme of this event is Modernize Now. And one of the big announcements is Capella, which of course, as you all undoubtedly know, is the brightest star in the constellation Auriga, which is Latin for Charioteer. Yup, you can find that in the constellation, that constellation in the night sky in late Feb, early March, in the Northern hemisphere. So with that little tidbit, I'd like to welcome in Scott Anderson to The Cube, who's the Senior Vice President of Product Management and Business Operations at Couchbase. Scott, welcome. Good to see you. >> Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. >> Yeah, it's our pleasure. So, you've launched Couchbase Capella. If I understand correctly, it's built on Couchbase server 7, which you launched just a few months ago in the middle of the Summer. Can you give us an overview of Capella? >> Yeah, absolutely. So Couchbase Capella, is our fully managed databases service for enterprise applications. One of the goals of launching Capella and our database as a service offering that we just announced today is, about increasing the accessibility of Couchbase. So, it's about making it easy for a Developer or an Enterprise to get up and running in just a few clicks and a couple of minutes. And about making it more affordable and accessible through the development phase, through the test phase, the production phase. So really it's about ease of use, having the right offerings aligned to the phase of development that a customer's in, and eventually into the production of their enterprise application, leveraging Capella and Couchbase Server 7. >> So let me ask you, I went pretty deep with Ravi on the, the technical side, and I want to understand, what makes Capella different from some of the competitive offerings? Is it the, sort of the fundamentals that I learned from Ravi about how you guysbhave really done a awesome focus on SQL. But been able to maintain acid compliance, deal with distributed architectural challenges, and then bringing that over to database as a service? Is that the fundamental? What are some of the other differentiators? >> Yeah, that, that is the fundamental. We have an amazing platform that Ravi and our core engineering team have built. And we've talked about that, and I think Ravi mentioned that, the ease of SQL and applying that to a documented oriented database. and combining some of those capabilities with the ease of use. The ability that you can get up and running, signing up for our free trial. Couple of minutes later, you've got a database endpoint that is fully managed by Couchbase. And so we're doing the monitoring. We're doing alerting. We have calls to action based off what events are occurring within the database environment, ensuring it's always available, as well as doing kind of some of the mundane tasks of backup and recovery, scaling the environment upgrades and so forth. So it's really about ease of use making it, leveraging our incredibly robust broad platform, and then making that in different consumable model for our customers and developers and getting started really easily. The other thing that we've done, is really leveraged the best practices over the last 10 or 11 years, if some of the largest enterprises in the world using Couchbase for the mission critical applications. So we've codified those best practices. And that's how we keep that service high performant, always on, highly available. And that's one of the core value propositions that we're able to bring with Capella. It's really that management capability, global visibility of your clusters, coupled with what we believe is the best, no SQL database in the marketplace today. >> What about, what about costs total cost of ownership as you scale, a lot of times when you scale out and you get diseconomies of scale, it's kind of like, you know, you get that negative curve. What are you seeing? >> Yeah, we've done third party benchmark studies, which have proven out how we were able to linearly scale the environment and continue on that curve, as you add nodes, you're getting that incremental performance that you would expect. The other thing that we do that's really unique within in Couchbase is, our multi-dimensional scaling. And this allows you to place our services, things like data index query, full-text search, indexes and analytics. You can co-locate those on single nodes within the cluster, or you can have dedicated nodes for each one of those services. The reason that is important is, you get work-life isolation for those specific services within our cluster. The other thing that you can do is, you can match the compute infrastructure to the needs of each one of those services. So some services like query are much more core compute intensive, and that allows you to have a specific instance type that is optimized for that, reducing your cost. Indexes, where do you want very fast performance? You may want to have a higher amount of memory relative to the number, of course. So that ability to mix and match the infrastructure within the existing cluster, allows us to lower overall costs. That coupled with our blazing fast performance with our in-memory architecture, allows people to get incredible performance at scale. What we've proven out in the study that I mentioned earlier is we have that linear scalability, and you're able to do more for less, at the end of the day. You're getting more operations per second, per dollar, if you want to use that as a metric data. >> Thank you for that. What do customers need to think about when they want to get started with Capella? How difficult is it for people to jump in? >> It is incredibly simple. It's as simple as going to couchbase.com Clicking on start your free trial. You go into that free trial. You provide a minimal set of information for us, and it's literally a few clicks and you're going to have a database endpoint within three minutes. And that's really been a foundation of, of what we've been focused on over the last six to nine months is removing any friction we can in the process. Cause our goal is to give a firm a tremendous user experience and get people up and running as quickly as possible. So we're really, really proud of that. And then from a paid offering perspective, we have a number of offerings which are really aligned to the needs of each customer. Some individuals who want a larger cluster and they want to be able to pay for that, we've optimized service levels around that, in terms of level of support and the features that we think are appropriate for a dev cycle, a test cycle, and then inner production. And lastly, we'll be announcing a number of promotional starter pack bundles. Really trying to couple the overall service that we have with Capella, with some of our expertise. So helping new users get up and running in terms of things like index definitions, what's the best way to do document design and schema within Couchbase. Our end goal, is to match these services and bundles with the life cycle of application development. So in my development phase, what's the offering for me, as I move for production readiness, what services capabilities I need and then production and the ongoing, if I expand my use. So we've been really focused on how do we get people up and running as quickly as possible and how do we get them to production as quickly as possible at the lowest total cost. >> That's nice. That's a nice accelerant for, for customers. So as you heard upfront, I did a little research about the name, Capella. How did you choose it and why? >> Well, one thing I learned early in my career is naming is not a strong suit of mine. I leave that to John our Chief Marketing Officer in the overall team. We all have opinions, but I trust John. And we went through, I think it was over 60 names, seven rounds of debate to come up with Capella. But we wanted a name of strength. We liked the alliteration, Couchbase and Capella together. One of the little facts may have tipped it over is, I believe in Latin, it means little goats. So we kind of played, I'm from the bay area. So I was thinking to Jerry Rice, goat, greatest of all times. So that was nice play on that also. But I leave it to them and really happy with the overall name, love the, literation, love some of the hidden meanings within that. And we're really, really excited about getting it going. So you wouldn't want me to pick the name. I get a vote, but I would say my overall influence is a little bit lower than where John's is and, and Matt Cain, who I know you spoke with previously. >> I love it. Jerry Rice definitely is the little goat. I'm from New England. So of course, we think Tom Brady is the big goat. >> I know, I grew up in that Joe Montana era. So maybe you can take that offline after this interview, we're going to have around debate, but I guess a Superbowl trophies are the ultimate measure at the end of the day. >> Oh wait, I got a little stat for you. So, so Capella is also one of the 88 modern constellations as adopted by the international astronomical union. I.e not one of the ancient constellations. Pretty clever, right? >> Yeah, exactly. >> Scott, it's great to have you on the cube. Thanks so much, really appreciate it. >> Thank you so much. I really appreciate it All right. Thank you for watching. Our pleasure. Thank you for watching The Cubes coverage of Couchbase Connect 2021. Keep it right there for more great content. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> This is Dave Vellante, and I'd like to welcome you back to The Cube's coverage of Couchbase ConnectONLINE, where the theme of this event is Modernize Now. And one of the big announcements is Capella, which of course, as you all undoubtedly know, is the brightest star in the constellation Auriga, which is Latin for Charioteer. Yup, you can find that in the constellation, that constellation in the night sky in late Feb, early March, in the Northern hemisphere. So with that little tidbit, I'd like to welcome in Scott Anderson to The Cube, who's the Senior Vice President of Product Management and Business Operations at Couchbase. Scott, welcome. Good to see you. >> Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. >> Yeah, it's our pleasure. So, you've launched Couchbase Capella. If I understand correctly, it's built on Couchbase server 7, which you launched just a few months ago in the middle of the Summer. Can you give us an overview of Capella? >> Yeah, absolutely. So Couchbase Capella, is our fully managed databases service for enterprise applications. One of the goals of launching Capella and our database as a service offering that we just announced today is, about increasing the accessibility of Couchbase. So, it's about making it easy for a Developer or an Enterprise to get up and running in just a few clicks and a couple of minutes. And about making it more affordable and accessible through the development phase, through the test phase, the production phase. So really it's about ease of use, having the right offerings aligned to the phase of development that a customer's in, and eventually into the production of their enterprise application, leveraging Capella and Couchbase Server 7. >> So let me ask you, I went pretty deep with Ravi on the, the technical side, and I want to understand, what makes Capella different from some of the competitive offerings? Is it the, sort of the fundamentals that I learned from Ravi about how you guysbhave really done a awesome focus on SQL. But been able to maintain acid compliance, deal with distributed architectural challenges, and then bringing that over to database as a service? Is that the fundamental? What are some of the other differentiators? >> Yeah, that, that is the fundamental. We have an amazing platform that Ravi and our core engineering team have built. And we've talked about that, and I think Ravi mentioned that, the ease of SQL and applying that to a documented oriented database. and combining some of those capabilities with the ease of use. The ability that you can get up and running, signing up for our free trial. Couple of minutes later, you've got a database endpoint that is fully managed by Couchbase. And so we're doing the monitoring. We're doing alerting. We have calls to action based off what events are occurring within the database environment, ensuring it's always available, as well as doing kind of some of the mundane tasks of backup and recovery, scaling the environment upgrades and so forth. So it's really about ease of use making it, leveraging our incredibly robust broad platform, and then making that in different consumable model for our customers and developers and getting started really easily. The other thing that we've done, is really leveraged the best practices over the last 10 or 11 years, if some of the largest enterprises in the world using Couchbase for the mission critical applications. So we've codified those best practices. And that's how we keep that service high performant, always on, highly available. And that's one of the core value propositions that we're able to bring with Capella. It's really that management capability, global visibility of your clusters, coupled with what we believe is the best, no SQL database in the marketplace today. >> What about, what about costs total cost of ownership as you scale, a lot of times when you scale out and you get diseconomies of scale, it's kind of like, you know, you get that negative curve. What are you seeing? >> Yeah, we've done third party benchmark studies, which have proven out how we were able to linearly scale the environment and continue on that curve, as you add nodes, you're getting that incremental performance that you would expect. The other thing that we do that's really unique within in Couchbase is, our multi-dimensional scaling. And this allows you to place our services, things like data index query, full-text search, indexes and analytics. You can co-locate those on single nodes within the cluster, or you can have dedicated nodes for each one of those services. The reason that is important is, you get work-life isolation for those specific services within our cluster. The other thing that you can do is, you can match the compute infrastructure to the needs of each one of those services. So some services like query are much more core compute intensive, and that allows you to have a specific instance type that is optimized for that, reducing your cost. Indexes, where do you want very fast performance? You may want to have a higher amount of memory relative to the number, of course. So that ability to mix and match the infrastructure within the existing cluster, allows us to lower overall costs. That coupled with our blazing fast performance with our in-memory architecture, allows people to get incredible performance at scale. What we've proven out in the study that I mentioned earlier is we have that linear scalability, and you're able to do more for less, at the end of the day. You're getting more operations per second, per dollar, if you want to use that as a metric data. >> Thank you for that. What do customers need to think about when they want to get started with Capella? How difficult is it for people to jump in? >> It is incredibly simple. It's as simple as going to couchbase.com Clicking on start your free trial. You go into that free trial. You provide a minimal set of information for us, and it's literally a few clicks and you're going to have a database endpoint within three minutes. And that's really been a foundation of, of what we've been focused on over the last six to nine months is removing any friction we can in the process. Cause our goal is to give a firm a tremendous user experience and get people up and running as quickly as possible. So we're really, really proud of that. And then from a paid offering perspective, we have a number of offerings which are really aligned to the needs of each customer. Some individuals who want a larger cluster and they want to be able to pay for that, we've optimized service levels around that, in terms of level of support and the features that we think are appropriate for a dev cycle, a test cycle, and then inner production. And lastly, we'll be announcing a number of promotional starter pack bundles. Really trying to couple the overall service that we have with Capella, with some of our expertise. So helping new users get up and running in terms of things like index definitions, what's the best way to do document design and schema within Couchbase. Our end goal, is to match these services and bundles with the life cycle of application development. So in my development phase, what's the offering for me, as I move for production readiness, what services capabilities I need and then production and the ongoing, if I expand my use. So we've been really focused on how do we get people up and running as quickly as possible and how do we get them to production as quickly as possible at the lowest total cost. >> That's nice. That's a nice accelerant for, for customers. So as you heard upfront, I did a little research about the name, Capella. How did you choose it and why? >> Well, one thing I learned early in my career is naming is not a strong suit of mine. I leave that to John our Chief Marketing Officer in the overall team. We all have opinions, but I trust John. And we went through, I think it was over 60 names, seven rounds of debate to come up with Capella. But we wanted a name of strength. We liked the alliteration, Couchbase and Capella together. One of the little facts may have tipped it over is, I believe in Latin, it means little goats. So we kind of played, I'm from the bay area. So I was thinking to Jerry Rice, goat, greatest of all times. So that was nice play on that also. But I leave it to them and really happy with the overall name, love the, literation, love some of the hidden meanings within that. And we're really, really excited about getting it going. So you wouldn't want me to pick the name. I get a vote, but I would say my overall influence is a little bit lower than where John's is and, and Matt Cain, who I know you spoke with previously. >> I love it. Jerry Rice definitely is the little goat. I'm from New England. So of course, we think Tom Brady is the big goat. >> I know, I grew up in that Joe Montana era. So maybe you can take that offline after this interview, we're going to have around debate, but I guess a Superbowl trophies are the ultimate measure at the end of the day. >> Oh wait, I got a little stat for you. So, so Capella is also one of the 88 modern constellations as adopted by the international astronomical union. I.e not one of the ancient constellations. Pretty clever, right? >> Yeah, exactly. >> Scott, it's great to have you on the cube. Thanks so much, really appreciate it. >> Thank you so much. I really appreciate it All right. Thank you for watching. Our pleasure. Thank you for watching The Cubes coverage of Couchbase Connect 2021. Keep it right there for more great content. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> The last 10 months have forced upon us a new digital reality. If you weren't a digital business, you were basically out of business. Hello everybody. This is Dave Vellante and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we're going to share with you some fresh data from ETR on CIO spending, which is giving us a lot of optimism for 2021. We'll also set forth our thinking on the new digital economy, and really talk a little bit about where we see some of the opportunities and some of the spending and how those shifts are going to occur in the near term and midterm and even long term. Let's bring up sort of the first set of talking points that I want to share with you. 2020 has been a year of instant pivots, as we all know, and it's forced us to march toward a new digital reality, digital transformation, as everybody talks about, has been compressed by two to three years, but it's really been a Petri dish for everybody. Now, earlier this year, and we've been consistent since we first came out with this forecast of minus four to five percent in IT spending this year. The survey data suggests that, and even though Q3 saw a big bounce back in spending in GDP, we've still really maintained that -4 to -5%. We're seeing a comeback in the lockdown and the virus, and as such, we, you know, maintain that conservative forecast. Our current 2% growth for 2021 appears to be conservative based on the latest data we have. It could be as high as four to 5% growth in 2021. And we'll update that formally in January, but hold that thought. As part of that, as I said, we've seen accelerated digital business initiatives, led to really strong pockets in many sectors. We've seen that in video conferencing, in laptops, obviously, we've seen that in certain security sectors that we've detailed, like identity access management, like endpoint, like cloud security, cloud itself, and we've seen a big trend toward application modernization. So those sectors of the business, including those other data sectors, we certainly see the ascendancy of Snowflake, Snowflake closed the day on Friday, evaluation of Snowflake on Friday was now above that of ServiceNow, Snowflake's valuation is currently around the same, just slightly under that of IBM's, think about that. A company that was formed in 2015 is now as valuable almost as IBM, a 100 plus year old company. That's quite amazing to think about, why is that? It's because data now is at the center of the universe, and that's obviously what Snowflake's transformation is all about. The pace of the vaccine distribution appears to be accelerated. But as I said earlier, winter is coming in the Northern Hemisphere, and that's causing some concern. But overall, ETR survey data suggests that there's really positive signs in recovery, and we'll get into that. Companies are learning to leverage the cloud, cloud migration was a big priority in the last 10 months, that, including security, and people are realizing that, "Wow, we can actually change the operating model with cloud and it's helping with our agility." And we're going to show you some data that really supports that. As I kind of alluded to earlier, COVID created this massive digital business proof of concept, and the learnings from that experiment are going to get operationalized in 2021. And it's going to be a rapid year of invention and reinvention. And so that's why we think IT spending could snap back dramatically in 2021. Now ETR, when it does its surveys, will oftentimes do drill downs. And I want to share now with you, the next slide shows some drill downs from the COVID study, ETR since early this year, since March has been doing COVID studies, we've been reporting on that extensively, ETR was really the first to report that whole work from home pivot really, really early on in the cycle. So we use that as sort of a harbinger of things to come. This slide asked organizations in the past 12 months, "What is your thinking on when spending is going to bounce back to 2019 levels?" And that's really what's shown in this chart. So, you know, pre-COVID levels really was the question. "When does your organization expect IT budgets to return to pre-COVID levels?" You can see here on the left-hand side, 11% have said they increased budgets since the start of COVID. And those are the ones that are really in the best position. Certain e-commerce companies, those where COVID was actually a tailwind. 24% said, "We're already back to those 2019 pre-COVID levels." And then you can see as well, approximately 30% say that within 12 months they'll be back. 22% say within 24 months. And I know that's a big chunk of the economy in the CIO spend base, but only 4% that it's going to be more than two years. So a very large portion of the survey base, which is over 1400, suggest that there's optimism in the near term. Now, what we want to show you in the next chart is the factors that really enabled the organizations to be agile and resilient during COVID-19. Now it's no surprise that 84% said that being prepared for a remote workforce. Now, were it not for technology, we really would not have been able to respond to COVID in the way in which we have. And I think everybody really understands that. 44% said business continuity plans as we've reported in the past, many people told us their business continuity was far too DR-focused, they've shifted that focus in the last 10 months, really toward being able to pivot their businesses, and identify new opportunities. And so, that's something that we feel is going to carry through into 2021 and beyond. 39% said C-suite flexibility, I think this is a really important point, where the C-suite recognized the importance of investing in technology, and really understanding that it's now a strategic enabler, of course always has been, but now more than ever. You can see also that 30% said budget flexibility enabled them, and that is a function of we've got low interest rates, many many corporations if not most corporations improved their balance sheets by tapping corporate debt. And only 27% said emerging technologies, I shouldn't say "only", 27% cited emerging technologies as a primary factor that enabled their business resiliency, and I would argue that many of that emerging technologies probably falls into that 84% on that left-hand bar. So overall, you can see that the priorities of CIOs have shifted in the last 10 months, and it's not just going to snap back to where we were pre-COVID. As we've said many times, and many believe, these are permanent changes. Now, you may be asking, "Okay, where is the action going? Where are people spending? What are they adopting as new technologies?" And that's really what we want to show you here in this next slide. So what this slide does, you may recall the net score methodology that ETR uses. Net score is a measure of spending momentum. Basically, what it does is it breaks down those companies that are spending more, or a company, it breaks down the percentage of that company that's spending more versus spending less on a particular technology. So it's really, there's several components to it, one is new adoptions, the other is spending more, the other is flat, spending less, or retiring. So what we're isolating here in this chart is the new adoptions. And you can see here, that we've highlighted a few areas, container orchestration and container platforms. You can see those high, and we're showing three survey bases, October 19, July 20, which is the blue, and October 20, which is the yellow. And yes, while the spending is down from some of the previous highs, you can see the elevated levels of container orchestration, container platforms, machine learning and AI, and robotic process automation. What is that telling you? It says that people are modernizing their applications portfolios, they're applying machine learning and machine intelligence to get more value from data, AI plus data plus cloud is that new innovation cocktail that we've talked about a lot. And then we've also talked about the automation mandate, that we haven't seen the productivity improvements in the US and Europe over the last two decades that we would've liked to seen, so there really is an automation mandate, that's what the RPA adoption is all about. So really trying to drive those productivity gains. Now interestingly, you may look at this slide and say "Wow, look at how low cloud is. We hear all the time that cloud migration is a big priority, why is cloud so low?" So let's bring up the next chart and address that. This chart takes that increased spend portion of the net score, and remember I said it's broken down adoptions, spend more, spend less, et cetera, this is the increased spend, the spend more. Now look at cloud computing, it's up in the 46% range, that's 46% of the customers that responded in the cloud computing sector said they're increasing spending on cloud. So how do you interpret that from the previous slide? They're already in the cloud, that's why the new adoptions was low, 'cause everybody's doing some form of cloud, but this is a real tell sign. People are dramatically increasing their spending in cloud relative to some of these other areas, of course, same with container orchestration, container platforms, all about developer productivity, write once, run anywhere type of thing, it hedges for multicloud, bringing on-prem infrastructure into the cloud or on-prem apps into the cloud, that's what sort of you're seeing there with container. So this is the sort of 40% club, cloud computing, containers, machine learning and AI up at 40% spending more, and then again, robotic process automation. So, that sort of explains the cloud component, and you can see the container, the container orchestration and the automation piece also at very elevated levels. Let me wrap here by talking about some factors to watch, and I'll highlight them on this slide. Look, the propensity toward a lockdown definitely creates uncertainty and caution, you've got a new administration, there seems to be more of a willingness to lock down, the slowdown the economy, there's still uncertainty around fiscal stimulus, although it looks like that's going to be addressed hopefully in the near term. But there's still uncertainty around that. While that does potentially dampen spend for Q4, because of that uncertainty, it also creates further pent-up demand. As I said before, there's been 10 months of learnings from this forced march to digital transformations, and that is informing 2021 tactical plans, and then even longer term plans, long term planning has changed. When you talk to the C-suite and the conversation's going on at boards of directors, speed and the ability to turn on a dime, they're now fundamental principles that are being designed into businesses. This is a mainstay of the digital economy, we are entering a new era of digital business, and there's going to be the haves and the have nots. And the have nots are going to disappear, and the haves are going to do better. As I say, boards and CEOs, they got a glimpse of the future in 2021, but it was forced on them, it really wasn't planned. But it was an awesome Petri dish and experiment to understand what works, what doesn't, and they're now going to double down on those things that are sure bets. And those that don't act, as I say, they're going to be out of business. At the macro, yes, you've got, again, haves and have nots, and the have nots are going to potentially dampen, you're going to see companies that really got hurt, are going to constrict spending, no question, and that could dampen spending at the macro. But in our view, the survivors are going to prop up spending in 2021, it could be significantly above our initial estimates of 2%, could be as high as double that, maybe even four to 5% in 2021. So we're going to continue to watch that, we'll continue to check out the survey data, we'll have a complete update in the January survey, and in the meantime, we'll continue to report on the latest trends, both from the CUBE community, and also from ETR. So that's it for now, thanks for watching, don't forget, all these episodes are available on podcasts, wherever you listen. I publish weekly on SiliconAngle.com and Wikibon.com, check out ETR+ for all the survey action, and please do comment on my LinkedIn posts, you can also reach me @DVellante on Twitter, or you can email me at David.Vellante@SiliconAngle.com. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR, thanks for watching, everybody, see you next time. (calm music)

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

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

>> from Austin, Texas. It's Theo Cube, covering pure storage. Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by pure storage. >> Welcome back to Austin. I'm Lisa Martin. With Day Volante were a pure accelerate 2019 the fourth annual event. Getting bigger and bigger and more customers on the Cube. Very excited to welcome the C I. O of Kensington Swan. Nigel Stevenson. Nigel. Welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you. Thanks. >> Thanks for coming all the way up here or down here, Up here from New Zealand. Give us our audience. A little bit of an overview of Kensington Swan and specifically about your role is CEO. >> Sure again, Just once a top tier law firm in New Zealand. We've got a bit of an announcement from last month Were about to combine with sentence, which you might know more familiar from a brain kind of perspective. Slightly larger than what we are at the moment. We're, ah, a few 100 staffs, but between the officers and opened and Wellington with the focus spawn corporate commercial legal practice is so top tier or high in law expertise. >> So you've been there about three years. Give us a little bit of a picture of Kensington's I T department applications workloads. What's going on? There >> must be a pretty similar Thio emotional films or proficient service. Is firms actually a similar with the coming firms to smell the the most common tools we use around the PR, the practice management systems that we have on in production of documents for the work that we provide to our clients, maintaining those keeping them, searching for them, Actually, in all the emails and everything else that goes along every single matter that we do from a compliance perspective, we need to keep all of that and make sure it's safe and sound and easily searchable. >> So big drivers you got, you got the clients, you got the lawyers, you got the paralegals. It's this machine running you got, you know, to say confidentiality compliance. What are the big drivers in the business that are affecting I t. Strategy? I >> think, especially in the provision service is sick. Just continue to modernize. We've hit systems, and after the last decision, things tighten up a bit for a while, and then we fed a large push over the last few years to really bring things up. Today, bring it Bring it, Making more current on relevant to what's out there. With that, we can then bring on other applications. And I and other tools that would really help us Thio drive the business and different directions >> is the first time your accelerator Yeah, let's talk infrastructure. So it s so paint a picture. What's, uh what's it look like? You know you're here. Obviously you're pure customer, right? So what's the storage infrastructure look like? And >> we've had to guess what you would be a pretty typical infrastructure for many, many years with the two data center model. VM were storage observers and sewn on, then replicated across from a d R perspective to the other data center. They know we've gone through a big decision around. Where do we go with it? Do we take that out to the cloud? Do we keep it on Prem? Do we keep the $2 centers one way? We've ended up deciding this to go with the single Production Data center based in Auckland were we've got some d our capability. They want an office, but then plane to scale up to the cloud. So we've got enough compute to keep us going. The systems that we've got a cz we grow, we'll move. >> So you had to replicated data centers. Essentially. Is that right? You know, expensive. And then you've essentially now got a main data center. You've got some a little bit of lightweight infrastructure for D R purposes. Is that right? Way? >> Previously since he had two of everything. Well, more than two of everything but everything we head of the production, we head of the second read absent a lot of set there a semi idle for quite a lot of time. And as you say, that's quite expensive to have Ah, lot of equipment sitting there not really been used. So moving Maur to single data Seena Mol replicating some of the infrastructure, but not not the full sit. It's moving. >> So the decision to stay on Prem versus Go all in the cloud talk to us about some of the business drivers that led you to say we're going to stay on from and within that what elevated cure storage to the obvious choice >> sure is a little bit if it's old cloud model and I think that's really helped you guess influence were the on prim had we has gone as well, and we'll get that. Get that sick and weird things like the scalability off the simplicity, not having to have very experience experienced stories technicians on and so on. I think back to my days fishing nightie and putting together other brains of storage unit was a multi month process. Certifications after certifications just to be out a plug it together and then configure and coat. The story's all right. You know what the cloud and what we found with pure is. It's just become really simple. Within a couple of hours of the array arriving that was wrecked, it was turned on. It was cut into the pool and presented through TV anyway, so I'm just really, really simple. >> All the bit twiddling of the past really didn't do much for your business, obviously, but then you it shows you chose toe stay on Prem. Many law firms d'oh! Just because of the privacy and confidentiality And yeah, they had some color to that. This is a couple >> of ingles thio. If there's one being performance, wait. I need to make sure that the lawyers get the performance that they need they charging six minute increments like like most. If they can't work, then the building they're not working up providing to the clients and the clients. Also that work done at a at a good speed and returned to them as quickly as possible. And as the world has moved more to that client centric approach, you know, delivering to the client's becomes ultimate impairment to what we do. So performance was definitely key economic self. When we looked at cloud in on a price per gig per month with pure, it worked out very competitive. It wasn't quite there. Toe move into the cloud. New Zealand. We don't have the AWS or is your database data centers based on his own. They're all in Australia, So there's Ah Leighton see aspect of going many thousands of miles across the under the undersea cables to get to that data on payments. Right there, it's fast, is connected waken different, >> so you have essentially replaced your you're spinning disc with flash. Is that correct? >> Yes, that was on the other parts of it. No, you wanted to get something that was definitely modern and set us for the future. For quite a number of years Way didn't look a spinning disc. It'll weigh. Just win. Looked at what flesh rays were available. Way have head spinning this, but I definitely wanted to get your flesh. >> How >> important was the Evergreen model to you? Is it is it how much of it is marketing and how much is it? Is it Is it big business impact for you? >> Quite a few other places of work We've hit that three year or five year support moral challenge where all of a sudden the support can hockey stick up on become really, really expensive to carry on the arrays. So one of the other drivers was from an environmental environmental perspective of if you're gonna throw their equipment out after five years, but it's still working fine. Yeah, that's not really great on the environment. So with the fresh perspective as well as you have a green be able to maintain and keep their equipment running and going for longer than five years without a shop up left on the cost was really, really important. >> Sustainability was important to you guys. So you before we might live, you mentioned that you guys have been pure customers since about December of 2018. So about 10 months or so. So those lawyers that are billing every few minutes I have to get access to data because the clients are demanding kit. What's it been? Their reaction? Thio, the performance that you're delivering to them and a new correlation with revenue that business has made because of the decision to stay on from? >> I'll tell you what the best thing about it is. I don't complain that things are slow anymore, you know? So they say, Nighty, if you're not hearing any issues, that you're doing a good job and I would definitely in that camp The system's running significantly faster than what they were previously on. That was on a five year old array that was reasonable. Let's start as well. So the league Ford has been really recognizable from a performance perspective, so >> you don't get the Atta boy, but you just don't get the grief. >> Yeah, yeah, it's not very often that people come and say that you know, with regulations, and that since a nightie, >> but it sounds like it also simplified your management you described it used to take a long time Thio provisioning array before now it's sort of same day or a part of a portion of what have you done with that additional resource? Did you did your rift people? Did you redeploy them? >> You take the same style of if you do move things to the cloud. You know, with any type of outsourcing model messages freeing up time on the staff have got now work on other things. You know, we're slowly moving up the stack on a valu ed perspective of what we deliver, doubling more into automation integration, digital contract processing, the area that I think we should be working in rather than tweaking the nuts and bolts. Well, that that's where I started. So, yeah, it was good career passing the time >> being able to get to that value at is something that we talked with a lot of customers about that absolutely critical about not spending so much time at managing something. I want to get my job done. So a number of announcements came out today. I'm just curious to get your take on, for example, this kind of customer force that Dave and I were talking about with Charlie Giancarlo their CEO. Just a minute ago about this bridge to hybrid club, you mentioned an acquisition or a merger coming with Denton's. How would something like this hybrid bridge that here announced with AWS How might that be a facilitator of the merger? Or maybe even it's the IittIe foundation that you've established with Pierre. That's going to be a great facilitator of that pending merger. >> I think one of the slides and the Maquis know this morning talked about the on Priam in the cloud world being quite separate and we found that it is We've we've looked Whenever we go out to market, we'll look at both options and take your best of breed approach. Thio what, within a cure or subscribed way got into some cloud solutions. I'm not sure if Aladdin mention brains at all, but s so we have got cloudy >> from our standpoint, but your corporate standpoint, >> So we've got a bit of both, but it has been a bit hard to bridge the two, even even from a backup d R perspective on then also from scaling the the on cream applications into the cloud. Some some things just work better in the cloud or a better architect in the clouds. Fishy, some remote excess solutions were. If we've got issues, we want that separate, Will they dear? Yet between what else? Systems and the excess for staff on this kind of space that we've we've built in two for that be Never join those worlds a lot more seamlessly and through the same management consoles and just gonna make life a lot easier will be out of scale back and forward so we can move the data. I remember years and years ago talking to storage vendors and saying, Well, where can we can't replicate? No, Dad are up to a different brand or a different service In this case with the adoption or on sort of cloud, that's still very prevalent. >> Yes, So I mean, I deal. You'd like a common management framework control playing data plane, Back up framework. Is that right? Is that an objective between cloud and on Prem? I mean, it definitely helps, >> but the other things was mentioned in the keynote is around the availability of skilled people you think with my generation and I started often stopped supporting, then work my way through infrastructure and project management, team management and son. The people coming out of university now don't really have that same career path there from a slot in somewhere up the scared, the stick on >> very started python. And we're working on >> them or in the development of spice rather than the infrastructure space. The ability to find staff that have the knowledge off the system is getting hotter and hotter. Eso so the cloud moral, the almost storage is a service on the on prime since you cut through that and it means that you don't need those staff with the commonality of the tools that also helps us. Well, you don't have to serve someone who's years and years training and a new solution to be out of them have the confidence to move into it. >> What do >> you actually installing from frump? Yours? It is a vile storage block storage combination. We've got the X series of race. Okay, they're going for performance, obviously. And, um, because I was thinking in the cloud, you might you might be more interested in object store because of, you know, your document heaviness. But it depends on the merger, I guess. Where you guys go? >> Yeah, the you mentioned before on this some data sovereignty concerns around. We're that Donald stays. And that's why I think a lot of the law firms it probably are keeping some of their infrastructure on from so for sovereignty, we expect in performance. If it is the air, it's it is performing. The cloud can form in different ways, but having a bit of both gives you really good choice, that best of breed model >> with pure storage. You got the foundation as this acquisition, and this merger comes forward that everything's in place. Feel pretty confident about that. Yeah, we've >> got a lot of work to dio over the next few months while we adjust. What? We've got a software perspective to align with the intense global software suite. But I'm pretty confident that it can be delivered really well. >> So what's in the C I ose mind these days? You know, security cloud hybrid strategies, alignment with the business. What do your top three? >> I think like a mission before I'm really trying to kind of lift what we do to deliver value to the business. It's been John what type of business it is, but it can be seen as a cost center way. Really want to be out? Be more involved in in what, in our case, the lawyers are doing. The main project that we've got on the moment is automating legal processes not to replace any people but to augment what they do on to provide them better tools, more efficient tools. Talks that the younger lawyers, when they come in, can follow their way through and learn what their process is. Also overlaying the legal aspects around there as well. So it's not just online form. It's a it's a training guide. It's It's everything for each of those processes that >> you're deploying any machine learning, artificial intelligence, machine intelligence and in that regard yet is that we haven't quite got >> there. It's definitely on the list. Some of the things that would liketo look at those things, like machine readable software to go through documents, pullout snippets. A lot of time lawyers will spend have to read through a lot of material fine key bits of information and extract that to the news within the documents that we produce, even in simple process, is still doing that they loaned from the rial complex 56 page construction contracts. There's a There's a lot that we could potentially help to find that information for them when it comes into things like he discovery for litigation in the old days. Know that wheel in a truckload of >> paper file boxes? Guys must have loved that building at six minute increments >> way. Get your hard drive with terabytes of data. It gonna troll through all of that and that there's some real space that good I toes can help cut through that significantly faster than your standard kind of funnel based such fools. If >> you think you think software robots have a place like robotic process automation are, I think >> way we're going with it is Thea Pair. You can fit in between the human process. We're mapping out more from a business process. Perspective were there's gonna be some educational steps some human steps mopey a steps on eventually get through an outcome of delivering what the lawyers need for the clients. >> So last question is that I have is, you know, what way do all these shows we do like 100 events a year, everybody you know, the vendors tell you how great they are and what we always like to ask the practitioners your experience with pure relative toe other, you know, stories. And you know, the name names. But just is it substantively different? How much? I guess I ask you again. How much is marketing versus substantive business value for you as a practitioner? >> Yeah. So we've only had the array since December. One of things. I did a case study for Pure just recently in one of things that highlighted and there was the support. When you go on to a new vendor or choose any any different path, you're taking that kind of risk in the step into the unknown way did have an issue a few weeks after we put the first Korean on they came in during Christmas break were we were all off in our case at the beach, which is bit different in the Southern Hemisphere. But they came in flawlessly sort of the issue out gotta back working. Yeah, without necessarily having to do anything apart from let them in the building on, and that really gives the confidence and what they do, how they can deliver going forward. >> I think there's a lot of value and sharing that these things don't always go very smoothly. But you need to have established that relationship with that partner that can be rapidly deployed to help. Ultimately, I'm sure those lawyers either want to start building every three minutes. They want to be able to build more every six minutes. So never a dull moment, Nigel. In your world. But we thank you so much for joining David me on the Cuban. Maybe next year we'll be talking about how a I is helping. Hopefully clients achieve better results. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you, per day. Volante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube?

>> Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back to Las Vegas. We're in the Sands right now at AWS re:Invent. Seven kind of satellite venues also encompassing this show with 40,000 plus attendees. This show getting bigger and better than ever, and theCUBE back for out seventh AWS re:Invent. Along with Justin Warren, I'm John Walls. Good to have you have you here in the Sands along with Holger Reisinger who's the SVP of Large Enterprise Solutions at Jabra. And Holger thanks for joining us here on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> I think with all this noise we could use some headsets right now, right? >> I totally agree. >> I think we could, yeah. Alright, let's talk about the, it's a situation we've all faced, right? You're making a call about a particular problem to a company you get into the call center, your focus right now is making that interaction work. To make it go smoothly, to make it go well. Tell us what Jabra is doing to make us hang up that phone and feel a lot better about that experience. So, first and foremost, when customers are calling contact center operations these days they have been on a pretty intense journey, on a digital journey collecting a lot of information. So when they call us, it's because it really is important to them, it matters. For the agent that means that the call is much more complex because we have a lot of systems in place that automate basic conversations, maybe handled by a robot, so when it hits an agent then it's probably a more heated conversation, more emotional. And this is where we try to make a difference with out devices. >> Yeah, so tell us more about that. I mean Jabra is well known for being a headset manufacturer and you're doing a lot of work with software. We were talking just before the segment about some of what you're doing there around sentiment analysis which is pretty interesting. But a lot of what you're talking about here is around people and process and less about the technology. So, what's Jabra's vision for your role wtih helping customers about that entire experience and not just about the technology? >> Well I would say it's always a combination of technology. When it comes to people it's about behavior, and then when it comes to being the face to the customers maybe using the opportunity to get engaged with your customers by them escalating something to you. I think it's about culture, how you want your company to be portrayed in the public. So I would say it's always a combination of those things. Our devices per definition we call them variable technology. They are personal devices. They are more and more intelligent nowadays, right? So they're not just an accessory to a phone system transmitting human audio. They are now a business critical element of the whole infrastructure. The are digital. They are intelligent. And they can probably also listen to how people say things and not just what has been said in that conversation. >> So what is it about Jabra's technology that augments that human experience? So, I'm calling an agent, and I want to talk to them about a problem which is very personal to me, sometimes I'm grumpy about it because I've had a bad experience. So what is it about Jabra's technology that helps that agent to resolve the issue so that I, again as John said, that I walk away from that experience and I feel good about myself? >> Yes. So first of all this happens because we are integrated into something like Amazon Connect, right? Amazon Connect running on AWSS, a lot of technology in the backend working for that situation so you can get the call transcribed. You can look for certain key words. This is very much about what people are saying. We can provide very high intelligibility or clarity of human voice. So we have algorithms, AI technology that can also listen to how people say things. So there's a big difference if you apply let's say irony or sarcasm. So that is an information we can pass on to the agent to be more alert, to be more immersed in the conversation he has with the customer. And this is mainly coming by the signal quality we deliver thorough our devices. So we have crystal clear human voice. We can stream that as raw information directly to the cloud, and it can be immediately analyzed and handled there. >> And can you detect tone? Or emotion, sentiment, those kinds of things? >> Yes, exactly. >> If my volume goes up, or I can say the same thing three different ways, and you can discern maybe my emotional tone by assigning what? >> That's exactly what we are doing. So we can extract human sentiment from human voice. And it doesn't require a lot of data, sometimes one and a half two seconds are enough. It's language independent by the way. So that's really exciting. So we are providing proof of concept where you can as a new KPI for the contact center let's say measure agent friendliness against customer anger. So instead of doing a lot of recording and transcription, analytics, you can measure that in real time and show it as a graph in front of the agent, and the agent can adjust to that conversation. >> Now, there's a lot of face-to-face going on here, right? We have 40,000 people; a lot of pressing to the flesh. But as you know, I mean there's a lot of communication and a lot of meetings that are migrating online, right? So I assume you're pretty active in that space as well. >> Sure. So I mean, you're now leaving the contact center space and in general, saying having online conversations, online collaboration not just between agent. Yes, I mean that's how our core business. We are the leader in unified communication. In the old days it was you and me talking, having conversation. Now you collaborate; you share applications. You use technology giants like Amazon Chime. You might add video to it. So we deliver the crystal clear audio for these type of collaboration situations. >> As someone who lives on the other side of the world it's quite handy having these remote technologies to be able to converse with my colleagues up here in the Northern Hemisphere. So certainly being able to hear them clearly is quite important. >> But there's also an issue associated with that, right? I mean we put people into open offices because we want them to collaborate more locally, and that actually causes a problem for most of the people like here in these surroundings, it's extremely noisy. So I have difficulties to right now concentrate on the questions you are asking me. And it's the same thing in an open office, right? So you try to focus first and foremost on the conversation you are having with the person on the line. So we need to help you to basically cancel out the surrounding noise. At the same time we want to provide privacy for that dialog so we also have to reduce the noise in that conversation that the person on the phone we are talking to feels safe and secure about the conversation he is having with me. So managing noise in this open office environment, managing noise on the line is the key technology we are dealing with, and our devices are providing. >> So you're here at AWS. You're here clearly talking about your partnership with AWS and your use of cloud technologies. So what would you like to see from Amazon that would help you realize the vision for Jabra? >> So I mean we have a very close cooperation with Amazon and pushing Connect, and pushing digital contact centers. Pushing the ease of making things more digital, and by that easy to use as a company, but also to understand as a user of that technology. This is exactly the direction we want to want to be and want to go. Because our devices are mainly digital nowadays. I mean there's a lot of computing that is happening in the device in order to get the best sound the best pick-up of human voce, but also provide crystal clear sound when we receive that audio. So anything Amazon is doing to drive things digital is definitely in our favor. But also what we like to do more is engaging with Amazon developers. So our strategy is to be very open with any technology, including the one from Amazon, being agnostic to what our joint customers are using, providing SDKs and APIs for developers that are simple for them to use. And them building together a great solution for out joint customers. >> You know we always like to close down with the thought about where do you go from here? Or what hurdle do you want to get over next? Cause you've talked about a lot of fantastic capabilities that you already have, what do you want to do better? And how will AWS help get you there? >> So I mean provide the right information exactly to the context the caller and the agent is in. That we can really augment AI and all the technology that works in the backend with the brain of the agent and with the user. So make it easy for them have great conversations with each other. Augment computer intelligence and human intelligence for great customer conversations, ultimately leading to better satisfaction. >> And how does AWS play into that then? >> I mean that's the data center. This is where all the information is sitting. It can become audible. It can be over-layed to the conversation the agent is having so it can provide useful information while we are listening to the customer because our hearing is very powerful. It's faster than our vision. It is multitasking; we can have 1.6 conversation at a time so we can listen to a machine, we can listen to the person we are talking to, and we can provide smarter information and make better decisions based on that. >> I kind of feel like we're having 50 conversations at once right now, right? >> Yeah, that's challenging of us for sure. >> Holger thanks for being with us. >> Thanks for having me guys. >> We appreciate that. Thanks for walking us through it. >> Thanks >> We're at AWS re:Invent, and we are theCUBE, and we're live in Las Vegas. (electronic music)

>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. This is theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2018 here in Las Vegas. I'm Stu Miniman joined by my two guest hosts that have spent a bunch of time with us this week. John Mark Troyer and Justin Warren. Thank you, gentlemen for joining us for the wrap. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> We get to have a lot of fun. We get to hang out with community people, geek out on a lot of stuff. This is also a really good checkpoint for a lot of the IT industry. VMware, 800-pound gorilla in the data center. I put out one tweet that was like the 800-pound gorilla in the data center or the 800-pound gorilla in the cloud. The partnerships matured quite a bit, in my mind, for the last year. That was one of the big things that I've seen. RDS on-premises is definitely the thing that sticks out to me the most. John, let's start with you as to, checkpoint from last year. What impressed you? What are they making progress with? Let's start there. >> I think the RDS announcement was maybe even undersold here. We'll see in the coming months what actually happens and if everything works the way it's supposed to work. I think a lot of people who are putting chips down on various outcomes and scenarios in cloud world did not cover that one space in the roulette wheel. Cause that's actually pretty interesting. Stu, I kind of see this as a year of promises kept. Some promises that were made in years past are starting to come out. This multi-cloud world seems more real. VMware's relationships with various clouds and the hints that were thrown are there's more to come. It seems real. The cloud starting to come back on-prem. Both EBS on-prem and now Project Dimension with VMware being a service provider. I've talked to a number of vendors and you and I, Stu. Some are here on theCUBE. People starting to do more managed services from the cloud back into your data center. I see the multi-cloud world working and then this kind of blurring of on-prem and cloud even more. That's kind of what I'm seeing. >> Yeah, I've got to agree. It's that idea that cloud is a state of mind. It's not a location. >> We say it's an operating model at it's core, right? >> Right, yeah, and I think we're seeing a lot of those ideas come to fruition now that you can operate like a cloud on-site. It's how you run things, it's not where exactly you put it. With the multi-cloud world, like you said, we can have, some of it can be on-site, some of it can be in one cloud, another cloud, lots of different clouds. Some of it will be at the edge. We're seeing a lot of growth in edge computing, which is essentially just another way of doing on-site. Being able to use the same tools, and that, for me, is the idea around the RDS announcement. It's the same thing that you're used to in public cloud. Now I can do that on-site. We're seeing a real cross-pollination. You can take VMware and run that in cloud. You can take things from the cloud and now run it back on site. It's pretty exciting. >> This is awesome. We have an easy button. Customers just push a button. Any data, anywhere, moves all over the place. Laws of physics, throw them out. Come on, guys. I need some critical analysis here. The trope that I would have, always, when I became an analyst an eight years ago was like well, if it wasn't for management and security we would have this all sorted out. The multi-cloud world is made progress, but when I still look at it. RDS, super exciting. The thing that's most exciting about it? That's on-premises, it's doesn't have connection to Amazon, but I'm doing cool things with the exact same kind of bits there so I can do it here or there. Doesn't mean, necessarily here and there, or spread between there, because petabytes of data don't just float across the ether. We're still using things like the AWS Snowballs when we have to move a lot of data. Yes, it's matured, but when I look at the management of multi-cloud and how simple, there was a great comment from a company that's been around for a couple of decades on theCUBE and he said look, the new companies all say we're going to make this super easy. It's like well, because you don't have the trusted brand to set beside, simple would be nice but cloud isn't simple. Multi-cloud sure isn't simple. >> There was, probably, a surfeit of single panes of glass here at the show. Any app, any cloud, any whatever. Single pane of glass. We'll blueprint it, we'll manage it, we'll do it. That does seem like that probably isn't that real world. >> Multiple single panes of glass. >> Please, Justin, give me a touchpoint. When you talk to an administrator, how do they spell single pane of glass? >> Oh yes, P-A-I-N, yes, a single glass of pain. That's generally what it is. I think that the manageability and the operational side of things, that is where there's a lot more development required. Cloud is, yes it's a state of mind. It's a very different way of operating and a lot of the tools, particularly in the VMware community, a lot of what people are used to here is very much point and click. It's not really as automated as it would be in, say, developer land. I spend a lot of time with developers and a lot of what they're used to is all programmatic, it's driven from the API. We're seeing movement with things like PowerShell and VMware administrators are getting more comfortable with the idea of scripting and so on. But they're not programmers. They still need GUI tools. They still need things that are able to do point and click. Some things are better in that environment. I think we still have a long way to go with things around automation. The other thing that still has a long way to go, I think, is security. Security particularly around the networking of how you inter-connect with all of these things and do so securely at scale. There is a lot of invasion and work that's required to actually make that happen. >> Absolutely. John, do you have some comment there? >> I was going to say I think you're right. Especially on all those points. The community booth back here behind us this year had a VMware code section, which was jam-packed the whole time. For the first time. VMware's been trying to speak to developers for 10 years and not quite connecting. Now, these weren't developers back there, these were admins, and they're not going to ever be programmers, but they're going to start to learn more programmatic paradigms, automation, things like that. It was super popular this year. >> Luckily, we don't actually need programmers anymore, John, cause it's coding, which means you're really just coping, pasting, and modifying things and everything. Heck, I've even interviewed marketing people that are like oh, server-less, I can build with that stuff. Super easy. I don't think we need everybody to learn to even code, as it were. We bridged that gap. It's matured, it's become easier. They pulled over some of the, it was the EMC code team. It's half that team over there. They had some good gamification. >> Stu, I am an optimist and I think the glass is half full or 40% full at least. We've done some CUBE stuff, theCUBE's been all over the world here this spring, all through 2018. I've done a couple shows with you. The difference that I saw this year was that the use cases were real and the time to value was real. People are implementing cloud projects, multi-cloud projects, and they're getting to a good milestone within weeks or months. Admittedly, these are big, multi-national companies, so it's really at the top level where they have the army of people to do it, but sometimes these projects were very small and they were real. They weren't just marketing hokum up on stage. Of course, they're not the full enterprise in a couple of weeks, but that's the difference this year, I see, Stu. I'm 40% full. >> Absolutely, I'd say look. Energy level was up. Two years ago it kind of hit a nadir. It was doom and gloom. We were all over at the eye candy bar saluting the great run that VMware had and wondering who the next CEO was been. Now, energy level's back up. Investment in the ecosystem, oh my gosh. I don't think I've seen this many parties ever at a VMworld. We got to talk about something other than cloud so give me your non-cloud takeaways from the show. Areas that people should learn more about, things you saw in the ecosystem or from VMware or the community. >> I think that's one of the things I've noticed here at the show. Wandering around the show floor, unlike some of the other shows where it's we will have a storage show or we'll have a backup show. There's a lot more balance this year. There seems to be a good mix of some of everything. I think that it shows that in order to run a successful IT shop, you actually need to have a balance of, you need some backup, you need some data recovery, you need to have some software, you need some monitoring, you need to have security options. Go and have a look at all of the different vendors that are at a show like this to be able to make sure you have a portfolio approach to how you run things. >> Totally. I remember there were a couple of years, four or five years ago, it was like oh, it's VM storage world. >> Yeah. >> OK, yeah. John? >> There is a lot of storage here, but the storage is all connected to the cloud now. I think if you look at some of the big booths and some of the start-ups who have gotten funding recently. Large rounds. Cohesity, Datrium, Rubrik, folks like that, they're delivering on promises made in earlier years. Not particularly like oh wow, I never thought of, but this was the vision that we laid out and now we're delivering it this year. Big rounds of funding, big customer movement, connection to the cloud and solid, interesting DR as a service and data, as opposed to storage, ideas. I thought that was one of the more interesting aisles this year over there in the booths. >> To riff on what you said about developers and the bridge to the code idea, we see Puppet is here at the show, HashiCorp is here for the first time. >> Docker's there, of course. >> Docker's here. >> C & CF had a booth. >> Yep, C & CF had a booth. These are people that you wouldn't have expected to see at a VMware show in years past. >> One thing that struck me is companies with a mission for good. Pat Gelsinger kind of sets the bar. Talked about it in his keynote. Do better, do good, sets that example. He climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro for charity earlier this year. They had Malala up on stage with Sanjay Poonen. I did a couple of interviews here which were inspiring. Mission-driven companies and great to see the infrastructure in software companies being like hey, we're enabling and helping it. That was one to me. Takeaways from the community? Other things as we get to our wrap? >> I do wonder about that point. Just to add a little, slightly critical note on that. I think that there has been a bit of a tech lash, a bit of a backlash against tech companies. I wonder whether, I would like to see more from tech companies to show that this is real. That that social conscience is a real thing and it isn't just a bit of marketing that they've spray painted on to the front of the company. The fact that we had Malala here giving a keynote indicates that there is a commitment to it. I would want to see that carry through for the next couple of years, at least, to show that that sort of thing is real. And certainly, from the rest of the ecosystem, I expect that we're going to see a lot more. >> Diversity in the community, absolutely. I do realize we have three white guys of a certain age sitting here. We try to add diversity. I had my first European host on the program. Lisa's been on a lot this week. We're building out our bench, we're looking to add diversity. John, yeah, the community. >> Community, again, yeah, community was good this year. A lot of old faces have stayed around, which is really interesting but also people have left and come back. You saw people who have gone into the AWS and Microsoft ecosystems coming back in here. Again, some of those old faces. Also, new faces. Global diversity from the southern hemisphere and from other countries that you wouldn't expect are here today. That was super interesting. I do see a lot of energy, a lot of excitement about their careers going forward. I do see that tech needs to be, there was some symbolic do-good things here. But I mean, Justin is a little bit involved in your own home country about how the government has the power with technology to do good or bad. I think that may be an emerging thing that we see here now as you get a layer down of not only charity work but the impacts of technology. I bet we'll end up talking about that next year, Stu. >> Guys, we could start talking for a lot longer. The good news is I know how to get in touch with you. For our audience, by the way, you can hit us all up on Twitter, through various social channels. Jtroyer, jpwarren, I'm of course @stu. That's just S-T-U. Blue Cow is on Instagram. Follow the adventures of Blue Cow, showing where Justin's going all over the place. Thanks so much for joining us. Great coverage here. This community's where I get a lot of my guest hosts and still, it's like homecoming coming to this place. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (electronic tones)

>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. This is theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2018 here in Las Vegas. I'm Stu Miniman joined by my two guest hosts that have spent a bunch of time with us this week. John Mark Troyer and Justin Warren. Thank you, gentlemen for joining us for the wrap. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> We get to have a lot of fun. We get to hang out with community people, geek out on a lot of stuff. This is also a really good checkpoint for a lot of the IT industry. VMware, 800-pound gorilla in the data center. I put out one tweet that was like the 800-pound gorilla in the data center or the 800-pound gorilla in the cloud. The partnerships matured quite a bit, in my mind, for the last year. That was one of the big things that I've seen. RDS on-premises is definitely the thing that sticks out to me the most. John, let's start with you as to, checkpoint from last year. What impressed you? What are they making progress with? Let's start there. >> I think the RDS announcement was maybe even undersold here. We'll see in the coming months what actually happens and if everything works the way it's supposed to work. I think a lot of people who are putting chips down on various outcomes and scenarios in cloud world did not cover that one space in the roulette wheel. Cause that's actually pretty interesting. Stu, I kind of see this as a year of promises kept. Some promises that were made in years past are starting to come out. This multi-cloud world seems more real. VMware's relationships with various clouds and the hints that were thrown are there's more to come. It seems real. The cloud starting to come back on-prem. Both EBS on-prem and now Project Dimension with VMware being a service provider. I've talked to a number of vendors and you and I, Stu. Some are here on theCUBE. People starting to do more managed services from the cloud back into your data center. I see the multi-cloud world working and then this kind of blurring of on-prem and cloud even more. That's kind of what I'm seeing. >> Yeah, I've got to agree. It's that idea that cloud is a state of mind. It's not a location. >> We say it's an operating model at it's core, right? >> Right, yeah, and I think we're seeing a lot of those ideas come to fruition now that you can operate like a cloud on-site. It's how you run things, it's not where exactly you put it. With the multi-cloud world, like you said, we can have, some of it can be on-site, some of it can be in one cloud, another cloud, lots of different clouds. Some of it will be at the edge. We're seeing a lot of growth in edge computing, which is essentially just another way of doing on-site. Being able to use the same tools, and that, for me, is the idea around the RDS announcement. It's the same thing that you're used to in public cloud. Now I can do that on-site. We're seeing a real cross-pollination. You can take VMware and run that in cloud. You can take things from the cloud and now run it back on site. It's pretty exciting. >> This is awesome. We have an easy button. Customers just push a button. Any data, anywhere, moves all over the place. Laws of physics, throw them out. Come on, guys. I need some critical analysis here. The trope that I would have, always, when I became an analyst an eight years ago was like well, if it wasn't for management and security we would have this all sorted out. The multi-cloud world is made progress, but when I still look at it. RDS, super exciting. The thing that's most exciting about it? That's on-premises, it's doesn't have connection to Amazon, but I'm doing cool things with the exact same kind of bits there so I can do it here or there. Doesn't mean, necessarily here and there, or spread between there, because petabytes of data don't just float across the ether. We're still using things like the AWS Snowballs when we have to move a lot of data. Yes, it's matured, but when I look at the management of multi-cloud and how simple, there was a great comment from a company that's been around for a couple of decades on theCUBE and he said look, the new companies all say we're going to make this super easy. It's like well, because you don't have the trusted brand to set beside, simple would be nice but cloud isn't simple. Multi-cloud sure isn't simple. >> There was, probably, a surfeit of single panes of glass here at the show. Any app, any cloud, any whatever. Single pane of glass. We'll blueprint it, we'll manage it, we'll do it. That does seem like that probably isn't that real world. >> Multiple single panes of glass. >> Please, Justin, give me a touchpoint. When you talk to an administrator, how do they spell single pane of glass? >> Oh yes, P-A-I-N, yes, a single glass of pain. That's generally what it is. I think that the manageability and the operational side of things, that is where there's a lot more development required. Cloud is, yes it's a state of mind. It's a very different way of operating and a lot of the tools, particularly in the VMware community, a lot of what people are used to here is very much point and click. It's not really as automated as it would be in, say, developer land. I spend a lot of time with developers and a lot of what they're used to is all programmatic, it's driven from the API. We're seeing movement with things like PowerShell and VMware administrators are getting more comfortable with the idea of scripting and so on. But they're not programmers. They still need GUI tools. They still need things that are able to do point and click. Some things are better in that environment. I think we still have a long way to go with things around automation. The other thing that still has a long way to go, I think, is security. Security particularly around the networking of how you inter-connect with all of these things and do so securely at scale. There is a lot of invasion and work that's required to actually make that happen. >> Absolutely. John, do you have some comment there? >> I was going to say I think you're right. Especially on all those points. The community booth back here behind us this year had a VMware code section, which was jam-packed the whole time. For the first time. VMware's been trying to speak to developers for 10 years and not quite connecting. Now, these weren't developers back there, these were admins, and they're not going to ever be programmers, but they're going to start to learn more programmatic paradigms, automation, things like that. It was super popular this year. >> Luckily, we don't actually need programmers anymore, John, cause it's coding, which means you're really just coping, pasting, and modifying things and everything. Heck, I've even interviewed marketing people that are like oh, server-less, I can build with that stuff. Super easy. I don't think we need everybody to learn to even code, as it were. We bridged that gap. It's matured, it's become easier. They pulled over some of the, it was the EMC code team. It's half that team over there. They had some good gamification. >> Stu, I am an optimist and I think the glass is half full or 40% full at least. We've done some CUBE stuff, theCUBE's been all over the world here this spring, all through 2018. I've done a couple shows with you. The difference that I saw this year was that the use cases were real and the time to value was real. People are implementing cloud projects, multi-cloud projects, and they're getting to a good milestone within weeks or months. Admittedly, these are big, multi-national companies, so it's really at the top level where they have the army of people to do it, but sometimes these projects were very small and they were real. They weren't just marketing hokum up on stage. Of course, they're not the full enterprise in a couple of weeks, but that's the difference this year, I see, Stu. I'm 40% full. >> Absolutely, I'd say look. Energy level was up. Two years ago it kind of hit a nadir. It was doom and gloom. We were all over at the eye candy bar saluting the great run that VMware had and wondering who the next CEO was been. Now, energy level's back up. Investment in the ecosystem, oh my gosh. I don't think I've seen this many parties ever at a VMworld. We got to talk about something other than cloud so give me your non-cloud takeaways from the show. Areas that people should learn more about, things you saw in the ecosystem or from VMware or the community. >> I think that's one of the things I've noticed here at the show. Wandering around the show floor, unlike some of the other shows where it's we will have a storage show or we'll have a backup show. There's a lot more balance this year. There seems to be a good mix of some of everything. I think that it shows that in order to run a successful IT shop, you actually need to have a balance of, you need some backup, you need some data recovery, you need to have some software, you need some monitoring, you need to have security options. Go and have a look at all of the different vendors that are at a show like this to be able to make sure you have a portfolio approach to how you run things. >> Totally. I remember there were a couple of years, four or five years ago, it was like oh, it's VM storage world. >> Yeah. >> OK, yeah. John? >> There is a lot of storage here, but the storage is all connected to the cloud now. I think if you look at some of the big booths and some of the start-ups who have gotten funding recently. Large rounds. Cohesity, Datrium, Rubrik, folks like that, they're delivering on promises made in earlier years. Not particularly like oh wow, I never thought of, but this was the vision that we laid out and now we're delivering it this year. Big rounds of funding, big customer movement, connection to the cloud and solid, interesting DR as a service and data, as opposed to storage, ideas. I thought that was one of the more interesting aisles this year over there in the booths. >> To riff on what you said about developers and the bridge to the code idea, we see Puppet is here at the show, HashiCorp is here for the first time. >> Docker's there, of course. >> Docker's here. >> C & CF had a booth. >> Yep, C & CF had a booth. These are people that you wouldn't have expected to see at a VMware show in years past. >> One thing that struck me is companies with a mission for good. Pat Gelsinger kind of sets the bar. Talked about it in his keynote. Do better, do good, sets that example. He climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro for charity earlier this year. They had Malala up on stage with Sanjay Poonen. I did a couple of interviews here which were inspiring. Mission-driven companies and great to see the infrastructure in software companies being like hey, we're enabling and helping it. That was one to me. Takeaways from the community? Other things as we get to our wrap? >> I do wonder about that point. Just to add a little, slightly critical note on that. I think that there has been a bit of a tech lash, a bit of a backlash against tech companies. I wonder whether, I would like to see more from tech companies to show that this is real. That that social conscience is a real thing and it isn't just a bit of marketing that they've spray painted on to the front of the company. The fact that we had Malala here giving a keynote indicates that there is a commitment to it. I would want to see that carry through for the next couple of years, at least, to show that that sort of thing is real. And certainly, from the rest of the ecosystem, I expect that we're going to see a lot more. >> Diversity in the community, absolutely. I do realize we have three white guys of a certain age sitting here. We try to add diversity. I had my first European host on the program. Lisa's been on a lot this week. We're building out our bench, we're looking to add diversity. John, yeah, the community. >> Community, again, yeah, community was good this year. A lot of old faces have stayed around, which is really interesting but also people have left and come back. You saw people who have gone into the AWS and Microsoft ecosystems coming back in here. Again, some of those old faces. Also, new faces. Global diversity from the southern hemisphere and from other countries that you wouldn't expect are here today. That was super interesting. I do see a lot of energy, a lot of excitement about their careers going forward. I do see that tech needs to be, there was some symbolic do-good things here. But I mean, Justin is a little bit involved in your own home country about how the government has the power with technology to do good or bad. I think that may be an emerging thing that we see here now as you get a layer down of not only charity work but the impacts of technology. I bet we'll end up talking about that next year, Stu. >> Guys, we could start talking for a lot longer. The good news is I know how to get in touch with you. For our audience, by the way, you can hit us all up on Twitter, through various social channels. Jtroyer, jpwarren, I'm of course @stu. That's just S-T-U. Blue Cow is on Instagram. Follow the adventures of Blue Cow, showing where Justin's going all over the place. Thanks so much for joining us. Great coverage here. This community's where I get a lot of my guest hosts and still, it's like homecoming coming to this place. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (electronic tones)

>> Narrator: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE. Covering IFS World Conference 2018. Brought to you by IFS. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IFS World here at Georgia here at World Congress Center I'm your host Rebecca Knight and along with my cohost Jeff Frick. We are joined by Cindy Jowden, she is the CEO North America a position she has held since 2004. Thanks so much for joining us Cindy. >> Good morning, how are you? >> Good, I'm good. >> Great. >> Good. >> It's our first IFS World, it's quite a show you guys have. >> Yeah, we're very excited, you know it's such a great opportunity for us to, you know, connect with so many of our great customers. >> So, tell us a little bit about the theme of this year's conference which is Connect to What's Next. What, what is that all about? >> Well, it's about connecting to what's going on next in technology, and in business, and in the economy. You know, we've got many, you know great customers who are, you know, medium to large size industries and they're having you know, all different kinds of things come toward them around business transformations, you know, their customers are becoming more demanding, consumers are becoming more demanding, and so this conference really helps them see not only what they're facing today but what they're facing for the future. You know, we've got many levels of people that come to this conference you know, we've got CFO's, CIO's to power users and so there's something here really for everyone. So, you know if you want to talk about trends in the industry, you want to talk about what's going on with our new versions of products, that's available. If you are a power user and you're in finance and you just want to go connect with a industry expert to find out how you can do your job easier, it's all here. >> So, it's not only what is next in the technology, it's also connecting human to human. >> Oh. >> I mean that's really what the congress is about. >> Oh, most definitely, you know it's really fun because you'll see you know, customers that maybe haven't seen each other in person since the last world conference. But, they connect and they talk all the time you know via the phone or Skype or whatever, but they see each other and they run and they hug each other and they say, "oh it's so good "to be able to see what's going on" and you know our customers share so much and so that's really just a great opportunity and also for our customers to connect with our experts and you know, the people that they work with, you know from day to day as well. >> Man: So you're CEO of North America. >> I'm the president of the Americas. >> President of the Americas. >> Yes. >> Which includes the southern hemisphere, right? >> Yes, you don't want to forget our friends in Latin America. >> That's right. So it's a Swedish, founded in Sweden, so how are things going in North America or South America, excuse me the Americas, and what kind of values and things that you take from a Swedish based company that you're applying here in the Americas that's maybe a little bit different than a company that was founded in Silicone Valley or someplace like that. >> That's a great question, you know at IFS we've got you know strong you know, Swedish roots and Swedish heritage which says, you know, do what's right, work hard, stay close to your customer and you know, say what you can do and if you can't do something, make sure you say that as well. So, it's setting that right expectations, and we've taken that and that's really pervasive through all that we do. And, you know, we want to make sure that we, you know, can do, you know, say what we do, deliver on what we do, and then, you know, our employees love working with our customers and I think our customers feel you know, feel that we're partners and it's not something that you know, we're not just saying something to get the next deal. It's not unusual for us to say well, I'm sorry, you know, we shouldn't work together because what you want to do Mr. Prospect, is something different and it's not really in our focus and you know and sometimes it's hard to do especially if you're in sales is to walk away from somebody who's ready to buy business, right? >> Right, right. >> But, we want to make sure that you know, the customers that we work with are really good fits for where we're going because these are really long term relationships. >> Right, and how about that, it probably increases your probability of customer success pretty dramatically if you can actually deliver you know, what they want. >> Oh, most definitely, most definitely and you know certainly we also, I don't have the largest marketing budget depending on you know, my competitors that I deal with and so I really depend on great customer satisfaction and great customer references to help, you know, bring the next prospect on as part of the IFS family. And, you know, and our customers I think are some of our best sales people out there. It's really, it's really great. >> One of the things that the CEO talked about in the key note was really about building trust and you were just talking about your marketing budget. He also said, we're not going to market nonsense. Can you talk a little bit about how you build that trust, being honest with customers, obviously, sorry we can't do that, we can't deliver that, but we can deliver this. How, what else, what other kinds of ways do you make sure that you are building the kind of trusting, collaborative relationship with customers that you want? >> Well, it starts with listening. I mean, when you meet with a customer you got to step back, you have to listen, you have to be willing to listen to what you're doing well, and what you're, you know, what you need to improve on. And then you need to be able to take that in and then you know, synthesize it and then, you know, figure out how you're going to improve, you know and at IFS we're always striving to improve, not just with our products and you can see you know, we just released Applications 10 and that's exciting and many many things that are in Apps 10 came from feedback from our customers and from the user group. But, it's also listening with how we do service or how we work with our partners or do we need more partners? You know, we, you know, we have to just, you know be very open and communicative with our customers and I think everybody says that, you know, but you know, you don't say and say oh, I'm not going to listen to my customer. But, you really have to listen and then put it into action. >> Right, right. And, it's not easy to be maniacally focused on your customers, a lot of people say they are but when you peel back just a little bit they're more focused on their products, they're more focused on the competition, they're more focused on a lot of stuff so it is hard to be really singularly focused but you guys are kind of in services management management business so you work with those types of businesses that they themselves are really active in managing that client relationship. >> Oh, most definitely and when they're involved in that business they have very high expectations of what they expect, you know, on the other side when they're the customer as well. And I think we've learned some things from them, too and you know and how they, their service levels and things that they expect from that particular area. I also think it has something to do with the fact that, when we, you know IFS has been in the U.S. for, 20 some years now. But, we didn't come as the biggest player and so we really had to listen. We really had to work directly with those customers and you know we really needed to make sure that every one of those implementations was successful because we needed to you know have that customer ground swell of you know this is the greatest you know greatest software out there to help us continue to grow. >> Right. >> Really prove yourself. >> Exactly, exactly because I can. >> We're number two, we try harder right? >> Exactly, yeah. >> I mean it's a great its a great person to get together with versus we're number one and we're cocky and arrogant and don't care what you say. >> Exactly, exactly, exactly, yeah. >> So, so what is next, I mean we've seen the introduction of IFS 10 and I know we have some early adopters that it's already live with. You've got great scores, your NPS score, your Gartner insight scores are very high. What are some of your ambitions for growth? >> Well, certainly we want, you know, I would look to have the Americas be the largest region for IFS. I mean, that's, I think that you know we've got a great opportunity here. We've got a large market, we've got a great product and you know certainly we just want to continue to grow and so you know right now we are a large percentage of the IFS revenue but we want that to be even larger here in North America and in the Americas, so I think that's certainly very important to us. And we want to grow not only with what we're doing with IFS applications in its core, but also as we're adding new pieces with IFS, new add on products, new technologies to be able to make sure that our customers understand what we're doing there and how that can help their business. You know, I think it was interesting Dan's keynote today was talking about cloud which was a few years ago and now it's mainstream for us. Last time it was talking about IOT and now we've got more and more customers doing that, and so certainly we're looking about artificial intelligence and everybody is talking about that but at IFS we don't just want to say these buzz words. We want to really figure out as a customer what you need, how can you use this technology and monetize it, right because no one implements technology just to implement it. You want to have it help your business. And, so you know those are the kinds of things we're working on what's next and then there's going to be the next thing after you know, artificial intelligence and the next thing and that's why we depend on labs so we're always ahead of the curve and we can be bringing what our customers need. >> I thought it was interesting on Darren's keynote the other thing really is function versus experience, which he talked about time and time again and then with the Arena demonstration, kind of getting to a unified UI experience across all the different platforms. Looks like in nine you had kind of a different hodge podge of five and then you showed how Arena slowly replacing all of them so you'll have this unified experience. But, that's an interesting point of view, really to focus on the experience ahead of really the function and that seemed to be a pretty clear message in his keynote. >> Well, we've been focusing on user experience, that's been one of our you know, core things for the product road map for many years and I think Dan talked about that as well. Certainly it's a balance because if you don't have the feature and function it doesn't matter what your user experience is, you're not going to use it. But, IFS is a very feature rich product and then you need to make sure that you can make it easier to use and so certainly it is focusing on that user experience but continuing to add the functionality that we need to support that as well. And you know, millennials today, they expect to be able just to sit down, they don't want to go to days of training, they don't want to have to. It just should be intuitive and that's our, you know, really what we're trying to do is just to make sure that it's as intuitive to use as a consumer product but really has the depth that you need to get your job done because you know, our customers they have complex businesses and complex business problems that they need to solve and so we need to make sure that we can develop, you know use both and have both of them for our customers to use. >> But, historically in the ERP space was always function over experience and a lot of the historical companies had a pretty bad rap for the user experience so you know, to really prioritize that and then to add some of the automation and the AI to hide certain levels of that detail that you just don't need to see under the UI. I thought that was pretty impressive. >> Yeah, I think it is, I think it is and I think it's very special for where we're going and if you don't, people never really get to implement all the features and functions underneath it. And what my hope is, is that with a good user experience people will use more of the product and then they'll be able to use more of the features and functions that are there today and that we're adding for the future, and they can use that to make their businesses even better. >> So are you working with the customers in the labs, too? I mean, how, how, at what point, 'cause you said that's why you have the labs so you can experiment and iterate and then, but then how do you know what the customer, what is intuitive to the customer and then what the customer needs, how closely? >> Well we'll bring customers into the labs. We will do a labs tour, we did last year that we did that and you let some customers see that. Then our customers know that everything that we do in the labs doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to come out, right? Because you know, we want, we don't want them to fail, but they have the right to fail in the labs because you learn a lot about, you know, what didn't work as well. So, it's making sure that when we have events like this, you know, there's the innovation center over there and making sure that, you know, getting feedback on what they're doing there and letting customers see there and get their input. It's all, once again, about we've got ideas, we need to bring those ideas to the customer, listen to them, get their feedback, listen, and then take it back, synthesize it and go to the next step. >> Deliver it. >> You talked about growth, being a big objective. Are there any particular market segments that you're, that you're looking at? >> Well IFS has had an industry focus for quite some time and we don't expect to change that industry focus. You know, we're very focused on customers who make products and who can, you know, maintain and service assets and so you know right now we're very strong in aerospace and defense, we're extremely strong in service. You know we're ranked highest on those. We've got a great customer base in industrial manufacturing and process and in those particular industries and so we're going to continue to focus on those. I don't see that we're going to go outside those industries because there is more than enough market here in the Americas for us to focus on those and to be very good at it and we need to focus and be extremely good at what we do. Therefore, we can keep the good customer satisfaction. >> All right, and then we just had Tobias on too talking about IOT and really starting to integrate multiple data sources you know a lot more stuff into your existing application to expand on your capabilities. >> Cindy: Oh, most definitely, that's certainly the point. >> You don't need to build a bunch of new stuff necessarily. >> Cindy: Yeah, yeah exactly. >> Great, well Cindy thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. We've had a great time talking to you. >> Cindy: Great, it was a pleasure, thank you. >> Thanks. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick, we will have more from IFS World, theCUBE's live coverage just after this. (techno music)

>> Narrator: From Berlin, Germany, it's theCUBE, covering Dataworks Summit Europe 2018. Brought to you by Hortonworks. >> Well hello, welcome to the Cube. I'm James Kobielus, I'm the lead analyst for the Wikibon team within SiliconANGLE Media. I'm your host today here at Dataworks Summit 2018 in Berlin, Germany. We have one of Hortonworks' customers in South America with us. This is Fernando Lopez of Quanam. He's based in Montevideo, Uruguay. And he has won, here at the conference, he and his company have won an award, a data science award so what I'd like to do is ask Fernando, Fernando Lopez to introduce himself, to give us his job description, to describe the project for which you won the award and take it from there, Fernando. >> Hello and thanks for the chance >> Great to have you. >> I work for Quanam, as you already explained. We are about 400 people in the whole company. And we are spread across Latin America. I come from the kind of headquarters, which is located in Montevideo, Uruguay. And there we have a business analytics business unit. Within that, we are about 70 people and we have a big data and artificial intelligence and cognitive computing group, which I lead. And yes, we also implement Hortonworks. We are actually partnering with Hortonworks. >> When you say you lead the group, are you a data scientist yourself, or do you manage a group of data scientists or a bit of both? >> Well a bit of both. You know, you have to do different stuff in this life. So yes, I lead implementation groups. Sometimes the project is more big data. Sometimes it's more data science, different flavors. But within this group, we try to cover different aspects that are related in some sense with big data. It could be artificial intelligence. It could be cognitive computing, you know. >> Yes, so describe how you're using Hortonworks and describe the project for which you won, I assume it's a one project, for which you won the award, here at this conference. >> All right, yes. We are running several projects, but this one, the one about the prize, is one that I like so much because I'm actually a bioinformatics student so I have a special interest in this one. >> James: Okay. >> It's good to clarify that this was a joint effort between Quanam and GeneLifes. >> James: Genelabs. >> GeneLifes. >> James: GeneLifes. >> Yes, it's genetics and bioinformatics company. >> Right. >> That they specialize-- >> James: Is that a Montevideo based company? >> Yes. In a line, they are a startup that was born from the Institut Pasteur, but in Montevideo and they have a lot of people, who are specialists in bioinformatics, genetics, with a long career in the subject. And we come from the other side, from big data. I was kind of in the middle because of my interest with bioinformatics. So something like one year and a half ago, we met both companies. Actually there is a research, an innovation center, ICT4V. You can visit ICT4V.org, which is a non-profit organization after an agreement between Uruguay and France, >> Oh okay. >> Both governments. >> That makes possible different private or public organizations to collaborate. We have brainstorming sessions and so on. And from one of that brainstorming sessions, this project was born. So, after that we started to discuss ideas of how to bring tools to the medical genetiticists in order to streamline his work, in order to put on the top of his desktop different tools that could make his work easier and more productive. >> Looking for genetic diseases, or what are they looking for in the data specifically? >> Correct, correct. >> I'm not a geneticist but I try to explain myself as good as I can. >> James: Okay, that's good. You have a great job. >> If I am-- >> If I am the doctor, then I will spend a lot of hours researching literature. Bear in mind that we have nearly 300 papers each day, coming up in PubMed, that could be related with genetics. That's a lot. >> These are papers in Spanish that are published in South America? >> No, just talking about, >> Or Portuguese? >> PubMed from the NIH, it's papers published in English. >> Okay. >> PubMed or MEDLINE or-- >> Different languages different countries different sources. >> Yeah but most of it or everything in PubMed is in English. There is another PubMed in Europe and we have SciELO in Latin America also. But just to give you an idea, there's only from that source, 300 papers each day that could be related to genetics. So only speaking about literature, there's a huge amount of information. If I am the doctor, it's difficult to process that. Okay, so that's part of the issue. But on the core of the solution, what we want to give is, starting from the sequence genome of one patient, what can we assert, what can we say about the different variations. It is believed that we have around, each one of us, has about four million mutations. Mutation doesn't mean disease. Mutation actually leads to variation. And variation is not necessarily something negative. We can have different color of the eyes. We can have more or less hair. Or this could represent some disease, something that we need to pay attention as doctors, okay? So this part of the solution tries to implement heuristics on what's coming from the sequencing process. And this heuristics, in short, they tell you, which is the score of each variant, variation, of being more or less pathogenic. So if I am the doctor, part of the work is done there. Then I have to decide, okay, my diagnosis is there is this disease or not. This can be used in two senses. It can be used as prevention, in order to predict, this could happen, you have this genetic risk or this could be used in order to explain some disease and find a treatment. So that's the more bioinformatics part. On the other hand we have the literature. What we do with the literature is, we ingest this 300 daily papers, well abstracts not papers. Actually we have about three million abstracts. >> You ingest text and graphics, all of it? >> No, only the abstract, which is about a few hundred words. >> James: So just text? >> Yes >> Okay. >> But from there we try to identify relevant identities, proteins, diseases, phenotypes, things like that. And then we try to infer valid relationships. This phenotype or this disease can be caused because of this protein or because of the expression of that gene which is another entity. So this builds up kind of ontology, we call it the mini-ontology because it's specific to this domain. So we have kind of mini-semantic network with millions of nodes and edges, which is quite easy to interrogate. But the point is, there you have more than just text. You have something that is already enriched. You have a series of nodes and arrows, and you can query that in terms of reasoning. What leads to what, you know? >> So the analytical tools you're using, they come from, well Hortonworks doesn't make those tools. Are they coming from another partner in South America? Or another partner of Hortonworks' like an IBM or where does that come from? >> That's a nice question. Actually, we have an architecture. The core of the architecture is Hortonworks because we have scalability topics >> James: Yeah, HDP? >> Yes, HDFS, High-von-tessa, Spark. We have a number of items that need to be easily, ultra-escalated because when we talk about genome, it's easy to think about one terrabyte per patient of work. So that's one thing regarding storage and computing. On the other hand, we use a graph database. We use Neo4j for that. >> James: Okay the Neo4j for graph. The Neo4j, you have Hortonworks. >> Yes and we also use, in order to process natural language processing, we use Nine, which is based here in Berlin, actually. So we do part of the machine learning with Nine. Then we have Neo4j for the graph, for building this semantic network. And for the whole processing we have Hortonworks, for running this analysis and heuristics, and scoring the variance. We also use Solr for enterprise search, on top of the documents, or the conclusions of the documents that come from the ontology. >> Wow, that's a very complex and intricate deployment. So, great, in terms of the takeaways from this event, we only just have a little bit more time, what of all the discussions, the breakouts and the keynotes did you find most interesting so far about this show? Data stewardship was a theme of Scott Knowles, with that new solution, you know, in terms of what you're describing as operational application, have you built out something that can be deployed, is being deployed by your customers on an ongoing basis? It wasn't a one-time project, right? This is an ongoing application they can use internally. Is there a need in Uruguay or among your customers to provide privacy protections on this data? >> Sure. >> Will you be using these solutions like the data studio to enable a degree of privacy, protection of data equivalent to what, say, GDPR requires in Europe? Is that something? >> Yes actually we are running other projects in Uruguay. We are helping the, with other companies, we are helping the National Telecommunications Company. So there are security and privacy topics over there. And we are also starting these days a new project, again with ICT4V, another French company. We are in charge of their big data part, for an education program, which is based on the one laptop per child initiative, from the times of Nicholas Negroponte. Well, that initiative has already 10 years >> James: Oh from MIT, yes. >> Yes, from MIT, right. That initiative has already 10 years old in Uruguay, and now it has evolved also to retired people. So it's a kind of going towards the digital society. >> Excellent, I have to wrap it up Fernando, that's great you have a lot of follow on work. This is great, so clearly a lot of very advanced research is being done all over the world. I had the previous guest from South Africa. You from Uruguay so really south of the Equator. There's far more activity in big data than, we, here in the northern hemisphere, Europe and North America realize so I'm very impressed. And I look forward to hearing more from Quanam and through your provider, Hortonworks. Well, thank you very much. >> Thank you and thanks for the chance. >> It was great to have you here on theCUBE. I'm James Kobielus, we're here at DataWorks Summit, in Berlin and we'll be talking to another guest fairly soon. (mood music)